#Lost Endangered Species Act Episode

[pnfoutofcontext]

Based on this Tumblr post about a (fake) lost episode

#transxfiles #Lost Endangered Species Act Episode #(not a real lost episode) #season ∅ #Phineas and Ferb #Candace Flynn #Ferb Fletcher #fan works #original content #lies are the glue that hold society together

[transxfiles]

lost phineas and ferb episode where perry is called to investigate what dr doofenshmirtz is up to because carl the intern got ahold of some intel that doof has been seen speaking to lawyers and looking up the endangered species act at internet cafes and as major monogram says, "something fishy is going on"

meanwhile phineas and ferb's subplot of "i know what we're gonna do today!" is that isabella needs her environmentalist fireside girls badge so they start researching which species are in urgent need of help in the tri-state area so that they can use new cloning and gene therapy technologies to bring at-risk animals back from extinction

(yes there is a c-plot where buford and baljeet argue the ethics of this idea, i don't have time to explain it all for you rn)

we cut back to🎵doofenshmirtz evil incorporated🎵where we see perry carefully maneuvering around doofenshmirtz's lab scared he might fall into a trap but he hasn't set off a single booby trap and it's clear something is off

he runs into doofenshmirtz and goes to kick him in the gut action movie style but doof steps back one overly confident and says, "nuh uh uh, you see perry the platypus, you are TRAPPED! by the danville section of the endangered species act of 1973!"

doof goes on to explain his tragic backstory: "you see, perry the platypus, when i was a child my parents did not show up for my own birth! but you know that already, yadda yadda yadda they did not love me and then they loved roger more, ANYways i was raised by ocelots! i had a lovely foster mother who took me in and made me one of the pride, and so you see, perry the platypus, i am still legally considered an ocelot. did you know that there are only 50 recorded ocelots still alive in the continental united states? very sad for me as a member of a near-extinct species. it would be immoral for you to hurt someone critically endangered... in fact, you have made many attempts on my life this summer"

[montage of doof's security camera footage of their battles]

"which is why i have decided to bring you... TO COURT!" we cut back to phineas and ferb's back yard where they've decided to start cloning ocelots in their kiddie pool

candace storms outside enraged and says, "phineas and ferb are you cloning ocelots in my duckie momo kiddie pool!?"

ferb's one line of the episode is "well, i guess it's more of a kitty pool, now"

candace storms away saying, "i'm going to tell mom!" and isabella turns to phineas and says, "oh, does your mom have experience in wildlife conservation?"

we cut back to the doof and perry plotline where the two are now in the danville hall of justice and we learn that doof has spent his monthly alimony check on a defense lawyer and perry turns and sees the lawyer and then vanessa helping her organize her briefcase and perry chitters at her and vanessa shrugs and says, "i'm thinking about going into legal defense. sorry perry."

the rest of the doof and perry b-plot is spent in court and perry is about to ask for a public defense lawyer when carl runs into the room and explains that he's owca's official legal defense and perry looks at him like, "uhhh is that even allowed?"

it doesn't matter because apparently the judge is out sick today but because it's danville roger's the judge now because he's the mayor and everyone loves him.

the court case continues.

meanwhile phineas and ferb have successfully cloned multiple ocelots from the original ocelot dna they had on hand and isabella asks phineas if these clones will experience health problems like premature aging, phineas casually explains that ferb figured out the problem while they were experimenting with stem cell harvesting.

back in the courtroom, doof's ocelot foster mother has been brought to the stand along with an ocelot to english translator. doof gets emotional seeing her after so long. she says that he was one of her favorite child and he was as strong a hunter as anyone else in the family. it's incredibly sweet. the jury's in tears.

meanwhile, isabella has established connections with a group in texas who are going to release the ocelots back into their natural habitat and, using the cloned ocelots to prevent inbreeding, help establish an ocelot breeding program. the group explains that they are going to send a helicopter to retrieve the cloned ocelots from danville and bring them to texas soon.

isabella gets her fireside girls badge.

candace manages to get mom to see the backyard only after the ocelots have been helicoptered off to coastal texas, their primary habitat.

mom makes it into the backyard as phineas stares wistfully over the fence and says, "if you love something, you have to let it go." candace goes, "look mom look look look!" and points at the ducky momo kiddie pool, devoid of cloned ocelots, where baljeet and buford are now chilling out, having settled their philosophical debate about the ethics of animal cloning.

back in the courtroom drama, doof looks like he's about to win when an attendant walks into the courtroom and whispers something in roger's ear.

roger looks up, grinning, and says, "good news, everyone! my attendant here has just enlightened me that ocelots are no longer considered critically endangered!"

this settles the case, with perry being decreed not guilty and the entire affair being called off. the courtroom cheers, roger walks over to doof and personally congratulates him on his species' return from the brink of extinction.

doof shouts, "curse you endangered species classification system!" at the ceiling of the danville hall of justice.

perry arrives back home just in time for mom to say, "who wants pie?"

the end.

#cricket.chatterbox #phineas and ferb #pnf #dr doofenshmirtz #perry the platypus #phineas flynn #ferb fletcher #greatest hits

[mysticonsheadcanons]

Mysticons Fan Episode: Deal with Feels

The Mysticons are in Magi-Mall when Clawdette comes, saying that she was looking everywhere for the Mysticons. After Sharise is introduced to Clawdette, Zarya asks what happened. Clawdette says that the people in her clan are acting strange, and asks the Mysticons to come.

They go to the village where her clan lives, and sees a group of them bringing in a captured unicorn, which Em sadly points out is an endangered species in Gemina. Clawdette explains that her clan used to only hunt for creatures clients specifically request, but now would hunt anything in order to make a profit. Piper asks if all they do is hunt, and Clawdette reveals that they go to a strange monument that suddenly appeared near their village at least once a say. Clawdette says that the monument might be causing this, but is too scared to investigate, as she doesn't want to become heartless. The Mysticons decide to go, and Piper suggests Clawdette goes with them, promising that they will look out for her.

As they head to the monument, Em notices that Clawdette seems nervous and distracts her by asking her about her family. Clawdette looks away, and admits that her parents said that she's a disgrace to the clan, and that they're ashamed of having such an emotional daughter. Arkayna overhears this, and suggests that Sharise talks to Clawdette, as Sharise knows what it's like to have difficulty with family members. Sharise admits that she doesn't know what to say, as her own issues with her uncle aren't resolved.

They find the monument, and are about to destroy it with the Lances of Justice, but soon begin having visions of them gaining power by showing their strength and serving the spectral hand. The Mysticons are about to turn on each other, but Clawdette, who kept her distance from the monument, snaps them out of it by saying how good of friends they were when they protected Stormy from her. This snaps them out of the monument's influence, and realize that it is connected to the Spectral Hand. However, the distraction lasted long enough for the clan to come, and the Mysticons are forced to retreat.

Deep in the jungle, they talk about what to do, as they suspect using their magic triggered the monument to activate. Piper brings up how fab-tacular unicorns are, and Em agrees, saying that their horns have the power to break anything. This gives them the idea to free the unicorn, and get the unicorn to help destroy the monument. Clawdette leads them through the jungle, and warns the Mysticons to be careful, as it's easy to get lost in the jungle. Clawdette reminises about how she used to go here all the time to enjoy the beauty, and admits that those walks should have been her first hint that she didn't fit in with the clan. After a look from Arkayna, Sharise is about to say something, but Clawdette motions for the Mysticons to be quiet, as they are approaching the village.

While the Mysticons are distracting the villagers, Clawdette is freeing the unicorn. Zarya notices that Clawdette is having troubles with the locks, and goes to help. The clan memebers see what Zarya and Clawdette are doing just as the girls finish freeing the unicorn, and ignore the Mysticons to stop them. Zarya, Clawdette, and the unicorn gets seperated from the others, but between Clawdette's experience in the jungle and Zarya's tracking skills, they manage to find the others.

They get to the monument, but hear footsteps approaching. Em tells the uncorn to attack the monument. The unicorn tries to do so, and notice that while it's cracked, the monument is still standing. Arkayna guesses that the clan weakened the unicorn somewhow, but guesses that their Lances of Justice would help finish the job. While they are worried about the monument influencing them again, they decide to block it out by thinking of all the good times they had together. Sharise thinks of Em talking to her on the first night, Em thinks of Piper comforting her after Kasey was hurt, Piper thinks of Zarya apoligizing for not believing her about the monster, Zarya thinks of Arkayna telling Zarya she loves her, and Arkayna thinks of Sharise spending all night helping Arkayna learn basic halfling words for a royal halfling family that was visiting. The clan comes just as the monument is destroyed, freeing the clan from its grasp.

When they get back to the village, Clawdette suggests that the clan tries helping people. Her parents tell her that she's weak, and that she'll never be one of them if she doesn't learn to be ruthless. Meanwhile, the Mysticons are talking about the Spectral Hand returning, and realize that they have to tell Proxima. Just as they are ready to go, Sharise sees Clawdette sitting alone and goes to talk to her. She tells Clawdette that while you can't pick the family you're born into, you can find others who care about you. The other Mysticons join, and Piper hugs her, saying that they're friends now. Clawdette hugs back, and Piper comments how tight her hug is.

#Mysticons #Fan episode #Episode Description #Deal Wiyh Feels

[ooops-i-arted]

What did you think of episode 3?? From a child development perspective at least?

I’ll start with a couple things I would like to add about Episode 2:

WE FINALLY SAW THE BABY RUN!  HIS GROSS MOTOR DEVELOPMENT IS IMPROVING!  YAY!!!

I s2g if I see one more stupid-ass post about Baby Yoda being “canceled” or “committing genocide” HOW THE FUCK IS HE SUPPOSED TO KNOW OR UNDERSTAND THEY AREN’T FOOD IF NO ONE IS TEACHING HIM THAT?  HAVE YOU MET A TODDLER, EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS NEW TO THEM AND THEY ARE EXPERIMENTING AND EXPLORING AND IF THEY DON’T HAVE ADULT GUIDANCE YOU CAN’T EXPECT THEM TO START LEARNING ADVANCED CONCEPTS INDEPENDENTLY AT THAT AGE.  If it smells and/or looks like food to him (which is probably does) he’s gonna think it’s food and eat it until he is taught differently!  Also the episode CLEARLY states the eggs are unfertilized, so not a baby at all yet, and that the species is not endangered, that frog lady just personally is having her last batch of eggs.  Pay attention before you start having stupid opinions. /rant

Well to build on that - Baby is learning and we see it in this episode.  Din tells him “I will get you food” when he sees Baby is hungry and Baby does successfully wait until he gets food!  We also see him use a spoon, which is fantastic because he can then practice those fine motor manipulative skills, even if he couldn’t quite figure out how to use them to get that octopus off his face!  And his self-preservation/problem solving skills come back with him sealing his pod to protect himself.  Like I’ve stated before, to me that seems like a learned behavior, since we don’t see it in Season 1.  There’s clearly a time skip between Season 1 and Season 2* so to me that implies Din has been teaching him to do that to protect himself.  He also seemed to have some awareness of/reaction of fear to what the Quarren meant by “we’re gonna kill your pet” so he is definitely comprehending more, including things that no child should be having to experience, unfortunately.

It’s subtle and a little up-to-interpretation, but the way Baby was looking between Din and the dehelmed Bo-Katan made me think he’s trying to process this, because his Dad DEFINITELY does not do this, who the fuck is this and why the hell is she taking her helmet off???  IIRC I think he looked funny at Cobb too when the helmet came off but I haven’t rewatched Episode 1 yet so I’m not 100% sure.  It’s another mark of his attachment to Din; what Din does is Normal and Right and these other Mandalorians are Doing It Wrong to his mind.

And ofc Baby does actually learn “these are not food” when he sees the eggs hatch.  I think Frog Lady had figured out what was going on with the eggs and it seems she and Frog Husband maybe even actually took the time to show him the tadpole and teach him not to eat it?  Since that is definitely a food-sized item to him by the end of the episode.  He is so excited to have a playdate when Din picks him up!  So many people want to hurt him and Din has to keep him close and out of sight so much, it’s wonderful he got a chance to have some healthy social interaction.  He clearly enjoyed himself since he didn’t want to leave.

And ofc he continues to have his dad as a “safe harbor” to use while he experiences the world, and also seems to regard the ship as a safe place.  In Episode 2 he was crying and scared a lot while the spiders were around, but he recognizes that on the ship with Dad, he is safe, seeming more curious than frightened of the sea creature at the end of the episode.  He even laughs when Din kills it!  No matter how dangerous things get, he still knows that he’s safe with his daddy, and that sense of security is SO important for a child’s mental well-being.

As for Din, Dad Points gained for actually talking to the kid about things (telling him he’ll get food, trying to tell him not to eat the eggs although he really should’ve been more explicit with a little kid) and for being so Soft it melted my heart when he was checking on the baby after his kraken encounter.  Minor Dad Points lost for just yanking the poor kid away from his new frog friend (you have to transition little kids, no wonder poor Baby was fighting so hard to not leave!).  MAJOR Dad Points lost for bringing the kid close to the big-ass hole in the ship when those Quarrens were acting sketchy as fuck about insisting he let the kid see.  Seriously Din what were you thinking??

*I’m actually kind of sad we didn’t see The Shopping Trip, an episode where Din does nothing but bargain shop for a new pod.  (That will probably be a Baby Yoda POV Interlude tbh, since I set up Baby Hating Pods Now and will have to realign his Feelings On Pods to align with the new season.)  And more seriously, where did he get that thigh plate??  Did he have to forge it himself (since it’s kind of implied his Mandalorian search has been unsuccessful so far)?  Did he just find a raided covert and retrieved it from a fallen brother?  That’s depressing... or did he just make a pit stop to see the Armorer?

#baby yoda #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #asks #anon #baby yoda meta

[arcticdementor]

Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not simply using the environment as a convenient opportunity for class-conscious virtue signaling—may want to brace themselves for a shock.

The sign I have in mind is a recent flurry of articles in the leftward end of the mainstream media decrying the dangers of ecofascism. Ecofascism? That’s the term used for, and also generally by, that tiny subset of our society’s fascist fringe which likes to combine environmental concerns with the racial bigotries and authoritarian political daydreams more standard on that end of modern extremism. If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s good reason for that, but a significant section of the mainstream media seems to have taken quite an interest in making sure that you hear about it now.

…

The first thing I’d like to point out to my readers here is that, as already noted, ecofascism is a fringe of a fringe. In terms of numbers and cultural influence, it ranks well below the Flat Earth Society or the people who believe in all sincerity that Elvis Presley is a god. It’s one of those minute and self-marginalizing sub-sub-subcultures that a certain number of people find or make in order to act out their antinomian fantasies in comfortable obscurity, and enjoy the modest joys of being the biggest paramecium in a very, very small pond. It’s fair to say, in fact, that the chance that ecofascism will become a significant political or cultural force in your lifetime, dear reader, is right up there with the chance that the United Church of Bacon will become a major world religion.

So why is this submicroscopic fringe ideology suddenly on the receiving end of so many faux-worried essays in important liberal newspapers and magazines, and in the corresponding end of social media and the public blogosphere?  The reason, I’d argue, has to do with something else that’s been finally receiving its own share of media attention.

…

That is to say, counting up all its direct and indirect energy costs, this one conference had a carbon footprint rivaling the annual output of some Third World countries—and you guessed it, the point of the conference was to talk about the menace of anthropogenic climate change.

…

At this point, in fact, one of the current heartthrobs of climate change activism, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, refuses to fly anywhere because of commercial air travel’s gargantuan carbon footprint. Sensibly enough, she travels through Europe by train, and her rich friends have lent her a sailboat to take her across the Atlantic for her upcoming North American tour. This would be bad enough if Thunberg was an ordinary citizen trying to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, but she’s not—she’s the darling of the Davos set, a child of privilege who’s managed to parlay the normal adolescent craving for attention into a sizable cultural presence.  Every time she takes the train, she adds to the number of people who look at the attendees at the Sicily conference mentioned above and say, “So what about your carbon footprint?”

That, in turn, is fatal to climate change activism as currently constituted. For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

…

To some extent this is common or garden variety hypocrisy, heavily larded with the odd conviction—on loan from the less honest end of liberal Christianity—that if you feel really bad about your sins, God will ignore the fact that you keep on committing them. Still, there’s more to it than that. Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral:  that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral.  Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.

…

If you haven’t heard of these followup studies, dear reader, there’s good reason for that. They argued unconvincingly that everything would be just fine if only the nations of the world handed over control of the global economy to an unelected cadre of experts, under whom the institutions of democratic governance would be turned into powerless debating societies while the decisions that mattered would be made by corporate-bureaucratic committees conveniently sheltered from public oversight. (If this seems familiar to those of my readers who endure EU rule just now, there’s a reason for that:  the state of affairs just described has been the wet dream of Europe’s privileged classes and their tame intellectuals for quite a few decades now.)  That’s the usually unmentioned reason why The Limits to Growth fielded the savage resistance it did:  a good many people in 1972 recognized it as a stalking horse for a political agenda.

…

In the same way, the mere fact that certain people are trying to use climate change as a stalking horse for unrelated political agendas doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to dump trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or that doing so won’t cause epic disruptions to an already unstable global climate. Mind you, anthropogenic climate change isn’t the end of the world, not by a long shot; the Earth has been through sudden temperature shifts many times before in its long history, some of them due to large-scale releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—that’s one of the things really massive volcanic episodes can do, for example.

Attempts to dress up climate change in the borrowed finery of the Book of Revelations—sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia!—have more to do with our culture’s apocalyptic obsessions, and with the desires of ambitious people to scare others into signing on to their agenda, than with the realities of anthropogenic climate change. That said, we can expect a good solid helping of coastal flooding, weather-related disasters, crop failures, and other entertainments, which will take an increasingly severe economic toll as the years go on, and help drive the declines in population and economic output mentioned a few paragraphs back. Yes, this is one of the things The Limits to Growth was talking about when it predicted the long slow arc of decline ahead of us.

The problem faced by the people who have been pushing climate change activism is that their political enemies have found a very effective way to counter them:  they can point out that the people who babble by the hour about the apocalyptic future we face due to anthropogenic climate change don’t take their own claims seriously enough to walk their talk. Thus the attendees at the environmental conference on Sicily mentioned earlier can no longer count on having their planet and eating it too—or, more to the point, they can’t count on doing so while still convincing anyone that they ought to be taken seriously. This is hard on certain delicate egos, and it also makes it hard to keep pursuing the agenda mentioned above while continuing to lead absurdly extravagant lifestyles propped up by stunning levels of energy and resource waste.

There’s a simple solution to that difficulty, though:  the celebrities, their pet intellectuals, and the interests behind them can drop environmentalism like a hot rock.

That’s what happened, after all, in the early 1980s. Environmentalism up until that point had a huge cultural presence, supported by government-funded advertising campaigns—some of my readers, certainly, are old enough to recall Woodsy Owl and his iconic slogan, “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”—and also supported by a galaxy of celebrities who mouthed pious sentiments about nature. Then, bam!  Ronald Reagan was in, Woodsy Owl was out, John-Boy Walton and John Denver gave way to Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko and “material girl” Madonna, and the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth had corporate executives on their boards of directors, and did everything they could think of to deep-six the effective organizing tactics that got the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a galaxy of other environmental reforms enacted into law.

…

I think we’re about to see the same thing happen to climate change activism, and one of the symptoms of the approaching swerve is the sudden flurry of mass media publicity being given right now to the tiny fringe phenomenon of ecofascism. Over the months ahead, I expect to see many more stories along the same lines all over the leftward end of the media and its associated blogosphere, insisting in increasingly shrill terms that anyone who pays too much attention to the environment—and in particular, anyone who expects celebrity climate change activists to modify their lifestyles to match their loudly proclaimed ideals—is probably an ecofascist. In fact, I would be very surprised if we don’t see a series of earnest articles in the media claiming that believing in ecological limits is racist; such claims are already being made in the blogosphere, and their adoption by the mainstream left is, I suspect, merely a matter of time.

#john michael greer #ecosophia.net #environmentalism #greta thunberg #ecofascism #green nude eel #puritans gonna puritan #the limits to growth #climate change

[thekoshertribble]

What’s up with “the Preservers?” Questions and Speculation

So I was thinking about “the Paradise Syndrome” - you know, the super awkward and problematic Native American stereotype episode - and I was thinking about the “Preservers.” This is the ancient race that apparently searched the galaxy looking for cultures threatened by extinction and moving these populations to other planets where they could thrive. They’re never brought up again and I have a few questions...

- How do they decide which culture is threatened? Spock says they look for “primitive cultures” whatever the heck that means...To a race as supposedly powerful as the Preservers are, who is considered “primitive?” And was this their only way of selecting a population? The Native Americans on Amerind were selected because of genocide - but what about other threats like natural disasters, or plagues? 

- Personal question: if the Preservers rescued certain Native American tribes from genocide, did they do the same for other peoples of Earth. Is there a planet out there somewhere inhabited by Jews? If so where is it, I would very much like to go there.

- Spock says the Preservers were an ancient race. But the earliest acts of genocide against Native Americans only goes back to the beginning of the 16th century. That’s only 700 years ago, from the 23rd century. In celestial time, this isn’t very long at all. Were the Preservers time travelers? Did they “foresee” the genocide of certain populations and move them before it happened? (On Amerind, for example, they placed an asteroid deflector because they predicted an asteroid would threaten the planet?)

- Did the selected population know it was being moved, or “re-seeded?” Or were they basically abducted by the preservers against their will? This, obviously seems extremely unethical and unsafe. 

- Or maybe a representative of the Preservers would live among the selected people in disguise to learn about them and who is the natural leader among them? The representative could then tell said individual(s), in that culture’s terms, that there is a way of escaping persecution, and offer to help?(Miramanee refers to the “wise ones,” suggesting that the Preservers made some positive connection with her ancestors - I’m guessing it was positive because she calls them the “wise ones”, not the “takers” or “abductors.”) 

- Or perhaps the Preservers had a form of selective memory-wiping that they employed to make their transported populations forget the likely trauma caused by their re-seeding. (Kirk’s memory wiping in the control room of the obelisk might be evidence of this technology.)

- Why did the Preservers do this at all? What was their motivation? They seem to sympathize with cultures and people in peril - is this because the Preservers themselves had suffered in some way? Were they an endangered species through some tragedy? Suppose they “saw” their own future inevitable demise, and decided to use the rest of their time dedicated to saving similarly endangered cultures from an early death. 

- Final big question: is the “re-seeding” of cultures by the Preservers ethical? Obviously it violates the Federation’s prime directive of non-interference, but on the other hand, if you had the means to save a culture from extinction, wouldn’t you try to do something to help? 

Bonus: Apparently I am not the only person who has wondered about the Preservers. In Marvel Comics’ Star Trek: Untold Voyages #5 (by Greenberg, Collins and Williams) the Enterprise meets a species that look strikingly like the “visitors” of old Earth scifi tales and UFO encounters. This species explain to Spock that they are as old as the Preservers and knew of their “re-seeding.” However, these “visitors” found this work unethical, and has been working for centuries to re-do the damage of the Preservers. Here’s why: (Transcripts below each image from comics)

Kirk: Why were they abducting the Lycosians?

Spock: For the same reason that they have visited and studied various planets and peoples throughout the galaxy over millions of years--to confirm whether or not these worlds were “seeded” by their contemporaries--an ancient super-race known as the Preservers.

McCoy: The Preservers...You told me once about them Spock!  A long-lost race believed to have traveled the galaxy, rescuing life forms in danger of extinction and placing them on worlds where they could thrive...

Spock: Quite correct doctor. But these abductors opposed the work of the Preservers, believing that seeding planets with life forms from other worlds robbed these planets of their individuality--and wreaked havoc upon their natural environmental cycles.

Spock: It is the belief of the abductors that countless life forms were suppressed and unable to come into being, on world that would have rightfully been theirs, because of the very presence of the Preservers’ “seeds.” Thus, these abductors have been slowly working their way to across the galaxy, trying to determine how much damage was done to worlds seeded by the Preservers -- and undo that damage. 

McCoy: “Undo--how?”

Spock: By removing the “seeded” life forms from the planets. To give each of these “tainted” worlds a chance to develop naturally. 

McCoy: And what do they do with the “seeded” life forms, Spock?

Spock: They store them in the bowels of this vessel, in suspended animation. To eventually be returned to their rightful homes. 

Kirk: What? 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So clearly, not everyone approved of the Preserver’s work. The “Visitors” in this instance, were mostly concerned about the planets that the Preservers were “seeding,” not so much the “seeded” populations themselves. Obviously they don’t have problems with abduction, considering their own practices. 

#star trek #the paradise syndrome #star trek untold voyages #long post #the preservers #star trek comics #kirk #spock #mccoy #alien abduction

[aion-rsa]

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Review: That Hope is You, Part 1

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Star Trek: Discovery review contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 1

Star Trek: Discovery has taken a long time to find its footing. What started as a show about the Federation-Klingon war quickly became a show about the Mirror Universe quickly became a show about legacy TOS characters quickly became a show about an evil A.I. set on wiping out all living things in the universe. The Season 2 finale, which saw the Discovery jumping almost a millennia into the future, was more than just a cliffhanger—it was a much-needed narrative reset, a way to keep the characters we have grown to know and love while wiping the slate clean of the muddled worldbuilding of the first two seasons. Was it a smart choice? Judging by this first episode, it was a brilliant one.

In “That Hope is You, Part 1,” we are introduced to a strange future where anything is possible. No longer burdened by the weight of canon and continuity, Discovery finally feels like it can tell its own story—and, best of all, it doesn’t feel the pressure to rush through it. This season is taking its time. The series gives its premiere to its protagonist in a way it has rarely been willing to do before, allowing Sonequa Martin-Green the space to show her acting chops. So much of this episode relies on Martin-Green’s performance, as she is our audience surrogate to this strange new world, and she absolutely nails it. She is overjoyed (when she realizes she has saved life in the universe). She is terrified (when it first hits her she is truly alone). She is silly (when she is high on the Mercantile agents’ truth powder). She is devastated (when she cannot contact her ship). She is hopeful (when she meets Mr. Sahil). Somehow, she is able to portray these emotions all in the course of one episode (sometimes, in the course of one scene), and make it feel true.

Of course Michael isn’t the only character carrying this episode. Really, it is a two-man story, centered around the burgeoning relationship between Michael, a stranger in a strange future, and Cleveland Book (David Ajala), a courier with a special connection to animal species who is working to save as many endangered species as he can in an indifferent universe. In a way, they are very similar—both have dedicated their lives to helping those who in need. In other ways, they are very different, and that difference seems related to environment. Book has grown up in a universe without the Federation, which is to say in a world without a just institutional authority that has the power and resources to protect the innocent. This hasn’t made him cruel, but it has made him pragmatic. When he meets Michael, he really doesn’t want to help her—not because he thinks she doesn’t deserve it or he doesn’t think it’s important to help those in need, but because “everybody has a story,” and he has already chosen his specific path of positive change-making. If he chooses to help Michael, it could mean failing the trance worm he has hidden in his cargo bay.

Of course, Michael doesn’t give Book much of a choice. She demonstrates, in action, how they can help one another. When Book is at his wit’s end, he chooses the safe path: betrayal. When Michael is at her wit’s end, she chooses the brave path: hope. She hopes placing her faith in Book will pay off and, even when it doesn’t, she does it again (although not without a punch or two to his pretty face). She hopes that Discovery has made it or will make it through the temporal wormhole, even if there’s no precedent for that outcome. She hopes that the ember that is the Federation could be stirred into something bright and alive again, even if everyone in this time is telling her this hope is foolish.

Then, she meets Aditya Sahil (Adil Hussain), a man who has woken up every morning for 40 years to serve in an institution he isn’t even officially a part of, and she sees her hope mirrored in someone else’s hope. “Hope is a powerful thing,” Mr. Sahil tells Michael. “Sometimes, it is the only thing,” she replies, and there are perhaps some contexts where this exchange would be too much, but in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and weeks from the presidential election that has revealed the open wounds on our nation’s soul, they are words to grab onto and hold tight. Watching Star Trek has never solved any real-world problems, but it has reflected hope back at us and the value of that experience cannot be underestimated. Popular culture has power and far too few of our contemporary stories value hope in any honest way. Star Trek has always represented hope as the brave choice, as the strong one, and more than anything, this Season 3 premiere doubles down on that legacy. And, perhaps because this is a story set in a world in which there is no utopian institution that will uphold justice for all and because this is an episode that features no visibly white characters, it feels honest.

In a strange future where the Federation is no more, a red angel falls from the sky. The third season of Star Trek: Discovery has begun, and this show has never been better.

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Additional thoughts.

This is a real Mad Max: Fury Road moment…

You may have noticed that, while the title for this first episode is “That Hope is You, Part 1,” next week’s episode is not “Part 2.” Perhaps that will be the season finale?

Olatunde Osunsanmi continues to be one of the go-to directors for this show. Discovery should hold onto him for as long as they can. In this premiere, Osunsanmi makes ample use of the Icelandic countryside, playing up its desolate, alien-like tundras in some scenes and its lush natural landscapes in others. This show has never looks better and that’s saying a lot because it has always looked good.

I do wonder what Book thinks of the Michael/Aditya exchange. Has it made him believe in the Federation just a little bit more? Or does hope take a different form for him?

OK, what is up with Grudge? “She’s a queen” is not something you say about a cat—well, some people might say it, but it’s still weird. Is Grudge literally a queen? Captain Marvel has trained me to expect anything.

While I wouldn’t call this episode particularly Battlestar Galactica-esque, Michael’s crash landing on an alien planet reminded me of Starbuck’s dilemma in “You Can’t Go Home Again” and Aditya’s setup on the old Federation relay station reminded me of dude waiting for the Cylons at the beginning of the BSG miniseries. (It doesn’t go as well for him as it does for Aditya.)

Speaking of references, tell me you didn’t think of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Book told Michael to close her eyes.

I love that Michael has absolutely no chill about being a time traveler. She barely tries to hide it.

“Dilithium… one day it all just went boom.” This feels like the kind of description someone who had shitty science classes in school might use. I know this because I am in fact one of those people. But, really, what is The Burn?

When Aditya is searching for Discovery, he mentions that there are two Federation ships currently in flight within range of his sensors. Whether this means they are active Federation ships of some kind or they are simply Federation ships that have been commandeered by other people remains to be seen…

Who had Andorians and Orions on their Alien Bingo Card for Season 3?

I love how David Ajala says “tricorder.”

“It’s temperature sensitive and really valuable so it’s probably ice cream.” I have never related to Michael Burnham more.

Programmable matter and portable transporters, but few subspace channels and a scarcity of dilithium creates a future that, in some ways, is technologically leaps and bounds beyond what Michael has known, yet, in other ways, is burdened with massive limitations compared to her life in the 23rd century.

“Were you praying?” “Something like.” Michael and Burnham discuss Book’s ability to communicate with different kinds of living creatures, from a plant with medicinal properties on Hima, to the trance worm who, um, swallows Michael momentarily.

Book thanks Michael for saving the world. She deserves a thank you.

What did you think of the Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 premiere? Are you into the time jump? What is up with Grudge? And how long do you think it will be before Michael finds Discovery again? Let us know in the comments below…

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Review: That Hope is You, Part 1 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[tsglexingtonkentucky]

Earth Day Turns 50!

EcoSense and Earth Day

Earth Day is celebrating 50 years this Wednesday, April 22nd during this global pandemic. Meeting the urgent COVID-19-related need of educators’ around the world for virtual learning science resources, EcoSense for Living is now available on PBS LearningMedia, through a partnership with KET (Kentucky Educational Television).  This amazing opportunity adds to the platform’s online resources for educators and middle and high school students to explore science-based environmental challenges, solutions and conservation topics.

Hosted by Jennie Turner Garlington, an eco-champion and mom, the EcoSense for Living series explores eco-challenges, solutions and conservation topics for a more planet-friendly life.

“We are so proud of how Kentuckians have stepped up and banned together to keep friends and loved ones safe.  Although our hearts break everyday for all of the loved ones being lost, we embrace our families and are thankful for our time together. Through all of the loss we have gained bonds with our family. We have so much gratitude  for so many  hero’s in the medical field, grocery stores and all of the essential business’s that have remained open. I’m so proud of our fellow Kentuckians,” said Garlington

PBS LearningMedia syncs with Google classroom, explores state curriculum standards, manages classroom assignments and much more. The EcoSense for Living team worked with Dr. Melinda Wilder, a former elementary and middle school teacher, experienced educator and education professor at Eastern Kentucky University, to design the teacher’s guide and learning materials to accompany the complete video content, that originally aired on PBS stations. Dr. Wilder created discussion questions, vocabulary guides, hands-on exercises and other materials for teachers to tell environmental stories in a way that’s fresh, entertaining, and puts needed tools at the fingertips of teachers.

“We developed the content to accompany EcoSense for Living on PBS LearningMedia so the guides met the widely accepted three-dimensional standards, chose performance expectations that most closely aligned with the video information, and then developed appropriate questions for middle and high school students,” Dr. Wilder said.

The academic science literacy standards and benchmarks were developed with “buckets” or grade level disciplinary core ideas from Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) or similar state-wide frameworks. Some buckets include science, life science, ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem relationships. 

This first set of EcoSense topics available now on PBS LearningMedia includes:

Grizzly Bears and Wolves: understanding the challenges of living in areas where they live, how they’re managed, and the “Endangered Species” Act - what it is and how it’s used.

Future of Food: from little changes we can make in our diets to reduce carbon to eating bugs!

Clean Air Act – how we got it and why it’s still so important.

Talkin’ Trash – how cities find innovative ways to turn trash into compostable treasure.

“With the EcoSense magazine style format, we were able to break the content down into digestible segments that fit well into classroom lessons, leaving room for interactive exercises,” said Garlington. “We’re excited to share these educational, entertaining segments that offer environmental science, history, biology and other lessons for middle and high school students. Moreover, we’re happy to help at this important virtual learning moment so students can hear from national experts, spark discussion, and provoke thoughts about caring for the planet.” 

As an environmental media champion, former CNN producer, mother and concerned citizen, Jennie fervently embraces the sustainability views of her father, Ted Turner. She developed a PSA series called EcoSense for Living in 2005 that received high acclaim and she quickly expanded it into a 30-minute episode of the same name. That first show, featuring Clark Howard, offered environmentally friendly ways to save money daily around the house and led to more than two dozen half-hour subsequent episodes over the last 15 years. 

These episodes are available for streaming on PBS. Four new episodes will premiere in April for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and Earth Month: 

Wild Crossings looks at how animals can find passage in an increasingly developed world.

Fashioned for the Planet explores one of the most polluting industries of the world and alternatives to fast and cheap fashion.

Wild Healing shows our deep-seated connections to nature and how we all can understand and appreciate our link to domestic and wild animals and plants.

Innovation & Biomimicry explores the amazing versatile applications of mushrooms and how organizations like the Georgia Aquarium and Zoo Atlanta band together to use data to ensure survival for diverse species.

To date, the EcoSense for Living series has aired thousands of times in top markets nationwide including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Austin, Nashville, Seattle and many more. Each episode is produced by Picture Window Productions and made available to PBS stations across the United States via NETA, an internal network/satellite service. 

View full episodes live streamed at https://www.pbs.org/show/ecosense-living/episodes/. 

View the educational segments on PBS LearningMedia at pbslearningmedia.org/collection/ecosense-for-living. 

Visit www.EcoSenseForLiving.com or Facebook (EcosenseForLiving) for more information.

[avannak]

Hey AvannaK! I'm genuinely curious what you would've liked to see in a canon-consistent bridge series between HTTYD/GOTNF and HTTYD2? Do you have specific "should haves" and "would have been nice if..."? Sorry if you've answered this before. 😕 I'm not around as much. Take care!

Heya!!!

This is a really fun ask and it led me on a journey through a lot (a lot) of old posts. Some I’ve quoted, some I’ve linked to, but hopefully I’m managed to peace together a readable summation of things/events I like to imagine happened in between HTTYD/GotNF –> HTTYD2. Thank you!

Hiccup’s awakened to a whole new world; in the span of a month or so his entire life has been flipped and he’s got no choice but to hit the ground and run with it because, as of now, he’s at the forefront of Peace. The village is not only paying him positive attention (for being him) but also looking to him for direction. He’s lost a leg. He seems to have gained everything else.

In the following months, years even, his father does a lot of directing within the village, as Hiccup learns to lay out a plan. It’s not long after Hiccup awakens that Stoick sits his son down and says “Tell me everything”. Stoick wants to know Hiccup’s history with Toothless, his desires, his personal thoughts on where Berk is and move on from here and, to Hiccup, its a moment he’s been waiting for his entire life. His father has always loved him, but its felt like years since he’s openly valued his opinion. Stoick wants to be a team with Hiccup, because Hiccup is Berk’s first and only step into this new territory, but Stoick has the pull.

Stoick is openly impressed with his son after hearing the full tale; he says as much. About how brave Hiccup was, to make himself vulnerable like that, purposefully, and to come out victorious. The sort of bravery few vikings show anymore. The sort of bravery his mother had.

Hiccup and Stoick’s relationship had started to take a dive as Hiccup grew out of childhood and into a disappointing vision for a viking. It’s being restored, heftily, as they walk an entirely new path together (though, not at all without disagreement; both will continue to claim the other “doesn’t listen” until the very day they part ways).

Right from the get-go, Hiccup struggles with his leg or lack there of. There’s heavy frustration with limb loss and the adjustments Hiccup has to make around it leads to flares of temper – moments where he snaps at his father in misplaced anger, or Toothless, before he’s struck by reality and apologizes. Sometimes he pushes himself too far, insistent on maintaining independence, and Astrid, or Toothless, need to help him back, and he’s left sweaty, and angry, and embarrassed. Hiccup would have periods where he felt so helpless and it killed him because losing his independence for a time makes him feel like he’s Hiccup the Useless all over again. Phantom pains and feverish nightmares plague him often at first; times when he grows testy and stressed as this burning sensation runs up his leg like its still on fire, and Gobber has to sit him down and help him work through it. These episodes manage to crop up again and again in the following years no matter how comfortable he’s become on his feet.

In fact, late winter of that year, not long before Hiccup’s 16th birthday, when he’s just begun to feel physically normal, a common sickness is taken to an extreme for him. He can’t shake it, he loses weight, his leg pains him constantly. It has his father besides himself and Toothless acting out and Astrid furious with the gods.

And then there’s the growth spurts. He’s just sixteen when he gets a new leg fitted by Gobber. And then sixteen and a half when he adjusts that same wooden leg. Twice more before his seventeenth birthday he makes even more adjustments and it’s when he’s 17 and four months, after a fortnight of an aching back and pinched calf that Hiccup fashions himself a full new prosthetic of his own design. He happily braces it to his stump, sighs in contentment, and stands to look directly over his girlfriend’s head… who had merely come to accompany him to the Mead Hall and not be ridiculed for height disparities.

Gobber’s relationship almost immediately starts to transition from Uncle-figure/Blacksmith-master to confidant and therapy guide. Every other viking on Berk seems to have lost a limb, but Hiccup feels safest around Gobber to be open and vulnerable and actively seek help. Gobber teaches him the tricks to fastening a prosthetic, the mental and physical exercises to better deal with limbloss, holding his hand through the hardest of times and listening to his rants patiently. Limbloss is a way of viking life, but that doesn’t make it any easier watching a familial child go through it. At the same time Hiccup’s being pulled out of the forge more and more, and Gobber, like a distant, proud father, will both needle him about it and be supportive all the same. Gobber takes on another apprentices from time to time — capable young’ns, a few old hands with good experience — but he’ll miss the back and forth banter, and the exasperating ingenuity, of his honorary nephew.

Toothless takes it upon himself to get Hiccup into shape on his leg. He pushes the boy to exercise, to be physically stronger, just as Hiccup pushes him to tolerate silly human manners (like to not nest on Stoick’s bed or help himself to any fish netting in sight). Hiccup and Toothless have, by far, the best human-dragon relationship yet to be seen on Berk, often and unwittingly acting as ambassadors to their respective species with the goal of making cohabitation as seamless as possible. They also are still learning about each other, and the differences in their behaviors as humans and dragons; where they’ll compromise and where they simply won’t. The subject of Toothless’s tail come up between them. Hiccup has it confirmed that Toothless knows… he knows it was him. Just as Toothless understands, as well as any dragon could, that Hiccup’s learned and accepted that he too took his foot. It’s not instant forgiveness. Not when Toothless still bears the scars of the bola canon, and not when Hiccup is still freshly relearning how to walk, dealing with a new upheaval of emotion and pain, but both find the results well, well worth their suffering, and finding each other even more so. They forgive each other. They communicate through touch and two different, one-way, verbal speech habits until they’re able to make “we got even” jokes about it five years later to some rando, feral dragon lady.

Hiccup’s relationship with his peers is another thing that takes an immediate 180. Much like the village in its entirety, Hiccup finds himself saddled with their positive attention and respect. It carries a past of longing, heartache, and anger. Hiccup can’t find it in him to hold onto his resentment; not when they’re so willing to learn, so sets aside his unease and pushes them. He pushes them to fly, and to bond, and to listen to their dragons. He’s barely aware of a protective element building between the teens and himself; a rapport born from fighting a battle unlike any other. He doesn’t stop to question if its out of guilt for their recent past, or if they’re that singularly minded. Whenever he stops to think about it he starts to get overwhelmed by the reality that this is all happening, he’s “one of them” (or they’re one of him?), so he tries not to. …Even though they sit with Hiccup in the Mead Hall, and hang out with him beyond dragon training, and pull him into battle spars when just months earlier they would have shoved him down a knoll first. The twins show up at the forge from time to time, seemingly just to mess with him. Fishlegs will spend hours with him pouring over text discussing dragons, gushing about possible revisions to the Book of Dragons. For once, Snotlout gets to laugh along with Hiccup’s biting, witty retorts as they’re finally directed towards others: stubborn, withered old vikings set in their ways and still battling dragon integration.

Ruffnut quickly figures that her attention to Hiccup is hitting a stone wall, and her interest that came so fast and hard is easy to shrug off almost as quickly (though losing to Astrid, even in a one-sided, unacknowledged battle, still smarts). Instead she keeps up with the uncomfortable attention a while longer simply for her own amusement. Snotlout too learns to let go of Astrid. She so easily rolled into this new life (not that he’s fighting it), and, perhaps, she was never the ideal woman for him in particular. Still admittedly hot, though.

And then there’s nights in the Mead Hall. They grow older, stay out later, test the limits of Mead and foreign ales. Engage in drinking games they’ve only seen older warriors participate in. There’s a streaking incident. Brawls. Hiccup finds himself pushing to ban drinking and flying (because if vikings want to be idiots, then fine, but don’t endanger the dragons). Stoick enforces it (someone needs to look out for his idiot vikings). A more sober variation comes of it over time: Dragon Racing.

Debates within the tribe about spreading peace break out almost immediately. For the first year of peace, well into late summer, the tribe was nearly unanimous about focusing on integrating dragons: learning to fly, acclimating to the benefits (and drawbacks) of sharing space with dragons, and loose plans on altering the village to fit their new needs. As they grew comfortable Hiccup, and a few others, started to push towards communicating with their distant neighbors about bringing on this way of life. Frienemy tribes (the Meatheads, the Bogs, etc) were opening communications once more, and all Hiccup sees is an opportunity. Hiccup’s on a high over many platforms; he wants to expand peace, knowledge, and understanding between dragons and humans. People are listening to him and he’s good, really good, at what’s passing for impressive these days. He’s ready for more. But this is one area where the older generations has more experience, more assurance. It is almost unanimously agreed to keep the pro-dragon lifestyle secret, and it’s not to punish Hiccup, or dragons around the world that still battle humans, but to protect their own, very new way of life. Especially as it develops, and they’re left vulnerable, off-footed, all the while very much aware of how tribes once were long before violent dragons had forced humans to keep a united front.

It’s confirmed in HTTYD2 that Berk keeps their dragon lifestyle a secret from other tribes. Berk manages to shirk hosting an annual Thing year after year, claiming repairs for being the most devastated by the dragon war, that they’ve had to travel for timber and food given the ruin dragons laid upon them before the war mysteriously ended. Instead they travel, by boat, to meet old allies, testing the waters of old friendships, waiting for a time when an opening will come forth to bring dragons into their lives as well…

Hiccup must go to these Things, and does so without his dragon, often wary at familiar faces, nervously making up stories about his leg, wishing he had Toothless with him. Snotlout goes as well, meeting up with old playmates, but shocking them with a more protective attitude towards Hiccup. Astrid starts to accompany him when he’s seventeen; both having decided their relationship is concrete enough to make known outside Hooligan territory.

Following the events of HTTYD, Astrid (and the others’) focus is on learning to fly dragons ahead of the curve so that they can continue to master and teach. Beyond number one priority, and beyond keeping up with traditional physical tasks (as she’s still Very Viking, thank you very much), and a bit beyond helping out her village adapt to dragons, is Astrid’s interest in Hiccup. Yes, a lot of it has to do with him being the best and first dragon rider. He’s actually impressive. He’s impressed her. He has a future as a chief, and not just any chief, but the chief. The one that changed everything. And, it turns out, he’s pretty funny (and frustrating) and incredibly ingenious (but impractical at times) and he genuinely cares about her (but he’s probably being as impressed and disillusioned by her as she is him). She’s learning a lot about Berk’s heir, and she intends to continue to do so.

Astrid starts out by planting a kiss on Hiccup’s cheek from time to time. Sometimes in front of others as she tries to subtly secure a claim she’d thrown down in a moment of rapture. Sometimes in private, where she actually feels embarrassed, and vulnerable, because its more intimate than some public decision.

They get into arguments. Their priorities don’t always align. Astrid challenges Hiccup on his dragon knowledge (but it’s not just knowledge like Fishlegs has, where it can be categorized from books, but a silent empathy that can’t be taught. It takes her years to truly figure that out). Hiccup gets irritated when Astrid chooses Vikings over Dragons (as he often views it, but it’s not so black and white). There’s miscommunication. And Guilt.

Astrid goes through her own self reflection, and acknowledges that the man Hiccup’s becoming is worth her respect, just as she reaffirms that the boy Hiccup was, or who she knew him as, was not. She can forgive herself. Same as Hiccup gets to really know Astrid, beyond the shallow crush he had on her (which had been all but driven from him in the throes of discovering a life’s purpose).

They’re juggling a relationship (that didn’t have the most wholesome start) in the background of readjusting their worlds and taking on tasks and roles most adults wouldn’t be asked to. But they’re giving it a try, and it’s harsh at times, and sweet at others, and they “take breaks”, sometimes unhappily, and they meet other people (not court, or ‘date’, but there are other heirs who look at Hiccup as potential alliance material, and other Vikings, many other vikings, who are impressed by Astrid).

But through it all, as they learn about each other as people (and not crushes, or heir figures) they discover that they are a team. They were a team the moment they were forced to work together, and they remain a team throughout the rest of their lives.

Hiccup’s at the cusp of 16 and Astrid well already when Hiccup initiates a kiss with her. Kissing becomes more casual, but still soft, and sweet, from there on out. He fumblingly asks her on a “date” of sorts shortly after (having to insist that, no, this doesn’t involve the rest of the gang. Just her. She has an ‘oh!’ moment).

Hiccup’s 16 and a half, it’s the anniversary of the Death’s demise, when he allows Astrid to see his stump for the first time. She’d helped him through leg pain in the past–supporting his limps, staying by his bedside through fever–but this time he willingly removes his prosthetic and bares a scarred and ugly part of himself to someone who’s opinion matters. Astrid reacts to the breathtaking moment of trust and exposure with tender hands and speechless assurances, and Hiccup relaxes in her presence. I imagine it wasn’t sexual or humorous, but a terrifyingly intimate and vulnerable experience that launched them into a deeper level of their relationship. He allows her to touch the hard tissue, and to ask questions he hadn’t felt comfortable answering before. 

A couple months later Astrid learns of the scars on his back, the ones she’s never considered before, from when he fell backwards into the explosion.

Not long after that Hiccup’s allowed to see her hair down, and to touch it. They grow more interested in each other as budding adults, and make more time for each other. Kissing intensifies. Groping and exploring follows. Sometimes they take things a little too far and it ends in giggles or, on occasion, an older viking yelling at them.

Astrid takes to grooming Hiccup. She braids his hair. Comments on his scruff. Gets involved with his wardrobe.

The flight suit is in development and Astrid finds it ridiculous; both a point of hilarity and something that scares her (though she’d never admit it outright) and Hiccup learns to hide it in one of the few white lies they’ve picked up in regards to one another.

They’re 18 the first time they exchange “I love yous” and the intimacy of their relationship continues to rise from there.

At just shy of twenty, and after much needling from his father and not-so subtle hints from Astrid’s family, Hiccup proposes.

The entire village is on a high in the following weeks. Heartened, Stoicks makes a weighty decision.

#HTTYD #HTTYD2 #Hiccstrid #httyd speculation #e wills #Thank you for asking #no really this was fun! #haha and I think I have a similarly subject'd ask of yours in my queue #recs rants rambles #long post #sorry kids #i got writing and didn't stop for a bit

[swwewrestlers-blog]

Movie Review - The Wrestler

Throughout the World Wrestling Federations heyday that they had many alternative product vehicles. You could purchase buying and selling playing cards, lunch boxes, video games, attire, tickets, VHS tapes; you name it and you could just about guarantee that the WWF had a product for it. Again within the eighty's you'll discover many overt promos for all of these products. Fifteen second spots would air selling the products, the announcers would have them, followers with the product can be shown on TV and even the wrestlers themselves would carry the product or "gimmicks" to the ring.

Whereas many of those merchandise nonetheless exist, the very best sellers for the company are T-shirts, video video games, & wrestling figures. And the promoting of these products is extra tongue and cheek than up to now, as usual mentions are brought about in a comical manner.

Taping Format

Lately on Monday nights the WWE tapes a one hour web and international market show named Warmth, followed by the 2 hour reside version of Monday Evening Uncooked. On tuesdays ECW is taped and is immediately followed by a taping of Friday Night Smackdown. As you can see, every taping consists of one week of TELEVISION for 2 completely different reveals.

The previous format was drastically different. Utilizing lengthy blocks, the WWF would run TV tapings for 4+ hours. Usually they'd tape 4 one hour episodes again to again, each episode representing every week's price of TV. Many wrestlers would appear three or four instances per show. Clearly this is able to develop into just a little tedious for the followers in attendance. As was the norm, the vast majority of the tapings included the aforementioned "jobber" matches. On prime of this they might additionally usually tape one or two matches that had been unique to the WWF's residence video tape library, Colosseum Video.

Objectives of TV

The construction for the business was different again then than it is at this time. For example, right now's WWE tv is geared in the direction of scores & PPV purchase charges. Prior to now, whereas essential, rankings weren't as huge of a priority. The principle income sources for the WWF got here by way of home present (off TV reveals held in native towns) and in PPV revenue.

The usual for as we speak options not less than two massive matches per TV. Within the mid eighty's there would normally be a set of jobber matches, matches by which big identify stars have been placed towards no-name expertise, with the celebs set to get "put over" or to destroy these no-identify wrestlers on a weekly foundation. This formulation would occasionally change, in most situations during the WWF's late saturday night NBC hit dubbed Saturday's Night time Essential Occasion.

In October 2006, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched its annual 'Living Planet Report' - detailing the global impression on pure sources and the declining numbers of animal species which can be dependent upon them. It also provided solutions on tips on how to reverse the downward traits in these areas. This year's report also explores the affect of human exercise on the planet and concludes that the world's natural ecosystems are being run down at a price never seen earlier than in human history.

The 'Residing Planet Report' makes the terrifying inference that the world's inhabitants of vertebrate species have declined by a third since 1970, thus confirming the worst of human wrestlers who need to retire fears: that humanity is utilizing up the planet's resources at a much quicker rate than which they can be produced. Carter S. Roberts, President and CEO of the WWF, commented:

"The bottom line of this report could not be extra clear - for twenty years we have lived our lives in a approach that far exceeds the carrying capability of the Earth. The choices we make at present will form the chances for the generations which comply with us. The truth that we stay past our means in our use of pure resources will surely restrict alternatives for future generations to follow.

In truth, the USA, because the world's foremost client society, is seen to be on the forefront of what the WWF report calls 'resource overshoot' - the use of extra resources than is sustainable by the planet. This makes it all the more necessary for institutions within the USA - including the federal government, mother and father and academics - to show our kids (the "future generations" that Roberts talks about) with such concern of precisely how dangerous human behaviour might be to the planet.

In an try to attempt to educate kids, there has, so far been a wide range of efforts made by totally different sources on how best to protect the setting for future life. For example, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) runs a children's educational useful resource referred to as TUNZA, which goals to work in partnership with children internationally so as to equip them with the tools wanted to maintain the surroundings for their very own children in flip.

With environmental and wildlife awareness having turn into a lot extra prevalent in in style culture over the past ten years - by means of sources as broad ranging as The Body Shop's 1990s product packaging, through to Al Gore's recent film 'An Inconvenient Truth' - many bigger organisations that are not traditionally related to schooling have jumped on board. As an illustration, Doubletree hotels runs a program called 'Teaching Children to CARE®' - a special academic initiative that goals to carry wildlife and environmental awareness to the forefront of the classroom.

With the continued initiation of this and different, similar packages each in America and the world over, there may be the chance that such applications will allow a reversal of the downward development of environmental harm; maybe permitting for the WWF's Living Planet Report back to predict a way more promising future for the world in future years.

As lobby teams and environmental organisations proceed to push governments the world over into taking drastic measures to curb the acceleration of world warming, it is maybe fair to say that other environmental points may be in peril of being pushed apart. People need to do not forget that local weather change will not be the only scourge to the health of our planet; the protection of endangered species, as an example, remains a paramount concern to many individuals intent on the preservation of natural wildlife across the world.

What makes a species 'endangered'? Generally speaking, a species could be mentioned to be in peril of extinction whether it is few in number or threatened by changing environmental or predation parameters. The 20 th century noticed the significance of defending certain species from extinction - particularly with the pioneering efforts of organisations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has been protecting endangered species since its inception in 1961.

The UN estimates that nearly 100 species are lost every single day - a staggering statistic. The foremost species protected by teams like the WWF include: tigers, nice whales, marine turtles, elephants, gorillas, of which fewer than 650 are left, and giant pandas, of which solely 800 are estimated to exist within the wild immediately.

Nevertheless, these are only a collection of the hundreds of endangered species that exist internationally. Their survival is crucial for plenty of causes - including that they function umbrella species; because of this their survival additionally helps quite a few other species that reside in the identical habitats.

The early efforts of organisations like the WWF have been essential in passing essential laws for the safety of endangered species; this consists of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 in America, which was designed to guard plant and animal species from becoming extinct. Since this time, international awareness of the significance of defending endangered species has skyrocketed. In the late Nineteen Nineties, excessive road retailers started to see the importance of animal safety - retailers like The Body Shop, for example, designed a whole vary of products on the protection of endangered species, and saw their recognition improve dramatically.

Local weather change is a natural means of the earth, any mammoth or dinosaur would be able to inform you that, nevertheless the speed at which it's at the moment occurring is unnatural. Should you have been to think about a process your physique goes by way of when a mosquito bites you; you get an itchy-bite, for a couple of days have a small pink bump and then eventually it goes away. It is a natural course of if it was left alone. But we do not depart things alone; in fact humans have a repute of improvement, change, growth and become involved in things when maybe sometimes issues ought to simply be left alone. So we itch, we scratch, we infect. The itchy-chew turns an angry purple and develops into something a lot more extreme than it ought to have been.

The yr 2010 is the Worldwide 12 months of Biodiversity, the yr that new species proceed to be found, but there are extra tigers in captivity than there are within the wild. Here in Africa our trademark beast, king of the jungle, the lion is now an endangered species, with consultants predicting its extinction in 20 years. These are occasions occurring in our life-time.

In accordance with the Living Planet report in 2007 alone man-form used 2 planets price of assets. We already over-shoot the biocapacity of our planet by 50% in 2007 and the carbon footprint has increased by 11 fold since 1961. seventy one countries are experiencing stress on blue water sources and here in South Africa we're already predicting water-scarcity points and a few rural and small cities are already experiencing them.

As per the ripple impact, biodiversity loss has an impact on ecosystems, inflicting injury, degrading and eventually leading to a whole collapse. Threats of habitat loss, alteration and fragmentation, over-exploitation of untamed species populations, pollution, climate change and invasive species in turn destroy the companies that ecosystems give people free of charge; regulating services of natural processes, similar to water filtration, waste decomposition, local weather regulation and crop pollination. Providers resembling help for regulation of basic ecological capabilities and processes for example nutrient cycling, photosynthesis and soil formation.

"Crucially, the dependency of human society on ecosystem companies makes the loss of these providers a critical risk to the long run nicely-being and growth of all individuals, all around the globe" - Residing Planet Report; 2010.

Globally there has been a 30% decline in biodiversity. A couple of examples of particular person species embrace the blue-fin tuna, a fish made famous not just for tuna salad and pasta but by the latest risk of its breeding ground caused by the BP Gulf oil spill earlier this year, has decreased in inhabitants by 5.8%. One other instance is the leatherback turtle, another species affected by the BP Gulf oil spill, which has declined by 20.5%.

In the report's biogeographical realms, South Africa is part of "Afrotropical" which exhibits indicators of restoration since the 1990's the place the Living Planet Index was at minus fifty five%. The statistics differ for every nation as in America and Arab Emirates need four.5 planets to keep up with carbon emissions and consumption used. In India they need less then 50% of a planet.

In an try to seek out 'greener' gasoline by utilizing bio-gasoline, palm oil crops have increased by 8 fold over 20 years, changing 7.8 ha by 2010. This land conversion included forests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the home of the Orang-utan. Their population has decreased by 10-fold in two species populations on account of the deforestation and habitat degradation.

However the report does say that each one is not lost. The minimum criteria for sustainability based on accessible biocapacity of the planet and the human development index "indicates that it's actually possible for international locations to satisfy these criteria, though major challenges remain for all nations to satisfy them.

Minimalist structure moto "Much less is Extra" method is needed, not solely in structure and art but from the person, to nations, to the world. The steadiness wants to vary us getting all the things and nature nothing, to nature getting extra, more in protected areas, more in conservation, more in investment to recuperate the injury that has been created over the years and us to getting much less and rather using the sources we've already captured.

[biofunmy]

Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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[magneticiris]

Discovery Episode 10 Thoughts/Reaction

Obviously spoilers

- Title/premise-wise, it reminds me of "despite everything, it's still you". I want that to be true. I want the series to end with something akin to "where I am, I choose to be", because none of them really have been at this point. You have the researcher thrust into battle, the kid who's been shunted around from one culture to another all her life, and the guy straight up tortured to the point of having no control of his reactions. Also Saru, who's basically in constant fight-or-flight mode. Only Tilly knows what she wants, basically, which is what makes her such a sweetheart. And maybe Lorca, depending on what's going on with that dude.

- Yellow alert? You'd think another universe would be red alert, but I guess Lorca's too chill for that.

- Oh shit, Saru's ganglia and the stress clicks as soon as Tyler entered. Raising some death flags?

- Seriously, why are there no seatbelts on this thing. Or padding, to stop people braining themselves on the consoles. It is insane. Stamets nearly broke his damn skull, which would have cut short all their research.

- What the hell. There's a Discovery there? With a spore drive? So does that mean Stamets always sacrifices himself, or is there like an army of tardigrades/people in there as disposable fuel? I hope the latter, because that's messed up in the best way.

- Haha, Lorca's accent is getting a little thick. "*extreme lorca voice*: gentlemen, ah love war"

- Aw, Tilly. OMG, I want to hug her so bad. AW. Poor thing. I hope there's fanfic where Stamets sits down and apologises to Tilly for being such a dick to her, because he's honestly like that with everyone and my heart just kind of broke into pieces.

- To the palace? So he's out of the woods now, getting closer to here, maybe? Hm.

- Aw, Culber is so sweet... and so salty towards Lorca, lol. "Speak of the devil", dang.

- OH FUCK. Suddenly Lorca goes from possibly good guy to straight up fucking evil. Motherfucker needs to get decked. I mean, he has a point, but the idiot should have thought of that before he drove Stamets into a fucking catatonic state.

- I guess this is him feeling guilty about it and blaming their relationship as reason this wasn't found out earlier, but it's still shitty as hell to bring it up now. Glad they didn't shunt Culber off screen though, that'd tick me off.

- UH. Why would they send the dude ostensibly suffering from severe PTSD  in to a war zone. How could Burnham have let him? I mean, I know they have other things on their mind, but still. It's not just endangering him, it's endangering everyone around him.

- What is with Lorca pulling this "I know about your relationships" bullshit now of all moments. I do get that it's guilt, but it's really undermining his whole "I care about my crew" thing. Love is important, especially in the midst of a crisis like this.

- Poor Tyler. He really was Voq. But he isn't any more? He's what she turned him into as a cover? I really hope they're not two separate people, because that's no fun. I'm invested in the idea that the torture got his wires crossed and he really thinks he is Tyler.

- I do love the idea that he wants to be Tyler so much it's overwritten his programming. Like, if Voq is a different person, it ruins the whole thing where he wanted to be part of something greater. Unless he's been staring through Tyler's eyes, maybe?

- Burnham is so pretty. i'm gay

- Aw, I like the idea that this other universe has an alliance. Like, a second of hope for this universe.

- Aw, Stamets being missing is killing me a bit, too. I miss his barely-existent eyebrows, which gave life to every scene. Bless Anthony Rapp.

- I hope this version of Tilly is Captain, because otherwise they need to explain why not. It’d be like not having the tardigrade return in terms of missed opportunities.

- Aw, so Voq's going to see what fascism looks like from the outside. I love this angle, and I'm glad it's the humans who are space Nazis after all. I was worried that they were going that route with the Klingons as well as having them be tribal, which is a whole boatload of problematic racial subtext, but they've mostly dodged that bullet.

- Oh shit, they switched places. There's an evil Discovery out there causing havoc.

- HAHAHAHAHA. YES. CAPTAIN TILLY. This gives me hope for a lot of plot threads this season, you have no idea. Also, I love the visual motif that straight hair is conformity and being crushed by the system, while natural hair is being yourself. They started that with Burnham's Vulcan bowlcut, so I love it here.

- Oh my god, Tilly is an absolute treasure. I love her trying to act tough.

- HAHAHA Lorca’s Scottish accent. No wonder his Southern accent got a little thicker.How does he know how to do that at the drop of a hat?

- Poor Tilly, she has to learn how to be cutthroat. She's clearly never had to find that part of herself before.

- help. Tilly's nicknames. Killy. I love that her evil self is clearly going to be known as Killy until the end of time now, because that nickname is just as goofy as the real Tilly. So wonderful.

- Huh. Lorca murdered her?

- Aw, Lorca had my thought. Maybe you are a better person, dude. Maybe you're secretly an antifa idealist who wanted to destroy the empire.Anything’s still possible at this point.

- Destiny? Lorca really knows how to spin some bullshit when he has to, considering he's the one orchestrating everyone's destiny. Also, is that why he messes around with fortune cookies?

- I hope they run into their "dead" selves at some point.

- Love Saru being horrified by their plan. Especially since he's basically just had confirmation that humans are a terrible predatory species. More so than usual, in this universe. I hope he meets up with other alien races or gets something to do here.

- Aw, Culber. I know it'll end up okay, but it's killing me.

- is he seeing the future? Considering the mention of an emperor, the palace thing seems relevant.

- AW, this is heartbreaking. OH god, for two seconds he seemed back.

- Terrans don't apologise? Dang, I would make a useless Terran, then.

- Their strength is in survival. Yes, necessity. Tell the world that fascists are really scared little bigots who think everyone is as horrible and deceptive as they are. Although, in having to survive here and now, they're going to have to become like them. Which is why I hope mirror Lorca was antifa, because it'd make a nice counterpoint. He's almost been forged into one of them by whatever gave him those scars.Or he is one of them. Either way.

- AW, Burnham and Tilly. They're so great, and Tilly is such a goof.

- HAHAHA I love Killy so much. She's so OTT.

- Oh shit, it's that poor kid from the med bay. Well, the brig, but he thought it was the med bay.

- Killy is too much, it's delightful. I love them all trying to act over the top, it's killing me. Also, her asymmetric RPG hair is wonderful.

- His personality could be written over this? "You're not you" Personality doesn't equal soul, though. Really hoping he's not being taken over, and that he's just super confused. If they make Voq just an evil invader, I'll be kind of mad.

- Whoa. I like that it didn't linger, though. I don't think I could bear that kind of fetishisation of his death.So Stamets is going to need to pull a deus ex machina of some kind, I guess.

- "The enemy is here."

- Lorca really fucked up in that regard. They had almost too much faith in him, to the point where he had to actively undermine it this episode. I do hope he's good, though, because the twist being "Lorca's evil" seems kind of boring.

- Unless he and mirror Burnham somehow worked out that they needed to disband the empire, and she sacrificed herself to send him to the other universe? That’d explain why he’s so desperate to keep her alive and happy. I hope that’s it, if they go that route. It’d also explain why he thinks her destiny is for something greater.

- Man, Burnham is so good at this. I guess she's already kind of lost everything, so she knows how to harness that strength in absolute terror.

- Agoniser booth? Dang.

- FUCK. Did he kill the entire crew? OH. She has to kill that poor kid from the med bay. For a second there, I thought they were going with the kid being as cartoonishly evil as Captain "cut out your tongue to lick my boots" Killy.

- I mean, obviously it's not the same person as Connor, but still. In the circumstances, they could have become these people. Either they'd be dead, or they'd have lived long enough to become cartoonish villains.

- Oh god, the applause.

- So Voq is somewhere in Tyler's body. Ugh.

- God, everyone's so broken now. Even the hearts of the show, Tilly and Culber, are both compromised. Tilly maybe not as obviously so, but she's just had her dream shattered a bit and is stuck acting evil. This is the darkest quarter, right before everyone gets built back up... hopefully.

- AW. Tyler is so doomed. I hope Voq is seeing through his eyes and understands, if they are going that disappointing route. I really want them to be one and the same,

- So, was Lorca being an asshole to Culber earlier mostly to justify his being tortured? Because I see him in pain and I'm just like "yeah, you kind of deserve that, mate".

#discovery spoilers

[talkingwithburritospodcast]

Colossal Kong and The Creature Feature - TWB76

The 80’s welcomed in a different type of horror movie which steered away from the fear of the atomic 50’s and the boujee-ness of the 1960’s Euporean bloodsuckers. Horror did not necessarily include monsters but monstrous figures committing monstrous acts. In the late 70’s and 80’s, the movie monster replaced cheesy storylines with utter suspense and terror, like, Jaws (1975) and Alien (1979). Long were the days of monsters coming from afar outer space to terrorize earth, no, the monsters were next door in your own neighborhood and not so easy to dispose of. As a kid, I watched (whenever permissible) creature features on television and sometimes those “creature features” were more Sci-Fi than epic monsters. The King Kong movies, Godzilla, gigantic mutant insects, and aliens were a common staple of this genre but then there was Dracula and Werewolves sprinkled into the play mix. These were all considered horror movies at the time before they were all lumped into the distinctive category of The Creature Feature. Comment on this episode, ask a question or share what entertains you by visiting our website.

EPISODE MENU

3:58 - Colossal is the creature feature of this era of humanization in creature feature films. 9:06 - King Kong, Godzilla, Them!, are these films horror movies or creature features? 10:27 - Kong: Skull Island is just Moby Dick with a large ape instead of a whale. 18:43 - King Kong is a good example of the imbalance of nature vs man. 23:31 - Nature's wonderful miracles will eat your face off. 26:30 - Hunting on the Oregon Trail; fend for yourself or die of starvation or disease. 33:3o - Hunting is taking a knife into the woods and seeing what happens. 35:52 - In the movies, Kong and Godzilla are nature's way of balancing things. What's keeping us in check?

FOR STARTERS

Ann Hathaway plays party girl Gloria who has to move back to her hometown when her fed-up boyfriend kicks her out of his apartment. Things quickly get weird when she discovers that she — by matters of pure obscure coincidence— controls a monster that terrorizes South Korea every evening after one of Gloria’s binge drinking fits. read review

SCOOP DU JOUR : The Natural Balance and Godzilla

The natural balance of nature was disrupted by the presence of an ancient creature. This event awakens Godzilla who must restore the balance set awry by the presence of this other beast. That’s why Kong was based in the seventies and not today. It wasn’t that Godzilla wanted to save mankind, he just wanted to eradicate that thing which should not exist within nature without a counterbalance. With Warner Bros. and it’s Monsterverse now established, it will be interesting to see if the next set of movies within this franchise focuses less on the humanization of the monsters and more on their need to exist because nature requires them to live.

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THIS, THAT, AND OTHER NEWS

Administration temporarily lifted on importing of elephant trophies and then thinks otherwise.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Picture of the baby rhino who lost its mother to poachers

Wildlife conservation and saving to kill

The attempt to lift sanctions on hunting endangered species, like, the grizzly bear.

Poachers take rhino horns at a French zoo.

The killing of a white wolf in one of our national parks

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Episode Length 37:41

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Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

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