food for thought from one of my favorite scientists.
”We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
-Carl Sagan
(via backinthecutoffs)
I saw an anti same sex marriage post arguing that if gay marriage was legalized then there’s nothing to really stop people from just marrying themselves
Why is that a bad thing
Dude have you seen me, I’d do that in a heartbeat
(via badcgijosh)
Well that’s because calling his stories complex is quite frankly letting him off too easily - there’s a difference between complex and deliberately inscrutable
See Steven Moffat subscribes to a school of writing previously made famous by JJ Abrams and the rest of the dinguses who wrote Lost in that he understands that being deliberately obtuse about your plot is a cheap and effective way to make people watch your dumb show
I really hate to be that guy singing Russel T Davies’ praises right now because, as Last of the Time Lords, Journey’s End and The End of Time effectively demonstrate, good god is he by no means a perfect writer
But! But but but butt butte he understood that a good story is a good story and that good characters make you care about that good story and what Moffat does instead is beat you about the ears with the same stupid unanswerable questions in an effort to hold you hostage and show up for next week’s episode - and they’re not unanswerable due to complexity, they’re unanswerable because there’s no fucking way you’d know the answer to those questions. What are the Silence? How does River Song know The Doctor? What’s The Doctor’s real name? I don’t feel like watching Sherlock so I can include a Sherlock related question in this list I’m riffing?
There’s a point in all this, I’ll get to it right now
It’s this: if you’ve been paying attention to Steven Moffat’s style of writing you’d have known for ages leading up to this headline that he has no respect for his audience
He’s not a master of “mind-fuck”, he’s a master of “hahaha fuck you”
i visited the friend zone to see if i could make some friends but it was just a bunch of angry men’s rights activists in fedoras???
(via stfuconservatives)
