Lucy Lawless was not a particularly burly woman, but somehow she made Xena seem like a fucking tank and I don’t understand how.
Don’t get me wrong—she was strong, and certainly not a waif, but more than almost any other female superhero actress I’ve ever seen, Lucy Lawless exuded physical power and weight that I actually believed (when she wasn’t somersaulting in front of a ridiculous greenscreen).
EVERYTHING. ALL OF IT. I DON’T KNOW I’M JUST FEELING EXCEPTIONALLY WARM RIGHT NOW.
I LOVE HER
This is because the tank is not concerned with muscle or endurance. Tank is purely a matter of 60% attitude, 30% mindset, and 110% fuckaroundandfindout.
I’ve also seen another version of the commentary on this post speculating that she was also SHOT like male action star at the time - which has nothing to do with size, but with posture and staging and yes, attitude. 😊
She definitely was permitted to show -effort- in a way that female action stars often are not. She gets to grunt, yell, make weird angry faces, put FORCE and ANGER and JOY and just, you know. Personality, generally, into her fighting. It makes her feel more real, which means that when she does impressive or impossible things, they also feel more real and thus more impressive.
I live in India. If any of us needs medical attention if infected, I’m quite sure we won’t survive. Delhi is a large capital city, MP’s have to tweet and beg to get medical attention for their loved ones. We have the record for highest single day infections.
This video by the BBC India bureau is pretty distressing and summarises the issue quite effectively: supplies, infrastructure, vaccines.
I call all of this genocidal colonialism by another name. Please organise. India is the producer of vaccines and pharma that is intended to go to middle and low income countries, as long as the crisis continues here, it will have knock on effects in South America and Africa. The virus mutating through 1 billion people will get deadlier and find you too, so it’s probably in your self interest.
If you live in the US: find your reps here & email them. Send “sign PRJXNQ“ to ResistBot on Twitter (via DM), Facebook Messenger, or text message at 50409 to send a letter about this to your representatives in Congress! (thanks @absurdlyuseless)
I’ll update with resources for more countries as I find them. Generally calls work better than emails, so do try calling your representative directly if you can.
Man… I love watching people be harmlessly excited about things. Passionate about them. Start beaming and overflowing with chatter and get all animated and delighted. It breaks my heart when I see them take a breath and apologize and keep backtracking and quieting down because I know at some point they were told to control all that joy. I’m constantly like - don’t be sorry! Tell me more! Honey go ahead and talk until your throat is raw. I love being in this moment with you and watching you light up. I don’t need to even understand what you’re talking about. I just like you, and therefore like anything that makes you feel this way. Lemme sit down. Gimme that Ted talk. Keep on glowing.
If you ever, and I mean EVER think that you fucked something up royally, remember that the organizers of the 1904 Olympic marathon:
- Had zero stations for water on the 26 mile (42 km) course
- Accidentally gave North American competitor Tom Hicks a cocktail made of egg whites, brandy, and actual fucking rat poison
- Had a guy come into the race late wearing a beret and cutoff slacks, sneak into an apple orchard during the race because no food had been given to him for 40 hours, eat rotten apples, projectile vomit onto the track, fall asleep for hours, and finish in fourth place OVERALL because most of the other runners collapsed of exhaustion or injuries
- Conducted the race on a dusty road, which caused so much dust to be kicked into the air that an American runner somehow inhaled enough to tear his STOMACH LINING open
- Accidentally released feral dogs onto the track
- Fucked the other competitors up SO BADLY that Tom Hicks—the guy who ate RAT POISON and was HALLUCINATING the entire run—came in first place
i just looked it up and it wasn’t an accident that they gave rat poison to him, the mistake was that they gave it to him twice. strychnine was apparently used as performance enhancing drug way back in the day because it has stimulant properties if you take it at a sub-lethal dose. a third “wake up cocktail” might have outright killed him though.
I don’t think a single other human being alive can imagine what it would feel like, physically, to be starved of water for 36 hours, fed only Special Hallucinogenic Rat Juice, and then made to run a MARATHON and WIN. That man saw the eyes of god I’m sure of it
My number one reason for abandoning a fic is because the dialogue is not punctuated correctly. Sure, typos happen, but more than an occasional – “Pass me my phone.” Said Sherlock. – and you’ve lost me.
At one level, it’s simply an annoyance. Imagine reading a story in which there is a word misspelled in every single sentence. I experience a similar level of irritation at incorrectly punctuated dialogue.
It goes beyond just being a pet peeve, though. I have found that generally, when a writer has not mastered the rules for punctuating dialogue, I will find the plot trite or not well thought out, the characterizations flat and immature, the sentence structure faulty, and the vocabulary limited or improperly implemented.
In other words, incorrect dialogue punctuation is a great red flag for me that signals that a fic is probably not going to appeal to me.
There are fics that have managed to grab me and keep me interested despite the technical deficits, but they are few and far between. Some of these are by non-native speakers of English who
may actually have great English writing skills but are not aware that
dialogue is punctuated differently than in their native language.
Dialogue punctuation in English is actually very easy - one of the rare things that is - and there are only a few rules.
