CritterKeeper

Pets can do that with sedatives sometimes. They call it "paradoxical excitation".

Geocahing wouldn't be nearly as much fun if you knew where the cache was to within four inches! The GPSr gets you to the right general area, but the cache is also camoflaged to prevent accidental discovery by Muggles. Figuring out how it's hidden is a big part of the challenge!

Wow, you really got different trailers than I did!

Some of my favorite episodes are when characters switch bodies, and you get to see the actors immitate each other! That, or a dead character takes over the body of a current one, The Invisible Man had an episode where Darien switched back and forth between himself and his brother who was killed in the pilot. Vincent Ventresca did a wonderful job with different body language mannerisms, etc.

Hmm, y'know, after looking at the episode list on Wiki a bit, I may have to revise my opinion of Season 2 and of the effect of the writers' strike. Melinda Snodgrass wrote the script for "The Measure of a Man" on spec, and it was accepted due to the strike. Perhaps my favorite episode, "Q Who," was in the second season, and it's absolutely fantastic! As for "Shades of Grey," what I just read says that they spent an extra $50,000 on "Q Who" and also went overbudget on "Elementary, My Dear Data," and that's what left them needing to save money by doing a clip show. If I were asked whether it would be better to skimp on those two, or do a clip show to make up for them, I know what I'd say! The more I learn about TV production, the more I've come to appreciate just how difficult it can be to craft a good bottle episode. That's an episode which is filmed with minimal cast, sets, effects, etc. to save money. Some of the finest pieces of drama are bottle episodes, because when you take away all the shooting and running and guest stars and new sets, what you get is the main characters everyone knows and cares about, talking to each other and hopefully revealing new depths. Unfortunately, if it's done wrong, then it comes across as cheap, boring, or both. Or, of course, it ends up expanding until it's no longer the money-saver it was meant to be,

Well, there was a big writers' strike early in the series, so they kinda had to go with what they had at the time. If you have six Wesley-saves-the-day scripts sitting on your desk, normally you'd pick the best one, maybe two, and put them at most at opposite ends of a season, if not in completely different seasons. If you've got nothing else to use and you have a show to put on, then you have to use more of them and closer together than is ideal. A lot of other shows had the same problems. Ah, but those are exactly the roles you need the best actors for, because it's such a challenge to convey what you need to while handicapped. (I use the term here like it's used in chess or golf, where a stronger player might give up a few pieces from the beginning in order to make it a more fair game for the weaker opponent and more of a challenge, and thus more interesting, for the stronger player.) To be able to deliver a nuanced enough performance to make it believable that Data is only just starting to develop and explore friendship and loyalty and fear; to be able to show love and concern and distrust without showing it through the eyes; even to express emotions when their forehead is a prosthetic and they can't wrinkle their brow; those are the times you really appreciate how good an actor is!

You're making me realize just how long ago I watched TNG. I think most episodes, I haven't seen since they aired, although there have been a few favorites I nearly wore out the tape on. (Yes, tape. We taped it, and I watched the tapes. DVDs first weren't around and then were expensive.) I may have to re-watch the series, although I think I need to watch the huge chunk of David Tennant's Doctor that I haven't seen yet first....

And within hours someone online said, "I'll bet I could hide a treasure chest off in the woods, and post the GPS coordinates, and you guys could find it just based on those coordinates!" And he did, and they did, and thus was born the hobby of Geocaching!

Grace is already in on the secret of Tedd's mark and has agreed to not tell Tedd's dad about it. Grace might be a much better person to talk to Sarah right now than Elliot would be.

I tend to prefer movies and shows with diverse casts. I grew up on a university campus with a lot of international students, so I had classmates from India and China and Nigeria; growing up in that town, my childhood was similarly diverse. I saw a bit of a TV show with a black private investigator and a Latina detective, and was quite enjoying the fact that they each showed their heritage in the way they spoke and acted, instead of just being completely assimilated into white-majority society. I love accents, and love learning about how different cultures view the world differently. Differences in how big a personal space is considered polite vs standoffish vs uncomfortably close, shoes on or off in the house, styles of furniture or lack thereof, all the little things that you discover are different. On the other hand, there is a comedy show on late at night here which has a black host and four guest comics, and while they usually have diverse participants, every once in a while they'll announce the name of the show and append, "Hot Chocolate Edition!" to the name, signaling that they are having an all-black show that night. The studio audience, when visible, is also all black for such shows. On those nights, I tend to switch channels, because it seems clear to me that they are specifically *not* targeting me that night, they are deliberately choosing to exclude me and people who look like me, and therefore I will take the hint and go watch something else.

Tedd self-identifies as gender-fluid, but we mostly see Tedd wanting to be a girl. I keep waiting for him to declare that he really feels like a guy at some point, and I can't wait to see him trying out the extra-manly counterpart to her extra-girly form. It feels like she's been stuck in the male form when she wanted to be female so often, that there's a sort of psychic backlash, and I'm hoping that once she's had some quality be-a-real-girl time on a regular basis, then he'll be ready to really experience being a guy, too. (Not saying that Tedd *has* to spend equal time as a guy, just that it seems like if Tedd *only* ever wants to be a girl, that would be trans, not fluid, so there must be at least some times he actually *wants* to be male.) Tedd may have declared his mark redundant, but I can't help but think that knowing that it is the *default* form that becomes a girl when she wants to, will feel more real to Tedd than having a female form added on by the TFG or watches. Sort of a, "Finally, it's really me that's changing to match how I feel!"

The problem isn't with individual movies so much as it is with the overall presence. Still, the main problem is that movies seem to start out with "straight cis white male" as the default for main characters, with pretty much every movie having at least one, and many movies having all but one main character fit that category. You never see an action movie where the main characters are an Asian woman, a black woman, and a First Nations woman, unless that is the movie's particular gimmick. "Hey, look, they made all the Ghostbusters women! Let's heap scorn on the movie for months before anyone even sees it!" There is no other ethnicity that is seen as a must-have the way that almost every movie or TV show has straight cis white men.

I second carrying a notebook of some sort everywhere! Especially have it handy when you are drifting off towards sleep and when you wake up, but I've had good ideas pop up during lectures, at the store, while reading.....write down every idea,nit just what applies to your current project. I never have just one project going, so if I get stuck on one, I can move on to another for a while. But sometimes, you just have to sit down and write, even if you don't feel like it. Writer's block can end up being an excuse for being lazy. If you can't write the story directly, work on mapping out the details of who does what when, and make sure everything is actually possible and makes sense. When all else fails and you can't seem to write anything, write something completely different from your usual. Write smut, write a Victorian epistolary tale, write a piece that's all dialog, write a fanfic. Something short that you know you can finish, or a small piece of a larger work. Just something to get the mental juices flowing. It might be good, but will more likely suck. Stick it in a drawer, and then once you have a collection built up, when you get stuck, pull out a random piece and try to find a way to apply some part of it to what you're doing.

Do you think it's the acidity of the oranges that ruined it? Are they too juicy? Too strong a flavor?

She's too skinny in the later pics, with no abs, no muscle tone. It's not just the absence of a bulky sweater and sweatpants, she looks like the image was photoshopped badly, especially fourth of the five.

Silly me, I was too busy being happy Dan gave them tails with no scales and with the flukes in a dolphin's horizontal orientation, which always made more sense to me than trying to mix mammal with fish.

I love how Dan isn't afraid to do a realistic pose where her belly sticks out! And that hair makes me think of all the hair colors I keep running into where the "red" is really purple instead of the orangish that real redheads have. We definitely need Pandora to follow our gang to college when they finally get out of high school, and end up in the sane dorm! Reset or not, this form is just too adorkable to only see her once in canon.

Hmm, not sure I'd call that more girlie, just different girlie, but either way, it's an adorable image! And Dan really could put both this and Link Grace in the Sketchbook section....

I started to say, "It'll never happen in canon, but it's some very nice fanservice!" But then I thought about all the changes characters have gone through, and Elliot's evolution from "I'm a guy!" to gender-meh, and decided "never" was a little strong for someone who seems relatively open to self-discovery and re-evaluation. :-D

Yeah, I like this one. Not trying too hard to be someone's idea of "sexy," just Grace looking happy to be having fun.

Well, people tend to try to apply the Bechdel test to individual movies, when it's most useful as a measure of the movie industry as a whole. How many of this year's Oscar nominees would pass? What percent of movies overall would? There's also the question of how to apply it. Does a ten second exchange between a mother and her daughter about how late she's allowed to stay out countas a "conversation" between them? So we add a qualifier that a "conversation" must be at least sixty seconds. Fine, what about if the two characters are a medical examiner and a detective, and their conversation is entirely about autopsy findings? Do they pass if the victim was a woman, but fail if they have the exact same conversation about a male victim, just because it means they are talking about the body of a dead man? Personally, I think that's going a bit too far, but I've seen it applied that way.

I know I'll sound ungrateful and horrible, but I really do wish he'd do more non-pinup stuff. I'd rather pay Patreon for Dan to do regular Sketchbooks than pin-ups! Or at least, maybe a mix of the two. We haven't had a Sketchbook entry since April 22! And even then, the last one was really a pin-up type, so no real Sketchbooks since April 19.

I've most recently come across mention of Twilight movies being given as examples of movies that do pass the Bechdel Test.

It will if you quote it here!

Okay, let's wake this thread up by giving it a topic and see what happens.... What is your favorite threat? One of my favorites is from the TV series Witchblade. Gabriel: He could make my life very difficult! Ian: "Difficult"? I can make you pray for "difficult." Ever notice how the word "difficult" looks like it's spelled wrong, even when it isn't? Another good one is from Forever Knight....LaCroix (who is a couple thousand years old) is, in a flashback, threatened by a Nazi, telling him nasty things he could do to him. LaCroix looks him straight in the eye and, with a hint of a smile, tells him, "Try." Conveys more genuine menace than everything the Nazi had said did. So, anyone else remember some good threats?