I think it’s important to know, there’s an older picture of David signing stuff, with his father-in-law WHO WAS THE FIFTH DOCTOR, holding a very similar sign behind David’s back. I don’t have the pic, but you can probably find it if you look a bit.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one’s cleaning this shit up, it’s polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there’s a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it’s in a painting, if it’s in your home, it’s not poisoning wildlife.
Lost followers after reblogging that whole thing about JKR being radicalized over the years, and that disturbs me.
Like if you think saying that people can be radicalized and manipulated into hate is somehow justifying it, yikes. And if you think that people are somehow just good or evil and that you are not at risk of buying into propaganda, have I got some very red flag news about that!
Idk if its because I am an older Millennial maybe (most who unfollowed were younger) but I watched a ton of that generation slide from one of the most progressive to the far right before my every eyes. Hell, my dad fought alongside his black friends in the Detroit race riots and now he watches Fox News 24/7 and talks about the border wall. Yet still claims he could never be racist because of how he used to be. He doesn’t even realize what he has become.
JKR isn’t a deluded old woman or innately evil, but in fact THE prime example of how well-meaning ignorance and privilege can be weaponized and encouraged down a pipeline, until it turns into a force of hate, and should be a cautionary tale about why educating and being open about these issues are necessary. Because there are those out there who will use those divisions and ignorance to their own ends. And just digging in our heels and saying “that could never be me!” is the very thing that puts you more at risk. I’ve lost so many loved ones down that pipeline and it is more slippery than most realize.
Stay alert, stay compassionate, stay humble, and make sure you move through life guided by reason rather than reaction. I love y’all and don’t want to see your passion twisted to get used against the world.
Thinking “I could never be a bigot” is the first prerequisite for becoming a bigot.
In the UK we’ve seen a few people ride this crazy train to the end of the line in the last few years. Perhaps because our political landscape is different from that of the US, it’s easier to see it happening. There has never been an expectation here that being a conservative means you will hold insane views. It might mean you have some objectionable political ideologies, but you are still expected to be a somewhat normal human being who occupies the same planet as the rest of us.
So when we see somebody make the transition from being just a bit right-wing in their thinking, to being a full-on conspiracy lunatic, it really shows. We’ve seen it with a lot of our politicians and other public figures.
There’s a guy called Neil Oliver who used to present historical TV. His views were always a bit weird and biased (historians and archaeologists did not like him at all), but he wasn’t an actual crazy person. But he rode that crazy train to the end of the line and became a fully-fledged antivaxx COVID denier, who is now babbling about one world government and peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories. It happens.
JK Rowling’s radicalisation has really disturbed people, because she was famous for books which championed ideas of equality and rights for marginalised groups. In retrospect, those books had some biases and prejudices in them as well, but they were ones that most white Britons carry without realising it. So the seemingly sudden change from that to being someone spreading hatred of trans people and seeming to consciously back antisemitic ideas was a massive whiplash. A real shock. Even more of a shock than the fact she seems to have forgotten how to write a readable book.
Now, I’m a pro-independence Scot who was active on Twitter in the years after 2014. So I already knew she was disingenuous, a bit of a troll, and had some fairly reactionary views. Perhaps her further radicalisation was less of a shock for me. But it still took me aback.
This happens. It happens to people who are too secure in their own self-concept as a Good And Progressive Person. They feel that because they are a Good And Progressive Person, all their thoughts and feelings and biases must also be Good And Progressive, because Good People don’t have Bad Thoughts, and of course, Bad People never have Good Thoughts.
By painting JK Rowling as having always been a secretly Bad Person, and Harry Potter as having always been secretly propaganda for Bad Thoughts, we make ourselves vulnerable to the same kind of radicalisation. The truth is that she is just a person, a white cis woman with some unexamined biases, who wrote a series of books that were good-hearted and had good messages, and also reflected some of those biases. And now she has taken a ride on the crazy train, and it’s scary to see.
top stories about weird shit that happened behind the scenes of doctor who
those anecdotes frazer hines loves to tell about patrick troughton secretly taking off his pants while in the tardis during rehearsals and then coming out and doing the whole scene in his underwear
paul mcgann runs into the cast of the x-files in an elevator while filming the tv movie and is too intimidated to say anything to them because they are more famous than him
“we accidentally left colin baker tied to a pole alone in the middle of the woods for half an hour, oops”
there are probably a lot more that i’m just forgetting right now. how did they ever even get anything made
adding some of my personal favorites:
the first day patrick troughton came to set to play the doctor, anneke wills (polly) and michael craze (ben) wore t-shirts that had “come back bill hartnell” in huge letters on them that they’d had specially made and ordered just to fuck with pat
the crew so strongly believed that jon pertwee could just naturally drive any vehicle that at one point they were just like “lol drive this hovercraft, you can do that right” and didn’t give him time to practice driving it and he nearly wiped out the entire camera crew with it
tom baker thought the drowning scene in the deadly assassin was too scary, so at the day and time that the episode with it in it aired he literally knocked on a random door, asked “do you watch doctor who here?” and then sat with the family as they watched it
“And I turned around and they were all wearing mustaches”
Jean Marsh forgetting she’d put her lunch in her pocket, reaching to draw Sara Kingdom’s gun, and corpsing when she tried to draw a cold squishy tomato sandwich
Jon Pertwee waking in a WWII morgue and scaring someone like Eight in the movie; the Master sitting on the Doctor between takes to give him back/neck massages bc he still hurt 25 years later
Katy auditioned with contacts before they were common, and the producers made her take them out, so that’s why Three’s always taking Jo’s hand and leading her about like a seeing eye dog
Lis Sladen getting stuck for real in the fucking air duct in Arc in Space
The various improbable explanations of how Tom Baker got a dog bite on his mouth right before the filming of The Pirate Planet
The horse demolishing both the cart it was pulling and the archway it tried to pass through, trying to follow Peter Davison fresh off his stint as Tristan
The real story of Kamelion which was basically JNT swallowing BS marketing and believing the machine could do what its inventor claimed even though it hadn’t been demonstrated, so it really WAS an impostor
The gossip scene in the production of Fiddler on the Roof where Sophie was working the evening she got the call was actually a bunch of actors whispering “Sophie got the job!” “Sophie’s going to be in Doctor Who!”
Sylvester saving Sophie from drowning, being cut to ribbons by glass and/or electrocuted when the water tank she was in started to crack
Sylvester not breaking character when his coat started smoldering due to a miscalculation by the pyrotechnics crew:
we would find out later i had burned off my entire cornea - about 65% of my eye. my doctor told me it is the organ with the highest concentration of nerve endings - i was in an amount of pain that can’t be spoken.
and i was blind. for the first time in my life, i was totally blind. i kept thinking about reading, about writing. weirdly, just once, about driving. we had no idea if i would ever see again. just like that - my entire life was different.
it is a strange place to reference for a soft memory, to begin here.
my siblings were taking excellent care of me, but there was a moment in the hospital where, just through bad luck and timing - both of them had to step away for a moment. i was crying at that point; not emotionally. for 3 days after this i would still be crying, my tears, like a mermaid’s, a frothy pink with blood.
my brother worried about leaving me. he had another, just-as-bad emergency.
“i got her,” someone said. “don’t worry.”
a soft hand held mine, and then she started talking.
her name was jess. she has a wife named clyde. they live a few blocks up the street. clyde fell down, but the x-rays seem to be coming back better than expected. jess says she’s got long dark hair and “more wrinkles than an elephant”. jess describes every chair in the room and every person. she talks about her two kids and her cats and her favorite memories from college.
a doctor came. i had to switch to a different waiting room. i tried to stand up to follow the voice - i found jess’s hand, following me. she didn’t let go. she kept talking the whole way: lamp to your left, just a few more steps, okay to your right is the ugliest painting, good, now a little more walking straight, you got it baby
in the new silence of the next room she sat me down and called my brother for me, telling him where we’d gone to. and she stayed there for a bit, just chatting, her voice echoing in the eerie quiet. gently describing the room to me. and then someone was rude. from the sound of the voice, a kid, i think.
“why is she crying?”
“she just lost her vision,” jess said. “she can’t see.”
“oh.” said the kid. “that’s scary.”
the kid tells me he is here because he has peas stuck up his nose. that makes me laugh, his mom (?) groans. she tells me about the kid (he’s 6, he likes paw patrol and eating cheese), about herself, about moving from cali.
jess says she’s sorry, but she has to leave now, she’s gotta go check on her wife.
“don’t worry,” says the mom. “i got her.” and then i felt her hand press into mine.
for hours like that: i am taken care of by strangers. each person just talking with whatever comes to their head - not for any reward or celebrity or real reason, i guess. just because i am scared and alone and in the hospital and blinded and need to be distracted. not everyone even got told the story - they would just pick up in the silence with - oh by the way the television is playing HGTV - do you like that kind of a thing?yeah, me too, but could never quite get into those open-floor plans, i’ll tell you -
by the time my brother is able to come back, the room is buzzing. we talk to each other like old friends, laughing, cracking jokes about if you don’t like hospital food wait until you get on an airplane and can’t believe i’m up past two in the morning what a party animal i’m becoming. i am holding the hands of someone named drew, who likes my crow tattoo and making crochet snails.
there are many dark moments full of pain in this world. this - in the low of absolute-dark, absolute-pain: people find a way to paint in it anyway. the color splash of their voices: this triumphant, radiating kindness of - let’s be here together, let me help you, let’s keep going.
i never saw their faces. i can’t remember many of their names. but i think about them often, and the way we all took a deep breath - and did something gentle amongst the pain.
popping in to say that for the past 6 months I’ve used this post as an indicator of when to check the news because it spikes in notes every time there is a major world event
You guys do know you’re supposed to reblog things, right
“well i like this post but i’m worried my followers might not” fuck your followers. The entire point of tumblr is to cause irreparable psychic damage to your followers. We are locked in mortal combat on the astral plane. You must win. You Must Win. You Must Destroy Them.
Actually Captain Jack Harkness is SO important. During a time when we couldn’t get a single queer on screen in most shows and even those few we did get ended up dead 90% of the time, he was not only openly bisexual, he was openly bisexual and LITERALLY unable to die.
They buried that gay and he still dug himself up and kept fucking
I just want to remind you that sometimes your life really doesn’t begin until you are 26+… Romanticizing and obsessing over our youth is harmful. Growing up is beautiful. Discovering who you are and how you interact with the world is a gift. Maturing and learning what you truly want out of life and living in that purpose brings fulfillment and peace. Your life is not over in your early 20’s because you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s just beginning.
