Actor Brandon Flynn to Play James Dean in New Movie About Gay Romance
Jun. 24th, 2025 10:28 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
colavito_feed
This is, of course, the same thing that I tried to do in Jimmy, and I hope that the movie will help to bring a truer version of the story of James Dean to a broader audience.
Guido saw the same thing. As he told The Hollywood Reporter:
“It’s a tender and sometimes tragic story about two young men who found each other in a time and place where being seen — truly seen — came at a cost. Brandon Flynn brings both the fire and vulnerability this role demands. I couldn’t imagine anyone more perfect to explore and play out the complexities of James Dean.”
Tesla Takedown Tuesday
Jun. 24th, 2025 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdToday is another Tuesday Tesla Takedown at the Lynnwood (Washington State) Tesla dealership.
4:15 PM • Tesla store – Lynnwood • 17731 Pacific Hwy, Lynnwood, WA 98037
There are several other protests, sign events, and so on today in other locations as well. You can pick your preference.
Tesla Takedown is an endurance run. Please show up to help demonstrate that going in with Trump has long-term consequences.
If you can’t show up today, you can find more actions on different days here.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
Bolted Production Update & Playtests
Jun. 24th, 2025 05:01 amwondermark_feed
Some quick updates on my Wondermark card game Bolted!
I’m working on getting this game finished and off to print, but there are still a few things to iron out.
Specifically: One big change that I’ve introduced is an extra mechanic that allows for additional strategic choice in the game. If you don’t want to play a card onto your creature, you can instead “scrap” that card for a variety of different effects.
This opens up a new dimension of strategy and also allows for the creation of combos that can be really fun to pull off! I think it’s a great new wrinkle for the game.
Join Virtual Playtesting With Me
I’m now doing more playtesting to confirm:
- That the secondary effect options are interesting without being too overwhelming.
- That the effects I’ve designed are fun, and affect the game flow positively.
- That what you can do is clearly explained to players.
To get in more reps with the updated rules, I’m hosting more virtual playtesting this week:
Feel free to grab a slot at: picktime.com/wondermark
If you’ve played before, I’d love to have you back! If you’ve never played, I’d love to have you too!
Unsupervised Playtesting
Pretty soon, I’m going to be sending out the rulebook to folks to confirm it’s clear and understandable. Please feel free to sign up here if you want to be on that specific review list!
(If you’ve signed up for this earlier, I’ve still got your info and will be in touch soon enough.)
Other Updates
- I THOUGHT I was basically done with the art for this game, but then I unfortunately stumbled across thousands of additional vintage images. (As documented here.) This might necessitate some new additions.
- I’m going into much more detail on the finer points of game updates and design over on my Discord. Feel free to pop in there to ask any questions or get into the nitty-gritty with me!
- If you happen to be in Seattle, I’m also doing in-person playtesting most Wednesdays at the Playtest Northwest meetups. Drop me a line on Discord if you want to connect in-person at one of those.
- I’m pretty excited about this game, friends!!
a day that will…
Jun. 22nd, 2025 07:48 amsolarbirdDecember 7th, 1941: the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it “a day that will live in infamy” in his famous speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Japan.
That particular epithet – that’s a strong one. And unlike most such epithets, it’s held up. People know it, still.
I mean, sure, slogans like “Remember the Maine!” rallied people at the time, but it’s an historical footnote; “Remember the Alamo!” has more weight, but not because of the attack – it’s because of the hopeless and romanticised defence.
(That it was, push comes to shove, in defence of slavery is important but not relevant to my line of thought here.)
Why was the Pearl Harbour attack somehow that much worse?
It wasn’t that Japan attacked a purely military target in a United States territory. Nothing wrong with that by the rules of war. Certainly nothing infamous about it, either. Within the rules of war, it’s fair play.
It’s not that it was a surprise, even – though it was, and that tends to be what people think of when they hear the phrase. Most people at the time assumed a Japanese Imperial attack would come in the Philippines, not in Hawai’i. But surprise attacks are the meat and gravy of war, and simply good strategy – again, not a source of infamy.
It wasn’t even, really, that they started the war with the attack. That’s kind of how wars tend to go. As a rule, one doesn’t go declare war and then stand around a while giving your enemy a week or two to get their defences in place.
So why were people who were absolutely expecting war – absolutely getting ready for a war – with Japan still so very angry about the way it started? What made a crowd certain that war was inevitable – a crowd that was getting ready for it, whether they liked it or not – go, “oh, that is too goddamn far”?
It was that Japan was literally still negotiating as the bombs fell.
Roosevelt mentions this in his speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war. It’s shallow in the specifics, but it’s explicitly there, in the first minute. He didn’t have to get into the weeds of details; everybody in Congress knew.
The Japanese attack started at 12:48pm Eastern time. The military finally got word sometime after 1:30pm Eastern time. The Japanese ambassador had scheduled a meeting with Secretary of State Hull for 1:45pm, and didn’t show up until 2:05pm, by which time the bombs had been falling for over an hour – and even then, they delivered a statement responding to a previous US position paper delivered on November 26th.
It was harsh, but it was no declaration of war.
The Japanese delegation were literally negotiating as their air force’s bombs fell.
That betrayal – that subterfuge, that backstab – coloured the entire rest of the war in the Pacific, up to and including the decision to use those atomic bombs.
Does that still-negotiating-as-the-bombers-let-fly trick sound like something that just happened this afternoon?
Maybe it should.
Japan’s plan was a quick but heavy knockout blow on a military target, to weaken American forces in the Pacific and force the Americans to accede to their demands in China.
Trump’s plan was apparently also a quick but heavy knockout blow on military targets, to force the Iranians to accede to Trump’s – and Netanyahu’s – demands in the Middle East.
Iran is in no way the 1940s US; Trump’s clown car criminal crowd is in no way the leadership of Imperial Japan. This is not World War II, and since Trump didn’t go nuclear, I don’t think it’s World War III; this is not that kind of projection, so don’t make it into one.
I’m just talking infamy. As far as infamy goes?
Yeah.
I could really see saying this is an act of infamy.
Obviously, that’s the kind of thing Iran would say, no matter what. Aside from that, times have changed. Asymmetrical war, disinformation, irregular warfare as a primary strategy – all those old ideas about war have rather gone by the way side. It’s hard to talk about something as infamous in war these days.
But still. I could see it.
And more importantly… I could see people believing it.
Couldn’t you?
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now
Jun. 21st, 2025 09:55 pmsolarbird…but here are some options from a foreign-policy standpoint as laid out by The Atlantic. Seems a reasonable summary to me.
What it completely leaves out is that this is a direct violation of the War Powers Act, the UN Charter (to which the US is signatory), and even the National Security Act. I guess that’s not important anymore.
Correctly, there are calls for impeachment tonight from outside and within Congress. I suggest you write whoever you’ve got up there to do the same. But I do not expect it to go anywhere; I am absolutely confident the MAGAts will find a way to justify their 100% spin on the “peace president” and why bombing Iran – an absolute act of war – is just fine and all the more reason to worship their shit-stain incarnate God Emperor.
I’ve got a short essay going up tomorrow morning at 7:48am. If you know why 7:48am on Sunday is an important time, you’ll probably have some idea what it’s about. You’re probably not completely right – but you’re quite certainly not really wrong, either.
For the rest of you?
It’s about infamy.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
In Brief: June UFO News Roundup
Jun. 19th, 2025 05:44 pmcolavito_feed  | In an interview with Mick West, a former AARO leader confirmed that in areas like Washington, D.C. that had sophisticated surveillance, there were no unidentified flying objects over the past twenty years—everything could be identified. It was only in areas with limited ability to track and detect objects that “unknown” things flew through the skies. In short, UFOs increasingly seem to be a product of limited information about what someone is really seeing. In Matt Laslo’s Ask a Pol newsletter today, he presents UFO-friendly Rep. Eric Burlinson’s reaction to the recent Wall Street Journal UFO exposé revealing that the Pentagon had systematically fed its own program leaders fake information about space aliens and recovered flying saucers. When Laslo asked him about it in an interview posted last week, Burlinson offered a shifting response: |
“Well, you remember, like, that was my original worldview,” Rep. Eric Burlison exclusively tells Ask a Pol. “What he's saying is probably the case. I think it's the most likely scenario.”
Interesting. But that kind of seems at odds with your conversation with folks in the FBI’s UFO unit. Or do you think they’re all just siloed?
“Yeah, so I would say, I do think that the people that provided information for that article did not have a full picture of everything that's going on,” Burlison says. “They do not. There's no way they could. But at the end of the day, I think they don't have the full picture.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a conspiracy theorist, called the report “bullshit” and told Laslo she would stick by her conspiracy theories, while Sen. Mike Rounds, another UFO enthusiast, told Laslo on Wednesday that the WSJ findings were “common knowledge.” This means that since he had never previously mentioned these findings, which he said were “not secret,” he had himself therefore personally chosen to hide the truth from the public while publicly stoking UFO conspiracies.
A New Rune Stone Found in Canada Is Yet Another Nineteenth Century Fake
Jun. 18th, 2025 04:11 pmcolavito_feed
An interdisciplinary team that included Henrik Williams—the Uppsala University runologist readers with a long memory will remember from his long-ago critiques of Scott Wolter—examined the runes and kept quiet for several years as analysis progressed to prevent incomplete or incorrect information from leaking.
"We didn't want to release information publicly until we had done as much as we could at the time to understand exactly what it was," archaeologist Ryan Primrose told the CBC.
The team determined that the runes were most likely carved by a Swedish member of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early to middle nineteenth century, and the text—the Lord’s Prayer in Swedish—was copied from a version published in the later nineteenth century, derived from a 1611 original version. The text used a form of Furthark runes developed by Johannes Bureus in the 1600s, which Bureus had adapted for Swedish. (The original use of the alphabet in from the first millennium was not deciphered until 1865.) The team speculates that the stone may have been meant for a worship site for Swedish workers.
The discovery is especially important because it provides direct evidence that Swedish-speaking immigrants carved runestones during the nineteenth century and deliberately buried them. This is exactly what skeptics have long believed was the origin of the Kensington Runestone. If the dating of the Canadian stone is correct, the carving of rune stones dates back half a century or more before the Kensington Runestone’s “discovery,” and coincides closely with the period in the 1830s and 1840s when Carl Christian Rafn set off a craze for Scandinavian history when he claimed in Antiquitates Amercanae (1831) that the Norse had colonized North America.
hey team north end!
Jun. 17th, 2025 02:54 pmsolarbirdToday’s Tuesday. There’s a Tuesday #TeslaTakedown protest, Lynnwood, Tesla dealership on 99. 4:15pm TODAY, like usual. As I’m writing, that’s literally an hour and like 20 minutes away.
Yeah I kinda forgot too lol, but no reprieves for the fascist.
Let’s get out there~~~
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
Wondermark on Discord & Instagram
Jun. 17th, 2025 07:06 pmwondermark_feedI have a Discord server for Wondermark (and the other things I get up to)!
This has existed for a while, but it’s been pretty quiet for most of its existence.
Now, though, I’ve set up some new channels and am spending more time in there!
I’m excited to do more casual chatting and sharing with fellow lovers of the curious and creative. Participating more in smaller communities is feeling increasingly important to me.
Recently I’ve been answering questions about my card game Bolted as well as admiring a lovely photo someone posted of a pregnant hedgehog.
Come share pictures of good animals and tell me about what you’re enjoying reading, making, doing these days! Those recommendations are always welcome.
I’ve also started re-running the entire Wondermark archive on Instagram:
It’s a bit of a strange feeling, posting 22-year-old work to an audience that may be seeing it for the first time.
I’ve chopped up the old comics in such a way that they are nearly impossible to read on a desktop browser, but swipe very satisfyingly on phones, which is how the vast majority of people use IG, I figure.
Hooray, now you have some links to click on! Or tap, if you are on your phone. Either interface option works; that is the promise of technology!
On the Names of Sesostris, Vesozes, and Vezosis
Jun. 17th, 2025 05:32 pmcolavito_feedI have no idea how the Arabic translator whose work al-Maqrizi copied (he states explicitly that he is using a translation) got from Vesozes to Berūbah. But I did discover that Orosius apparently got his name from Justin, whose Epitome of the work of Pompeius Trogus gives the same figure’s name as Vezosis. This, everyone agrees, is supposed to be Sesostris.
All of the references in the literature suggest that there is some body of common knowledge of how this mangling of names happened, but no one will say what it is. The closest any source came was to give page numbers to a French-language article by Gaston Maspero from 1901 in which he reviews a German-language book, Sesostris, by Kurt Sethe, which apparently attempted trace the etymology of various forms of the king’s name. I don’t have access to the book, so a translation of Maspero’s summary will need to suffice:
In 1867, [Georg] Unger adopted the thesis of these scholars, and he attempted to prove its accuracy by carefully comparing all Greco-Roman texts with all known Egyptian documents at the time. He observed that classical tradition traced its hero further back than the Ramesside line. He came to believe that Osirtasen III was the successor whom this tradition attributed to its Sesostris—Sesostris, Marachos, Narachos, Nakkaros, Nencoreus. He showed that most of the features of the legend were also visible in the kings of the Twelfth and Twenty-Eighth Dynasties, and he concluded that Sesostris really belonged to the Twelfth Dynasty, just as Manetho had asserted: he was Osirtasen or, as pronounced according to Lauth, Vesourtesen III. Sesostris would have been a popular corruption of Vesourtesen, but by derivation of the second part Sen from the official form; the first part responding, as Eratosthenes had it, to an Egyptian term meaning "powerful, vigorous": Ses-Sis, perhaps an abbreviation of the name of the god Khonsu, Schonsou, Epupis or Psamphis. Unger henceforth had no doubt that Manetho had indeed meant a Sesostris from the XIIth Dynasty; most Egyptologists continued nonetheless to believe that the hero of Herodotus had been modeled primarily, if not uniquely, on Ramses II of the monuments.
Mr. Sethe has just revisited the question and added a new point. The most important fact, he says, is that all readings of the name transcribed until now as Osirtasen, Osortesen, Vesourtesen—all consist first of the name of a goddess, Ousret–Ousret, later followed by the feminine termination –t, Ousreté, the powerful one; and second, an element SEN, possibly from the root snj, to resemble, to be equal to…, which appears in many theophoric names under the first Theban empire: Sn-t-Imn, the one who is equal to Amon, Sn-t-Bȝ, the one who is equal to the Ram of Mendes, Sn-t-Mȝᶜ.t, the one who is equal to the goddess Maat.
The name of the goddess, written at the beginning of the word, does not take second place in pronunciation, due to the principle of honor usually applied in such cases: hence one wrote Ousresen but said Sen-Ousret, then Sen-wosret, she who is equal to the goddess Wosre. Σεσωστρις is therefore not much further from Sen-wosre than most good transcriptions of Egyptian names are from their original Egyptian forms. “S” for the auxiliary vowel in the middle of words, long “e” for the short “o” in an open syllable, “e” for “a” in the feminine ending –at, the final “ou” in Greek instead of Egyptian “w” are all fully regular. Elsewhere we find the Greek combination σε for an Egyptian or Semitic “w”: especially when it is placed at the beginning, as in this case, which is nothing but natural. … There is no real difference between Senwosret and Sesostris than that of the second part, corresponding to w and t in Egyptian.
Mr. Sethe supposes that the name fell into the hands of those who themselves misunderstood it and transformed it—as did Ausone, in the form Sesostris; to avoid the hiatus resulting from the fall of an n in Se(n)ostris–Sostris, an extra s was inserted between o and t, and one arrived at Sesostris, Sesostris, and then Sésostris, Sésostris. The versions without t or n, Sésosis–Sésosis, derived from a misunderstood Egyptian model where the root wsr, strong, powerful, would have been kept and perhaps even reinforced; as is often the case in other names: Senwosre–Senwosre would have gradually changed into Sewose, then into Sesose, Sésostris and Sésostros.
Since the first century, the name Sesostris has most often been attached to the heroes named Sesosis, Sesostris, Sesonchosis, Sesou, and Sesetsourai, all supposedly drawn from the Ramesside name (like Rameses I, II, or III). Mr. Sethe rejects this etymology and substitutes the one he just explained. This is the core of his study. When it comes to laying out the dates, wars, reforms, all the historical material attributed to Sesostris by classical authors, the facts better match what we know of the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty and especially of Osirtasen I than the “history of Ramses,” which is supported only by indirect testimonies collected by Bunsen and, more recently, by Wiedemann. If we add to that what we owe to Sethe’s analysis, it is all the hypotheses that attributed to Ramses II the portions of the Sesostris legend that Unger thought he could attribute to another.
That didn’t really help, unless the argument is that Trogus ignored Greek tradition and rendered the name from a transliteration of a partly understood hieroglyphic original, Vesourtesen. That’s possible, but probably not the answer, not least because Trogus’ sources were Greek, not Egyptian.
In checking into Justin’s Epitome, it seems that there are two hundred ancient and medieval copies of it, and “Vezosis” is only one variant. According to an 1898 article by the German scholar Fritz Hommel, the same name is given as “Vexoris,” “Uesosis,” and “Sesosis” in other manuscripts. It might have saved me quite a bit of time if anyone had just said that it was most likely a gradual scribal corruption by copyists who didn’t realize he was talking about Sesostris rather than scholars being super coy about it and giving long lists of references that refer to one another and ultimately go nowhere.
Let’s talk “Remigration”
Jun. 16th, 2025 09:15 amsolarbirdFarty McShitgibbon squirted out another racist authoritarian shart on Pravda Sotsialnaya late Sunday night, blowing off steam caused by his frustration at protests and over his shitty birthday parade. It’s a screed of lies about Democrats being sick in the head and not actually Americans, sending more waves of cops and military at us, and about cheering on mass deportations. Like y’do, if you’re a fascist fuckhead.
But let’s pay particular attention to this bit:
…I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came…
CAPS as in the original. Bold added.
Remigration pretends to be but is not actually a subtle word.
Remigration means ethnic purge. Ethnic cleansing, if you insist – but I hate that term, because there’s nothing cleansing about it. It’s an ethnic purge. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s repression, it’s expulsion at the point of a gun, based on your ethnicity.
Remigration means ancestry-based expulsions of people who aren’t white, for being not white, and not for any other reason. Just for being not white. Legal status means nothing; being a citizen means nothing. Not white? Get the fuck out, at gunpoint. That’s how it went during Operation W*tback; that’s how he wants it to go again, and now he’s just saying it.
This is not a question; this is not up for debate. If you feel like debating it with me, screw you you fascist-apologist fuck, and sit the fuck down. In this context – in any context outside academia – that’s what it means. Go read Wikipedia if you want the definition and history.
“Remigration” in this context absolutely and only means ethnic purge. All the leading haters in his administration – Miller, I’m looking in your direction – know damn well what it means. They used the word on purpose.
So I’m asking you not to discuss this shart of a statement without going directly to what REMIGRATION means. Do not let anyone lie and pretend it means something else, because that’s bullshit. Remigration is why they’re revoking every legal status they can; remigration is why they’re trying to end birthright citizenship; remigration means a violent ethnic purge.
And that’s what he’s told ICE – or more generally, “ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department” – to make happen.
So. What do we do, in particular, right now?
First off, make sure people know what this word means.
Second – know any “good cops”? Like, relatives or something you might actually be able to reach? Show them the Wikipedia article about what “remigration” means, and only then show them Trump’s statement. Make sure they understand what Trump said, and make sure they know what they’re being asked to do. Make them understand, like… now.
Make sure they understand the criminal act they’re being asked to perform.
Because that is, absolutely, the ask, and “just following orders” … just won’t do.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
A word you need to know right now
Jun. 15th, 2025 10:45 pmsolarbirdI’ve got a post going up tomorrow (Monday) morning, but the word you need to understand right now is:
Remigration
If you don’t already know this word – or if you’re in certain areas of academia and think you do, but do not in any context outside academia – you need to know what this word means right now. And you need to make sure your friends know what it means.
Wikipedia will explain it to you.
More tomorrow.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
