:P

It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.

"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.

There’s also Alexei Leonov, writer and artist and first person to conduct a spacewalk!

This is his art.

You can't forget this, the first art made in space.

March 1965, Alexei Leonov made this drawing only moments after narrowly surviving the very first space walk.

What I think is so fascinating is how clearly you can see the connection between that drawing and his later painting which is right above it.

My good sir I had a mortgage before any of those characters were published 💀

I know who exactly three of these people are. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Herald of Valdemar.

I wanted to be Menolly with her entire Faire of fire lizards.

I wanted to be a Starfleet officer.

Rolf Ohst (German, b. 1952)

Amnesia, 2016

Oil on canvas

La letra con amor, entra. (via)

DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THOSE BOOKS ARE PUSSYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOOK AT THOSE BOOKS BEING PUSSY;S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOW THATS WHAT I CALL “INTELLECTUALLY STIMULATING”…!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS WILL… REALLY MAKE YOU THINK!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

if this post gets deleted on the 17th I’m going with it

I’m pleased to announce that after nearly a year since the great tumblr porn ban of ‘18 Those Books Are Pussys has survived the great purge 

Official Cliterature Post

— Taylor on Clara Bow

You know how to ball I know Aristotle

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie – Albert Bierstadt (detail) // Lofoten Island – Lev Lagorio // Rosenlaui – François Diday // Mount Elbrus in the Clouds – Nikolai Yaroshenko // Storm in the Mountains – Hermann Ottomar Herzog // Sierra Nevada – Albert Bierstadt // Rocky Mountain Landscape – Albert Bierstadt // Inkpot Gods – The Amazing Devil

Discussion thread on reddit

My favorite example from there is Tinkerbell, but it also points to “Gods Need Prayer Badly” on TVTropes

Most of the responses in that Reddit thread are talking about the idea of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour, rather than the modern literary trope of gods gaining their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith; the former is, of course, an ancient notion, but uncritically conflating it with the latter may result in misleading conclusions.

I had been thinking that in response to the original prompt, because it's an interesting difference, right? Modern religions often focus on orthodoxy, believing the right things; but ancient polytheisms didn't care about that. They cared about orthopraxy, which is doing the right things.

Ancient polytheistic religions were fairly functional and transactional. They didn't spend much if any time thinking about "belief"; at least in the Mediterranean, atheism basically didn't exist, and the closest you got was believing the gods didn't care about you. (Bret Devereaux writes about this, and other differences between D&D religion and real historical polytheisms, here.)

Cultures do ritual sacrifice because "it works". (Yes, it doesn't "work" in reality, but it "works" in the sense that the cultures are performing these sacrifices and surviving, therefore the sacrifices are at least compatible with surviving as a culture.) And that comes before the theory, honestly; but the purpose of ritual is to make things happen. They're tools. And "just as a hammer and a wrench do not very much care if you think the ‘right things’ about hammers and wrenches, so the ritual does not care if you ‘believe’ in it, or have the ‘correct’ doctrine of it, so long as – like the wrench and the hammer – you use the tool properly."

And then the sacrifice is an exchange.

So then we can ask, what was the theory for why this stuff worked? And that varied.

Now you can see how e.g. the Aztec take relates to the "gods need belief" thing, but it's also very different, because the Aztec gods needed sacrifices. They don't care about the belief, they care about the stuff and the actions.

So the "gods need belief" thing is sort of a weird fusion of ancient polytheisms, which posited gods who needed or wanted sacrifice, with modern religions, with their focus on belief and orthodoxy. So it can basically only happen in a modern-invented pagan or polytheistic religion—which is, presumably, why we see them popping up in mid-century sword and sorcery stuff. It's a vague recreation of the shape of ancient polytheisms, but filtered through a very modern take on what religion is and how it works.

The short story "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Man_on_the_Subway" by Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl was originally written in 1941 and fairly explicitly posits gods powers as fueled by followers' belief, but it does so in a way that feels to me like it's exploring an idea from other fiction. So I doubt it's the first example, but being originally written even earlier than the previously cited A E van Vogt story (although it wasn't published until 1950), it might be useful to look at Pohl's other early stuff or extant work he might have been drawing on.

Well that's handy - someone actually just asked Neil Gaiman and got an answer which cites Deathbird Stories as expected, but also a book from 1888.

Interesting. I haven't read Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods, so I can't personally speak to where it falls on the "gods derive physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour" versus "gods derive their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith" continuum – it'd certainly be a considerably earlier example of the latter than I'd previously been aware of if it qualifies.

It's on Gutenberg!

Since I am procrastinating my thesis, I can say that it does seem to be a mixture of both. My memory of the greek gods (mostly from Percy Jackson...) indicates that the former is true in general, but I am definitely seeing shades of the latter as well.

So I see! Based on a quick skim I'd be inclined to consider it a transitional work rather than an example of the trope in its fully modern form – but then, if @jadagul's thesis that the trope represents a post-Victorian reinterpretation of Western polytheism is on the money, late Victorian popular fiction is exactly where you'd expect such transitional depictions to start popping up.

(A separate discussion thread initiated by @jakethesequel in the replies argues that the notion of the egregore as a collective thoughtform is also a late Victorian invention, from around the same time that Garnett's work was being published. I have to wonder which direction the influence flows – was Garnett drawing on ideas from contemporary occultism, or was occultism being influenced by contemporary popular fiction? Probably both!)

Deadpool & Wolverine | Official Trailer

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

I love the sorrow in which you wrote this

The tragedy of growing up british & left wing is realising all your beloved childhood animals in waistcoats were monarchists to the core

something about me is that my very first sex dream (as far as I can remember) was about the onceler. something else about me is that I didn’t regularly use the social internet until about 2017. so you can imagine my surprise when, about two years ago I discovered. well. you can imagine

So true

call that a skill issue. i have all 5 😎

ok you’re not gonna believe this. but my advisor

gonna buy this god-forsaken web site and charge all y'all $8 a month to edit reblogs.

'oh he's so funny now.'

mf i was always funny.

WONDER BAR (1934) | dir. Lloyd Bacon

Here is the actual clip, and let me tell you, Jolson’s delivery does not disappoint:

Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

Some fun stuff from the notes:

I met a girl last semester who volunteered at a national park for several years and she told a story of the time a facility that rehabilitates bear cubs had a lady pull up with a Black Bear in the back seat of her car because she had hit the bear with her car and drove an hour to the rehab facility with the bear in the car with her. They had to make a post that was like "PLEASE DO NOT BRING BEARS TO US. BEARS WILL KILL YOU"

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

Please read all of this, anyone ignoring the cut. It’s worth it.