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Jul. 28th, 2019 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. So, apparently the Earth narrowly missed being hit by a giant asteroid, bit enough to take out a city.. which scientists didn't really think too much about or notice, and kind of snuck up on them. The Asteroid That Snuck Up on US and scientists almost didn't detect it in time
Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.
Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.
“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
2. Deepak Chopra on the Surprising Benefits of Journaling for 15 minutes a day and 7 Prompts to Get You Started.
I sort of already do this. Prior to the internet I was doing it paper journals. I had over 30 of the things, stored in a box, in my parents closet. I gave them permission three years ago to throw the things out. I had no interest in reading them and didn't want anyone else to.
And I'm certainly doing it with the DW blog. It's replaced the journals, just not as private. (Although I can privatize the posts if I so desire.)
Is it beneficial like he's stating? Eh. I don't know. Maybe. Do you think it's helping you?
I tend to work stuff out by writing about it. I know that. Do it here all the time. And the whole private journaling thing on paper was taking up space - two boxes. Also sharing it with others, gives me feedback. I don't feel as if I'm doing it in a vacuum. I guess some people don't talk to themselves? This has never been my problem. If anything, I talk to myself far too much. I'm very chatty. I wish I'd shut up. [Meditation is helping with that.]
These are the 7 prompts..
If you don’t know what to write about, here are some ideas:
Write about something (or someone) extremely important to you.
Write about three things you’re grateful for today — and why.
Write about what advice you’d give to your younger self.
Write about a current challenge you’re struggling with and possible solutions.
Write about 10 things you wish people knew about you.
Write about one thing you did this year that you’re proud of.
Write about 10 things you’d say yes to and 10 things you’d say no to.
Coming up with things to write about has never been my problem. Or talk about. My difficulty is I don't like talking about things without delving into the emotions, whys', etc.
Also...why are the ideas always really touchy feely, and not exactly something that most people would want to write about?
While I've written about...most of these, I don't particularly like some of the suggestions all that much and find them off-putting.
1. Write about something (or someone) extremely important to you. (Eh, done this quite a few times.)
2. Write about three things you’re grateful for today — and why. (yep, done this.)
3. Write about what advice you’d give to your younger self. (Frak that. I honestly think this is silly. It's a writing prompt that just leaves me with a big blank.]
4. Write about a current challenge you’re struggling with and possible solutions.[ Do this all the time -- current challenge is my diet and figuring out what I can and can't eat -- which is turning into most of the stuff I love and crave, I can't eat. And I'm annoyed and somewhat resistant to this.]
5. Write about 10 things you wish people knew about you. [Eh, why not just tell them? Seems rather passive. I figure people know what I want them to know about me, including quite a few things I wish they didn't know. I've certainly told them enough. Whether they listen or grok it - is another issue.]
6. Write about one thing you did this year that you’re proud of. [Why do I always get a blank when this question is asked. It's well-meaning, but ...my mind just starts evaluating everything.]
7. Write about 10 things you’d say yes to and 10 things you’d say no to.[Now that's an interesting prompt.]
My difficulty with these articles by well-meaning self-help gurus is well...they act like there's a specific way you should be journaling or a right or wrong way. That there are rules and guidelines. And there really aren't any. And whenever I try to do it their way -- it doesn't work for me, and I get annoyed.
That said, I might do the #7 prompt, I liked that one.
______
3. Rutger Hauer's Performance in Blade Runner still a haunting achievement decades later
The below does a good job of explaining why I loved Hauer as an actor. And why Blade Runner continues to be among my favorite sci-fi films of all time. And why I had no interest in the sequel. Sorry Ryan Gosling, you are no Rutger Hauer.
Arriving from Holland, Hauer made his American film debut in 1981, as a remorseless terrorist in the Sylvester Stallone thriller “Nighthawks,” At first glance Hauer might have looked like just another in a long line of European musclemen who steadily found work in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, ready to play their share of killer robots, stoic soldiers and disposable blond henchmen.
But Hauer brought to this particular killer robot a mixture of physical menace, regal charm and psychic anguish. He moved with melancholy grace, his eyes alternately darting and serene. The character, we’re told, has a lifespan of only four years, and probably even shorter if the film’s protagonist, the gruff cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), has anything to say about it. What’s only implied, and then suggested through performance, is that Roy Batty will cram into that short period the existential journey of an entire human life.
So, in his early scenes, he speaks in clipped, hesitant tones. Batty has clearly researched his predicament — he knows he doesn’t have long to live, and he has ideas about all the scientific methods that could be used to prolong his existence — but he sputters the words out, as if saying them for the first time: “EMS recombination,” “a repressive protein.”
That childlike nervousness evokes genuine pathos, even as we witness the violence he’s capable of. When he finally viciously kills his creator, the scientist-businessman Eldon Tyrell, rage, sadness, fear and exaltation all dance across Batty’s face. And are those tears in his eyes, or just the ever-present sweat caused by “Blade Runner’s” apocalyptic climate? Is there even a difference? This world is as broken as the humans and near-humans who populate it.
Had Hauer played Batty as another stone-faced Eurobaddie, “Blade Runner” itself might have been a more comfortably classifiable genre effort, the kind of movie that many viewers expected in 1982, the kind that promised to pit Ford, the star so familiar to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, against a new kind of futuristic nemesis. Instead, audiences were thrown off by the knotty neo-noir that Scott and the screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples delivered, the film flopped, and a cult masterpiece was born.
Look no further than Batty’s extended final battle with Deckard to see both the evidence of the movie’s idiosyncratic tone and how Hauer’s remarkable performance enhances it, practically deconstructing the simple plot before our eyes. The replicant chases the beleaguered, frightened Deckard around an abandoned building, toying with the cop and playing singsong children’s games. But there’s still a catch in Batty’s words, slight pauses scattered in unusual places. Seeing that Deckard has killed his replicant lover, Pris (Daryl Hannah), Batty offers, “I thought you were good. Aren’t you the … good man?” The awkwardness of the words, combined with the pause before “good man” seems to question the film’s very moral universe.
And maybe, when Batty strips down to his underwear for the final pursuit, it’s a sign that he has nothing to hide, that he is finally fully himself and self-aware — in contrast to our hero, who never really suspects that he himself may well be a replicant (a much-speculated-upon theory that years later was confirmed by the 2017 sequel). We see Hauer’s impressive physique, and sense Batty’s growing confidence, which turns first to bewilderment, and then to a kind of joy when Deckard fights back and actually wallops him in the face.
Hauer’s delivery of Batty’s dreamily immortal final lines is certainly perfect, but what’s even more heartbreaking is what he says right before, as he saves the seemingly defeated Deckard from plunging to his death: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Scott shoots Hauer in extreme close-up, and captures in the actor’s eyes an instant of almost explosive awareness. It’s the kind of moment that still catches a viewer off-guard, many decades later. It’s the look of a man who has finally unlocked himself, and a brave, cruel new world.
4. Struggling with dietary issues. I've discovered that I really can't do any of the grains or diary. So will have to go all grains and diary again. Also off sugars. Scale down to just fruit, nothing with added sugar. (Easier said then done, considering people add it to everything. And I don't enjoy preparing all my own meals, and don't have a gas oven or stove-top at the moment, just a hot pad with two electric burners, a tiny grill, a microwave and an instapot. Been doing a lot of shrimp and hotdogs, and burgers. Also green salads.)
And I'll need to go off chocolate.
I'm resistant. I did it before. I found it painful. But alas, will have to do it again.
Ate wrong things yesterday and suffering for it IBS wise this morning.
5. Trying to talk myself into going to my church this morning and maybe a movie. But, alas, I'm feeling incredibly lazy with stomach issues, and don't want to go anywhere. Beautiful day -- not a cloud in the sky.
Maybe I'll take a walk around the park or Greenwood Cemetery later.
Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.
Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.
“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
2. Deepak Chopra on the Surprising Benefits of Journaling for 15 minutes a day and 7 Prompts to Get You Started.
I sort of already do this. Prior to the internet I was doing it paper journals. I had over 30 of the things, stored in a box, in my parents closet. I gave them permission three years ago to throw the things out. I had no interest in reading them and didn't want anyone else to.
And I'm certainly doing it with the DW blog. It's replaced the journals, just not as private. (Although I can privatize the posts if I so desire.)
Is it beneficial like he's stating? Eh. I don't know. Maybe. Do you think it's helping you?
I tend to work stuff out by writing about it. I know that. Do it here all the time. And the whole private journaling thing on paper was taking up space - two boxes. Also sharing it with others, gives me feedback. I don't feel as if I'm doing it in a vacuum. I guess some people don't talk to themselves? This has never been my problem. If anything, I talk to myself far too much. I'm very chatty. I wish I'd shut up. [Meditation is helping with that.]
These are the 7 prompts..
If you don’t know what to write about, here are some ideas:
Write about something (or someone) extremely important to you.
Write about three things you’re grateful for today — and why.
Write about what advice you’d give to your younger self.
Write about a current challenge you’re struggling with and possible solutions.
Write about 10 things you wish people knew about you.
Write about one thing you did this year that you’re proud of.
Write about 10 things you’d say yes to and 10 things you’d say no to.
Coming up with things to write about has never been my problem. Or talk about. My difficulty is I don't like talking about things without delving into the emotions, whys', etc.
Also...why are the ideas always really touchy feely, and not exactly something that most people would want to write about?
While I've written about...most of these, I don't particularly like some of the suggestions all that much and find them off-putting.
1. Write about something (or someone) extremely important to you. (Eh, done this quite a few times.)
2. Write about three things you’re grateful for today — and why. (yep, done this.)
3. Write about what advice you’d give to your younger self. (Frak that. I honestly think this is silly. It's a writing prompt that just leaves me with a big blank.]
4. Write about a current challenge you’re struggling with and possible solutions.[ Do this all the time -- current challenge is my diet and figuring out what I can and can't eat -- which is turning into most of the stuff I love and crave, I can't eat. And I'm annoyed and somewhat resistant to this.]
5. Write about 10 things you wish people knew about you. [Eh, why not just tell them? Seems rather passive. I figure people know what I want them to know about me, including quite a few things I wish they didn't know. I've certainly told them enough. Whether they listen or grok it - is another issue.]
6. Write about one thing you did this year that you’re proud of. [Why do I always get a blank when this question is asked. It's well-meaning, but ...my mind just starts evaluating everything.]
7. Write about 10 things you’d say yes to and 10 things you’d say no to.[Now that's an interesting prompt.]
My difficulty with these articles by well-meaning self-help gurus is well...they act like there's a specific way you should be journaling or a right or wrong way. That there are rules and guidelines. And there really aren't any. And whenever I try to do it their way -- it doesn't work for me, and I get annoyed.
That said, I might do the #7 prompt, I liked that one.
______
3. Rutger Hauer's Performance in Blade Runner still a haunting achievement decades later
The below does a good job of explaining why I loved Hauer as an actor. And why Blade Runner continues to be among my favorite sci-fi films of all time. And why I had no interest in the sequel. Sorry Ryan Gosling, you are no Rutger Hauer.
Arriving from Holland, Hauer made his American film debut in 1981, as a remorseless terrorist in the Sylvester Stallone thriller “Nighthawks,” At first glance Hauer might have looked like just another in a long line of European musclemen who steadily found work in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, ready to play their share of killer robots, stoic soldiers and disposable blond henchmen.
But Hauer brought to this particular killer robot a mixture of physical menace, regal charm and psychic anguish. He moved with melancholy grace, his eyes alternately darting and serene. The character, we’re told, has a lifespan of only four years, and probably even shorter if the film’s protagonist, the gruff cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), has anything to say about it. What’s only implied, and then suggested through performance, is that Roy Batty will cram into that short period the existential journey of an entire human life.
So, in his early scenes, he speaks in clipped, hesitant tones. Batty has clearly researched his predicament — he knows he doesn’t have long to live, and he has ideas about all the scientific methods that could be used to prolong his existence — but he sputters the words out, as if saying them for the first time: “EMS recombination,” “a repressive protein.”
That childlike nervousness evokes genuine pathos, even as we witness the violence he’s capable of. When he finally viciously kills his creator, the scientist-businessman Eldon Tyrell, rage, sadness, fear and exaltation all dance across Batty’s face. And are those tears in his eyes, or just the ever-present sweat caused by “Blade Runner’s” apocalyptic climate? Is there even a difference? This world is as broken as the humans and near-humans who populate it.
Had Hauer played Batty as another stone-faced Eurobaddie, “Blade Runner” itself might have been a more comfortably classifiable genre effort, the kind of movie that many viewers expected in 1982, the kind that promised to pit Ford, the star so familiar to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, against a new kind of futuristic nemesis. Instead, audiences were thrown off by the knotty neo-noir that Scott and the screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples delivered, the film flopped, and a cult masterpiece was born.
Look no further than Batty’s extended final battle with Deckard to see both the evidence of the movie’s idiosyncratic tone and how Hauer’s remarkable performance enhances it, practically deconstructing the simple plot before our eyes. The replicant chases the beleaguered, frightened Deckard around an abandoned building, toying with the cop and playing singsong children’s games. But there’s still a catch in Batty’s words, slight pauses scattered in unusual places. Seeing that Deckard has killed his replicant lover, Pris (Daryl Hannah), Batty offers, “I thought you were good. Aren’t you the … good man?” The awkwardness of the words, combined with the pause before “good man” seems to question the film’s very moral universe.
And maybe, when Batty strips down to his underwear for the final pursuit, it’s a sign that he has nothing to hide, that he is finally fully himself and self-aware — in contrast to our hero, who never really suspects that he himself may well be a replicant (a much-speculated-upon theory that years later was confirmed by the 2017 sequel). We see Hauer’s impressive physique, and sense Batty’s growing confidence, which turns first to bewilderment, and then to a kind of joy when Deckard fights back and actually wallops him in the face.
Hauer’s delivery of Batty’s dreamily immortal final lines is certainly perfect, but what’s even more heartbreaking is what he says right before, as he saves the seemingly defeated Deckard from plunging to his death: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Scott shoots Hauer in extreme close-up, and captures in the actor’s eyes an instant of almost explosive awareness. It’s the kind of moment that still catches a viewer off-guard, many decades later. It’s the look of a man who has finally unlocked himself, and a brave, cruel new world.
4. Struggling with dietary issues. I've discovered that I really can't do any of the grains or diary. So will have to go all grains and diary again. Also off sugars. Scale down to just fruit, nothing with added sugar. (Easier said then done, considering people add it to everything. And I don't enjoy preparing all my own meals, and don't have a gas oven or stove-top at the moment, just a hot pad with two electric burners, a tiny grill, a microwave and an instapot. Been doing a lot of shrimp and hotdogs, and burgers. Also green salads.)
And I'll need to go off chocolate.
I'm resistant. I did it before. I found it painful. But alas, will have to do it again.
Ate wrong things yesterday and suffering for it IBS wise this morning.
5. Trying to talk myself into going to my church this morning and maybe a movie. But, alas, I'm feeling incredibly lazy with stomach issues, and don't want to go anywhere. Beautiful day -- not a cloud in the sky.
Maybe I'll take a walk around the park or Greenwood Cemetery later.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 03:00 pm (UTC)Oh, I sympathize with your IBS issues. I'm so sorry you have them. Sugar is the big killer for me. Grains I tolerate as well as yogurts (but not other dairy). I treat myself to ice cream and then wait for the pain that follows, but sometimes the pain is worth the treat.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 06:20 pm (UTC)Sigh.
And thanks.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-28 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 12:51 pm (UTC)I read an interview a while back with Harrison Ford and Ridely Scott on Blade Runner and their decades long fight. This was when the sequel came out. Ford did not play Deckard as a replicant and insists it made no sense. Scott liked the suggestion and pushed it, because it was cool dramatic irony. But Ford stated that the script doesn't support it and it didn't track.
The original movie and the sequel are deliberately ambiguous. Also the whole point of suggesting it -- was to show there is no difference between the two. And you, me, etc could be one, we really have no way of knowing for certain.
I did read the original story by Philip K Dick, and Deckard isn't really a Blade Runner in that story, and it's even more ambiguous.
I've seen both the director's cut and the original film -- and no, neither sold Deckard as a replicant to me. And they need a hell of a lot more than a silver pated unicorn to show it, honestly, anyone can dream of unicorns. The logic didn't hold. I agree with Harrison Ford. So, no, it's not canon to everyone. Just a select group.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 08:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 12:26 pm (UTC)Yeah, Scott tagged it on at the end, along with the narration -- which Ford was against. If you read some of the interviews -- that bit was inserted later, and not part of the original film. It was basically the director getting a tad self-indulgent and feeling the need to add a bit of unnecessary dramatic irony to the film. But as Ford points out, it doesn't track, goes against the film's central themes, and his character. Also it's not enough.
Not canon. Canon has to be something that is obvious and accepted by everyone. If it's open to debate, not canon.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 12:25 am (UTC)Haha, yes, I talk a lot in my own head. The part I hate is when I decide to do it when I'm trying to sleep.
I never really journaled, in that the diaries I kept were almost entirely focused on what I'd done that day, or events that had happened. I kept those for a long time but I can't imagine struggling through my own handwriting to read about my life 20 years ago. I expect I'll dump them all the next time I move.
That said I do think that writing stuff out helps people make decisions in their lives and get a better handle on things. I think it's much like what a therapist does in giving people a less unreliable narrator for their lives. When you see things in print it can give you distance and make you spot things like embedded assumptions.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 12:46 am (UTC)Nods. Meditation/Headspace app has helped me stop doing this. Slept better.
But I still do it. Busy mind. (It's why I stay away from certain horror films like "US" and "Heredity" and "Midsommer" -- my mind will grab it and chatter on about it endlessly, feeling a need to pull it apart.)
I never really journaled, in that the diaries I kept were almost entirely focused on what I'd done that day, or events that had happened. I kept those for a long time but I can't imagine struggling through my own handwriting to read about my life 20 years ago. I expect I'll dump them all the next time I move.
Yeah that was how I journaled. I tended to write about my experiences, how I felt about them, and things I did. Actually I journaled more or less the same way I do in my DW journal. There wasn't all that much difference.
I'm still trying to come up with 10 things I'd say yes to and 10 I'd say no to...drawing a blank.
That said I do think that writing stuff out helps people make decisions in their lives and get a better handle on things. I think it's much like what a therapist does in giving people a less unreliable narrator for their lives. When you see things in print it can give you distance and make you spot things like embedded assumptions.
Yes. I find it to be very therapeutic, more so than actually therapy. Seeing it in writing, even if I delete immediately after or don't actually post it -- helps. It does create a type of distance. I read it and once outside my head -- it feels different somehow.