resourceful

You know you’ve got a decent rep as a supervillain when a Dalek comes to you for help finding parts. I mean, I don’t mean to brag, but screw that, actually, yeah, I’m kinda bragging. I’d say that depends, cyborg – whatcha got for me?

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I decided over the summer that I’d give the new series of Doctor Who a chance, after last year’s trainwreck. I’m not convinced – it’s got a bit too much fanservice and we are again retreading old ground, even if they do acknowledge it outright – but it’s still better than anything I saw last year. I quite enjoyed the first 15 minutes, which is something I couldn’t say about last year at all.

Regardless, it looks like they’ve backtracked on a few bad ideas, and I do like Michelle Gomez’s take on Missy/The Master – particularly with these rectons – so… we’ll see. Modern Who is back up to probationary status, at least for the moment.

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wow, this is... yeah.

Oh my gods, this is the most fucked up thing. I mean, on the scale of things, maybe not, but for its scale, the clusterfuckery is magnificent.

Okay, so, there's an arterial road not far from my house, NE 145th Street. We're trying to get HOV and transit improvements on it, but it is a jurisdictional nightmare.

Here's what I mean:

It's also a state highway, designation SR 523. The state DOT state have authority because of that.

But also, Seattle city limits go up to the middle of the road, so the eastbound lanes and the southern sidewalk are City of Seattle, and City of Seattle has exclusive jurisdiction over the southern sidewalk, except that the state has a right of way covering that same sidewalk.

Meanwhile, Shoreline, which is by far most affected by this road? Their city limits start at the northern edge of the north sidewalk, and cover none of the road or that sidewalk. But! Any additional widening - necessary for HOV and/or improved transit - will be into their city limits.

You may notice that leaves the westbound lanes floating between the two cities. Yes, that in fact means that the strip in between is unincorporated King County. As is the sidewalk. Which is King County's responsibility. As you can tell, seeing as it's never, ever repaired.


to wit

This is a special kind of how-did-we-get-here-and-how-do-we-get-out, I gotta say. Fortunately, from what I'm reading, everybody is willing to hand over their chunks to Shoreline, and Shoreline is willing to take it on, because it affects them most. Except it will still be a state highway, but that's fine, all the state highways are like that and people know what to do.

But right now, wow. That's just... impressive.

do not see stonewall

Stonewall, the “fictionalisation” of the Stonewall Riots that I talked about back in August, is finally getting reviews.

It is even worse than originally feared, rewriting history carte blanche to eliminate and/or outright mock the actual people of the Stonewall riots, replacing it with a straight-looking white-guy butch hero narrative, filled with caricatures of pathetic too-femmy-to-ever-find-love gays, abusive and vaguely pedophilic drag queens, and comic-relief trans and gender-variant people of colour.

It rewrites history, taking the actual revolution from the hands of the real heroes – the transwomen, the lesbians, the bulldykes, the drag queens, almost all people of colour – and actually has the straight-passing cisgendered corn-fed white-boy hunk start the action. (In real life, those guys mostly hid out in back, because they could pass, and didn’t like going to jail. Can’t blame them for that – and neither did the cops, who generally didn’t arrest them.) It’s whitewashing, it’s erasure, it’s the elimination of women and people of colour from history, all exactly as the trailer promised. It is a bundle of abominable racist lies.

From Vanity Fair‘s review:

Real-life Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson only gets a little screen time, and is played as comic relief, flatly, by Otoja Abit. Many of the characters who don’t look and sound like Danny are rendered as jokes, silly people who need Danny’s relatively rugged masculinity to get them angry and organized. Stonewall is ultimately yet another cartoonish fantasy about white saviors and square-jawed heroes; it should be called Independence Gay.

There’s lots more like that. Do not see this film. Do not support it, do not give it your money. Do not participate in this travesty. Simply. Do. Not.

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