pcklesthings - Tumblr blog

[pcklesthings]

[pcklesthings]

Lunge Feeding Blue Whales © Gone Whale Watching Inc

[pcklesthings]

My memory of The Birdcage (1996) is always that it's more dated and more difficult to watch than it actually is. You hear "drag-themed comedy from the 90s based on a musical from the 80s based on a play from the 70s" and you brace yourself just a little, right? But the film has a strong gay perspective, so the fruity fag jokes mostly come off as warmly affectionate. There is a surprising amount of poignancy in Robin Williams' portrayal of Armand, grudgingly agreeing to his beloved son's request that he go back into the closet for an evening ("do me a favor and don't talk to me for a while"). The drag club's staff attempting to redecorate the apartment with stuff straight people might like (a taxidermy moose head, an enormous crucifix, and Playboy magazine) is extremely funny. Albert's histrionics are a point of tension because he does often come off as a stereotypically pathetic/comic figure, but towards the end of the movie he makes it very clear that he's aware of how people see him, and asserts that trying to copy a stoic masculinity he doesn't possess for the sake of social approval would be more pathetic. In the 1983 musical adaptation, they give "Albert" (Albin) the only good song in the whole show, "I Am What I Am", which Gloria Gaynor covered to the delight of gays everywhere. Apparently Nathan Lane wasn't (publicly) out yet in 1996, which is amazing because it means that at one point in this movie you're watching a gay man playing a straight man playing a gay man playing a straight man, in a movie about how it's important to be yourself, an absurdity that does seem to encapsulate the state of gay America in the 90s.

[pcklesthings]

bedtime is a very difficult.

[pcklesthings]

poor old granny scorpion-shoes. no one ever saw her death coming

[pcklesthings]

[pcklesthings]

[pcklesthings]

My guilty pleasure right now is watching luxury hotel reviews and I found this british guy who keeps accidentally clipping into the backrooms.

He's unintentionally making the best liminal horror content on youtube

[pcklesthings]

[pcklesthings]

An observation:

In Swansea, when you get on a bus, the driver will literally sit at that bus stop and block the traffic if need be to watch you, hawk-like, on the bus cameras as you make your way to a seat. This is normal service. We must all be seated before the bus takes off. Very occasionally they might start driving while you're still standing in front of your seat, having reached it but not quite sat down, and the sudden inertia makes you instantly hinge 90 degrees at the hips and collapse into the chair like a doll in Toy Story when a human enters. We all have a good laugh. "Quick off the mark, isn't he?" an old lady will say. "Not even sitting, you weren't!" she will cackle. This is high entertainment. Her week is made. Your forced seating is a rare treat, a moment of human connection. You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.

In Edinburgh, the bus drivers have never heard of the very concept of waiting until the passengers are seated. Half a picosecond after your card is tapped the bus driver punches a nitro injection button and stamps on the accelerator. You are instantly hurled to the back of the bus, where you are thinly laminated to the back window. Time unspools into the traffic behind you. A local tuts at you, because you should have known to hold the handrail. After several seconds you manage to unpeel yourself, only for the driver to slam on the brakes for the next stop, flinging you at speed through the windscreen and onto the road in front of the bus. Ashamed, you get up and re-board. It costs nothing extra, because Scottish public transport is cheap and convenient. The driver actually pauses, because a woman with a cane has boarded. You seize your chance. You try to run up the stairs to a seat before she sits and the bus moves again. You are out of luck - at the top step the driver spins out into oncoming traffic at 87 miles an hour from a standstill, and you tumble like a house of cards impacted by a bowling ball, thrown down from the Olympus of the upper deck that you, in your hubris, thought you could reach. You rattle around in the aisle like a discarded can. The woman with the cane laughs at you. Some children kick you towards the back. You lodge under a seat, and cling on until your stop like a terrestrial limpet.

You still thank the driver as you get off the bus.

[pcklesthings]

The Princess (2022) is plastered all over Hulu with a cringing bad trailer and poster art implying a perfectly coifed Bad Girl (tm) will fight her way through a bunch of medieval times rejects to prove to a Guy she's just as good as the men.

The actual movie is a gem, a florid and well oiled machine for telling a very simple story about a princess at the top of a tower who fights her way to the bottom. The bad guys are over the top sneering villains, the fight scenes are much more like a screaming berserker with martial arts fluidity overlayed into the setting that makes it into a kind of fairy tale kung fu movie in the best way.

There are bombastic dramatic speeches that resonate down the line with movies like Princess Bride, and the action sequences punch with just the amount of chaos and blood and messiness. There's some terrible CGI naturally but the whole story is contained inside the single set of the tower in ways that feel ingenious. It's a low budget, low stakes, high hopes movie and watching it brings back happy memories of stumbling into something unexpectedly on a video cassette with a luridly enticing cover.

[pcklesthings]

2010s tumblr girl Miku

[pcklesthings]

Prisons/Jails vs Colleges - More prisons or more colleges?

[pcklesthings]

you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands

[pcklesthings]

Half-foots have it so rough in the Dungeon Meshi universe. You have the shortest lifespan of any race, your heightened senses and lack of muscle lead other humans to treat you like hunting rabbits, your mana threshold is so low that the elvish secret police will disappear you for the slightest inclination of dark magic association, and god help if you want to romance someone of a different race because chances are they view Half-foots as children and anyone who WOULD date you as a creep. And to top it off labor laws were only introduced for you within the past few years

[pcklesthings]

FOOTLOOSE (1984) dir. Herbert Ross

[pcklesthings]

it's crazy how no one ever talks about the frozen section of the grocery store. like if you lean in too far and the door closes on you you're just trapped and you have to STAY THERE until you can grab another shopper to take your place?? and we all just acts like that's normal?? I missed two weeks of eighth grade because I was stuck living in the frozen breakfast food section at fucking Walmart and I'm literally just supposed to be fine with that. hello???