LordOfLotion

I don't think I would call what Serena got a spanking. Fred beat her.

It's may not be as easy to see in the black and white, so I cut out an image from one of her recent color pictures and magnified it to 2 times the size as well. She's drawing in a second set of eyebrows above her first set, and it's painfully obvious because the second set is a lot lighter than the first. I do not understand why she is doing it. Her regular eyebrows are just fine. They don't seem to have any gaps in them-- in the color one there is a little bit of a gap on the edge between the pencil and the natural brow, though. I think she's trying to make them more arched, but she's not brushing the natural brow into it. It's like she's drawing a shadow on. I just do not get it.

Well, I guess who was born and who wasn't would be a crap shoot. The way this show has explained things isn't very good. Pick names out of a hat and you're bound to pick a few who would throw a wrench into the works. As for Tinder, just because it is there doesn't mean it should be, or would be. Would there be a bigger demand for dating apps in this world, or apps for surrogate mothers who can make $250,000 per baby?

I need her to stop drawing in the double row of eyebrows. It's driving me loony.

This runs on the assumption that the people who created these technologies and the people who helped those people were even born. This decline in births supposedly began in the 60s and slowly snowballed as time went on until the rate of healthy births dropped 61% in the year prior to Serena being shot. There would have been a butterfly effect into all kinds of cultural and technological developments, and the writers have completely ignored that. It wouldn't have just been a matter of actual technological development, either. Gilead's people getting into positions of power prior to the takeover would have stifled certain things and encouraged others. They didn't just flip a switch one day.

The problem that I have with the cloud, or social media, and some of the other modern amenities in the flashbacks in general, is that they've tried to sell us an alternate history or time line that was badly planned. A lot of people who make this stuff would have been distracted at the least, and the population may have had priorities that led to things like Facebook and Twitter not being the successes that they are, or people like Zuckerberg might have created something else entirely. Things like the cloud might not have existed when Gilead was formed. PCs were around when Atwood wrote the book. I know because I had them in my room. My father was a systems analyst and we had ones he built himself in the 70s as well, but that was an exception. I feel like we are never going to get answers to what is going on in the outside world, and if we do, it won't make sense. The Mexico plot didn't exactly set a good precedent. Right now, this show is about misery. If they show stuff from your list, that gives viewers hope, and they're not interested in that. I suspect that if we see any of what you've described, it will somehow result in handmaids losing body parts or some other disaster, even if there is no logical reason for that to happen. Things happen in this show because the writers want it to happen, not because it would. I'm wondering how long it would take for other countries to go from "Americans are jerks!" to "Hey, that's not right!" A lot of people don't like us, and the countries who commit the same kinds of offenses are simply not going to care. Also, with the US out of the picture, you'll have countries like North Korea and Russia free to do anything, so human rights for the rich fat kid who tripped and spilled his ice cream all over the sidewalk will get pushed to the side while other countries deal with their own problems. You might see trade sanctions and-- oops, someone's invading Poland again. Y'all got any extras of them goons with guns that you have on every corner? We can trade some oranges for 'em.

Wait a minute... A room full of binders. Did Canada run out of computers? Even Gilead has laptops.

Maybe I've seen too many horror flicks or HBO, but when the handmaids took off their veils in the funeral scene, I was expecting to see mangled faces from the bombing. Luke is useless. At least Nick helped fill out Serena's forms and knew how to get that nosy commander taken away. Those women they brought back from the colonies are going to have shredder babies if they even get pregnant at all.

I think she just doesn't care.

This doesn't look like a grenade to me. Also, she pushed a button; she didn't pull a pin. It's hard to tell if that stuff coming off the end of it is part of the handmaid habit or if it's a wire leading to explosives tied to her body.

Just dropping the latest push for the cruise video here for your viewing pleasure.

If they're talking about Washington DC, I never got the impression that it was no longer being used. I thought that maybe Boston was a hub for the New England area or something along those lines. If DC wasn't nuked, and Gilead has control of it, I'm not sure why they wouldn't use it. All I've heard so far about the big coup is that there was a bomb at the White House and a bunch of machine guns used on congress-- hardly enough to render the rest of DC useless, and Gilead had control of it. I would think Gilead would want to use it for the symbolism, and there's a lot of useful stuff there. Maybe guardians could have a chance at being promoted to commander, but Nick won't because he is an eye. They want him right where he is so he can keep spying for now. I don't think we'll know unless we see other guardians get a promotion, or if Waterford is ousted and Nick is promoted and takes Waterford's place.

Let's not forget that she always has some kind of crippling accident when she gets in a tub, or it overflows, or some other disaster happens.

No one is going to mention June burning those letters?

Yeah, sockpuppetry is right up her alley.

This is like "They told me to kiiillll myseeeelllfff!!!!" I want screen shots or it didn't happen.

Watching her social media is kind of confusing, because she uploads these candid stills and videos showing her lumbering around like an unwashed walrus, and then we get these made-up head shots that have been filtered to death by someone who runs a "No Body Shame" campaign. Whitney needs someone to tell her what to do with her public image. These slop job glamour shots and these selfies are all over the place. She has double sets of eyebrows, there seems to be dirt either on her face or the camera lens in one of them, and she's using this "make me skinny" software without having any post work done. So, like her exercise videos, this is yet another confirmation that she does everything half-assed. It's like she had a PR person make a list of things not to do and she's doing everything on the lsit.

Aw, shucks. I'm not really good at being a leader. I'd make an excellent consigliere, though. :-)

When you blow up that Instagram photo, you can see it's not just the angle. Along the line where I've drawn in red, you can see ultra-fine peach fuzz hairs sticking out of her skin, so that the line is much more naturally defined. Now look at the skin next to the blue line. There is no peach fuzz, and frankly, the line is a little rough. I've seen photoshop actions that leave edges like this.

OK, try this... I am by myself this morning so I have given Whitney a neck lift and removed the tumah in photoshop. I just don't see the point of uploading stuff like this when we all know how big she is, but if you're going to do it, why not do it right?

"I fed myself" I'm sorry, but I cannot let this go. This is an accomplishment for a toddler. She is a toddler.

Fake news. There is not job; there is only Tal.

Because it all funnels into people believing her ability to identify blame. It shows how she's an accurate blamer-- she's also "right all the time." Then when any doubts come up about her, she has that extra credibility. It took me years to figure out what she was doing. Not everyone in Gilead believes in the religious dogma, so at least some of them are just engaged in oppression tactics.

I know someone who loves to assign blame in any kind of situation-- fictional, personal, in the news, if there's blame to be had, she'll figure out where it goes and nail it to the person's forehead. Whenever anything happens, the most important thing to her is to figure out whose fault it is, even if it's herself. It's rare when it's herself, but occasionally it's her. Now this isn't because she's interested in the truth. It's because occasionally blaming herself gives her credibility, so that when she dishes out the blame on others for the big stuff, people will believe her. That's because assigning blame, or fault, or whatever you want to call it, isn't about getting people to take responsibility. With people like that person I know, it's about covering her own ass. In the case of Lydia and Gilead, it's all about protecting the status quo, or Gilead. Once blame is assigned, people feel guilty, and you can get them to do what you want, or if you've assigned it to deflect blame from yourself, you will not be under attack. Other than that, blame is mostly useless for immediate survival unless you're deciding who gets rations, or if you're trying to figure out who is trustworthy, something like that. We're talking about people who are being held prisoner by other people who are "looking for a reason." Whether June runs away or runs her mouth, the aunts and the goons with guns every 20 feet are going to find a reason to justify their existence. Whether it's because a handmaid runs over people in a car, or someone comes home with Miracle Whip instead of real mayonnaise, everyone in Gilead is going to suffer because torturing, maiming and killing is simply what this regime does-- no matter what. Whatever happened in the past doesn't matter. Which handmaid said what to whom doesn't matter. As long as people blame themselves and each other for what the regime does, Gilead will continue to do it.

I think if we can go through a whole episode in the colonies, we can spend one in Canada. I bet they have lights there-- maybe not in the apartment where Luke & company live in Little America, but in Canada at large, maybe at the American Embassy too. I can think of a whole lot of things to do on this show other than wasting time sitting in dark rooms doing nothing, and dragging out torment and sex scenes. I thought she said she was Luke's first-- it struck me as odd, so I may have it wrong. I can't sit through that again to confirm. Does anyone else remember?