Bumblebee complaining she’s not receiving any pats
PLEASE! PAT HER!
An amiable fellow if ever there was one (Major Kira might even agree.)
Let me introduce you to three of my friends: hallucigenia, opabinia, and wiwaxia. They’re all from the Cambrian explosion, the period of time around 500 million years ago when life was just starting and was still trying to figure out questions like “how should a mouth work?” and “legs?”
Hallucigenia was about an inch long (most life back then was tiny, they were only a few eras removed from being single celled after all) and it had sixteen clawed legs, hard spines coming out of its back, and a wicked tentacle neckbeard.
Opabinia was between two to three inches long and it had thirty fins along the side of its body, along with five mushroom shaped eyes on top of its head. By far though, its most interesting feature was its strange proboscis. Like a Dr. Moreau style mashup of an elephant and a lobster, the long nose terminated in a large claw that it used to grab prey and bring it to its backward facing mouth.
Finally, this is wiwaxia. This danger-artichoke was a two inch long armored slug-like creature with no head. In fact, its actual body was largely just its one massive foot.
I find these animals interesting for three main reasons. First, it’s incredibly fascinating to see all of the potential paths that life on earth could have taken. Imagine an ocean filled with elephant lobsters! Second, whenever I feel like my life is going nowhere and all my choices are the wrong ones, I like to think that I’m in in my phase where I’m still developing hallucigenias and wiwaxias, and not yet making awesome things like butterflies or velociraptors. Finally - it serves as a stark reminder that if we ever find alien life, there is a fantastic chance it will look like nothing we’ve ever seen before - it might look more like one of these creatures than a human being.
The Cambrian explosion is my go to chill out meditative tool. Look at all this teeming monster life, just living their monster lives. It makes me feel so so small.
Somewhere in these scripts you know Moffat has written: “The Doctor is staring down the Mondasian Cybermen, like a distinguished Scottish actor who’s slightly too excited for his own good.”
I was legit just talking about how these are far more horrifying than the robots we have now, I am jazzed as fuck.
That one fic that’s so out of character that it makes you hate your favorite character
bonus round the entire rest of the fandom loves it
then it creates persistent and widespread fanon that influences how the whole fandom sees the character, in direct contradiction of both canon and your preferred interpretation!
Some Quotes From my Art History Professor:
- “Caravaggio was the BEST renaissance painter, because he knew his shit. Literally. Look at this painting, he’s painted shit on everything, even Saint Peter!”
- “For those of you fortunate enough to Not grow up catholic, a baptism is where you mist a baby like an orchid to keep it from going to hell.”
- “You get Extra Credit for you eerily comprehensive knowledge of Muppets. Now stop talking.”
- “GOD I love flying buttresses. They’re so melodramatic!”
- “I don’t call him “Da Vinci” because that means “From Vinci”. That’s like calling Steve “Of Greeley” instead of his real name and that’s just rude. And not just because Greeley is Awful.”
- “Michelangelo was really depressed because his job sucked. Also because he was a bit of a douche, but mostly the job. He should have been doing literally anything else.”
- “Everything can be improved with a Simpson’s reference!”
- “Send me Memes, I like having recent content in my lectures.”
*Next day* “Stop sending me memes. Please.” - *whilst angrily pointing at a picture of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles* “The Turtles have all their names mixed up for their personalities and frankly that’s embarrassing. The techie should be Leo, the Flirt should be Raphael, The Boring Leader Dude should be Donatello and the angry one should be Carvaggio because that asshole literally spent his life drunk, fighting people and blackmailing cardinals. Carvaggio was the BEST.”
- “I could have studied in Rome. I could be trying to match boxes of broken dicks to statuary. Instead of dicks I have you assholes.”
- “Warhol was, as you young people say, A Troll. The art is not the Art, the Outrage is the Art. Which is kind of a Dick Move, which we old people say too.”
- “Remember Kids- mental illness and heavy metal poisoning are not actually substitutes for Talent and Hard Work! Get therapy and don’t drink your paint water!”
The episode “Bride of Chaotica!” offered viewers–and Star Trek: Voyager’s cast–a delightful black-and-white side trip into an era when science fiction wasn’t quite so polished. The story primarily takes place on the starship’s holodeck, a recreational area where the crew can interact with realistic holographic projections. Due to a misunderstanding with alien life-forms from another dimension, several of Voyager’s crew members are forced to assume the identities of fictional characters in order to save the ship. The most outrageous of these characters, both in appearance and behavior, is Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People. And who better to portray her than Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew).
As soon as he read the script, Robert Blackman knew just what to weave for the Spider Queen’s attire. “I told Kate, ‘We need to think of Arachnia as a ‘30s vamp. She’s a spider lady.’ We had a great fitting and I made a copper-beaded dress that made her look like a million bucks. The fabric was on a silk base. It was beaded, the whole thing, solid, with little copper glass beads and feathered shoulder pieces. And the neckpiece was wire built on plastic, with black, metallic beads.”
Star Trek Costumes: Five Decades of Fashion from the Final Frontier, Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann
deepintheshadyglen