lottiefairchildbranwell

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

there is currently a vagrant fig-obsessed ancap/libertarian on the iNaturalist forums and everyone is having way too much fun dunking on him its great

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

When you said X, it immediately sounded like Y to me. Is that what you meant?

So what I got from that, is you're saying X. Is that right?

I had a strong emotional reaction to X, because of Y. Did I interpret that correctly/ could you clarify?

I felt uncertain and just wanted to clarify. Were you aware that X is strongly linked/has the connotation, references Y because of Z? (At least from my understanding.) (add sources?) As that makes what you're saying possibly sound like N. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or overlooked something. I'm always happy to learn.

Took me a moment to work out what this was lol. But yes! These are all good ways to ask nicely for clarification and avoid reading comprehension fails.

A Bad variant on these to avoid, mind - which I have been on the receiving end of a few times - is to ask, but use the question to lecture about the topic anyway, as though the poster in question said Y regardless. A bad faith clarification, if you will. It looks something like:

"When you said X, did you mean Y? I hope not, because Y is actually problematic because blah blah blah, that would be really shitty."

Do Not Do This. This is a smug, shitty and unfair way to speak to someone (and it certainly gets you ignored or blocked if you do it to me lol.) Ask nicely, like anon's examples, and keep the lectures and judgements to yourself until you determine if they're actually needed.

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

Me: let's bake a Christmas spice cake!

Me: *puts cake in oven*

Me: wait hang on it's almost midnight why the fuck did I just -

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

(x)

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

Mrs. Claus opens "The Year Without a Santa Claus" by claiming the eponymous year took place "before you were born". Seeing as the movie was released in 1974, this means the year must have been before then.

Bounding this on the lower end is the presence of ice hockey - mentioned by Heat Miser - and the use of telephones. Ice hockey was invented in 1875, while Alexander Graham Bell built the telephone in 1876, meaning the year must post-date these. These figures give a range of approximately 100 years during which Santa may have taken his holiday.

Yet, narrowing this further is the presence of a December calendar counting the 1st to a Wednesday. Between 1876 and 1974, only the Decembers of 1880, 1886, 1897, 1909, 1915, 1920, 1926, 1937, 1943, 1948, 1954, 1965, and 1971 started on a Wednesday.

But still this can be narrowed further.

When Santa set out that Christmas Eve, we see what appears to be an almost full Moon in the sky. Within the years listed, only 1920 had a full Moon on Christmas.

Ergo, 1920 was the year without a Santa Claus.

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

Need for fans to understand that George Lucas shoots his movies like an old school documentarist on purpose. They're never purely that way, but it's the thing that most influences his style.

And that's why a lot of critiques leveled at his directorial style are baseless, because he's doing it deliberately. He knows a lot of his shots are static. It's the point.

He doesn't do a whole lot of moving with the camera (in non action sequences), at least compared to other directors. He lets the actors walk in and out of the frame. He even does this with CGI characters. He doesn't construct a frame around their movements (or thats how its meant to appear, because everything is obviously planned). So you get a lot of static shots that allow for us to take in the cultural context of this universe. This is also why a lot of Star Wars world building can be done without exposition. It all plays out within the static wide shots. All the information is on your screen. Including characterization and theme through the mise en scene.

Why does he do this? Because tracking shots and the like are highly choreographed and he doesn't like when it appears to be overly engineered or manufactured. It's the influence of cinema verite, where the point of the film is to portray the truth. It's the same reason he uses delayed exposition and doesn't infodump unless a story is being told by the characters (C3PO in RotJ and Palpatine in RotS). He wants it to play out and for you to observe it without too much manufactured framing.

He's not worried because he knows what he's going to say in each act of the story and what the resolution will be. He doesn't need to bombard you with all the information at once.

Sometimes the camera will track the actors, and of course there's occasionally a pan up or down. But very few times will you see him move the camera through a scene. It rarely follows the action from one set to another, and he rarely uses the camera to push in towards an actor for dramatic effect. When it does happen, it's a point of reference and meant to inform you on what that character represents at the moment. And it adds another layer of meaning. It's just more rare in his movies.

That's his thing, I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's a choice. You have to get it. I mean, he talked about this, but I feel like people forget.

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

Of the Beginning and the End

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.

my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

If she's more interested in playing football right now than chasing boys, well, quite frankly, I'm over the moon about that.

@pscentral event 28: throwback Bend It Like Beckham — 2002 dir. Gurinder Chadha

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

oh to have been a fly on the wall during the "ayesha's girlfriend (spitting image of keira knightley in bend it like beckham)" auditions

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

Standing in a checkout line, when an older man asks me about my Goncharov t-shirt. I say "It's a movie, " when the person behind me chimes in, "Oh, yes, Scorsese."

The original gentleman goes on to tell me about the author Goncharov, his favorite of his novels, and a famous character from one of the novels. The three of us discuss whether the main character in the movie is intentionally named after the author, referencing that character, or whether it just sounded good to the film maker. We discuss how steeped the movie is in symbology.

Two of us are having a very different conversation than the third.

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

One very stupid thing that bothers me in historical romances and fanfic is the fact that male characters often take off shirts but stay in their breeches. The breeches aren’t the last layer of underwear, the shirt is. The shirt is the body linen— that’s the thing that goes against the skin and is the first thing to be put on and the last thing to be taken off— that’s the thing that is sewn by hand by wife/ sister/ daughter/ mother partly out of a lack of extensive manufacturing but because it is the most intimate layer of clothing and you don’t want a stranger’s work against your skin.

Is it just because to modern eyes it would look silly? Is this a case of “I got too interested in the material culture of body linens in the Regency era and now I know too much to enjoy myself”??

[lottiefairchildbranwell]

The 'hyperspecific situations' polls are really once again highlighting that native English speakers tend to forget that 'foreign' doesn't mean 'non-English' or 'non-American'

"Did you watch a foreign language movie in the past three days?" Yeah I watched the foreign movie "The Martian" with foreign actor Matt Damon