Kelly Marie Tran attends the “Sorry For Your Loss” premiere during 2018 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 8, 2018 in Toronto, Canada
i am Q u A k i N G,,, she just…. WENT THERE. i have transcended my body
environment concept art from Tekkonkinkreet – adapted from the manga, ‘Black and White’ byTaiyō Matsumoto… Art director: Shinji Kimura – director: Michael Arias – animation by Studio 4°C…
James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn’t stay up – Youtube’s Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement
because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth
of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for
300 years.
Just last week, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser posted his research
on automated censorship of classical music, in which he found that it
was nearly impossible to post anything by composers like Bartok,
Schubert, Puccini and Wagner, because companies large and small have
fraudulently laid claim to their whole catalogs.
Europeans have one week to contact their MEPs to head off this catastrophe.
Stop what you’re doing and contact two friends in the EU right now and send them to Save Your Internet – before it’s too late.
“but how could thor and the other asgardians have been completely unaware of their people’s violent history as a conquering and enslaving empire?!?” have you ever met an english person
In more detail, they aren’t completely unaware of it, they just aren’t contextualizing it in a negative way.
We know that because the audience knew long beforehand, too. It’s just that it was being presented as a good thing by the narrative.
In Thor: The Dark World, Odin flat out says that Asgard, under the rule of his father, rendered an entire race’s homeworld unlivable and consigned them to extinction. At the beginning of the first Thor movie, we find out that in the wake of the war against Jotunheim, Frost Giants are basically branded as savage monsters who had it coming to them. We never find out Jotunheim’s reasons for the war, or all the factors leading up to the conflict with Svartalfheim. It’s enough for the Asgardians present that these are just ‘savage’ people who mean harm, and Asgard is presented as having a moral duty to protect ‘the realms’ from them.
Odin frames the Jotunheim conflict as a necessary intervention to save the people of Midgard from the Frost Giants. But when Thor brings a Midgardian – a woman whose life is in grave danger, a woman who helped him in his own hour of need – to Asgard for help, Odin accuses him of disrespecting the realm by bringing such a lowly being there. Like a ‘goat at a dinner table’. A strong clue that the stated, morally upstanding reasons for the conflict are a lie – no one sends armies of soldiers to die protecting animals they’re indifferent to.
We know that Thor thinks highly of warriors and conquest. At the beginning of the first movie, he goes to Jotunheim with the intent of killing the frost giants there over the actions of a few who interrupted his coronation. He thinks this is his right, that it’s heroic and laudable behaviour. And later we discover that Thor himself is actually a pretty chill dude most of the time, and given half a chance, likes making friends and learning new things. So this isn’t one guy’s violent inclinations winning out – it’s a product of cultural values and cultural conditioning.
What’s interesting is that as his character develops, Thor decides that all this time, he’s been misunderstanding Odin’s meaning. He projects his own personal growth onto Odin – he actually learns the importance of only fighting when you need to, of defending those who can’t defend themselves, and he sees his own follies (even if that doesn’t always stop him from repeating his mistakes). It’s not an immediate process, his development into a hero doesn’t begin and end in the first movie – he’s growing slowly throughout. But he still thinks that the problem is that he misunderstood Odin’s values. That the understanding and wisdom he’s personally trying to achieve is something that his father already has.
Ragnarok is Thor learning that, in fact, no. He wasn’t just misunderstanding Odin this entire time. He was learning the lessons that Odin himself never fully understood. That all his thoughts of ‘aha, I have learned something – so Father must have already known it, and wanted me to learn it!’ were childish and naive. That’s why Odin declares, with authority, that Thor is stronger than him. Thor is better than him. Odin made monsters, he made them literally with Hela, and he made them figuratively with his propaganda about the other peoples and races of the realms. He made Asgard a realm of monsters, within and without.
Thor defeats monsters. He defeats them literally, as with Hela. And he defeats them figuratively, as when he recognizes the ‘humanity’ of the people who Odin dismissed as weaklings and villains, and sees that the ‘monsters’… aren’t. He saves what he can of Asgard, from the ruinous path that his forebears set them onto long ago.
You Ya-ting, left, and her partner Huang Mei-yu stamp their names in front of a statue of Buddha in the prayer hall as they are married in the first Taiwan same sex Buddhist ceremonial wedding in Taoyuan, Taiwan
my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”
i googled this bc i desperately wanted this to be real, and guess what…it is.
the dude’s name was su dongpo (also known as su shi). his original poem went like this:
稽首天中天，
毫光照大千，
八風吹不動，
端坐紫金蓮
(Humbly bowed my head below all skies Minutest lights shine through my deepest bounds Immovable by strong winds from eight sides Upon purplish gold lotus I seated straightly by the low mound) (x)
on which his friend wrote “放屁” (fart, literally), and you know the rest.
where’s my grandparent who will peacefully die of old age and give me a note only to open when i need it, revealing that they have gifted me their old farm that i can use to escape to if i ever need a reprieve from capitalist corporate life, in an idyllic town with lovely villagers and also a wizard
funeral-biscuit 