@wrestlingaknife / wrestlingaknife.tumblr.com
Ruey Ling Chang, 83, was on her way to pick up a prescription when we met her. We loved how her all-gray outfit was dynamic: a silk paisley shirt from Taiwan, thick ribbed pants and black slip-ons. A silver hair clip pulled back her gray bob. On Ruey, this dark monochrome was vibrant.
She also had the blogger pose down.
Hermione smugly presenting the findings of the international symposium that declared Pluto not a planet as final proof that astrology is made up.
But it turns out that’s what’s been throwing off everyone’s readings so a lot of divination quickly starts becoming more refined and accurate when they take that into account.
Hermione is hailed as a divination savant and that’s what she’s most known in the history books for.
“Women who pull their hair back and know their way around a toolbox are sexy as hell.”
Manslation: Everything women do, no matter how functional or practical, is a performance for men and I’ll never hesitate to judge it on that basis. With a healthy dose of condescension, of course.
It’s always fun when someone like @manslator is there to belittle you for having a progressive outlook on technically-proficient women
Manslation: As we all know, true progressiveness means focusing on the sex appeal of a woman who knows how to use tools instead of her actual knowledge of said tools. Also somebody made fun of one such “progressive” stranger on a popular humor blog and I cried for dayz :( :( :(
Manslation: But objectifying women doing stereotypically masculine things is progressive! I could be objectifying them for stereotypically feminine things instead!
“It’s not our clothes you don’t respect, it’s us”
Boom
As everyone knows, Christmas came early yesterday. So I’ve been rewatching TFA and I’ve been thinking about something I’d never really considered before: why is Kylo Ren so interested in FN-2187/Finn?
Of course everyone is perfectly aware of Ren’s sick interest in Rey, of how he wants to capture her and bring her over to the dark side, but have you noticed how he’s also incredibly invested in Finn?
The first time this happens is in the village on Jakku:
Ren clearly feels something and is compelled to look over at FN-2187. What did he feel that was so strong it made him stop and look over? Fear? Uncertainty? I don’t think that’s it. And al he sees is a stormtrooper with a bloody handprint on his helmet, no big deal. Totally forgetable, right?
But then, when Hux tells him that Poe Dameron has escaped with help from someone from the FO, Ren immediately responds like this:
So he was so impressed by what he saw in that one stormtrooper that he not only memorized his designation, but also thought of him as soon as he learned that someone had betrayed the FO. Uuhn, interesting.
Fast forward to Ren’s first tantrum. Poor officer dude is telling him that BB-8 has escaped Jakku aboard a Corellian freighter, but that’s not what sets Ren off. He asks if the droid stole a freighter and officer dude says that no, it had help, possibly from FN-2187. And Ren freaking loses it. Why does he have such an exaggerated reaction to this? Certainly it’s not because he’s personally disgusted by Finn’s betrayal of the FO. He has already shown us that he doesn’t care very much about the FO’s interests (Hux warns him not to let his own personal interests get in the way of Supreme Leader Snoke’s) and that he doesn’t have much faith in the stormtrooper program (he even says maybe they should go back to using a clone army).
Fast forward even more to the famous confrontation on Starkiller, and we get this:
Jesus Christ, that’s not the face of a man who’s only angry at Finn for betraying an organization he kinda sorta belongs to. That looks a lot more serious than that. So do I have to go on? The conclusion is clear:
Ren is in love with Finn.
No damnit, that’s not it. It’s clear that Finn is Force sensitive, that he had his awakening on Jakku, which Ren felt, and that his breaking free from the FO spells out A LOT of trouble for Ren. It could also mean that Ren knows something about Finn’s real heritage (then I’ll start getting into Finn Skywalker territory) and that’s even more reason for him to feel so strongly about his “betrayal”.
Wait, what's wine forgery? How would you fake wine?
VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.
First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million in 2014.
And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine’s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?
Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world, I’m gonna say no.
There are definitely flavors associated with old wines, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don’t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like Harvey Rodenstock and Rudy Korniawan do exactly that.
It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them. They’re not for drinking! They’re an investment, or they’re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?
So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you’re faking, and there’s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They’re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.
Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby’s auction house’s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place.
The question isn’t how do you fake wine: it’s how the fraudsters ever get caught. In Rodenstock and Korniawan’s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down).
As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place.
There’s a great podcast on this topic in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this.
This is how I will scam the bourgeoisie out of 1.4 million dollars.
Hey, @popliar @proteinscollide ! Relevant to Dick Francis! But interesting in its own right too. The world is weird.
…100% that Finn is so expressive because wearing the helmet all the time no one could see him making faces at Phasma and everyone else behind their backs yes? Good.
Like seriously imagine him forgetting everyone can see his face now and Poe having to be like, “Uh…you seriously have to stop doing that stuff with your face in the command center…even though I find it wildly endearing.”
consider this: bees with flower crowns. are the bees huge or are the flowers tiny? we may never know but at least they're cute.
( EDIT : turns out this ask was based on this text post ! )
A Sith apprentice clearly not happy with his new Sith name
Black Panther #1 - “A Nation Under Our Feet” (2016)
written by Ta-Nehisi Coates art by Brian Stelfreeze & Laura Martin
I was doodling smol birbs and ended up with a birb that looks like it’s having an existential crisis
Yall know Bring It On was a metaphor about cultural approp…..nevermind
Nah say it Bring It On was a movie of how the white girls stole the Black girls shit
^^they stay jockin
Bring it on was about cheerleading, it could even be argued that it was about intellectual property theft or the fairness in competition. Shit, you could even say it was about the fact that schools in lower income communities are not able to provide for their students in ways that schools in other communities can; but the movie was not about cultural appropriation.
Its okay mama it went over a lot of our heads too.
Still my favorite post.
Come Away O Human Child
a playlist for the book Every Heart A Doorway
The Call Regina Spektor
What Girls Are Made Of Garbage (contains brief cisnormative language)
The Dark Waltz Hayley Westenra
Sugar (Maroon 5 cover) Nicole Cross
Viva La Vida Coldplay
The Lightning Strike Coldplay
Anything For You Evanescence
Dance In The Graveyards Delta Rae
Coming Home part 2 Skylar Grey
For me to get this? You are the one who is not getting it, it’s simple, just look at the calender and COUNT THE DAYS.
