I’m an author with at least mild aphantasia! I literally can’t tell you what my mother looks like, and I saw her last night.

It was only a few years back I realized other people DO see images in their head, the same way I can, like, imagine a smell or replay a bit of a song in my head. People just… close their eyes? And still see stuff?

Seems fake but okay.

Look, I’m a simple woman. I like morally difficult female characters and the lawful-good emotionally-undereducated men who admire them.

all this to say, Henry Hopkins has SUCH A GOOD “O No She’s Hot” look

Hmmmmm…. wouldn’t the whole Barehand Manslaughterer thing knock him down to Neutral, if not Chaotic Good?

Someone get me a D&D 9-square of the Mercy Street characters, stat!

We’ve found our 2019 equivalent of 2018′s moodboards!

You know, that’s a really good question. 

Okay, most of this is half-baked while waiting for my coffee to brew, so most of this is not a hill I’m willing to die on! But:

I could see Henry Hopkins being Neutral Good, especially post Season 2, but from what was explained to me in undergrad D&D sessions, it’s not that Lawful characters always obey the law or that Chaotic characters don’t, but their attitude towards Law/Rules - a Lawful Character believes that Law, Rules, etc. are what create and maintain Society, and that life is best when there are rules and folks follow them. Lawful characters may break Social Rules, but generally speaking, it’s never something they want to do and it’s a last-resort or greater good thing. Chaotic characters believe that laws and rules stifle life/creativity/achievement, and will only follow the rules insofar as they don’t conflict with their sense of right. Or they’re straight-up “F the Police!”. Either way. Rules exist to be broken, because Rules don’t create meaningful lives and existences.

I think Jed Foster’s a good example of Chaotic. He doesn’t like Rules because Rules stand in the way of doing his job: giving the best care possible. He resents authority, and adheres to his own notions of right. 

Henry Hopkins breaks the law/Law violently twice that we know of: once when he was sixteen, and once in S2. Both times, either he says it thoroughly shook him, or we see it. He knows what he did at 16 was wrong, and he also thinks killing the soldier in 2x04 was wrong, though Emma argues self-defense mitigates. HH knows causing death is wrong, does it once accidentally, once purposefully (sort of) - I’d argue that he’s still tending closer to Lawful, because he doesn’t think what he did was right or justifiable - whereas if he was Chaotic or Neutral (like Emma), I think it’d cause him a lot less angst.

Honestly, where I think the strongest arguments for HH being Neutral or Chaotic are with regards to his attitude towards McBurney & his abolitionism. Henry does defy McBurney when he thinks McBurney is wrong, even though McBurney is the Lawful Authority in Mansion House Hospital. Although it’s never a point of conflict on the show, Henry is enough of an abolitionist he’s willing to cause a scene at a funeral over it - and in the years leading up to the war, being a strong abolitionist would have set him at odds with the Federal government constantly, especially post Compromise of 1850 & revamped Fugitive Slave Act. I’d speculate that, at least there, HH was/would have no respect for the Law, because US laws on slavery he’s implied to perceive of as wrong or evil. That is speculation, tho. 

Alternately, we could posit that for HH, part of his problem is that Rule of Law/Social Rules in the US reaaaallly don’t align very well all the time with his Christian morality, so while he tends to adhere to the Law, it’s never going to be the be-all and end-all for him, because of the Higher Law thing. But I’m not enough of an expert on D&D alignments to say anything about religious morality and Lawful/Chaotlc alignments.

So, uh, this is getting really longwinded. 

tl:dr Breaking certain laws causes Henry Hopkins a lot of angst, but we also see other parts of his character that indicate that if he thinks the Law is wrong he will ignore it, therefore I think there’s a good case to be had for HH: Neutral Good, though I think he’ll always prefer that the rules be there and just than not there.

other Hot Takes on alignment: Silas Bullen: Neutral Evil (Evil is pretty self explanatory, but he’s not Chaotic because he likes rules - they allow him to manipulate others, even though he himself doesn’t feel bound by them)

Mary Phinney: Neutral Good (Good is self-explanatory; the Rules are frequently wrong and when they’re wrong we should break them, but Society functions best with some order)

Major McBurney: Lawful Neutral (Rule of Law is everything, but though he’s petty as hell, he’s not outright Evil)

(Psychological lunch break!)

I think you highlight extremely well the main difficulty of doing what initially seemed like a fun straightforward game: 

What standards we should use to measure the alignments?

They are hard to define, especialy in a situation of political conflict taking place in a time and society that did not share our modern views of Human Rights and Equality (although looking at the state of the world these days, sometimes I wonder if we’ve evolved at all…):

- Good vs Evil: The initial assessment would be “Good helps people and Evil harms them”, but then add the complexities of race, sex and politics. Can someone still be considered Good when they dismiss / neglect a certain subgroup? I think nobody would argue that Mary is a good character, but she willfully neglects Confederate soldiers; Jed dismisses Black people. On that aspect, could our modern “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” Humanist viewpoint (that might be my French showing) consider anyone Good who was a slaver or misogynist at a time and place where both were the norm? 

- Lawful vs Chaotic: As you said, is the Law the higher, moral Law (The Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated), or is it that of the land in which the character resides? For army members, does martial law take precedence over civilian law? In the specific case of the Greens, their home and land occupied by the enemy, whose Law of Land should they follow?

So is the final, boring conclusion that anyone with a minimum of complexity is by default Neutral Neutral because there is no such thing as Good vs Evil, Lawful vs Chaotic, as Morality and Rules themselves are in constant flux, and often neither?

Oh, good points! I don’t think I ever got around to philosophical discussions of alignment and morality in college dnd, so I’m afraid I don’t have any insight there.

I think Lawful vs. Chaotic is a little easier to answer: I tried to stick with “Lawful” as “Sees and adheres to prevailing Social and Civic Law” rather than Higher Law as a yardstick for judging lawful or not. I think that’s fair - though, as you observed, there’s multiple different legal codes in play.

As far as good vs. evil goes - hmmm. I guess I’d lean towards some excessively hasty Utilitarian conception of Good - how much Good does a person’s actions do, vs. Evil? At least that helps with Mary and Jed’s morality. But you’re right - characters are working within their own moral systems and it’s hard to both acknowledge that and classify them based on our own. At the end of the day, I guess the alignment square only works with a universal(ish) standard?

Sidenote: of all y’all either responding or reblogging, no one’s taken issue with describing Henry as “emotionally under-educated” and I’m glad we all agree.

NERD ALERT!

Here’s what I got after @jamesknoxpolka‘s great start (sorry for the fuzziness, tumblr won’t let me build tables directly, nor adjust picture size):

Lawful good: Both keep to their prescribed stations in life, follow the rules even if they are completely unfair to them, but try to make the best of it and help others.

Neutral Good: Neither hesitates to go against the rules they find unfair in their pursuit of the greater good, but otherwise respect order.

Chaotic good: Both definitely break the rules & society’s expected paths to help others.

Lawful Neutral: Good little soldiers. Emma starts there, doing what proper Southern young ladies do, and drifts towards Chaotic Good, burning bridges with Dixie and her family as she realizes the harm done by Slavery.

Neutral Neutral: James Green is the Switzerland of this thing. He does all the stalling he can to avoid pissing off people and keep making money.

Anne is hard to peg. She can be both helpful (nursing) and harmful (planning devices as Matron says… Damn I forgot Matron! Lawful Good. There). She follows the rules when they suit her, and gladly goes on the rampage when they don’t (which seems often); could also be a

Chaotic Neutral: Aurelia is definitely a “Fuck the rules” type and does what she must to survive and get her son back. Frank gets the Neutral for his soldiering and the Chaotic for the undercover way he does it.

Lawful Evil: The Fosters, hands down. Horrible people. 

I’m putting Jane there somewhat reticently because I don’t feel she deliberately wants to harm people, but wants to preserve her “way of life” for herself and her family above all else; BUT she also does nothing to help when Belinda is in trouble and never relents on her views. Maybe starts Lawful Neutral but drifts to the Dark Side.

Neutral Evil: He Who Shall Not Be Named

Chaotic Evil: Tweedledee and Tweedledum Green, those devil spawns with their half-assed plotting and spying and murdering. Fight me.

I’m finding it hard to believe Emma would be the only one to change alignments over the series… Samuel definitely is less Lawful in S2 with Charlotte’s influence, so that might be another.

Other ideas, opinions, characters I missed? Anybody willing to make it prettier with pictures / GIFs?

Oooh, very nice! I love a good chart - nautical or otherwise!

I am with you 100% on pretty much all of this (especially Charlotte, who looked at the Law and definitely and forever said “Fuck This”) - the other character who comes to mind as having alignments that shift over the course of the series is Alice Green. I’d argue she also starts out as Lawful Neutral (or Lawful Evil, for Devoted Confederate reasons): for most of S1, Alice plays by the rules and measures her success and sense of self by them. She’s charming, she’s performing (adolescent) antebellum Southern femininity flawlessly, and what she wants out of life is what she’s supposed to: Alice wants to marry her sweetheart, and presumably settle down to a life much like her mother’s. Initially, she’s more obedient than Emma! It’s not until Tom dies - and her path to the socially-approved life she wants is obscured - that Alice stops playing by the rules/Rules. After Tom dies, she goes renegade: she lies to and disobeys her family, breaks the Law in a far more serious way than her hair-ribbon rebellion in S1. What did playing by the rules get her? When she and Mrs. Green fight in 1x06, she even asks “What did it get Tom?”

I’m actually kind of waffling on Emma, though - she starts the series with an act of disobedience (one that might be socially acceptable because she’s looking for her Beau and such), but she demonstrates pretty quickly she’s animated more by her internal sense of right and wrong than she is by her family or her workplace’s - which not politically neutral, I might argue that Emma starts as Neutral-Neutral or Neutral-Evil, because of that willingness to disregard Rules and conventions. Which isn’t to say that her moral compass isn’t informed by her parents (”You raised us to be charitable!” I think is her line in 1x02; she falls back on appeals to parental authority when breaking up with Frank) or by the society she grew up in (the whole “The Confederacy will make it right” thing in 1x01), but she abandons parental authority and even loyalty to the Confederacy without much angst. But she is willing to obey the Rules when it gets her what she wants - acting like a belle in 1x04 to help free Tom, petitioning Authority (Abe Lincoln himself!) to free her father - or when she thinks the Authority is worth obeying. Idk. Emma’s a chameleon - she may not set out trying to embrace change, but she does it. 

A sidenote/point? Emma’s shift in politics and allegiances interests me because while her arc is kicked off by her loyalty to (ugh) Frank, and her sea-change in allegiances coincides with picking up a Union beau, the show does a pretty decent job (at least to me?) of making it clear that Emma doesn’t change her politics for a romantic relationship, but that her changing politics and allegiances make her consider Henry Hopkins a viable option. (“viable”)  

I don’t think Jed Foster starts as Chaotic Good– he assaults Mary in Season 1, arguably hurts/betrays his wife, has no real issue with slavery and operates while intoxicated. I think he is Chaotic Neutral who shifts to Chaotic Good.

I think McBurney was probably Lawful Neutral when the War started, but by the time we meet him, he’s straddling the line to Lawful Evil, given his treatment of Mary and how he arranges for Jed to be away so that he can’t intercede. In fanfic, I’ve elaborated on his possible acute stress disorder, but the show doesn’t give us that.

I notice that Lisette Beaufort isn’t on the chart. I’d vote Chaotic Good because frankly my dear, I don’t think she gives a damn. Percival Squivers isn’t on it either, perhaps because he’s too pure a cinnamon roll for a chart like this :)

Also, if we included deleted scenes from the DVD, I think Anne Hastings moves to Neutral Evil, since she is seen conspiring with Silas Bullen…

Edmund’s Sharpest Weapon Wasn’t His Sword

Yep, Edmund’s tongue was deadlier than his sword.

Have a fic  Strength for Honor by Lirenel on FFN.

Steve Rogers did, in fact, realize that something was off when he saw the outline of the woman’s odd bra (a push-up bra, he would later learn), but being an officer and a gentleman, he said that it was the game that gave the future away.

#EXCUSE ME MA’AM BUT YOUR TITTIES ARE NOT CONES I’M CALLING BULLSHIT (via)

No, see, this scene is just amazing. The costume department deserves so many kudos for this, it’s unreal, especially given the fact that they pulled off Peggy pretty much flawlessly.

1) Her hair is completely wrong for the 40’s. No professional/working woman  would have her hair loose like that. Since they’re trying to pass this off as a military hospital, Steve would know that she would at least have her hair carefully pulled back, if maybe not in the elaborate coiffures that would have been popular.

2) Her tie? Too wide, too long. That’s a man’s tie, not a woman’s. They did, however, get the knot correct as far as I can see - that looks like a Windsor.

3) That. Bra. There is so much clashing between that bra and what Steve would expect (remember, he worked with a bunch of women for a long time) that it has to be intentional. She’s wearing a foam cup, which would have been unheard of back then. It’s also an exceptionally old or ill-fitting bra - why else can you see the tops of the cups? No woman would have been caught dead with misbehaving lingerie like that back then, and the soft satin cups of 40’s lingerie made it nearly impossible anyway. Her breasts are also sitting at a much lower angle than would be acceptable in the 40’s.

Look at his eyes. He knows by the time he gets to her hair that something is very, very wrong.

so what you are saying is S.H.E.I.L.D. has a super shitty costume division….

Nope, Nick Fury totally did this on purpose.

There’s no knowing what kind of condition Steve’s in, or what kind of person he really is, after decades of nostalgia blur the reality and the long years in the ice (after a plane crash and a shitload of radiation) do their work. (Pre-crash Steve is in lots of files, I’m sure. Nick Fury does not trust files.) So Fury instructs his people to build a stage, and makes sure that the right people put up some of the wrong cues.

Maybe the real Steve’s a dick, or just an above-average jock; maybe he had a knack for hanging out with real talent. Maybe he hit his head too hard on the landing and he’s not gonna be Captain anymore. On the flipside, if he really is smart, then putting him in a standard, modern hospital room and telling him the truth is going to have him clamming up and refusing to believe a goddamn thing he hears for a really long time.

The real question here is, how long it does it take for the man, the myth, the legend to notice? What does he do about it? How long does he wait to get his bearings, confirm his suspicions, and gather information before attempting busting out?

Turns out the answer’s about forty-five seconds.

Sometimes clever posts die a quiet death in the abyss of the unreblogged. Some clever posts get attention, get comments, get better. Then there’s this one which I’ve watched evolve into a thing of brilliance.

Omg this is so fucking good! Wow

@the Star Wars fandom: I’d like to throw my two cents in on the whole “Leia was never even tempted by the Dark Side” trend that is seemingly going on right now. Firstly, yes, I understand the joke–gosh darn those whiny Skywalker boys, the girls are so tough and strong (and they are, they absolutely are, don’t get me wrong). But…all the same, guys, I just can’t see it that way. This girl wasn’t just tempted by the Dark Side, she flirted with it on like a daily basis for probably years (both before and after she knew what it was). I mean:

Leia Organa burns with anger. She was horribly, incalculably hurt, more than once, and one of the ways she coped with that was by being angry. (In fact, Carrie herself has described Leia as such, and as having played Leia as such–as a very wounded and broken girl who is incredibly, incredibly angry.) And as we know, according to the Jedi: 

“Fear leads to anger Anger leads to hate Hate leads to suffering”

But that doesn’t make Leia any the weaker for it. In fact, I would even say that it goes to show just how strong she was. Because yes she was hurt. (She was hurt so, so badly, so many times.) She had every right to be angry, and hurting–and she did. She was angry. She did hurt. And it would have been so, so easy for her to give into the temptation of the Dark Side through that. Because of that. Because there are so very, very many kinds of temptation–and honestly, with Leia’s anger being such an integral part of her and part of her main coping mechanism, I personally can’t see Leia not being tempted by the Dark Side for years–since before she even knew it was truly a Thing, let alone that it had a name. Because oh, how easy it would have been for her anger to consume her–for her rage and her hatred to supplant all else, until she was nothing but a driving force of nature, a wildfire bound in human flesh that burned all in her path.

But you know what? She didn’t fall. Despite everything, Leia Organa did not fall. And that, to me, shows an incredible strength–one that supercedes even a claim that she was never tempted. (Because to me, saying that she was never tempted strips her of the fury of her wrath, the burning of her pain, the blazing of her power. Because to me that says she wasn’t wounded in the very soul by what happened to Alderaan, to her mind beneath Vader’s probe, to her heart again and again–and she was. Oh, she was. Because to me, taking away Leia’s anger and the rawness of her hurt means taking away what made her such a real character, a real woman, a real survivor.)

Ironically enough, it was love that brought her back from that possible path, just as it brought Vader back from the brink. Because I would eat my left shoe if it wasn’t Luke and Han, Chewie, Threepio and Artoo who kept her grounded, kept her here, gave her something other than anger and fear and hatred and revenge to live for.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents on the matter,

Thank you, Seren. I wish I could find the article now, but there was a good write-up on women being allowed to be portrayed as monsters rather than the virtuous heroine or the victim. We all have a dark side, a dangerous streak. To deny that women have the capacity for evil is to deny that they are fully human. 

Leia Organa has indeed flirted with the dark side. She is still fighting the good fight when we see her in TFA but I don’t think that her inner battle is over and her victories have not come easily. Leia has straddled the line between dark and light a few times, but ultimately clawed her way back to the light before she could be consumed by the darkness. Let’s giver her credit for struggling against her demons, rather than treating her as an empty, innately good character. 

When Leia speaks of Snoke’s influence over Ben, you can see on her face that she has empathy for her son. She was disgusted with Vader, she didn’t want to understand him, but she has walked a long road with Ben and the appalling things he does do not shock her, she gets it. This is a woman who has done a lot of growing in order to overcome her darker tendencies and it is a battle that she must engage in daily.

Everyone please sit down and be schooled by Seren. Girl knows her Leia meta.

This is why I’ve adored Leia since childhood. She’s real.

The problem with that meme is that it belittles everybody it talks about, and this post explains how that’s especially the case with Leia really well.

Leia is arguably hurt as much as Anakin was to turn him into Darth Vader.

But Leia was given love in a way that Anakin wasn’t.

I don’t mean in the sense of being loved, or even in giving love—Anakin had both of these.

I mean given the understanding of love as a connecting force, a healing force, a guiding force; I mean that she was taught that love, in all the personal forms that Anakin was expected to avoid, was the greatest of strengths and the lodestone of goodness. I mean that she was not only allowed but encouraged to feel love, to give love, to receive love, to act out of love, and not in the dry, detached all-things-equal “universal compassion” that the Jedi preached before their downfall, but in the way of embracing individual love as a gift and daring the risk of loss.

Leia has her love for her parents, her love for her planet and people, her love for the Rebellion and the vanished Republic, her love for freedom and justice and democracy and rights, her love for the people of the galaxy that draws her to risk her life for the betterment of theirs, her love for her comrades and friends and eventually for her brother, her lover, her son.

And when anyone threatens any of these, there is anger, born of love and blazing brighter than suns, and when she loses any of these, there is pain, sharp and bright and gutting; there is grief that stabs and devours; there is the brokenness of loss—but she is not lost. In the places of despair where Anakin seeks out the Dark Side to prevent or distract from or make worthwhile the pain, Leia holds her love as a lodestar, a beacon, a reason to endure and to walk the paths of light, even through her deepest anger and her darkest despair. She takes the hit, endures the suffering, and keeps fighting.

Anakin was expected to detach himself from his mother, to avoid unseemly closeness with any of his people the Jedi, to keep subdued his affections for his mentor. His love for freedom and justice and rights and his fellow sentient beings was diverted from his early expectations that the Jedi might be heroes come to free the slaves, to a more theoretical favoring of peace and unobtrusive valuing of freedom that respected the status quo and the balances of power. His love for Padme is made to be kept secret, his love for the soldiers he leads is made to subordinate itself to acceptance of their deaths, and when he is given cause to worry that Padme might die, the advice he is given is to accept it.

For Leia, love is a gift she’s never been without, a power she’s been encouraged to give herself over to in much the same way as Vader is encouraged to give himself to the Dark Side. For Anakin, it is a stolen thing, a secret vice he’s not supposed to have and which he can easily—does easily—lose, leaving a devastating wound that no one has taught him to heal.

When Leia suffers loss, she draws closer to what she retains. Love creates an inexhaustible store of purpose, solace, hope, healing: when she loses Alderaan, she draws closer to the Rebellion, and when she loses her parents, she gains Luke and Han, and through every torment, she experiences her own giving of love as a sustaining force for herself.

She is as angry as Vader, yes. But she has given herself over to love in the same way as he has given himself over to the Dark Side; from love she draws purpose and promise and the strength to endure, as he does from the darkness. 

Vader has known love, but was never taught to embrace it or to draw strength from it even through loss; it is the Dark Side he turned to instead and the Dark Side that has granted him strength and endurance and purpose and the twisted remains of a promise that, broken, still binds him like iron.

Vader learns love, again and eventually properly this time, when he discovers Luke’s survival. To accept the risk of losing, of loss, of defeat, and stand firm in defense of it, that he may be defeated but shall not be moved rather than trade everything to try to win, as Leia has time and time again, and the Dark Side for all its power is rejected as the less desirable thing, its promises worthless.

But Leia has always known this, and despite having suffered devastating loss after devastating loss, has stood firm, one with love in the way that Vader has been so long one with the Dark Side of the Force, and for all her anger, the Dark Side has no purchase on her, because she belongs wholly to love and there is no competing with it.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

It’s Colder in Chicago Illinois than Antartica!❄️

This literally looks like a post apocalyptic universe WHY is no one talking about that

Yes it’s very cold here in the Midwest but CAN WE STOP WITH THE “COLDER THAN ANTARCTICA” COMPARISONS.

IT’S SUMMER THERE

YOU’RE COMPARING OUR COLDEST TIME OF YEAR WITH THEIR WARMEST

IT’S MEANINGLESS

COMPARE IT TO THE NORTH POLE SURE FINE DO THAT

BUT SHUT UP ABOUT ANTARCTICA

Some of the art that are being shown at the “A Tribute Exhibition for Mulan’s 20th Anniversary” (x) (artist credits in the captions)

there was something monstrous in the hallway. it was not human. 

kingdom season 1 (2019) 

i can never face my family again

You ever see something so funny you bypass laughing entirely and go straight for crying?

always reblog

I fucking HATE how this has almost one million notes and ive NEVER seen this. I have missed out on life. This was the best study break video I have ever seen. I’m dying. I most def sharted. 

I never know which version I’m going to get when I see this video.

ArE tHeRe OtHeR vErSiOnS

Lol

Here’s how to quickly fix tumblr’s horrible eye-straining new blue background in two simple steps, thanks to the wonderful people at @new-xkit-extension who make this pile of trash run:

1) Click the xkit logo on the upper right corner of your dash (I assume you, being a sensible tumblr user, have it installed).

2) That will open up the control pane (top screenshot). Click on “Get Extensions” (second from left).

3) Scroll down to “Old Blue” and click it.

4) Voila, you have your old-coloured dash back.

Passing it on for those suffering from ALL THE CONTRAST

California Dreamin’ by The Mamas & The Papas except it’s playing from a box radio while you sit on the porch of a Yosemite Ranger Station in the very early morning. It’s summer. It’s 1979. And you love your job.

An SR-71 Blackbird once flew from LA to Washington DC in 64 minutes. Average speed of the flight: 2145mph.

“There were a lot of things we couldn’t do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.

It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet.

I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn’t match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury.

Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace.

We listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: “November Charlie 175, I’m showing you at ninety knots on the ground.”

Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the “ Houston Center voice.” I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country’s space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn’t matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.

Just moments after the Cessna’s inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. “I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed.” Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. “Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check”. Before Center could reply, I’m thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol’ Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He’s the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: “Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground.”

And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done - in mere seconds we’ll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn.

Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: “Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?” There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. “Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground.”

I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: “Ah, Center, much thanks, we’re showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money.”

For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A. came back with, “Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one.”

It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day’s work.

We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.”

-Brian Schul, Sled Driver: Flying The World’s Fastest Jet

Always reblog passive-aggressive Blackbird speed check

Favorite story I ever heard about SR71s, from an old F14 pilot who transitioned F18 in my last squadron: he was flying training maneuvers over Death Valley once and heard a pilot come up on main freq (Joshua Control) asking control for clearance to angels 60 (60,000 ft). Highest the F14 Tomcat typically goes is in ~30k range. The controller was apparently a new guy, who had only dealt with Tomcats before, because he asked in a very sarcastic tone, “Son, how do you expect to get all the way up there?”

“Joshua Control, Lightning, we don’t want to get up to 60,” the other pilot said patiently, like he’d had this conversation before. “We want to go down to it.”

A pause, then the controller (definitely a new guy) asked slowly, “Y'all a Blackbird?”

“Lightning, Affirm.”

Another pause, then a new voice, speaking very clipped. “Lightning, Joshua, you are cleared to descend angels 60.” My buddy said he could hear the obviously much more experienced controller rolling his eyes at the new guy.

My whole squadron had a good laugh about that one.

Oh and also: “Better to die than to sound bad on the radios.”

Hard Truth of Aviation, right there.

Wait, is this…? I had never noticed this

realisation of Steve not needing his help anymore

was this really necessary

It’s also Bucky being more than a little upset that they turned his gentle, harmless friend—who Bucky wanted to PROTECT from the horrors of war—into a fighting machine.

was that really necessary

it’s also Bucky realizing that he can no longer protect his best friend no matter how hard he tries. he’s utterly helpless now, even after the war is over. they’ll always be wanting steve to fight this or that, and bucky won’t be able to do a darn thing to protect him.

#now was THAT really necessary

It’s also Bucky taking the 5 seconds he has of Steve not paying attention to him so he can allow himself to process all these emotions without worrying Steve. If you watch Bucky through the movies, you’ll notice he always makes sure to look like he’s 100% fine if other people are looking at him. Fighting with Steve, but smiling at their dates. Recently tortured, but walking confidently by Steve’s side. Basically a mess, but all “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” It’s a pattern, really. Even in the flashback in CATWS, you can see he looks a lot less confident when Steve isn’t looking at him than when Steve is.

Also, Seb has mentioned that researching WW2, what left the deepest impression was how quickly everybody dies. You get attached to someone only to watch their heads being blown up in front of you the next day. I’m sure this influenced how he chose to act this scene. Because you can bet by the time this scene takes place, Bucky has seen many people - hell, maybe even friends - die, and recently, he’s had to see his whole unit be killed or captured by HYDRA. This certainly plays a role here. It’s not just a general sense of “I can’t protect Steve anymore,” it’s more like “I don’t know if Steve will live till next week.” It’s very real, very immediate. It’s a concrete prediction more than a vague fear. And if Steve’s survives, there’s still the fact Bucky knows what’s like to be changed by war, and Steve will be changed by it, which Bucky certainly hates. Either way, he loses the Steve he knew, even more than he’s already lost, with the whole “Steve Rogers is suddenly a super soldier” deal.

I’d say this scene is wartime Bucky in a nutshell. He handles the entire crowd and this whole Captain America propaganda thing without hesitation, he smiles at Steve and makes sure Steve enjoys the moment instead of pulling some “I did my duty” bullshit, and only then he allows himself to be overwhelmed by the fear that comes with being able to think 48923740 worst case scenarios in two seconds. If we can trust interviews with cast and crew, this eventually becomes his role in the war, basically - he thinks fast and does his job protecting Captain America and the missions, he takes care of Steve on a personal level by shielding him from the worst of the war as much as he can, and only then, if there’s time and Steve isn’t looking, he thinks about how the war is affecting him.

But anyway, overall, this scene is about overwhelming loss of everything Bucky knows, as well as an attempt to hide this as well as he can. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the 4th and 5th gifs, Seb looks a lot like comics!Bucky does when he says goodbye to his younger sister, thinking he’ll never see her again and almost breaking down in tears, but unwilling to show her he’s scared. For your reference:

WAS ANY OF THIS REALLY NECESSARY

Always reblog

MCU actors in general and Seb Stan in this instance doing yeoman’s work to bring layers of depth and characterization above and beyond the script in a series of microexpressions. A++

Disney/Pixar Dog Breeds

(Note- the characters shown are examples, and this is not inclusive; I know who isn’t here)

#op i don’t think anyone likes ‘humanoid’ being listed here

How Marie Antoinette Became A Lesbian Icon

An Austrian by birth, Marie Antoinette was married to Louis XVI, then the prince of France, when she was fourteen as part of a political alliance between their respective empires. The marriage agreement required Antoinette to renounce all of her Austrian titles and ties, leaving her isolated and alone in the cutthroat world of Versailles.

By all accounts, Louis XVI was a nice guy but was obsessed with locks, famously indecisive, painfully shy, and constantly suspicious of his wife. It took them seven years to consummate their marriage, a fact that was public knowledge and made all the more humiliating by the fact that court decorum required their sheets be inspected each day for signs of blood and kingly “emissions.” The couple’s inability to produce an heir became another symbol of Antoinette’s inadequacy.

In the midst of the graphic, extremely public hatred being thrown at her, Marie Antoinette retreated further into the relative safety of the court and sought intimacy from those closest to her: her ladies-in-waiting. Her favorite was the Princesse de Lamballe, a young widow with whom the queen became so infatuated that she gave her the cushiest job at court (superintendent of the household) and a lavish stipend. In their letters they addressed each other as “my dear heart” and signed “with a heart entirely yours.”

During Marie Antoinette’s first separation from the Princesse de Lamballe, she was apparently so depressed that she had the princess’s portrait painted on the mirror of the room she used most. After a failed escape from the increasingly violent revolutionaries in Paris, the queen sent the princess a ring, set with a lock of her white hair and engraved with the phrase “bleached by sorrow.” Lamballe sent back a watch “to remind [you] of the hours we passed together,” saying she wished to “live or die” near the queen. When Antoinette was finally arrested by the revolutionaries, one of the last possessions taken from her was a miniature of the princess.

Eventually the Princesse de Lamballe got her wish—she was imprisoned soon after the queen and brutally murdered by a mob. Her head was then placed on a spike, paraded through the streets, and left outside the window of Marie Antoinette’s cell. The mob screamed for the queen to give the princess one last kiss.

Even biographers who remain skeptical of Marie Antoinette’s queerness acknowledge the intense intimacy of her relationship with the Princesse de Lamballe. The queen’s interest in women extended beyond just the princess—she also seemed to have had a lengthy romantic affair with a woman named Yolande Polignac. Not only did Antoinette pay off all of Polignac’s debts, she also made her a duchess and moved her into a thirteen-room apartment in Versailles. There’s also Mary Robinson, a well-known English writer and actress at the time, who visited the queen at Versailles and wrote at length about their flirtation.  Antoinette, according to Robinson, “appeared to survey, with peculiar attention, a miniature of the Prince of Wales, which [I] wore on my bosom.” Yes, she was writing in 1783 about the queen of France checking out her cleavage.

It wasn’t terribly unusual for women at court to have romantic relationships with one another, but that was mostly because people did not think intense sexual and romantic relationships between women could not exist. In 1811, two schoolteachers won a lawsuit against a pupil’s relative who accused them of lesbianism because the judges believed sex between women was literally impossible. Lesbian sex wasn’t real sex. Women who loved other women were simply “engaged in a passionate friendship.“ Like everything involving genuine feminine pleasure, it was regarded as an innocent frivolity.

That meant all those really, really close friends didn’t have many cultural reference points for their relationships. All the gay role models belonged to men. The classics are riddled with gay romance: Achilles and Patroclus in the Illiad, the Theban band of warrior-lovers in Plutarch, and Nisus and Euryalus in Virgil’s Aeneid. Then you had Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Frederick II, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman. Women had Sappho and Marie Antoinette.

Lesbians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to use the image of Marie Antoinette as a coded invocation—drop her name or mimic her style and you could secretly (and safely) reveal yourself to someone in the know. Famed nineteenth-century dyke and diarist Anne Lister once began a relationship with her long-time mistress by simply asking if the woman had heard the “rumors about Marie Antoinette.”

There’s a rich literary tradition of invoking the queen’s name to symbolize lesbian desire. In Rose Laure Allatini’s Despised and Rejected, the closeted lesbian heroine is named Antoinette. In Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, the closeted lesbian heroine visits Versailles and laments the queen’s tragic relationship with the Princesse de Lamballe. In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, memories of Marie Antoinette and the princess haunt the courtship scenes of Orlando and Sasha. In Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, the closeted lesbian heroine dresses up as the queen to hide from her husband. You get the picture. It’s a tradition that carries on today—Madonna even dressed as Marie Antoinette in the video for “Vogue.”

Although biographers as early as 1814 were split about the nature of her sexuality, even those who thought she was straight romanticized Marie Antoinette’s relationships with women constantly. The breathless titillation that has always surrounded the queen’s affairs has only served to infuse them with an enduring erotic charge. Whether she was or wasn’t gay is almost beside the point—Marie Antoinette may have helped facilitate over 200 years of lesbian hookups, making her (probably) the first modern lesbian icon.