Becky

Christian, wife, mom, office manager, artist, avid reader. If I friend you and you start randomly DMing, you will be ignored.

[Sci-Fi World Museum @hollywoodscifi]

Every Star Trek fan knows this story about Martin Luther King and Nichelle Nichols, but this goes into more detail and more context.

Bless them both, Giants

[Multiverso @MultiversoTM]

Bill Murray retomando su papel de “Atrapado en el tiempo” para un spot publicitario de Jeep.

Maravilloso 🤣

[TheMastiffMafia @mafia_mastiff]

Elon is The Master of His Domain 😂🤣

[🚫👁️Drinks on Saturday🇺🇸 @drinkonsaturday]

They were bound to let it go sooner or later...

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Journey to the past

[🎞️ nabilidosoo]

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Horse rider Katilyn Gunther is going viral after revealing her horse’s Halloween costume.

[📹 kaitlyngunthermedia]

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In 1987, Patrick Stewart refused to unpack his suitcase for six straight weeks.

My throat still tightens every time I read why.

Every Hollywood insider told the 47-year-old British stage actor that Star Trek: The Next Generation would be a disaster. Even his closest friend, Ian McKellen, begged him not to throw away his Shakespearean career on a television gamble.

Stewart kept his bags packed by the door, waiting to be fired and sent home to London.

That "six-week failure" lasted 36 years.

Watching him late at night here in Japan, we saw something Hollywood never expected.

In Japan, we call this quiet, unbreakable spirit "Fudoshin," an immovable heart under fire.
Most action heroes scream and fire weapons to look strong.
Captain Picard never needed to raise his voice.

Born into deep poverty in Yorkshire, terrified of a violent home, he left school at age 15 and lost all his hair by 19, convinced his life as an actor was over before it began.

Yet one English teacher, Cecil Dormand, handed that frightened 12-year-old boy a copy of Shakespeare, said "Read it out loud," and secretly paid for his first drama course.

Never forget what happened decades later.

On the morning Queen Elizabeth II knighted him as Sir Patrick Stewart, he invited that same retired schoolteacher to sit beside him at his knighthood luncheon.

No suitcase left unpacked.
No rage on the bridge.
Just a cup of Earl Grey tea, a tug of his uniform, and three quiet words that commanded the galaxy:

"Make it so."

He passed away at 86 surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, and laughter.
And this December, in Avengers: Doomsday, Professor X will grace the screen one final time.

A boy who thought he wouldn't last six weeks in Hollywood gave the world an eternity of nobility.

From Japan, with tears and our deepest salute:
Thank you, Captain. Engage. ✨🖖🇯🇵

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

RIP Patrick Stewart. What an actor. I still can’t believe he agreed to do this scene. And he didn’t even mind when I ruined every take. Legend.

[Nerdrotic @Nerdrotics]

More grateful than ever we got this.

[Kings Guard Tours @KingsGuardTours]

Buckingham Palace Honours Sir Patrick Stewart (1940–2026) with Star Trek Theme Tune 🕊️

The Band of the Grenadier Guards performs the iconic Star Trek theme at Buckingham Palace in honour of Sir Patrick Stewart, following the sad news of his passing.

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Sir Patrick Stewart in 2010, recognising his outstanding contribution to drama and the arts 🇬🇧

🎥 @KingsGuardTours
📆 30 October 2026
📍 Buckingham Palace

#SirPatrickStewart #StarTrek #GrenadierGuards #BuckinghamPalace #BritishArmyMusic

[Trek Central @TheTrekCentral]

💖 Actress Marina Sirtis Posts Heartbreaking Tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart! 💔

Posting on Instagram, she said: "He's gone. My friend. My Captain. Me fellow football fan"

Sirtis and Stewart worked alongside each other across #StarTrek: The Next Generation, 4 movies and returned for #StarTrekPicard 🖖

[Yaffa🖖 @archaicf0ssil]

Now feels like a good time for this clip

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

This is actually interesting. I had no idea why numbers look the way they do.

[Wynne @wynneflh]

Every time a German Messerschmitt pilot wanted to escape a Spitfire on his tail, he did the same thing.
He pushed the nose down.
In a dive, the German engine kept running — it used fuel injection. The British Spitfire's engine cut out. For one and a half seconds the Merlin went dead, the aircraft shuddered, and by the time it caught again the German was gone. Worse: if a German was behind a British pilot and the British pilot dove to escape, the German could follow and keep shooting while the British engine was silent.
Pilots were dying because of a carburetor.
The engineers at Farnborough knew about the problem. They were working on a long-term solution — a redesigned carburetor that would take years to perfect and manufacture.
A woman named Beatrice Shilling fixed it with a washer.

She was born in Hampshire in 1909 and was the kind of child who spent her pocket money on Meccano sets and tools. At fourteen she bought her first motorbike. Her mother, with the inspired instinct of someone who understood what her daughter actually was, found the Women's Engineering Society and arranged an apprenticeship at an electrical firm.
She went to Manchester University — one of the first two women ever to study engineering there — graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, stayed another year for a master's in mechanical engineering, and in 1936 joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough as a scientific officer.
By the late 1930s she was one of the best carburetor engineers in Britain. She was also one of only three women to hold the British Motorcycle Racing Club's Gold Star — awarded for lapping the Brooklands racing circuit at over 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle.
She had reportedly told her future husband, an engineer named George Naylor, that she wouldn't marry him until he earned his own Brooklands Gold Star first.
He earned it. They married in 1938.

The problem with the Merlin was specific and lethal. The SU carburetor used a float chamber to regulate fuel flow. Under negative g-forces — the forces experienced in a sudden dive — the fuel flooded to the top of the float chamber and starved the engine for 1.5 seconds. Just enough time for a German pilot to turn the tables entirely.
The RAF had known about this since the Battle of France. The formal solution — a redesigned pressure carburetor — was in development but wouldn't be ready for years.
Shilling was thirty-one years old, working in carburetor research, and she designed a fix in weeks.
A brass thimble with a precisely calibrated hole in the center — later simplified to a flat washer — fitted inline in the fuel line just before the carburetor. It restricted maximum fuel flow to just enough to prevent flooding without cutting off power. The key breakthrough: it could be fitted without taking the aircraft out of service. No downtime. No factory return.
The old guard at the RAE looked at it and called it a plumbing fix. They called her a plumber. The first batch of 5,000 units was made by a Birmingham firm that normally manufactured plumbing fixtures, which they found embarrassing.
The RAF pilots who flew Spitfires with Messerschmitts on their tails called it something else.
They called it Miss Shilling's Orifice. With deep affection.

By March 1941 she had organized a small team and was personally touring RAF fighter stations across England — traveling between bases on her old racing motorcycle — fitting the device to every Merlin engine they could reach. Squadron leaders all over the country were demanding installations. The word spread faster than the official channels could keep up with.
The Germans noticed. They couldn't explain why British fighter pilots had suddenly started following them into dives. They were baffled by the new aggression. They didn't know about the washer.
The restrictor remained in use until 1943, when the full pressure carburetor finally arrived. It had kept British pilots alive for two years in the middle of the war they couldn't afford to lose.

After the war she worked on the Blue Streak missile. She studied what wet runways do to braking distances. She helped design a bobsled for the RAF Olympic team. In 1967 she solved overheating problems on an Eagle Mk1 Formula 1 car.
She never received a top promotion at the RAE. Such positions, she was told, were for men.
She received an OBE in 1949. The citation said "services to aviation." It did not mention the washer.
She retired from the RAE in 1969. She kept racing motorcycles and sports cars. She modified and tuned both in her home workshop until she couldn't anymore.
She died on November 18, 1990. She was 81.
The Battle of Britain is one of the most documented events in British military history. Hundreds of books. Dozens of films. Memoirs by the pilots who flew in it. Almost none of them mention the carburetor problem. Almost none of them mention her.
The pilots who benefited most never knew her name. They just knew that when they pushed the nose down, the engine kept running.

[Becky @psychofilly]

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[Becky @psychofilly]

@naiacruz_ Or you take the bus. Not every kid has to be driven to school. My kid takes the bus since he transferred to public school in sixth grade. Many kids who live lose ride bikes or scooters, some walk. It's not one size fits all.

[visionaryvoid @Visionaryvoid]

Late one evening in 2003, Emma Thompson sat alone in her London flat, surrounded by the wreckage of a very public divorce

The press had been relentless. Her marriage to Kenneth Branagh had ended amid scandal, and the woman who'd won an Oscar for bringing Jane Austen's words to life couldn't find any of her own.
Then came a knock at the door.
Alan Rickman stood there holding a bottle of wine and nothing else—no advice, no pity, no expectations. He walked in, sat down, and stayed through the night. He didn't ask her to explain. He didn't tell her it would be okay. He just sat with her in the darkness, offering the rarest gift one human can give another: silent, judgment-free presence.
"You saved me without trying," Thompson later wrote to him. "And that's the kind of love I trust most."
Their friendship had begun years earlier during a 1980s stage production, when Thompson met a man whose fierce gaze and commanding silence intimidated most people. But she saw past the intensity to something tender underneath. "I recognized a fellow creature," she said, "one who felt deeply but rarely said as much."
By the time they filmed "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995, their bond had deepened into something rare in Hollywood—a friendship built on creative trust and emotional safety. While Thompson juggled the impossible pressure of starring in and adapting a beloved classic, Rickman quietly anchored her. "Alan had a way of being in the room that made you feel you belonged there too," she remembered.
What made their connection extraordinary wasn't grand gestures or public declarations. It was the accumulation of small, sacred moments. The long conversations about betrayal and forgiveness during "Love Actually." The way he never demanded she be strong when she was breaking. The trust that allowed complete vulnerability without fear.
Then, years later, Rickman fell ill. For a long time, he told almost no one about his cancer diagnosis. But Thompson knew. She noticed how he tired more easily, how his already quiet nature turned more introspective. One afternoon during a charity film shoot, he finally told her.
They stood in silence for several moments.
"Alright," she said simply. "Then we walk through this together."
In those final years, Rickman opened up in ways he never had before—sharing memories, regrets, and hopes with the one person he trusted completely. Thompson told him she had loved him from the beginning, though they'd never crossed the lines of friendship.
He laughed. "You would've ruined me."

"No, Alan," she replied. "I would've healed you."

When Rickman died in 2016, Thompson released a letter calling him "the truest of friends." Their bond had never been about celebrity or performance. It had been real, raw, and sacred—a story written in glances, in trust, in the knowledge that some people don't come into your life to dazzle you, but to hold a steady light.

Thompson keeps one of his handwritten notes tucked in her wallet: "Always speak the truth. It costs less."

And she still visits their favorite café, orders two teas, and talks to him like he's still listening—because the truest friendships never really end.

They just change form, becoming something even more permanent: memory transformed into grace, loss transformed into gratitude, and silence transformed into the loudest kind of love.

[Jon Del Arroz | Sci-Fi And Fantasy @jondelarroz]

We lost Walter Koenig today, Pavel Checkov, from the original Star Trek series.

He was amazing not just there, but also in his work on Babylon 5. RIP.

[The Extreme Music Enthusiast @TheExtremeMusi1]

Around 1500, Hieronymus Bosch painted sheet music on a sinner's bare butt in hell. 500 years later, someone transcribed and performed it. Now you can hear the original butt song from hell.

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

Holy fucking shit