Have I ever talked about how much I love the cave scene in The Empire Strikes Back?
Because I do.
-It all starts when Luke talks about feeling cold and death–”That place…is strong with the Dark Side of the Force. A domain of evil, it is,” Yoda explains. And then he looks up and says “In, you must go.”
Luke’s reaction is absolutely perfect here because so many stories have mentors warning their students “You mustn’t enter this place” or “You mustn’t read this book” and then the student inevitably does so anyway…but Yoda doesn’t warn Luke away from this place. He brought Luke here to teach him (or did Luke “accidentally” run to where the cave was, and Yoda realized what it meant? We don’t know, and it’s a valid interpretation either way).
This scene then shows us how far Luke’s come in the weeks he’s spent on Dagobah and the years he has been at war because he doesn’t say “All right then!” and rush in, nor does he question Yoda’s instruction: instead, he asks “What’s in there?” He’s trying to prepare himself, and attempting to figure out the meaning of the lesson.
“Only what you take with you.”
Again, we have a perfect moment: Yoda dipping his head and playing with the gimer stick, hesitating before he answers because…why? Does he know what Luke’s about to see? Has he been in before? What did he see when he went in? (Fun fact: that’s a yes, and you can see what he saw if you watch Season 6 of The Clone Wars!). Whatever it is, his response sets the stage for everything: this is a test of one’s self. He can’t help Luke, he can’t do this for Luke. All he offers is one piece of advice:
“Your weapons…you will not need them.”
Now, everyone knows that this is the point where Luke fails the test (or is this a lesson?), because he ignores Yoda’s advice and keeps the weapons on him. But what one must observe is that Luke nods in understanding (ahahaha) and keeps them on him–he’s interpreted Yoda’s advice as “Don’t worry, you don’t have to kill anything in there, there’s not some scary monster, this isn’t that kind of test”, and he’s just moving onward. He’s choosing to remain prepared, but doesn’t walk in there with his saber drawn and his blaster ready.
But having brought them in, the cave prepares a test that will suitably match what he took with him.
Darth Vader emerges, and Luke draws his blade…and this moment, right here, is one of the most symbolic moments in all of Star Wars. No more than five minutes prior, Yoda had told Luke that a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense–”Never attack.” When I was young, my father always observed that only the Dark Siders drew their weapons first: Obi-Wan ignites his lightsaber after Vader, Luke ignites his weapon first here and on Cloud City, and then he lights his saber up first when he is being tempted by Palpatine. The first to draw is making an aggressive move and is giving the edge to the Dark Side. Luke should have waited for Vader to pull out his weapon here, and he might have still passed the test…but he’s a Skywalker, so he just fumbles everything.
But before we get to that next part, let’s observe why he’s facing Vader here in the first place: his anger and his fear. Yes, he’s afraid of Darth Vader finding him and cutting him down before he can complete his training, following Luke to Dagobah to kill Yoda and end the Jedi, but it’s so much more than that. Darth Vader just led a squadron to put down the rebellion on Hoth, he murdered Biggs above the Death Star, he sent stormtroopers to kill Luke’s family, and of course, he struck down Obi-Wan. This menace is now turning to Luke, but here Luke finally has a chance to avenge everyone.
This isn’t merely a reflection of Luke’s fear: this is what Luke wants. The cave is offering him a test to see how he acts, and Luke dives headlong into it, striking the fatal blow and achieving the vengeance he craved.
But then the mask burns away, and he sees his own face staring back up at him, dead and smoking: in striking down evil, he struck himself down. His face was behind the mask of darkness, and this failure is what later teaches him to reject the Dark Side wholly: when he looks down at his artificial hand on the Death Star and realizes that he’s become like Vader, he remembers what happened in this cave and finally throws his weapon away. It’s in this moment that the cave shows him that seeking revenge and violence will only destroy one’s own self…but it’s not a lesson he learns immediately, nor is it a lesson that is explained. The lesson is left to be explored thematically throughout the rest of this film and the next, as much a parable for the audience as it is for the characters.
This isn’t even everything that I love about the scene: it also works as a warm-up to the final duel between Luke and Vader, giving the viewers a brief tease of lightsaber combat and the menacing power of the Dark Lord…and then Luke wins. So it seems that his training has pushed him to a level where he can match Vader…which makes it all the more impactful when he fail in the main event. It also serves to effectively break up the tedium of Luke’s adventures on Dagobah, keeping the kids engaged and not boring them on this lonely swamp world.
It’s a perfect marker of how far Luke has come in his training, and also a sign of how much he has left to learn: it shows that he can kill Vader, but also clearly shows the cost. It’s a scene that serves multiple purposes, and even Yoda’s “hmm…” at the end is a moment unto itself: was he expecting Luke to fail, and now feels, “Well, he’s learned his lesson”? Is he thinking “Well, I guess he’s not ready after all”? Again, we don’t know: but Yoda brings it up later as a warning to Luke when the Jedi is preparing to leave. “Remember your failure at the cave!” Luke doesn’t even defend himself by saying “I won”–Luke understood the lesson enough to realize that he had more to work on.
There’s more to talk about, I’m sure, but this is a lengthy post and rest I need.
I am willing to say that mostly they are just being obstructionist… but those first two… for them this was personal.
They do have a reason they voted against the bill change. It’s not a good reason, to be clear, but it is a justification not rooted in approval of bestiality.
Here’s the thing: bestiality is already illegal in Louisiana.
This new bill definitely strengthens the law, elaborates on what is illegal conduct (such as the procuring of animals for sexual purposes), and…and here’s the kicker…
Separates out the bestiality-is-illegal section of the law from the sodomy-is-illegal section. They used to be in the same paragraph, now the sodomy-is-illegal paragraph stands alone and a whole new paragraph (with subparagraphs) is there for bestiality.
To be clear, the sodomy-is-illegal parts themselves are null and void and have been since 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas, US Supreme Court). But they’re still on the books.
These ten Republicans are concerned that separating out the bestiality parts from the sodomy parts will make it easier to clean up and eliminate the sodomy provision altogether, and they don’t want to do that. (Again, that would only matter if Lawrence was invalidated somehow. But, well, they could believe that’s possible, too.)
So, yeah. They don’t want to change the law to expand on the illegality of bestiality specifically because that would make it feasible for a future change in law to eliminate a nonfunctional, homophobic section.
they’re willing to let all of the world believe they’re goatfuckers for this?
they’re willing to let
all of the world believe they’re
goatfuckers for this
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
If I sound pleased about this, it’s only because my programmers made this my default tone of voice! I’m actually quite depressed! | PayPal | Patreon
Let’s do a little recap of Amy Schumer’s racism, okay?
Amy Schumer joked about men of color being more likely to sexually harass vs YT men.
In her 2012 show “Mostly Sex Stuff,” Amy Schumer insulted African women’s names, called them “wild,” and performed a racist impersonation of Black folks.
Amy suggested that Latina women were “crazy” during the 2015 MTV Video Awards.
Once, Schumer said, “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual” implying that all Hispanic men are rapists – a suggestion that mirrors the racism of Donald Trump.
In her latest stunt, Amy parodied Beyonce’s “Formation” music video which was originally a commentary on race and police brutality. She used a moment that celebrated Blackness and turned it into a whitewashed opportunity to make cash.
And then, someone sent me this tweet below of Amy’s anti-Asian racism.
But aye!! She’s a feminist, right? She’s down for the cause, right? She talks about body positivity and all that YT feminist jazz while she shits on POC, right?
Funny. Very funny.
-Source:
The Love Life Of An Asian Guy/FB
#WhiteFeministsGottaGo
don’t forget that she raped a drunk guy and tried to make it sound like it was just a weird encounter
Reblogging this because Amy Schumer’s new movie is all over our dashes so this should be too
some dudes like to talk a big game about how comedy suffers when people are afraid to offend but man, Mitch Hedberg was a white dude working in the era of peak offensive edgelord and his shit holds the fuck up so while most comedians will never come up with anything as timeless as “if carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up” they could at least make an effort
Every McDonald’s commercial ends the same way, right? “Prices and participation may vary.” I wanna open a McDonald’s and not participate in anything. I wanna be a stubborn McDonald’s owner. I’ll say “Cheeseburgers? Nope. We got spaghetti! And blankets! We are not affiliated with that clown.”
Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read.
I would like to have a product that was available for three easy payments and one fuckin’ complicated payment. We can’t tell you which payment it is, but one of these payments is gonna be a bitch! The mailman will get shot to death, the envelope will not seal, and the stamp will be in the wrong denomination! Good luck, fucker! That last payment must be made in wampum!
Hey, if you wanna talk to me after the show, I’ll be… fuckin’ surprised.
This shirt is “dry-clean only”… Which means it’s dirty.
One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture is of you when you were younger. “Here’s a picture of me when I’m older.” “You son-of-a-bitch! How’d you pull that off? Lemme see that camera… What’s it look like? ”
An escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. You would never see an “Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order” sign, just “Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
I play golf. I’m not good at golf, I never got good. I never got a hole-in-one. But I did hit a guy. And that’s way more satisfying. You’re supposed to yell “Fore!” but I was too busying mumbling “There ain’t no way that’s gonna hit him.”
When you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say “All right you’re a stand up comedian, can you act? Can you write? Write us a script.” They want me to do things that’s related to comedy, but it’s not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook, and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, and they said “All right you’re a cook… can you farm?”
– “Rice is great when you’re you’re hungry and you want 10,000 of something”
– “Tennis is depressing because no matter how good you get, you will never be as good as a wall”
– “I order the club sandwich all the time, but I’m not even a member, man. I don’t know how I get away with it”
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats – but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true – but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates – it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need – it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile – and for that purpose, you count as a cat.
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
THE SHAKESPERE AU I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED
DUDE DID YOU JUST FIX ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLAYS EVER CREATED?!
ONCE AGAIN EVERYTHING IS SOLVED BY THE QUEER LENS.
A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish Courtesy Philip Mould
PAINT RESTORATION OF MESMERIZING
I saw this on Twitter. He’s using acetone, but a cellulose ether has been added to make it into a gel (probably Klucel—this entire gel mixture is sometimes just called Klucel by restorers, but Klucel is specifically the stuff that makes the gel).
Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.
It looks scary, but acetone has no effect on oils, and jelly acetone is even less interactive with the surface of the paint or canvas.
Will someone PLEASE clean the mona lisa
For those who are wondering, they cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa made by one of Da Vinchi’s students, and here’s a side by side comparison:
CLEAN THE FUCKING MONA LISA.
A couple problems with cleaning the Mona Lisa:
The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.
A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Paintingis a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze – a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil – is applied to the surface. Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).
The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish.
In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it.
The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.
Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps. Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.
The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques. The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration.
Don’t believe me, check it out:
This is how most people think The Last Supper looks
But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.
The actual Last Supper looks like this:
The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.
This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere. Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.
They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)
Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished. It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.
Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.
Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them – one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) – but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.
(also, I’m not a conservator but I’ll be applying to a conservation grad program sometime next year, so sorry if any of my info is at all inaccurate)
I found this really interesting, thanks for sharing.
So these are both “Aw Fuck I’m outta real food” meals BUT ALSO: if you’re learning how to cook, these are great “baby steps” meals to learn how to cook basics into something enjoyable without “wasting” anything expensive. Though I maintain that even cooking screw-ups are valuable in terms of lessons learned.
Also they’re great for when you get absorbed in something and you realize your blood sugar is dropping and you need to make something Quick.
They’re also fantastic for spoonies with limited mobility and chronic pain that makes cooking really hard and painful! Thanks for sharing OP 😀
Procrastination Station 