Spoilers, I guess.

The whole thing is a clumsy 9/11-aftermath metaphor.  
We wanted an excuse for this war! 
The public’s emotions/knowledge was manipulated to gain support for this conflict!
This guy will kill anyone he perceives as inferior!  
He hates who we are!
We’re going into “enemy territory” without legal justification!
We are provoking future wars with this poorly handled retribution!
We don’t know who’s really to blame for this kind of violence existing! 

The thing that got me most was a key reference to the frozen crew of the Botany Bay.

Sure, this is an “alternative” Star Trek universe.  But in the original series, the Botany Bay had 84 crew members.  Khan’s crew in this film is reduced to 72 with little explanation for any previous numbers.  He is asked what he is “doing this” for, he gives coordinates in the heavens near Earth, and says that if you look there, you will find “72 reasons,” which end up being the 72 frozen crew members.

Now, I can’t completely rip the writers for this number.  There were 84 crew members on the original Botany Bay, and 72 survived:
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/botany-bay-s-s
Shit is canon, y’all.
BUT
It just feels like it’s jammed into the script in the most opportunistic way. Please tell me I am not the only one who couldn’t take Khan’s character seriously because all I saw after that was a bad attempt to jam in a reference to “Omg crazy Muslims believe they’ll get 72 virgins in heaven if they kill us!”  It just ties in far too neatly with the 9/11 metaphors.  It starts to reduce an otherwise complex and sociopathically infatuating character to a caricature of Islamist extremism.  Why use the 72?  Given that this is going to be a much younger audience, and fewer will be intimately familiar with TOS and its movies (I sure as hell had to look up background on these characters), this mention of the 72— if noticed— will pop out as a reference to the 72 heavenly virgins that we’ve heard about so derisively and incredulously over the past decade.   It can’t be just a random number at this point, for these audiences. 

Add to this that Uhura’s beaming potential from the first film was totally sapped by the whiny girlfriend script, and I was underwhelmed.  I do not blame Saldaña; I don’t really know what I’d be able to do with those lines, either.  That and the fact that the two female leads frequently took to screaming and/or tearing up emotionally as a form of intervention/conflict resolution, compared to male leads who can actively fight with their bodies, use their weapons properly, and strategize without being visibly overcome by emotion.  Sure, Star Trek’s main characters are originally mostly male, and TOS has a huge amount of adorably engaging bromance, so I get that the film is going to focus a lot on men and their friendships.  They’re lovely friendships filled with adorable sexual tension!  But that doesn’t mean that the female characters have to be whiny and/or screaming and/or drily silent in the background to highlight this.



TLDR:  I like the Tribble, I like Bones, I like the Wrath of Khan references, I like all the space eye-candy.  I don’t like the handling of the 9/11 references or the halfhearted writing for the female leads. 

I have so many feelings.

Selfie because I put on eye makeup and contacts. Gonna go to a senior formal with people who are used to going to formals…

1.  You do not live here.  Knock first.  Especially at 2:30 AM.

2.  Don’t say things like, “What the fuck?” at me when I say that this is not your apartment.

3.  Mocking my nervousness and taunting me, my voice, and my refusal to have you in my apartment isn’t cool.  Do you know what it’s like being a lone female human faced with a group of large, drunk male humans invading her private space unannounced?  It’s kind of terrifying.

4.  I have a phone on me.  I could call the police if you do this again, or if you refused to leave. 

5.  I’m not the only one who lives in this building.  Stop shouting in the hallway.

OHHHH, but you’re drunk, so you’re “excused” from rational behavior.  Just guys having a good time, right? I guess I’m not really allowed to complain.  Forgive me for my rudeness.  I’ll go back to hiding in my room from people who could possibly harm me or my roommate.  I’ll try to remember, for future reference, that my nervousness is only based on made-up falsehoods in my brain and not on the actual experiences of assault or rape that people I know have gone through.

Pretty bow in the baaaaaack.

Designed and sewed this dress! Woot!

I have to do probably two hours’ worth of studio documentation, due at 9 AM, and I really can’t fucking be bothered with going down to studio and taking stupid photos and then cleaning them up in Photoshop and then typing a stupid image list of all their stupid titles, even though I’ve had six stupid hours this night in which I could have done that.  

It is currently 12:09 AM, and I have set my alarm for 6:15 AM.  I am hoping that I’ll be motivated roll out of bed and industriously photograph and edit my work under the pressure of a serious time crunch, because I apparently forgot how to do work without feeling like I’m going to die.

To celebrate, here is a gif of some really fucking weird owls. 

Check it out here!

Right now I only have three things listed, but soon there will be more.

1.  A puppy.
2.  Chickens.
3.  A vegetable garden, either on my own property or in an allotment.
4.  Studio space, either on my own property or rented.
5.  A job I like enough to keep and which earns enough to fund all this. 

Sometimes I can’t tell if I ask for too little or too much.

Please, for the love of humanity, watch this.

I’ve done a really good job most of my life at brushing off the crap I got, or the crap I get, but the truth is I’m still affected by the times I was pushed around: like when I was forced to eat sand and the time I was pelted with basketballs and the time— when I was eleven years old— that I was told by classmates that I was ugly and that I was fat, so I should either wear makeup and go on a diet or stay at home so no one had to see me.

I don’t like to get preachy on this tumblr or use it for much content that I haven’t generated, but I want whoever sees this to know I am an example of someone who took this shit from age 5 to age 13 and am LUCKY to be alive, and happy that I’m alive.

Actually finished this in the summer of 2011, just got around to properly photographing it.

Not All There
24” x 24”
Oil on canvas 

Evidence in a Plum
Oil on canvas
9” x 9”

Snapped a photo, just finished what I think is the last glaze it needs…

Best way to christen the first day of your last semester of college:  sit and sob in your studio space for an hour. 

“Everywhere and Nowhere”- detail

“Everywhere and Nowhere”— detail