Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@cweickhmann

Yeah, I don't think they need to specify the source unless they are trying to emphasize that it's NOT from fossil oil (for those who want to avoid that).

@admitsWrongIfProven

The reason I muted him before was for racist toots.

Here's a recent poll I did (which I'm sure he will claim that he didn't see) - https://qoto.org/@Pat/109837025503850597

@tripu

@Deglassco

Re cultural appropriation in music, here's a quote from Robert A. Clift's documentary 'Blacking Up: Hip-Hop's Remix of Race and Identity' (he names names) -- "racial and cultural ownership and authenticity – a path that begins with the stolen blackness seen in the success of Stephen Foster, Al Jolson, Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones – up to Vanilla Ice ... and Eminem".

Ray Charles was very brave to speak out against Elvis. But I guess it worked out -- Elvis died and Charles kept making his great music.

@empiricism

I don't understand your CW, so I didn't read the toot.

@tripu

I just unmuted you. Are you trying to fuck with me again?

@psmaldino

I think the guy in this pic has a hidden tattoo...

@peterdrake

They should instead head to the nearest car dealer to buy an electric car.

@hasmis

>"Nothing in the stratosphere can influence weather on the surface."

You mean like the ozone layer?

#joke

A man who had been hiding in a deep bunker in Baghdad since the beginning of the war finally crawled out, looked around and asked a guy, "So where's Saddam Hussein?"

The guy says, "What? Have you been living under Iraq?"

@stux

>"Time for the youth to take over, grandpas are getting a bit annoying"

Ageism and racism are cut from the same cloth.

I am a very old person and I resent your remarks, and I think they demonstrate prejudice just as racism as does.

Please treat people with respect.

@Nichol

@DecaturNature

People with money and political connects always have more influence, that's the way nearly all societies work. But a continual, 95%-re-election rate? That's recent. And that's not a democracy. This has happened just during the past few decades. The US, historically, has had many periods of true populism -- the revolution, Lincoln, FDR, and to a lesser extent Carter and Reagan. What we have now is different.

And the US has never killed a million of its own citizens before. Without accountability. With the media being completely silent about it. That's different.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #StarTrek #vulcan #deltan #klingons #CarbonUnits #Vger #AI #trekies #kolinahr

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

This film is about a bald, long-legged alien… and other stuff.

It’s hard to convey how anticipated this film was when it was released. The original TV series had been canceled a decade prior, which disappointed loyal fans and by time this film was made, the series had been widely syndicated and gathered a huge fan base. It was a really big deal. The first Star Trek movie, ever.

Production for the film was a real mess. The suits at Paramount thought the thing was some kind of Star Wars knockoff and the script was rewritten several times before production began. They even wanted to turn it into a new TV series at one point. When production finally started, the script was still unsatisfactory to everyone. Creator Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Wise struggled over the project throughout. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and other cast members, and even the special effect guy were contributing to the script as the production was going on. The final script at the end of production contained only a fraction of what was in the original script when shooting started.

In the end the narrative wasn’t the tightest story ever produced, but it was original. However, it lacked any contemporary social commentary, which was a hallmark of the original series. The special effects were fantastic (for 1979), as was the score.

Douglass Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey) did the special effects which were almost entirely done with models, lighting, hand-painted mattes and photographic special effects; only a few simple computer generated images were used. The score was done by Jerry Goldsmith who continued on with the franchise, providing it with it’s distinctive theme music.

Because the film was so rushed, Wise was not totally satisfied with it and a directors cut was eventually made years later, which he thought was the best edit of the film.

Even with its flaws, I highly recommend this film.

#Turkey #Syria #earthquake

Al Jazeera is reporting more than 45,000 people killed from the earthquake in Turkey.

That's more than three times the number of people who are killed during an entire year in the US from gun homicides.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/2/18/turkey-syria-updates-death-toll-from-earthquakes-passes-45000

Here's a picture of Uranus next to a pic of Earth, to scale.

(PD image per Wikimedia Commons)

@DecaturNature

FYI...

Neither party is loyal and we haven't had a democracy in the US for awhile now. About 95% of all incumbents are kept in office at each election. This is not possible in a fair democracy, especially when the satisfaction rate among people towards Congress is in the low teens.

(I'm not saying the elections are fixed, it's the system that's fixed.)

PS - I don't know why you marked this with a CW. By marking something with CW just because it is about politics is like saying that there is something wrong with political speech -- like there is something wrong with free expression. That's anti-democratic.

@MVEG001

Thank you posting this. I don't want to go read that whole article. Could you just list the words here?

I decided to mark the image as sensitive.

I didn't notice it until I was writing the image description, but this image could be seen as offensive. They (I assume CIA) choose to do the eyes in yellow and they made them slanted and squinted (or maybe those are just the pupils that are squinted) so it looks kind of like a caricature.

At the time in the 1960s, nobody even saw anything wrong with these types of caricatures of Asian people and they were common, but today those images are considered offensive.