#I Maintain That Seeing Scotty Pine About The Enterprise Was Absolutely Fantastic#100% Believe His Engineering

NOOOOO! DAMN IT, BILLY-BARD! I love Shakespeare so much, but this one play just will not stop haunting me. I'll never reach the ends of it. It's like a puddle that goes down far enough to have angler fish.

I have been exposed to this more than any other of The Bard's work, and never once by choice. I have been forced to read this play cover to cover four times in school, including for one exhausperated highschool teacher who got the lot of us engaged by giving extra credit to whoever found the most dick jokes. I've seen it performed by every kind of troop from school kids to the actual globe theater. I once got roped into playing a bit part in a performance art street production because I happen to be walking by, and I NEVER CAUGHT THIS?!?

I tip my hat to you, thank you for showing me yet another facet to the peerless jewel I am repeatedly clubbed over the head with whether I like it or not.

It's a perfect sonnet.

14 lines. 3 stanzas in ABAB rhyme, and a rhyming couplet at the end.

It starts off with each of them speaking a whole stanza. Romeo offering up a self depreciating metaphor (a pilgrim at a holy shrine, sinful for wanting to place a kiss on her hand), and Juliet returning it (it's not a sin for a pilgrim to touch the hands of a saint. Pilgrims and the saints hands can touch. )

Then they share a quatraine, keeping the rhyme and rhythm steady, the flirting turning even more overt. (Saints and pilgrims both have lips, yeah? Well, sure, for prayer. Well if a pilgrims hand can touch a saints hand, then their lips...)

Then they each speak half a couplet (the saints dont make the first move, but if its a prayer....well, here I am, praying....), and share their first kiss.

It's flirty and silly and a little irreverent, and they become more and more in sync as they speak.

This is a heightened, fantastical, almost reality bending moment. This is a moment where two lonely teenagers, one who is having her future decided without her and the other fresh from an unrequited rejection, feel the world shift around them.

And the foreshadowing sits at the end of stanza 3. This is an act of faith, but if it cannot be, it will turn to despair.

And I just. The craft of it. The poetry of it. How the form and the rhythm mirror the metaphor and mirror the emotion of it.

Dangit I missed the window, gotta catch the next drop. (Never underestimate SH fans, they brought the guy back from the dead and haven't rested since)

WATSON'S SKETCHBOOK VOL 1 is available to purchase! 178 pages of black and white comics, illustrations, and occasional essays on Victorian queerness, covering the Watson's Sketchbook story from A STUDY IN SCARLET through SECOND INTERLUDE. Many of the comics have been updated and cleaned up from their online versions. Also they are signed and I drew a little guy inside!

A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic.

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I invented Human Chow once! When I was in high school (and already very ornery on account of that) I found out that I had dietary restrictions, and decided I did not want to deal with that. So I teamed up with some actual nutritionists from the hospital that my mom worked at to create the cheapest, lowest ingredient, meal that I could eat three times a day indefinitely. Including all of the vitamins and nutrients that I would need, as well as the proper caloric balance. As I recall it involved soybeans, tomatoes, spinach, olive oil, and various veggies I could all get dried or frozen at the store. Then I put it through a food processor, and froze it into portioned pucks. It looked like vomit, tasted like whatever spices I threw on top of it that day, and meant I didn't have to worry about what I was eating for literal months, at the low low cost of being incredibly weird (and 25cents per plate). 10/10, I should get back to that.

I did, in fact, think of the meal cubes. I put it in an ice cube tray a couple of times, but I never did figure out how to dye it properly.

so tired of having to cook and trying to figure out wtf to eat, can I just have like. Specialized human dog food or something, like some vegetable and protein biscuits and a special drink so that I only have to think about maybe cooking something once a day instead.

I'd like to think this misconception is the result of a deliberate snow job on the part of the younger Ms. Watson. For the purpose of getting an in with the cute boy next door, natch. I mean, MJ *is* an actress, is she not?

HA! And I say again HA That's like the winning entrant in a "explain what MJ is NOT" contest. Amazing Spiderman 15

I managed to decode the lower speech bubble, got most stumped on the first, and then realized I could and should wait for the expert fandom decoders to do it for me XD . Never has phonetic spelling been so unintelligible, nor fans so dedicated to decoding it anyways.

Zoing's speech

I would like to thank the wonderful folks in the girl genius server for joining me as soon as thenpage dropped last night for us all to collectively transcribe and decode Zoing's speech about what's going wrong on castle Wulfenbach. The best guess we settled on was:

"He came back! Gilgamesh go walk about and father came back! A scary clank lady want to fix a new body in a tank, making new brain to put brain in tank body in a big lab!"

"It’s gonna work and then she in command of the whole ship and empire and everything! It’s bad!"

Which sounds like Lucrezia is on board stealing herself a new organic body that can potentially go queen mode! Uh oh!

Richard Scary's Couscous, the Algerian Detective. My Dad read it to me and my brother and always did the funny voices. Little did we know he was setting us up to share his love of noir mysteries.

Time for a new poll! I'm curious to see the spread of answers on this one (and hear any other series not on the list.) Tried to go for a range of older and newer series on here, more on the older end of the spectrum, but I can't cover everything with the limited poll options here, so I hope you'll share your answers! :)

Please reblog for a larger sample size, thank you!

That's crazy, you have this person who is basically family, and there's no indication of that when you talk to or about them? I didn't even know that was not a thing for some people, let alone that it was a race thing. Granted I'm white so I can't speak to non-white POVs but if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago I would have told you that Auntie/Uncle FamilyFriend was universal.

Seeing white people in fiction call friends of their parents "Uncle/Aunt ___" wigs me out because I have never done that a day in my life and I don't know any other white people who do that. We don't even do this with my sister's godparents. They're just like, George and Melanie. An adult friend of your parents is either Mx. Lastname or their first name exclusively, there is no other option for me.

Prompt:

Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne are childhood best friends.

Green Arrow hates Batman’s guts.

That animosity— and his aim to subtly piss Batman off at every turn— results in Green Arrow and Red Hood collaborating on a trafficking bust.

This somehow results in discovering that the Red Hood is his best friend’s supposedly dead son.

Oliver doesn’t know how he’s going to fix this, with Jason refusing to want anything to do with either Bruce or the Batman of Gotham (who everyone knows is dating the former)… but one thing’s for sure:

He needs to bring the kid home. Oliver can’t bear to watch Bruce suffer any longer when the cause for it is sitting at his kitchen table, alive, and stuffing his face with waffles.

To be fair, I have met (and herded out of a mildly exploding building) kids like that. Highschoolers, man. Just enough smarts to be so, so stupid.

Because some kids can't even hold onto the instruction of "there is a killer robot loose in the school, evacuate" Amazing Spiderman 8