gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:

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gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:

“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…

[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]

SINCE YOU ASKED

I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though. 

I have SETTING:

so it’s presumably postapocalyptic but I don’t want to get into the brass tacks of that. Some society presumably was preserved. Genetic engineering had gotten as far as restoring a bunch of Ice Age megafauna as the climate changed, though I don’t get into it; it’s been long enough that nobody really remembers the details except some urban egghead types.

The Earth’s magnetic poles sometimes shift, or have done so in the past, meaning all electronics go on the fritz. (It could also be sunspots. Again, some of the eggheads know for sure, but the majority of people don’t know or care.) This happens enough that people are used to it. Radios exist, but everyone keeps pigeons because sometimes the radios don’t work.

There are settlements where agriculture is practiced, and the cities are where most of the manufacturing happens. Far out in the countryside are populations of hunter-gatherers, some of whom farm seasonally, some of whom don’t; many of them are pastoralists, and herd animals. Others follow megafauna herds and more or less manage them. 

Our Heroine, the protagonist, is a hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherers in her area are loosely organized into clans, and are matriarchal, organized by bloodlines. If they want to breed, they have to breed with someone from outside their bloodline, which means either finding a visitor from another clan, or traveling to a larger settlement, or in some way making arrangments. Children belong to the clan, though, so even if a woman travels to find a mate, she would come back to her clan to give birth and raise the child. (Sometimes sons are given to their father’s family. It’s complicated.)

It doesn’t work that way in the cities, but our heroine doesn’t really know that; she’s well-traveled, but only within her herding ranges. 

But the radios stop working, right as they’re trying to track the mammoth migration: the herds are radio-tagged, so they can be more effectively managed. They can’t get the collar signals, and they can’t raise any of the other settlements or the city. Their pigeons go unanswered, until they’ve depleted them. (The way a pigeon works is that they’re one way, so you have to go to the city to get a pigeon that’ll communicate with the city.)

So, with no further ways to reach the city or the intermediate settlements, a couple of the clans have come together and determined that they’ve got no choice but to send an emissary, even though it’s prime herding season and normally they wouldn’t send anyone to the city until after the harvests and all. 

So our Heroine gets chosen to go to the city. She doesn’t want to go, she’s already got a daughter, but for some reason she’s the one who’s got to make the trip, so she figures, well, she’ll try to find someone to get another baby from while she’s there, and maybe she can trade some of her cool knicknacks and get some fun stuff, and she’s never been to the city so maybe it’ll be rad. She goes along with, like, a cast of characters, I haven’t decided who. It’s a big deal to get to go to the city. 

But there’s the adventure journey bit, that’ll be fine.

But I haven’t figured out yet a) why the radios don’t work and b) why the city hasn’t been responding. 

Also I was toying with letting her ride a mammoth to get there, if some of them are semi-tame, but that might be too much. I figure they’re about as tameable as elephants but tame elephants get handled every day. She probably rides a horse instead. Maybe a mammoth tags along for fun, though; they’re probably curious. That might be fun. (They know better than to give it any of their luggage, if it’s only coming for kicks. It could run off at any time.)

I was sort of considering that maybe it’s that usually the radios break because of sunspots and this time it’s a magnetic pole instability that’s causing it, which means they can’t just wait it out. Or just that it’s much more severe solar flares than usual, or somesuch. There could be some angst over whether there’s been an explosion or something somewhere on the planet– there may be some remnant of knowledge preserved about EMPs among the remnant egghead community in the university– and so the academics in the city are very worried, and that’s why nobody was responding to the pigeons. (It could also be, mundanely, that they were out of pigeons. Or, in the case of magnetic pole anomaly, that the pigeons were getting lost too, and so not useful as messengers!) 

Anyhow I hadn’t worked much out beyond that she goes to the city, causes a minor stir with her mammoth (who maybe wanders off into the countryside and wreaks some havoc that she then has to deal with while she’s enjoying the city), and she meets a very interesting nerd-boy who she decides to court, only it turns out sexual mores are very different in the city, and he’s not sure what to make of her and also her arms are as big around as his thighs and he’s really not sure what to make of that. Anyway maybe Our Heroine and Skinny Nerd-Boy maybe go on an adventure to Fix All The Radios or somesuch.

Only they wouldn’t be able to fix the radios, and the adventure would probably be doing research, and I suppose she can read but she wouldn’t be all that interested in libraries, but maybe she’d find out she was.

And mostly I want to poke at the gender roles and play in the fun semi-utopian setting.

But I need a Plot because I can only really fix my characters by Doing Something. 

So, that’s where I’m sort of stuck, and also I haven’t let myself think about it very much, so.

HEY you ASKED ok. LOL.
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gnefariousgnorc: bomberqueen17: gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added: ...

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gnefariousgnorc:

bomberqueen17:

gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:

“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…

[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]

SINCE YOU ASKED

I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though. 

Keep reading

HELL YEAH

so you’re going low-tech sci-fi with it kinda? I am all about this.

Keep reading

“Low-tech sci-fi” I mean, sort of, but I really did mean solarpunk. That’s the basic aesthetic, though most of the previous imaginers were thinking more of urban things and i’m thinking of a more mixed-density society. 

It could be that it’s not a thing Our Heroes wind up fixing after all. If it’s something like, oh boy we have a new era of not being able to rely on radio communications, then it could be that the pigeons are getting through but there just aren’t enough of them to reply. (Maybe the Heroine’s Journey was precipitated by her clan mother’s realization that they have all their pigeons back already, the city won’t have any more– the ones sending messages will be ones they raised, so they’d have bands on them and they’d know these were their own birds. So the city has already sent all they have, most likely. So somebody’s gotta go bring this crate of pigeons back to the city and make sure they all survive it. There’s a mundane-sounding but plausible reason that someone’s got to be sent. Maybe they’d normally send a couple of less-Important members of their clan on such a trip; our Heroine is an adult woman and one of the ones who knows how to read the mammoths’ radio collars and such, so she’s Important. Normally they’d send a couple of, like, teenage boys, people old enough to know how to get around but not specialists in any important tribal skill, but our heroine’s clan mother realizes this is Important and Possibly of Deeper Significance so she sends our Heroine.)

I was thinking that one or two of the other members of the party that go with the heroine can be members of neighboring tribes, too, for more interest. And so they get to the city and realize they’re gonna just have to get a bunch more pigeons to come back with them, and somewhere in there they figure that they need to journey to yet another destination? Maybe the comely, skinny egghead boy that Heroine is pursuing needs to go personally to some distant place, maybe he’s got to realign an antenna or something, and she sort of wants to get back home but also sort of realizes that he can’t travel that far on his own so she really ought to help him and also maybe she could actually win him over if she went, so she does. Like, they have to take pigeons to another settlement where his family’s from or something because nobody’s heard from them and he’s worried about his mom who lives there or something, but nobody prestigious lives there so it’s not a priority for the city folks with the resources for long journeys. (If his family lives in an agrarian settlement that’d give us a chance to explore that environment too, if we’ve seen the nomad/hunters and the city but we’d only have passed by agrarian collectives on the road.) And oh I thought of another thing after this next section about the mammoth.

And no, I don’t think the Mammoth needs to be deeply significant, but I think having it along needs to fulfill some kind of plot hole. Or like. Characterization. Or. I dunno.

I was thinking that maybe one aspect of the whole thing is that when they genetically reverse-engineered mammoths and some of the others, they put in a capacity to use communicators of some kind. I haven’t worked out the details. But so like, the mammoths aren’t tame, per se, but– like, we know elephants are pretty smart. And we even know that horses can use symbols to communicate, if trained to do so. (Even goats can use eye contact to determine intention.) So maybe there’s tech along with the radio collars that allows the mammoths to be communicated with, and it’s fritzing too, and it annoys the mammoth herd because being able to talk to the humans is kind of key to their full utilization of resources. (They share intel with humans, who have distance-communicators and so can talk to each other at a remove. What a useful thing! The humans only sometimes poach one or two mammoths, which the mammoths disapprove of and report, and sometimes there are consequences for the humans. Our Heroine has the distinction of belonging to a tribe that never does this, and so is given preferential treatment.) So the mammoth comes along to find out what’s going on with the technology, though her idea of what constitutes a reasonable adventure is much different from the humans’ ideas. 

Especially since they can’t use the communicators, so instead they have a really primitive cobbled-together idea board where she can point at things using her trunk but she can only sort of see the board, and it’s really difficult to actually convey anything, so in the glitchy moments when the communicator is actually working, they’ve tried to come up with like, flashcards and gestures and things, and the mammoth has learned to draw symbols with a stick in moments of extreme urgency. She’s really not human, though, so she thinks in very different ways and has completely alien priorities at times; our heroine absolutely does not have any mystical rapport with her, but the city folks think she does and are super-awed. 

Anyway I want the mammoth to be more a character than a plot mcguffin. 

I feel like I could really do this whole novel without there being any massive planet-wide Ancient Chosen One kind of crisis. I’m so stressed-out in general by current events that I really don’t want to write a novel where there’s a global crisis too. I feel like I could have just minor crises suffice.

 But that might be too many years of writing fanfiction, where people will happily read 75 pages of beloved characters’ daily lives and mundane frustrations as long as the character dynamics are good. I might be wrong about that…

Oh maybe some of the driving factor is that while the humans can make do about not having reliable radios for who knows how long, with more pigeons, however long this solar storm lasts or whatever, the mammoths really are stuck without their communicators, so the one who came with them expresses that she really wants a solution to that, there’s another herd maybe who has a range that overlaps near where City Boy’s mom’s people are, so she convinces the Heroine to go on that trip so that they can stop by one of the checkpoints of that herd’s range and teach them how to make symbols as a backup plan for if the communicators don’t work. Because that herd is at more risk for poaching and Mammoth is worried about them. So maybe heroine has already decided she’s lost interest in unattainable city boy, and mammoth is like no no we need him. Now kiss. Or whatever that thing is you do with your tiny flat faces.

I also was thinking of one of the opening scenes of the novel being the seasonal Return of the Mammoths, and it’s a long-standing tradition with Heroine’s tribe that what you do when the Mammoths come back is that you introduce them to your children, so we get to see her whole family and all the mammoths and it’s super cool, and that’s when they realize that the communicators aren’t working reliably. 

cipollakate: I had a hard time getting a decent picture, so...

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cipollakate:

I had a hard time getting a decent picture, so trust me when I say it looks better than this in real life. Anyhow, something that is constantly on my mind and that I’m constantly struggling with is how it’s only recently that queer people are being allowed a history, and even then it’s only begrudgingly, and in pieces.

A big part of being queer (especially in this day and age with access to the Internet, I think, which has helped matters somewhat) is learning throughout your life that there are loads of famous historical figures who were queer, and dealing with the frustration both that it’s been swept under the rug for however many years, from decades to centuries, and with how historians will do their level best to handwave away the queerness of the individual involved. A big part of our lives is being told repeatedly that there are no famous or wonderful people like us in history. That our sexuality is not palatable or acceptable to the world. That we are alone.

And it’s just not true. Shakespeare wrote shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? with male pronouns. Kitty Genovese was an out lesbian living with her girlfriend at the time of her murder. The Ladies of Llangollen named their dogs Sappho. But despite how loud we are, the louder historians get, going “well, who’s to say?”. And it’s even worse for people who don’t show up in history books, who just go about living their lives, because it’s far easier to sweep us under the rug when we have not lived our lives in the public eye. We are easily forgotten because for centuries, people have wanted us to be, and in large parts, they controlled the narrative, a narrative we are only just beginning to get a hold on.

I was looking for projects to work on when I returned to the woodshop this semester, and in my writing tag, I found this quote by Sappho, someone even the most desperate of historians have a hard time disputing the queerness of. And I thought about the quiet longing of this that I think a lot of us carry around. We won’t be blurred or buried forever. We won’t always be hidden. Someone will remember us, even in another time.

Tl;dr, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about queer history, so I made this thing, and it was kinda cathartic, so I’m glad I did.
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asofteravenger:what a t-shirt idea!

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asofteravenger:

what a t-shirt idea!
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hansbekhart: Dear White Fandom Let’s talk for a

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hansbekhart:

Dear White Fandom

Let’s talk for a second.

So Black Panther opens nationwide today. I saw it last night, and let me tell you: it’s absolutely incredible. It’s as good as you’re hearing. It’s gorgeous. It’s compelling. Everyone acts their faces off. It’s also, inarguably, the most complex movie in the MCU.

You might leave the theater super jazzed and wanting to write meta and fic about how beautiful Wakanda is, how badass the Dora Milajae are, or who the real villains might be and why, or over that little cameo at the end (no spoilers). And you’re not wrong - but if you’re white, pump the brakes on that feeling for a few days.

There’s a lot to take in, about Black Panther. It’s an intricate, incredibly well thought-out movie that covers a lot of ground in terms of thorny and important themes. It stares right in the face of generational trauma, the legacy of slavery, conflicts between the diaspora and Africans and what responsibilities and connections each feel to each other, how colonization continues today under different names, and on and on.

And you’re gonna be missing the context for a lot of that. So hit pause on that content creation for a little bit, okay?

There’s a lot of meta, fic, thought posts, personal experiences, and resources already being shared by Black fans. There’s gonna be a lot more. Take the next few days to read them. Get lost reading up on the historical and cultural touchstones that the movie draws from. Follow Black fans and reblog their stuff. Listen before you hit post on that fic or meta.

And maybe you don’t end up posting it at all. Maybe you learn the context of the characters and issues and history you saw up on screen, and that great idea you came out of the theater with seems more and more like a hot take. That’s okay. It’s totally fine just to listen.

I’m not saying that white people aren’t allowed in the Black Panther fandom. I’m not saying that only Black people can write Black Panther fic. First, that would be incredibly hypocritical of me; and Second, I think that white people not putting in the effort to humanize non-white people literally makes us worse human beings.

What I’m saying is, if you wanna do it: it’s worth putting in the work. Not just to create content that isn’t full of microaggressions and outright racism, but participation means you have to put in the work to do it right. If you’re not willing to wait, and listen, and learn, and work - then just don’t.

If your response to this is to get really mad and offended– maybe sit back for a second and reread it and think about why you’re so mad at the implication that you might not come out of this with the context to instantly write a good story about it.

Because if your knee-jerk reaction is fuck you I write what I want, then the odds are also good that you’re going to write something that’s going to piss off a lot of people and you’re going to have to keep deploying that fuck you I write what I want a lot. So like.

Think about if that’s what you want to do with your life, is all. That’s the fandom experience you really genuinely want? Really? I don’t think so.

You should be moved! That’s great! The movie is designed to move you! And absolutely you should write whatever your little heart desires!

You’re just gonna be a whole lot happier with the result if you hang onto that inspiration for a second and do a tiny bit of research.

I’ve done this! I’ve written a thing and thought deeply about it and been all happy with it and only later realized that I totally unwittingly fell into a horrifying racist stereotype out of complete innocent ignorance. That doesn’t mean I didn’t fall into it! My intention didn’t mean anything. And let me tell you, it sucked. I had no idea! But that didn’t make it any less real. 

So like. The above essay was clearly written out of love and concern. Take it in the spirit in which it was intended, and open your mind a tiny bit wider to let some context in. Your good intentions don’t save you from crash-landing into bad outcomes. 
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"Lemonade was not made for me, either. As a Singaporean Chinese woman, I would be lying if I said I.

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“

Lemonade was not made for me, either. As a Singaporean Chinese woman, I would be lying if I said I was familiar with the complex, myriad ways Beyoncé explores black female personhood, sexuality, and spirituality in the film. But as a non-American, non-white woman, what I am familiar with is appreciating art that is not and will never be made with me in mind.

This is a process that white people are now struggling with more publicly than ever. It seems to me that much of the pain in this process comes from entitlement, which often stems from ignorance. I wonder: Do white people in the Western world understand just how much of global popular culture is tailored to their tastes and their histories? Do white people in the Western world know that, for non-white people who wish to participate in and discuss global popular culture, being well-versed in white cultural and musical history is almost compulsory? Do white people in the Western world know how laughable it is that they feel excluded just because a popular work of art dares to be less culturally legible to them?

”

- Beyoncé’s Lemonade: A Lesson on Appreciating Art That Wasn’t Made for You | Consequence of Sound (via luxuriousvulgarity)
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cars ugh

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I sort of like cars, I was raised helping my dad fix them, they’re not really mysterious to me. But they’re stupid expensive and stressful.

My current car is pretty new. 2013 I think, 2014 maybe. I am super up on the maintenance, I take it in as soon as it needs a service, I don’t skip any. I’m like super up on it.

Over the summer I took it in for an oil change and figured it probably needed new front brakes. It cost $900. Ugh. They also said, hmmm your tires are a little thin, you might need to replace those soonish. I said I mean, they pass inspection, right? They said yeah, but, you’re gonna be sad in the ice. I said yeah, well, if that’s a problem I’ll get new tires. (Thinking, not from you. There’s a local tire place with a good reputation and multiple locations and I’ve used them to fix flats before. If you buy their tires they do rotations for free. Dude bought snow tires from them, they store the other tires for free. When I hit a curb and tore my sidewall I got a tire from them, and they were like “oh gosh you’ve got AWD we might have to do all four” and then the guy came out with a ruler and measured with me right there and was like “hey no the wear’s close enough, we can just do one! Phew! We gotta special-order exactly the right one but we can do it!” So like. Yeah.) (When you’re car shopping, consider that, if you buy an AWD car, you can’t replace one tire, you must have all four be perfectly identical, within a couple of 32nds of an inch of wear, so. All-Wheel Drive is Not Worth It, take it from me!)

I brought my car back in this time, actually slightly early for its next service– because the inspection was up and I was like, I might as well get it done at the same time as the inspection. So I did. 

They were like oh, your brakes, they’re pretty low, they might need replacing, best to do them now. I was like wait the ones I just had done? No no, the rear ones. 

I had the rear ones done already. The car was still under warranty it was so new, and the rear brakes were grinding, I had like 20,000 miles on the car, and I took it in, and they did my rear brakes and they were like whew good thing you came in still under warranty that would’ve been expensive! and i was like oh yah I’m so glad! wow! really that’s free? and they were like oh yah! car warranty!

… Oh, said the guy on the phone just now. Uh, well. Lemme scroll back that far. Uhh… they didn’t… replace your brakes. They took the rotors off, ground them down to be even, then put them back on rotated for better wear.

Really, I said icily. They did not tell me that. I asked them pretty specifically, and they said, oh, we replaced your rear brakes. I don’t know what question I was supposed to ask to find out that by “replaced” they meant “took off and put back on again”. That seems extremely sketchy to me. You commented just now when I dropped my car off how conscientious I am about maintenance. Does it not strike you that someone conscientious about maintenance would wish to know the details of how her brakes were “fixed” so that she could make informed decisions going forward about her car’s maintenance? I would possibly have requested a replacement last year when you were doing my front brakes, had I known I was riding around on resurfaced, reused old rotors in the back. I can handle balding tires but I don’t like to fuck with brakes, I have extensive experience in cars with bad brakes. [surely i’ve told the saga of driving my old minivan 300 miles with both brake lines busted.]

Yeah, the guy said uneasily, that’s, yeah, I’m sorry about that, we’ll see if we can do anything for you, gosh.

They could not do anything for me, the brake job cost about a hundred dollars more than they’d quoted me, and altogether the service was $600 more than they’d told me when I dropped the car off.

I’m going to send the guy one last email letting him know that I’ll be doing my future maintenance elsewhere, and if he could be a dear and send me a summary of my services so that I know what other sketchy fucking shit they’ve done so that I can begin my new maintenance program with another shop on an informed basis, that’d be super nice. 

Also my tires that were so bald last summer that I couldn’t possibly survive a winter? 

No mention of that this time! Hm could it be that they were just trying to sell me tires? Gosh it’s a dealership and they have sales quotas don’t they. Hmmmmm.

Everyone said “don’t go to the dealership for your maintenance they’re overpriced and shady” and I was like “but they’re so nice to me!” No. No, don’t do it, my friends.

There’s a mechanic on the corner of my street who knows a fair bit about Subarus. I’ll use them instead. (They don’t sell tires. They say oh get ‘em at Dunn like everyone else, they’ve got all kinds.)

I’m going to close it out by pointing out that my dude just bought a Mazda from them and was about to take it in for its first service (he’d scheduled it for today but forgot to reply to the confirmation email so inadvertently canceled it) and is now reconsidering that idea, and looking for another local mechanic that handles Mazdas. Because that’s also true.
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If the door’s locked, try the wall

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we-are-rogue:

[by
Geoff Manaugh]

a drywall knife

In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could  simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to  architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City

uh this is cute and all but it’s literally how our store was robbed this summer. this is how big robbery rings operate. we’re one of several similar stores targeted this way.

there are three stores in the building, it’s a little mini-mall kinda area. we’re on one end, with motion detectors and alarms and decent locks. (huge glass windows– but, motion detectors. very sensitive ones. if you try to open the door you might trigger the alarm. once our heat system’s draft moving a photo light umbrella set it off.)

the middle one sells hearing aids. expensive, but they all have tiny GPS trackers inside them. (this is real, by the way.) 

the far store sells insurance. they have no security system, and rinky-dink locks on their doors, because why would they need robust security, no one is going to break into an insurance salesman’s office. anything sensitive is on the computers. there’s not even cash on site. 

So the burglars broke in the insurance office. they’d scouted us out, knew where our motion detectors were, realized that the one in the back room was such that it would catch the back door, but not the farthest corner. the one in the front room was aimed at the entrance, and not pointed at the inventory shelves.

they sawzall’d through the insurance office bathroom, into the hearing aid place’s back room. they ignored the expensive hearing aids, apparently realizing that their GPS trackers would give them away, but they did steal a stereo system still in its box, that had just been purchased.

then they sawzall’d through the wall of the hearing aid place, into the… bathroom of the hearing aid place. whoops. then they re-oriented themselves, sawed through our wall, and pushed a shelving unit exactly as far as they’d previously observed that they could go without our back room’s motion detector picking them up. (sure enough, that model has a tiny light that illuminates when it sees you, and it does that all day whether the alarm’s armed or not. that’s a huge flaw! wow! i never would have noticed.)

Then at their apparent leisure they cleared out the inventory in our back room, then went into the front room, ducking low and hugging the walls, and took only cameras they knew they could sell. they left behind some cameras we had that were discontinued, and some lenses that were on the shelf closest to the sensor, on display and not in their boxes and so more difficult to transport; clearly, they knew what they wanted.

then they left. the alarm never went off. no one noticed anything until monday morning when the insurance people opened up and were like… where does this giant hole go???
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The Shape of Water and cinema visions: stealing an other American dream

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thebyrchentwigges:

Guillermo del Toro frankly says that The
Shape of Water is a love letter to cinema. Movie aficionados see the artistic
care in every shot, enjoy unpicking each film reference. There’s something more,
too. I see the cinema references in The
Shape of Water as offering an alternative version of the American Dream –
the same way those movies influenced my own immigrant father.

The price of admission…

Behind the cut: the straight-arrow American
Dream versus messy Hollywood fantasies, what Hollywood movies
meant to Guillermo del Toro and to my father, and defying machismo by stealing magic and romance. Spoilers for
The Shape of Water.

Keep reading
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He’s!! Washing!! The!! Broiler pan!!*explodes*

via http://ift.tt/2HlAWhL

He’s!! Washing!! The!! Broiler pan!!

*explodes*
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