Vandermeer’s Record Player

This is not strictly a mapping post, but I felt it should go here, anyway.

While taking new and imporved screenshots of La Sirena from season 1 of Star Trek Picard, I have made a discovery!

There is a small-ish case Rios keeps in his chest of Starfleet things. It sports a very fetchiing ibn Majid decal and I always assumed it contained more ship’s mementos that we just never get to see.

I took a bunch of screenshot of this scene in ep8, “Broken Pieced”, today, and now that I finally have all of these episodes in 1080p bluray resolution and am staring at them in that sort of detail, I realized something: This is not a simple case! This is Captain Vandermeer’s record player!

You can see the cover with the ibn Majid sticker lying behind the case, and you can see the handle at the front.

And just to verify this discovery, I went looking for the original model, et voilà:

This is the Vestax Handy Trax USB Portable Turntable!

It doesn’t look like these are being produced anymore, but if you have a bunch of vinyl records and are desperate to listen to them the exact way Rios does, you know what to look for in second hand markets ;)

@cristobalrios​: Feel free to add this observation to our collection of Sirena props. I’m pretty sure you have the most complete record of all of our collected discoveries ;)

substitute

silly is back

What led to this (orufrey comic, cw an uncomfortable/creepy scene)

little arthur malevolent lester portrait because my brain is full of him

There are SIX SONGS in the season finale?? Let's goooo

Tai & Van - The Origin of Love

I'm hoping episode 3 let's Ruby see the dark side of the Doctor. I feel that adds a very important dynamic to a Doctor-companion relationship, when they see how dark he can be and still choose to travel with him early on.

Rose watching Nine drag Cassandra back to die. Eleven yelling at Amy "Nobody human has anything to say to me today!" Donna begging Ten to stop drowning the spider babies, and then again to go back and save someone in Pompeii.

Fifteen has been FUN and I know he can do emotional range, I've seen his fear and his tears already. But I want to see him dark, and I want to see Ruby respond to that. I think it would add a LOT of depth to their relationship and is something missing.

Plus showcasing the Doctor's flaws (selfishness) will make him a much more interesting character. I want to see some conflict between the Doctor and Ruby.

WIP preview for the Hyrule-centric LU fan comic I've been working on in my free time 👀

I really want to work on this, but also I am very busy rn, so we'll see when I actually get it finished :,) But like since this is theoretically in part an art blog I thought I should probably post some art even if it is just a WIP like this.

"I will keep going forward, no matter how hopeless it might seem."

(please do not repost my art and just leave a link to it if you'd like to share instead, thank you!)

The worst part about reading in a genre where you have low expectations (in this case, Christian historical fiction) is that when a book impresses you, you have no idea if it's actually good or if you're just overly impressed because it was a fraction of a degree better than the usual garbage.

oh the dread, oh the worry! you love your sister so much and you need to know shes okay. you trust her but you cant trust the world, and more than anything else you cant trust yourself

hello, i'm finales georg...

i don't want to further clutter up the notes on this post while responding to the tags below but the persistence of the "finale is short/scenes are missing/extra ad break” conspiracies drives me absolutely bananas when i've watched the finale ten times and have posted about this A LOT trying to clear things up. (disclaimer that yes, i'm a goddamn destiel shipper but i care about Facts above all.)

ok but this is weird because i'd swear the episode was shorter (11 missing scenes!) but okay. maybe we all mandela effected ourselves into #beleving that. because it felt shorter. but i will die on the hill that it had another ad break. i understand this person has the thing #recorded with ads so i am thinking maybe different ad breaks in different idk time zones??? #because the finale did air an hour earlier in canada so maybe idk i am reaching here but maybe different states or whatever had different #ad breaks??? as for the last minute changes - wasn't the cover band asked for permission to use their version of carry on like a week before #the thing aired??? so even if the episode was 42 minutes and had no additional ad break - which i am side eying but lets say all was normal #i will always say they were changing thing until the absolute last minute (carry on my wayward son X 2 #the crew on the bridge which is not only giant 4th wall breaking but also wow they really got all those people in one place in times of #covid???) #anyway. tinfoil hat stays on sorry guys :/ (via @officialmisha)

short and snarky: there are plenty of real and sourced examples of network homophobia and scripted/directed destiel scenes being cut to point to. we don’t need to make this stuff up just bc the finale wasn’t what we wanted. so it’s not the mandela effect — it’s ppl repeating a conspiracy/rumor bc it supports their narrative and it’s easier and more fun to repeat something that supports a narrative they already believe (misha or something destiel was cut) vs the boring act of fact checking.

longer circumspect answer with links bc like many ppl i am in my debunking era and i rewatched "roblox_oof" last night.

like i said. i've watched the finale ten times. i’ve gone over the episode with a fine toothed comb and posted a detailed breakdown of timing marks on my blog. it’s actually extremely obvious where the ad breaks are once you know roughly where to look for them (they have a longer fade to black instead of a quick cut scene change). there’s no room for extra ad breaks and i think this conspiracy/rumor persists in part bc the episode feels so sparse in terms of cast and the fact that the episode’s momentum hits a barn post (and rebar) less than 20min into an hour-long programming block.

also i’m begging ppl to actually look at that timing mark post. it’s very straightforward and i spent a lot of time on it. i don’t care if ppl plagiarize it at this point if it means this conspiracy stops. i've got almost every second accounted for.

the "eleven missing scenes" that you're thinking of are probably from the finale script of questionable authenticity that @spnscripthunt acquired back in 2021 which can be found here. it's dated as the “final draft” from 11 sep 2020 and filming on 15x20 wrapped on 10 sep 2020. as noted at the bottom of this superwiki page "[the] script came from someone claiming to have been the person who did the closed captions for the show in Russia. There are some indications that it possibly may not be authentic, but this has not been confirmed."

if we go with the possibility that this was a transcript meant for subtitles, the "omitted" scenes were probably written but never filmed since it's the "final draft" and not a color revision (blue, green, yellow, etc). unfortunately, i’ve lost track of where i read it and a preliminary duckduckgo search isn’t bringing it up bc there's a program for script writing called final draft, but iirc the “final draft” version of a script is a transcript of what was filmed (e.g. there are parts of that 15x20 script that ended up being deleted scenes on the DVD). spnscripthunt also has an example of a confirmed final draft for 09x02 (funnily enough, also a dabb-penned ep). if anyone can confirm with a source that i have the purpose of the “final draft” version designation wrong, please let me know! i love being proven wrong with Facts.

i do want to acknowledge that the two “final drafts” do look different from each other and the 15x20 one doesn't look like a “real” final draft script since it lacks the revision/versioning dates that a script would normally have on the cover page. it could be that it was intended for subtitles; there's the chance it's been re-typed to anonymize it if there was anything indicating who the "owner" was, tho that seems a wee bit cloak and dagger to me. and again: it's considered of questionable authenticity. there are some things that don't quite line up but oh dear god i don't want to get even further out into the weeds than i already am.

i won't disagree that it's weird as hell that neoni only got asked about using their cover seven days prior to the episode airing (tiktok here). my personal theory is that they were hoping to get a more expensive song (maybe a zepp song, idk) and didn't manage to secure the rights in the end. again: this is pure conjecture on my part! but i could absolutely see someone working on the show hearing neoni’s cover and liking it and then maybe they were using it as a placeholder until it got down to the wire and they had to make a call/send the ep to networks. because yes, it is baffling they played a song and then a cover of it with only a 40 second break between. (i do actually really like the neoni cover! the placement is just weird and i think it could have worked if they had the kansas version at the beginning and closed with neoni's full cover.)

as to the 4th wall break COVID stuff: robert singer talked with variety magazine about filming the last two episodes and the logistics of filming during a pandemic. whether they should have been filming during a pandemic is a separate discussion but their use of office vs set pods, strict quarantining and daily testing meant that they had zero positive tests in the month they were filming (18 aug to 10 sep). so given all that, i personally don’t think it’s totally out of pocket to have everyone standing outdoors on a bridge for maybe an hour to get a drone shot of them together. (i won’t get into incubation periods and viral load, but if everyone tested negative that day and every day for a month prior, it was a fairly low risk scene to film outdoors and for all we know everyone was masked until the last possible second. there were plenty of outdoor masked protests in 2020 that weren't superspreader events.)

and before anyone brings up “but misha was in vancouver!” i know someone who looked into it and they said no dice, nothing matched up between the backgrounds in those pics and places in vancouver. his statements about “us” going back to set over the summer were pretty generic in hindsight and “we”/"us" could be him or the spn crew generally. unfortunately i’m not able to find those tweets but the use of “we” was likely so as not to give away he wouldn’t be returning to set. (bc we were absolutely casbaited!) and bc it comes up a lot: the "onion field pic" was from when they were filming 15x17 and was not taken while filming 15x19 and 15x20.

besides, it would be ridiculous to go through the financial and logistical headaches of bringing someone into the country to film during a pandemic, only to cut their scenes in the end! honestly, the script is pretty tight when the scenes are given so much breathing room! the only thing i could see being further cut down is The Monologue and even then, i don’t think there was any intent to cut it down given it was filmed in fairly long takes.

i’ve said it many times before, but i believe the finale was fucked long before they returned to set. walker got the green light in sep 2019 and it was being marketed heavily as a “follow on” show to spn given jared’s involvement. the demo they were courting for walker has little to no overlap with the demo for destiel fans — why would they want a finale that catered to a demo they weren't interested in courting? we just went through a historic double strike that exposed so much of the rot of business interests overriding creative vision. this isn't completely unfounded conjecture.

i will not apologize for the length of this bc i wanted to be thorough, but i do want to give context that i think the reason these conspiracies and rumors grind my gears so much is because anyone can fact check all of this. the truth is out there and absolutely none of it is that hard to find. the most time consuming/difficult part of this was finding someone who had a DVR’d copy of the finale from when it aired live and they actually found me themselves after i’d been low key asking around for a year!

and like. i get it. conspiracies are fun. but there are so many sourced instances of network homophobia and destiel being cut that it's like. why is this something folks are hanging onto? the cw is notorious for having upper level meddling with finales bc there's a follow-on show they want to shuffle fans along to and spn is no exception.

it's the day before my birthday, and my girlfriend surprised me with an outing to a local bird aviary/botanic gardens in the mountains!!!

this was an absolute delight for me, known bird enjoyer, and i got to have many cute and phenomenal birds perched on my head (which i loved and plushie magolor 'tolerated', on account of it being my birthday). i even got to see a nicobar pigeon, which i had never seen in person before!

they also surprised me with an early birthday present to use at the incredible mountain-top picnic spread my gf planned (😭😭) of this extraordinarily cute kirby themed liquid-glitter cup!!

and of course, in true starflung fashion i injured myself twice

once, not three minutes into the outing when my umbrella (which i only require because i'm allergic to both the sun and sunscreen) bit me, and my gf had to run to reception to get me a bandaid. later, when i just totally fkn stacked it on some loose gravel on a slope and i got the umbrella back by slamming it into the ground, along with my knees and one palm. but not the other palm, which was holding plushie magolor, who touched neither gravel nor dirt and never will while i still breathe!

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I had thought of this as the finished version but I'm on a lineart kick so I might clean it up more and keep this as a colored sketch. See if I can capture the Vibe™ and get lines I actually like lol

to love someone is to heal someone