My friend asked me how many people on tumblr really watch Star Trek on a regular basis.

Reblog for Star Trek.

Ignore for a soul-crushing sense of being alone in the universe.

Waheeda Rehman in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962)

@hotvintagepoll

There's an epidemic of AI-made photographs on this platform. Right now, they're mostly used for farming clicks, but as A.I. models get better at faking images, be prepared for a spread of scams, misinformation and propaganda.

Here are some tricks for spotting AI!

Propaganda

Ava Gardner (The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa)— She's so goddamn hot. Her and Frank Sinatra could've sandwiched me and I would've thanked them for the privilege

Jean Seberg (Breathless, Saint Joan)— Some of us watched À bout de souffle as a lil French undergrad and had the trajectory of our lives changed by Jean Seberg. She IS French new wave!! She is the moment!! She sadly had to work with a lot of shitty directors in her career but even so, she has this magnetic energy whenever she’s on screen. In her personal life, she was also very supportive of civil rights causes, and was even targeted/harassed by the FBI for financially supporting the Black Panther Party.

This is round 2 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

reminder that if you can get them (or any other matchup) tied, I’ll let them both into round 3

Propaganda

Joan Blondell (Footlight Parade, The Public Enemy)—My Pre-code QUEEEEEN. Joan is a large part of why I love 30s movies. She's got such a flair and presence. She's not known for her voice, but her rendition of Remember My Forgotten Man will grab you by the heart. She played a variety of roles, and held her own with major stars like Bette Davis and Hot Vintage Poll icon James Cagney. She was a hardworker, even as Hollywood stopped giving her prime roles, and continued working in film and television up until her death. She's an absolute firecracker, even in her supporting roles I end up focused on her. Also, I just think it's cute that her name (real!) is Blondell.

Hu Die (Sing-Song Girl Red Peony, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple)—i haven't seen any of her movies but apparently she was China's first "movie queen" in 1933? she was also in the the first Chinese sound movie!

This is round 2 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

me when i woke up and saw joans poll was up and she wasnt sweeping it

my pre-code queen!!! funny and sexy and wisecracking, world-weary and tough but still cheerful and unflappable, with those huge mournful pierrot eyes, shes the quintessential depression-era star and lights up every movie she was in, and she was in a lot of them!

you like james cagney? they were bffs and in seven movies together! (watch some of their comedies theyre so funny together)

get to the polls and vote for joan!!!! she could do cute, she could do smoking hot, she could do ball-busting, she could do melancholy, she could do shockingly hard-hitting political commentary on world war i emerging from nowhere in an otherwise lighthearted musical extravaganza (consult the videos under the cut), she could do silly and goofy, she's my ray of sunshine and my cynical wisecracking depression queen (i meant the era but the emotion too sure why not)

Even if you can’t immediately place the actress’ name, you’ll recognize Blondell the moment she appears on screen. No one did been-around better than she did, no one made wised-up and level-headed look more richly attractive.

But though her characters could convincingly proclaim, as one does in Blondie Johnson, “I know all the answers and I know what it’s all about,” there was more to the Blondell persona than that.

Because somehow, against formidable odds, having seen it all did not sour her on life. Yes, her characters couldn’t be fooled or taken advantage of, but more importantly you could count on them to be on the square with you, to offer support when you needed it most. Which, in these movies, was almost all the time. (source)

Working her way up the Warner Bros. ladder in endless gritty programmers, Blondell developed crack comic timing as she dished out Pre-Code dialogue, often in her underwear: in William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women (1931), she tells her many admirers that she’s “APO,” which she translates as, “Ain’t puttin’ out!” Blondell played girls on the make who were somehow decent, and she became a classic wisecracking heroine for the 1930s.

What stands out most about Blondell’s style is her lack of self-consciousness; she has one scene in Three on a Match (1932) where she’s hooked up to a monstrous metal hairdressing machine in a beauty parlor. Stuck there for a while in extreme close-up, with little make-up on, Blondell offers herself to the camera with no protectiveness, as if she’s saying, “Well, kids, here I am… gee, my feet hurt, but what you gonna do? There’s a Depression on!” Opposite an impassioned Cagney in Blonde Crazy (1932), Blondell jiggles around and drives him nuts; she’s like an amiable, sexy cartoon goldfish. But there was endless drudge work for every good film like Blonde Crazy, and trouper Blondell was never a complainer, or a fighter for better parts like her fellow Warner Bros. inmate, Bette Davis. It was “hard, hard labor and gruesome hours,” Blondell later said. “The biggest treat was when you got time off to go to the bathroom.” Later on, Cagney stuck up for her usually wasted gifts: “She could have done much better things than the roles the studio gave her.” The proof is in a movie like Gold Diggers of 1933, where Blondell’s emotional immediacy and frank, romantic sexuality come through very intensely during her scenes with Warren William. But in the middle and late thirties, Warner Bros. threw her into nothing but formula films, knowing that she would give them her all regardless.

[...]In her last years, Blondell continued trouping even under the strain of crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Outlandish as it may seem in retrospect, she had her final hurrah in a John Cassavettes movie, Opening Night (1978), one of his large, mysterious Gena Rowlands epics. As a playwright embroiled with the alcoholic, self-destructive antics of Rowlands’ actress, Blondell wears a blue-feathered hat in most of her scenes, so that she looks like a plump bird of prey. She was understandably confused at first by Cassavettes’ improvisational methods, but once she got used to them, this old pro took her gloves off and created a steely woman dripping with polite contempt for the star who is ruining her play. “I hate actresses!” snarls sensible Blondell, as she lights a cigarette after another impossible rehearsal. (source)

don't sleep on this hardworking queen!!! vote joan today!!

A message for all Americans of voting age: You don't have to like Biden, you don't even have to approve of any of his actions.

But if you choose to protest by NOT VOTING this year, you lose any right to call yourself an ally or progressive.

"But Biden-!" Doesn't fucking matter. If Trump or any Republican candidate wins, not only will the genocide in Gaza continue, but it will get worse. Not only will it get worse, but now the stage will be set for the far-right to install an authoritarian theocracy.

You know what's worse then genocide or an old guy? The fascist hell that the GOP wants to force upon us.

Go read up on Project 2025.

This isn't a game where you can refuse to play until you get a better outcome. You can't protest or petition your way to the perfect candidate. One of these people will be elected whether you vote or not.

There is no way NOT to participate, as not voting for Biden is the same as supporting Trump. (Doesn't matter what you say, that's exactly what it amounts to.)

Neither candidate is good.

YOU STILL HAVE TO CHOOSE.

I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to

"Sometimes, the only choices you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose." ‐ The Doctor