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morphing into a doctor who blog against my will

@timdrakeirl

HII I’m Mel, She/her. I’m here to rant aimlessly into the blog void and sometimes maybe post some art. I like DC, Good Omens, Broadchurch, Doctor Who (esp 9 and 10), Community, Twin Peaks, basically everything David Tennant is in, and many many many many other shows and movies. I also love music and art history and I am a Van Gogh superfan. #1 Cass Cain fan IN THE WORLD

I am not joking I just woke up from a melatonin induced dream that the doctor picked me up in the tardis and took me back in time to the 1980s because I had to make byler get together. apparently them being together was like a fixed event and because they didn’t the time stream was like eating itself and it was all so grave he was like “it’s up to you to save the universe… you’re the only one who can make this happen” and I was like jumping to all these different key byler scenes and like moving things around in the background to somehow butterfly effect them into getting together

I’m kind of losing it waiting for winter break to be over but also the cabin fever is putting me in some sort of creative renaissance. I’ve been playing my guitar for hours and hours at a time. I barely draw in the first place but I’ve drawn more Mike Wheelers in the last 48 hours than I can count or remember. My back is hurting from being hunched over my desk and I’m running out of glue AND tape AND good paper and somehow my pajama pants got covered in paint. I don’t remember when I last went outside and felt the air and the sun on my skin

It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.

He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.

Like, look at this stuff????

It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!

Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.

And then there's this one:

The Fantasy

For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.

The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.

But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.

Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.

This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.

"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.

"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.

"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.

There’s also Alexei Leonov, writer and artist and first person to conduct a spacewalk!

You can't forget this, the first art made in space.

March 1965, Alexei Leonov made this drawing only moments after narrowly surviving the very first space walk.

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I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything

When I say I love found family im not referring to “aesthetic youth by daughter run away queer ya teen dystopian rebel fantasy young adult” found family, I’m referring to “seven community college students ranging from 18 to 70 years old with varying degrees of neurological ailments who form an intense trauma bond over their Spanish one class” found family. If ykyk

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