This Day in History: Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United Sates. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
so imagine you’re making ratatouille and you don’t like tomatoes. you don’t like the taste, the texture, the putting them in the water and the peeling them – eugh! so you say to yourself “lookit, this whole dish is nothing but vegetables, so what does it matter if i leave the tomatoes out?” a seemingly innocuous decision on the surface, but 2 hours or whatever later when you’re done cooking, you open the oven to find a complete mess! just a pot full of baked vegetables, none of them congealed or somehow unified. what happened to your beloved ratatouille? so you take to google and find that actually the tomatoes are an essential ingredient of ratatouille, as they form a “sauce” of a certain kind that makes the whole thing work. and so a seemingly innocent decision has destroyed the very foundation of the established order with disturbing ramifications towards the whole. in this essay i will examine how martin luther’s 95 theses lead to protestants being more boring than catholics
Who took this picture!? This absolutely PERFECT picture??? It is just… so… perfect. Distilled autumn pastoral fantasy. The colorful mushroom, the curl of the fern and flowers, the muted background foliage, the beady eyes and precise whiskers of the tiny squeakbeast!!! Unreal. Wow.
The artist is Phil Winter, and he deserves to be credited for such a wonderful photo.
The bit in Deadpool where he accidentally leaves his bag full of guns in the car because they didn’t have the budget for any gun SFX in the final confrontation is literally the cinematic equivalent of a webcomic artist going “I blew it up because it was taking too long to draw”.
Yep – last-minute budget cuts. They couldn’t even afford extra gun props at that point; if you watch carefully, you’ll see that the taxi scene is shot so that you only ever actually see Wade handling one particular gun, and the inside of the duffel bag is never visible. It was reportedly mostly full of socks.
It’s absolutely incredible that Deadpool was made at all and a successful film on top of that. They had to leak their own test footage in order to get the movie off the ground. Their marketing department was leaning into internet memes, a notoriously fickle and fast-changing enviornment. Ryan Reynolds, tied to the horrific box office bomb that was Green Lantern, was the lead. The R-rating cut down its potential profits. Its risque content meant no China release. It was put in February, traditionally a “dumping ground” for films Hollywood had no faith in. Its star was hidden behind a mask for most of the film and it had no major stars otherwise, its supporting consisted of a teenage girl, a CGI metal Russian, and a woman most famous for being in abruptly cancelled sci-fi television shows.
Deadpool made a boatload of money. In spite of all of that, it made a boatload of money. That is a triumph and practically miraculous considering how little the studio gave them and how much the deck was stacked against them.
My favorite quote is still “It’s like the studio couldn’t afford more X-Men”
