I lost my fake ID, but you lost the motel key

[sovay]

How today has gone: the noises I just made on discovering a not completely empty bag of cough drops in the farthest corner of the counters in the kitchen are more traditionally associated with the lottery. Have some links.

1. I am delighted that sholio has made a gifset of Bill Maxwell from The Greatest American Hero (1981–83): "FBI agent and absolute weirdo."

2. Courtesy of moon_custafer: cogent thoughts on having feelings about problematic art. "And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it's okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It's okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it."

3. Courtesy of ashlyme: Judith Bingham's Salt in the Blood (1995), a maritime ghost story for chorus and orchestra, full of chanteys and fragments of ships' logs. I want a libretto.

P.S. Courtesy of my father: "Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies." It should maybe come with a content warning for video, but personally I cannot resist statements like "Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn't uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body."

Comments

[heron61]

Voltron is problematic? I haven't seen it since the 80s, so I had no idea.

[vass]

Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body.

I admire these pioneers in the treatment of neck pain.

[kenjari]

I have access to a pdf of the Cd booklet for Salt in the Blood, which includes the libretto. I can email it if you like.
(You can always ask me about tracking down music stuff - it's literally my job and I really enjoy it.)

[larryhammer]

:adds "autotomy" to the queue for prettygoodword:

[selkie]

For your amusement, my 4 am post-suffocation-nightmare (spoiler: a window had been left open, I was not suffocating, just pollinated) reaction to the slug video:

THE POOR SLU-UH-UGGGSSSSS
What if they secretly really liked that body and we can't know, because
THEY ARE SLUGS, SLUGS OF THE SEA

This morning: ew the detached bodies basically solar-powered themselves for months before decomposing, this is how the puny humans get super fucked in the slugpocalypse

Why'm I wearing your class ring?

[chanter1944]

See comment subject line. Thanks, now the quoted song is stuck in my head! I don't even like it much. :P

[minoanmiss]

Dang, I should have sent you a jar of citron-ginger-hooney. I don't know when next I can get to the Post Office.

[rachelmanija]

Wouldn't it be amazing if it turned out that the solution to diseases that don't affect the head was to rip your own head off and grow a new body?

[ashlyme]

I'm so glad you enjoyed Salt in the Blood! I'm going to hunt down the CD.

I liked sea slugs before I read that article. Now I seriously respect them.

[spatch]

Turns out William Katt once confirmed at DragonCon that Robert Culp was eating real dog biscuits and if you read further down the thread, it also turns out that Culp would apparently eat anything as a challenge.

This pleased a fan so much they made their own vegan Bill Maxwell dog biscuit crackers. And who says television isn't truly inspiring.

[radiantfracture]

I giggled at the gifs.

[swan_tower]

"And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it's okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It's okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it."

I can't help but suspect that some of the current . . . I'm not even sure what I want to call it. Charged atmosphere, maybe? With the implication of possible lightning strikes coming out of it? . . . around that kind of thing has to do with what you were railing against in this post. When the things you like aren't merely things you like, but statements on or components of your identity, then any problem in that thing or on the part of its creator feels much more like it contaminates you. At which point it becomes much more necessary for you to disavow it as firmly as possible, or at least to feel like you have to, lest you be judged by everybody else. But maybe the answer is to not treat these things like core parts of people's DNA, such that any appreciation for the text entails identification with and therefore support for the text in toto and the creator as well.

[asakiyume]

"I am not! I'm a wonderful liar!" is a great line.

And perhaps no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body, but I think many of us have had times when we'd like to....