Charissa Cotrill's Blog, page 58
July 9, 2013
joehillsthrills:
welovefineshirts:
PIZZA IS OUR BUSINESS,...
We’ve just added the title card art by David Aja from Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye #11 - the acclaimed issue featuring Pizza Dog! - to Fraction’s Mighty Fine Partners page!
Come and get the tees NOW, available in men’s and women’s sizes and various colors!; Fraction’s donating his curation commission for these and the other designs to Futures Without Violence.
It bugs me that Matt Fraction is one of the most talented writers in comics AND a painfully nice guy. WTF?!?!?! I want a photo of him spitting in a puppy’s face so bad.
I'm trying to make a point to a friend. Reblog this if you'd be okay with your child coming up to you and saying "I think I was born as the wrong gender."
silhouettesoliloquy:
getsherlockinmybed:
the-fury-of-a-time-lord:
leckcifur:
bi...
In The Garden: Indiana GOP passes law making it a crime for clergy to perform gay...
July 6, 2013
adventurerun:
thepeoplesrecord:
Yes, this is real.
Yes, this...
Yes, this is real.
Yes, this is exactly why we don’t trust pipelines in the ground that, if an accident were to occur, would infect our water (and in fact already has in some communities).
"The sky was red, yellow. It was like, it was like the end of the world," Resident Anne-Julie Hallee, who witnessed the explosion, said to abc.
Holy shit. Thinking of these folks…
starkpanda:
So, these guys are my dogs. The top one is my girl...
So, these guys are my dogs. The top one is my girl Claire and the bottom one who is mostly black with white on his front feet is Mycroft. I am in the super unhappy place of needing to find them new homes because I’m moving to the UK and the expense of moving them as well just keeps growing. Originally it was going to be about $2500 which I could just about afford, but now it’s more like twice that and I really can’t afford it.
If you think you can offer my dogs a home, please contact me. They are friendly with other dogs, cats, kids, you name it. I am willing to drive them to you, or at least half way (if you live in California, for example) and they come with their food and some toys and their collars and crates and the whole shebang.
If possible, I’d really like for them to be able to stay together. Mycroft was born blind and Claire is sort of his “seeing eye dog". They’ve been together since Mycroft was 6 months old and Claire was a year and a half. He’s now 2 and she’s 4. I can give you all their vet records and everything as well.
I’m pretty heartbroken about needing to do this but not only can I not afford it, but I think it would be really traumatic for them. They’ve never been on a plane before and when I get to the UK, there’s a really good chance that the paperwork to skip quarantine would be rejected and they’d be in there for at least a month. I wouldn’t be able to visit during that time because I can’t drive in the UK. I was raised with my parents always telling me that a pet is for life, but in this circumstance I think there’s a pretty decent chance of the move permanently damaging or possibly even killing my dogs and I’d rather find them a new home than be responsible for their suffering.
thegoddamazon:
sachimo:
abeardfullofbees:
alilnugget:
wanasho...
If you aren’t totally quaking in your boots at the news of millions of bees dead, yet again, you’re nuts.
this should be concerning a lot more people than it is
not only because bees are one of the most important animals in the world and their job is a lot more than gathering honey but also because they are what scientists refer to as an “indicator species"
this means that when their populations start dwindling and then rapidly dropping, humans need to watch their shit because that means that environmental factors are too difficult for THEM to live in, so it might be difficult for US to live in, too. bees basically act as an indication that humans have a lot to worry about and when they start dying like this it deserves a lot more than a few headlines.
last year my biggest worry was the steep decline in bee population and apparently thats not about to change anytime soon. people have told me to my face that they think its strange I’m so concerned for the bees. read this you selfish fucks
Get excited, motherfuckers. Without bees, we will die off. Bayer and Monsanto continue to produce the chemicals that have been proven to kill them, and the government has their backs. Bees pollinate 30% of our food in the US and we are passing legislation to PROTECT the scumbags responsible for killing them.
I preach this shit to everyone who will listen and I always get “WAAAAH I HATE BEES THEY STING AND THEY ARE BIG MEANIES!" but think about your future life without kiwis, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, peaches, sunflowers, cotton, apples, plums, pears, mustard, celery, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, beans, cherries, melons, turnips, canola oil, alfalfa, soybeans, lemons, oranges, and I could go on forever.
Bees are amazing creatures who are responsible for the comfortable lives we lead in this country and we cannot sustain and feed our population without them.
Alright you guys, there’s a good amount of notes on this but it’s only making us aware of the problem, not telling us what we can do to help. We can do something to help and YOU CAN HELP, YES THAT MEANS YOU. ALL YOU NEED IS DIRT, A FEW BUCKS, AND A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME TO MAKE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE, LITERALLY.
Plant flowers that bees like and that attract them.
Bees prefer flowers that are blue, purple, and yellow. Choose flowers that bloom successively over the spring, summer, and fall seasons such as coreopsis, Russian sage, or germander. They especially love clover! Other plants include sage, salvia, oregano, lavender, ironweed, yarrow, yellow hyssop, alfalfa, honeywort, dragonhead, echinacea, bee balm, buttercup, goldenrod and English thyme. Buy seeds online.
GET RID OF THE PESTICIDES!!
If pesticides are killing off the bees so easily, what do you think it’s doing to us? The EPA says studies have shown pesticides can cause birth defects, nerve damage, and cancer. There are other ways to get rid of pests in the garden than using chemicals. Organic Garden Pests shows you how to keep off the bugs the organic way.
Give the bees a free home!
Giving bees a “bee block" alone is a huge load off their backs! You can buy homes here or You can even build your own.
Please, if you have already reblogged this, reblog this is again with what I have posted onto it so you know what you can do to help. We can make a difference.
Sources and other helpful links:
5 ways to help our disappearing bees
How to “Friend" Your Native Bees
Why gardening is good for your health
Why isn’t this more of an issue?
Like why is our entire existence at stake and all anyone wants to talk about on the news is the “TWERKING PHENOMENON".
(I am working in the print department of an office-supply store. An older customer comes in with a folder of very old newspaper articles.)
thegoddamazon:
hellotailor:
I guess it does seem a little...
I guess it does seem a little silly to be all “People need to see this movie!!" like it’s an ~important cause~ or a small indie project or whatever. Yes, it’s a blockbuster movie. But I’m getting the impression that people are judging it inaccurately, mostly by comparing it to other blockbuster movies. For example, the vast quantity of people I’ve seen saying, “This looks like a ripoff of Transformers". Nothing could be further from the truth!
It’s not Transformers.
Transformers is everyone’s favourite example of hugely successful, critic-proof summer idiot movie. It’s based on a popular toy/franchise so the audience already knows what it’s about, it has really great CGI, and it transparently appeals to teenage boys. No matter how bad the reviews were for each successive Transformers movie, people would watch them because they’d spent the past 5 years being beaten into submission by the Transformers publicity juggernaut. And because they were guaranteed to show cool scenes of giant robots smashing into stuff.
Pretty much the only thing Pacific Rim has in common with Transformers is that it includes cool scenes of giant robots smashing into stuff.
Rather than reducing the main female character to a adolescent male fantasy (don’t even get me started on Michael Bay’s glaringly obvious lack of respect for women), it looks like Pacific Rim’s Mako Mori will have a heroic character arc. I haven’t seen the movie yet so I can’t comment on whether it passes the Bechdel test or whatever (AFAIK, there’s only one female lead and one secondary female character in the ensemble cast), but Guillermo del Toro has a really good track record with female characters.
Pan’s Labyrinth, which has a female protagonist, is fantastic, and if you watch Hellboy I think you’ll be surprised by how excellent Liz Sherman is. Hellboy really does embrace its own cheesiness, but at the same time Liz Sherman gets the most interesting character arc I’ve ever seen for a comicbook love-interest. As in, she actually gets to have a life and goals of her own, separate from Hellboy — even though they grew up together, and sometimes work together. In the first movie, she actually has herself committed to a mental institution because she thinks it’ll be the best thing for her. And this is in a mainstream blockbuster movie that basically amounts to “Men In Black: Demon Edition".
Pacific Rim looks like it was written by someone with an actual brain.
It’s already clear that wayyyy more thought has gone into Pacific Rim than into, say, Man of Steel. Man of Steel is a pile of trash garbage that disrespects its audience in every way, but was a huge success because a) Superman is a well-known franchise, and b) the advertising campaign was obliteratingly intense. (If you want to read an interesting article about Hollywood’s obsession with making stupid & offensive tentpole franchise movies, I recommend this: "The Lone Ranger represents everything that’s wrong with Hollywood blockbusters”.) The concern is that Pacific Rim may flop because a casual glance at the trailer makes people think, “That looks like Transformers vs Godzilla, starring some people I haven’t heard of," whereas a glance at the Man of Steel trailer makes people think, “That’s Superman. I like Superman, and Zach Snyder and Christopher Nolan have made good superhero movies in the past."
For a major Hollywood movie, brand recognition almost always means more than the quality of the film. If something stars Will Smith or Bruce Willis, people will go to see it because it’s a Bruce Willis or Will Smith movie. If a movie is part of a recogniseable franchise like Spider-Man or Tomb Raider, people will watch it because they’re familiar with the character, even if it’s so bad it makes your eyeballs roll out of your skull. With Pacific Rim, you’re looking at something that looks kind of like Godzilla and kind of like Transformers, but isn’t “the real thing". Therefore, it must therefore be a cheap knockoff, like those “Transmorphers" movies. Or Megashark vs Giant Octopus.
In fact, Guillermo del Toro has already put a great deal of thought into the worldbuilding of Pacific Rim. First of all, it’s a look at what happens after the events of a monster movie like Godzilla or Cloverfield. It’s not an origin story. It starts in media res, like Star Wars. Here are some of del Toro’s thoughts on why he didn’t want to make an origin story:
"The part that I was interested in was the part where things are hard. If you start with the origin, then you have to go with investigative characters, which are hard for me to relate to. Like a reporter, or military forensics. For me it has to be a character that has something against him or her, from the get-go. A character that starts already oppressed or down on his/her luck, for me to be interested in them."
Pacific Rim seems to be full of little details on what would actually happen in a society in the aftermath of a monster-movie style event. Because the Kaiju are so enormous, their skeletons are often left behind and people end up building houses around them. One of the main characters is a black market trader who specialises in selling parts of dead Kaiju to people who fetishise or worship the monsters.
But the most significant thing is that it’s an international movie. The Kaiju are a threat to the entire planet, so it only makes sense that people from all around the world are fighting back against them.
In blockbuster disaster movies, the action is almost always reserved for New York or another major US city. In the Star Trek reboot, “Earth" is represented by Iowa, San Francisco, and London. In the Batman franchise, it’s (obviously) Gotham, America. In Man of Steel: Metropolis and the US military, despite the fact that they’re facing a worldwide threat. The formula is: defend America, and occasionally send in the US Marines as canon-fodder against whatever alien attack we’re fighting this week. Actually, I’m struggling to think of a major blockbuster that treats a “world threat" as a threat against the world rather than just America. (Maybe World War Z? I haven’t seen it, but the trailer seemed to have scenes in places other than America.)
However, Pacific Rim shows a diverse cast of characters from around the world, because the Kaiju are a threat to everyone, everywhere. The Jaegers (giant robots) even have a variety of different characteristics, depending on where they were manufactured.
And don’t forget that in order to pilot the Jaegers, people have to forge a mental link. Yes, that’s right, Tumblr. This is a movie with canonical soulbonding.
So yeah, I haven’t seen Pacific Rim yet, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s going to be smarter and more entertaining than every one of the major blockbuster movies that came out this summer. And if you don’t feel like trusting me, trust Kanye:
With the exception of the shot taken at “Man of Steel" (which is the BEST Superman film in existence right now—let’s not kid ourselves), I get down with this.
Also, POC representation all over this film. And giant robots fighting monsters. This film is belying so much more than what the trailers give us.
underaged girl: "Someone is posting nude photos of me on the internet. This is dissemination of child pornography and is causing me to be harassed in school!"
shinga-tumblr:
wilwheaton:
sunfell:
theprosefool:
He’s yummy...
He’s yummy but I’m mostly just reblogging because LOOK AT THAT SKILL
Pole-yoga.
Further evidence that pole dancing is incredibly beautiful and sexy when the person doing it knows what they’re doing, regardless of their sex.
wow
oh yes please, more of this.
