Goodbye, My Friend.

In s2 of Broadchurch when Sharonville Bishop was trying to paint the picture that Alec and Ellie deliberately framed Joe to get him out of the way, couldn't the prosecution have fired back with the footage of Alec telling Ellie it was Joe? Of course Alec had turned off the voice recorder but there ARE surveillance cameras in that room, right?!?! Body language is more telling than words anyway so wouldn't Ellie's distress clue them into the fact that she genuinely didn't know?

Throughout all of my recent research into Ulysses S Grant and William T Sherman, I realized that we were never really taught in school about the Western Theatre of the Civil War; i.e., Grant’s mostly-successful campaigning around the States of Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Missouri. It’s his and others’ victories there that later helped win the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.

But what do we learn about in Social Studies/History? Gettysburg. Fort Sumter. Bull Run/Manassas. Antietam. In other words, the Eastern Theatre of the War. And those battles were dominated by incompetent Union commanders for a large majority of them: McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, McClellan again-- men who were more likely to retreat at the very cusp of victory than jump forward and seize the day. It’s bad enough learning about the Eastern Theatre that I remember saying to my parents that with such incompetent commanders the Union deserved to lose the Civil War.

I understand that History class has only so much time to teach students, and I understand that the Civil War is too big to teach in-depth, but why do we focus so much on McClellan and Lee, Hooker and Lee, Burnside and Lee, Meade and Lee, and brush over such an important part of the War as the Western Theatre? We effectively forget about Grant and Sherman until they’ve entered the Eastern campaign, let alone all of their fellow commanders and soldiers, and their years of fighting to take back and then keep the Mississippi in Union hands.

“what are you reading?”

“its a…online book.”

Youtube just recommended re-watching the Broadchurch series 2 trailer, and I had genuinely forgotten I had been more excited for that to air on January 5th than I had been for Christmas.

Just heard a local radio station talking about the president's who came from Ohio. When they got to the part where they talked about Ulysses S Grant, they played the Imperial March from Star Wars.

???

If they were trying to compare Grant with Darth Vader and the Empire, I don't get it.

Edit: now they're playing Stay by Maurice William's after talking about James Garfield's assassination.

Finally updated Everybody Wants To Rule the World again.

Goals. They still exist. Now onto a Broadchurch fic about a beached whale. Because beached whale.

Frodo & Bilbo play Scrabble regularly and are VERY competitive

'Nuff said.

Dear Avengers fandom:

Here’s the thing about Steve Rogers; he is not a delicate little flower. He is not really at all about patriotism, and you could even argue he’s not really about America, at least not exclusively. He is an extremely charismatic and intelligent leader, though he does sometimes have his faults when it comes to that. He’s a complex and compelling character, and when you distill his characteristics into a single, innocent, naive, cookie-cutter narrative, it honestly weakens the interesting aspects of who he is.

He is not completely ignorant about sex, sarcasm, or swearing. Steve Rogers frequently has sex, often initiates it, has an extremely dry sense of humor, and swears a lot, especially under stress. While he loves America, he’s slightly cynical because of how much it has changed since his time, and how he never asked to defend a time period that isn’t his.

His main things, however, are nobility and loyalty. He does what he thinks is right, even if it goes against the government, even if it involves violence or killing. He does what needs to be done, even if he doesn’t want to do so. He’s only human, after all.

I know that MCU Steve is different than comics Steve, but using the lack of MCU development to distill his character into an unfairly flat one is simply not something that should happen.

How many times is this tv show going to make me cry, damn it?!?!?!

M E R R Y  C H R I S T M A S