why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like…
rainbow mountains (peru)
red soil (canada/PEI)
rings (saturn’s if they were on earth)
bioluminescent waves
northern lights (canada)
salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)
and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens
BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species
I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:
Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar
Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)
Chocolate Hills, Philippines
Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland
So many missed opportunities with cool ass things on Earth, Lucasfilms smh…
I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)
Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).
It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.
Why did nobody in Fullmetal Alchemist carry around some fucking backup transmutation circles. Like Riza is there with a box full of fresh gloves for Roy when he gets soaked but you’d think after the first time he got rendered useless in a fight by some dude with a water bottle he’d start carrying around a spare set in a waxed bag or something but NOOOOO. And Ed’s even fucking worse like his arm gets destroyed how many times???? AND HE ACTS SURPRISED EVERY TIME. OH NO MY ARM. NOW I CAN’T ALCHEMY. Shit, boy, draw some transmutation circles ahead of time and keep em in your coat, this isn’t hard. “Oh no, you’ve destroyed my arm again, whatever shall I SIKE” Ed says, before throwing a rock with ‘explode’ written on it at his attacker and making good his escape. Everyone’s always carving shit into their skin or drawing it in their own blood, HOW BOUT INSTEAD YOU CARRY A PIECE OF FUCKING CHALK. Alchemists are useless
Like, the Flint water crisis, right? I just read an estimate that it would take $55 million to bring clean water back to Flint. That sounds like a lot of money until you consider that’s less than a tenth of a billion dollars. Jeff Bezos is worth $118 billion. For less than .05% of his net worth, Jeff Bezos could bring water back to an entire town. At the most money I have ever had in my bank account, .05% of it could buy me like a burger. And not even a particularly nice one.
And let’s say, yeah, the ultra-rich are soulless monsters devoid of empathy or altruism. For .05% of his net wealth, Jeff Bezos could completely turn his public image around. Instead of being the asshole who exploits his workers, suddenly he’s the unlikely hero who saved an entire town.
Like
How do you have the power to become a hero at practically no personal cost and just
Not?
Queue the stream of libertarians bitching about “you can’t just steal money from people!” Shut up, chad. I’d skin Jeff Bezos with a butterknife if it would undo his greed and give money to the millions of people it could help. He could single-handedly end poverty if he wanted to.
funeral-biscuit 