Pitch: a muppet movie where the muppets play D&D, and it cuts between the muppets around the table and the fantasy being acted out, but instead of it just being the muppets dressed up in D&D fantasy costume, it’s celebrity actors but the muppets do the voices, and the actors have to act how those muppets would. Imagine a barbarian played by Jason Mamoa voiced by Miss Piggy.
A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.
— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (x)
Fun fact! This is a Dmanisi skull from Georgia, another type of hominin to us.
Notice that jaw? When we lose our teeth, over time our jawbone heals the gaps, making it smooth, so when archaeologists discover skulls centuries later they can tell whether the tooth was lost after death (as the bone didn’t grow to cover the hole) or during the individual’s life.
The majority of this jaw has healed, so this person would have lived a number of years with basically no teeth. The age of this skull, according to wiki, is 1.8 million years.
This means that millions of years ago this person had a diet with soft, easy foods, and that others in the group would have known, understood, and helped by specialising their foraging for this one individual.
Or, in the words of my lecturer when we covered this, “Someone would have had to chew up this person’s food for them. Every day. Multiple times. For years.”
[id; a tweet by nathan bernhardt @jonberhardt: “why do marvel movies do so much stuff in CGI surely they could have just had wardrobe-” makeup and wardrobe is a union crew. the CGI animation sweatshop is not. it really is that simple. end id/]
Also just adding, you can outsource CGI to third world countries but makeup and wardrobe has to be in the country 👀
Love how when you dig down into it, Portal 2 is a ghost story. Glados is the ghost of a murdered woman who turned around and murdered everyone else back and now she’s trapped forever in an empty decaying facility. This is what does it for me. The blending of scifi and horror, the ghost in the machine. I’m gonna marry a dead murderous lesbian in a supercomputer
Cave Johnson is a ghost whose eons-old voice keeps playing in massive, sunken halls, echoing off condemned experiments, giving instructions to the memories of other subjects
He references his own death and, more casually, the sure deaths of a lot of people in the same position as the player
And you never meet Doug ingame, he’s absolutely dead by the sequel, but in portal 1 you have his notes and drawings hidden away, out of sight, like cave paintings in a futuristic age, the only evidence you have that any humans beside yourself exist. You can’t find him but he leaves remnants that are the only thing in the whole game like companionship.
Beyond Belief with Jonathan Frakes except it’s tumblr posts
“And Oppa Homeless Style? Never happened, it was invented by a writer.”
“Do you like the color of the sky?”
“Ever had a girlfriend? What about three girlfriends?”
“What does the letter ‘K’ mean to you?”
“Have you ever had someone compliment your shoelaces? Would you tell them where you got them from? Even if you stole them from someone very important? Would you tell them the truth?”
