you are 16. you are talking with a gay man in his 50s or 60s, a friend, huge and gentle with a scarf and short fluffy curls of gray hair, who has directed you in two plays staged in your mid-size artsy town. (he has not yet asked you to be in his production of The Laramie Project which will change your life. this conversation will also change your life.)
he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, “of course, it was AIDS then.” in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and “straight,” you ask him. what was it like.
he takes a moment in which his face is not like a person’s face. “there was a time,” he says, “i’m not sure how long, years. when i went to a funeral every weekend.” he tells you about two funerals in a day, and choosing between friends when you couldn’t make it to both. he does not look at you, he looks at them. his wet grey gaze is so clear that you start to see ghosts. it will be years before you understand why it feels like your grief too. why the ghosts call you family.
It should be illegal to require that any device or software connect to the internet just to run. I shouldn’t need to log in with microsoft to open any of their programs on my local computer. All games should be playable without access to an online server. All media you pay for should be downloadable to local disk as a raw file and if they don’t like that because they know you’ll share it and upload it, tough shit. They took your money already, they’ll live.
Yknow, deep space nine handles a lot of really heavy subject matter. But voyager is Fucked Up. Like, ds9 is about the horrors of war & in voy shit will just happen. People say voyager is the darkest star trek series and that doesn’t feel quite right to me because ds9 is About War and the aftereffects thereof but there’s definitely something happening on voyager. It has a really different vibe about it. Ds9 is dark but voyager is scary
Ds9 handles its subject matter gracefully and voyager Does Not. Shit just happens on voyager. You watch an episode of voyager and you say What the fuck? & the episode ends and they never talk about it again
[ID: a reply from @bonecouch that reads, “in this way voyager reminds me more of tos than any other star trek spin off” /end ID]
Oh now there’s a take. I think you’re onto something. Janeway definitely has a Kirk energy about her & the episode structure is pretty close to the tos formula of going to a place and something fucked up happening and leaving. It just feels slightly *off* though in a way that’s hard to pin down… tos was entirely episodic so you don’t really *expect* things to be brought up again, but voyager does have a level of continuity, so they kind of leave you waiting. Sometimes things come back later but a lot of it Doesn’t. It’s all very strange
Here’s a thing that happened to one of my friends. I was there.
Basically, we were walking down the sidewalk, talking about something meaningless. I think it had to do with a movie. Then this bus screeches up, stops next to us, and a bunch of people with “Down with Cis” shirts climbed out and started beating him up. I was punched and kicked a bit too, but I managed to avoid brutalization by going for their faces. After figuring out what’s happening, I started attacking them back, getting them off of him. He was quite injured but I called 911 and he made a full recovery at the hospital. I was fine, with only a cut on my arm that they patched up.
ALT
