Stardust harvesting starlight.

Australia Vegetation Zones, 1920s.

I like these guys

Falin, Oil on paper and digital

Your honor I love them…

My friend had some comments about delicious in dungeon

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

SHE THINKS HER LAUGH IS A SONG SO SHE SINGS BACK

@paperstorm

Oh 💖

I know sometimes we are all just screaming into the void

but

Robin reads her laugh as a song and sings back

and even with the miscommunication that’s such a beautiful thing

such a beautiful instinct

to reach out in the way we understand and try to reach a communion

Reductress: Deep Space Nine

Deep Space Nine 2x16, “Shadow Play”

I just cannot get over what a beautiful job Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton do playing father and son on DS9. The deep love and mutual respect that glows between them makes me so happy, and I appreciate that the show takes the time to develop their relationship instead of just skipping straight to action scenes and expecting us to accept that they’re a loving father-and-son duo without ever proving it to us.

It means a lot to see a dad who never responds “because I said so, that’s why” when Jake asks him a question; a dad who cultivates a relationship with his son based on their mutual love of things like baseball while also encouraging Jake to be his own person.

Also, I hope this scene helped parents watching it learn what being a supportive parent looks like. Ideally, parents wouldn’t make any assumptions about what their kids will grow to be, because it’s clear that Jake feels pressured to join Starfleet. But even though Sisko made the mistake of assuming Jake would want to be in Starfleet too, when he realizes his mistake he recovers quickly. He’s quick to reassure his son that all he wants is for Jake to find his passion and do it well. He doesn’t protest that “surely you’ll change your mind, Jake,” or say he’s hurt by Jake’s comment that Star Fleet is “too much like you.” Instead, he is proud of Jake for saying he wants to “find what’s me.” He doesn’t expect his son to be a perfect little clone of him whom he can mold to fit his own desires – he is proud of Jake for striving to be his own person.

It’s just. pretty cool.

This is such a great scene.

I’ve read that Avery Brooks, who was an amazing actor and director in Black theatre and has now mostly retired to teach it, didn’t really want to star in weekly episodic TV and considered leaving pretty regularly, but one of the things that kept drawing him back was how the Jake-Sisko relationship was written and how he and Cirroc Lofton had the chance to play it.

Because this kind of parenting isn’t that common on mainstream TV, let alone when it’s a Black father parenting a Black son. So often, then and now, Black fathers were represented on mainstream TV as absent or feckless. Being able to play an active and incredibly dedicated Black father to a Black boy and young man who had a loving and tender relationship with him was incredibly important to him.

The Jake-Sisko relationship is one of the absolute jewels of an excellent show, to my mind. The way they show Sisko *actively* learning from Jake - his son who has grown up in a *very* different environment from the one he grew up in and has really quite different views on many things - is *so* important and still incredibly rare in TV. The episode where Jake is dating Marta the dabo girl and Sisko is every middle class parent before he comes to realise that, like most sex workers, she is a young women doing a very well-paying job to survive in difficult circumstances. The way he initially massively disapproves of Jake’s friendship with Nog - and then realises over several seasons that actually that’s pretty racist of him.

Jake is such an important part of the deconstruction of the Federation that takes place in DS9.

EDITED TO ADD: Sources from the OP in the comments

Please stop seeing politics as an identity and start seeing it as a collective means for change

Refaat Alareer, an academic and lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza, was martyred along with his family in a targeted assassination carried out by the Israeli occupation on December 7th, 2023. We must continue to stand against this genocide.

🍉If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale 🪁