#American Craft Exposition

[tferyal]

Frank L. Koralewsky tarafından 1911'de yapılan karmaşık işçilikli kapı kilidi, 20. yüzyılın başlarındaki metal işçiliğinin dikkate değer bir örneğidir.

1872'de Almanya'nın Stralsund kentinde doğan Koralewsky, 1890'ların ortalarında Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'ne göç etmeden önce demir işçisi olarak çıraklık yaptı.

Boston'a yerleşerek 1906'da Boston Sanat ve El Sanatları Derneği'nin bir üyesi oldu ve çilingirlik ve hırdavat konusunda uzmanlaştı.

Tamamlanması yedi yıl süren bu özel kilit, onun uzmanlığının ve zanaatına olan bağlılığının bir kanıtıdır.

Altın, gümüş ve bronzla kaplı olan kilit, 1900'lerin başlarındaki ortaçağ hayranlığını yansıtan, sanat ve zanaatkarlığın olağanüstü bir birleşimidir.

O dönemde metal işçiliği geleneklerinin zirvesini temsil eder ve Koralewsky'nin işlevi dekoratif güzellikle harmanlama yeteneğini sergiler.

Tasarım, Grimm Kardeşler'in "Pamuk Prenses ve Yedi Cüceler" masalından esinlenerek, parçaya bir tuhaflık ve anlatı derinliği katar.

1915 Panama-Pasifik Uluslararası Fuarı'nda sergilenen kilit, altın madalya kazanarak Amerikan zanaatkarlığı tarihindeki yerini sağlamlaştırdı.

Dönemin titiz ayrıntıya gösterilen özenin ve sanatsal duygusallığının bir sembolü olarak duruyor.

Günümüzde hem işlevsel bir nesne hem de bir sanat eseri olarak hizmet ediyor ve Koralewsky'nin mirasını ve Amerikan metal işçiliğinin altın çağını temsil ediyor.

archeohistories

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The intricately crafted door lock made by Frank L. Koralewsky in 1911 is a remarkable example of early 20th-century metalworking. Born in Stralsund, Germany, in 1872, Koralewsky apprenticed as an ironworker before immigrating to the United States in the mid-1890s. Settling in Boston, he became a member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts by 1906, specializing in locksmithing and hardware. This particular lock, which took seven years to complete, is a testament to his expertise and dedication to his craft. Covered in gold, silver, and bronze, the lock is an extraordinary fusion of artistry and craftsmanship, reflecting the early 1900s fascination with medievalism. It represents the pinnacle of metalworking traditions at the time, showcasing Koralewsky’s ability to blend function with decorative beauty. The design is inspired by the fairy tale "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" by the Brothers Grimm, adding an element of whimsy and narrative depth to the piece. Exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the lock won a gold medal, cementing its place in the history of American craftsmanship. It stands as a symbol of the meticulous attention to detail and the artistic sentimentality of the era. Today, it serves as both a functional object and a work of art, embodying Koralewsky’s legacy and the golden age of American metalworking. #archaeohistories

[scooby-review]

The Scooby-Doo Show S1 E9-12

9. Mamba Wamba and the Voodoo Hoodoo

During a concert the gang’s friends are putting on, the band summons Mamba Wamba (using an ancient chant they were warned against using) who wants to turn people into zombies. 

The opening of this episode is really funny to me, sometimes the show feels a need to give overly long and in depth exposition dumps, when most of the time, it’s not needed. Despite this, I always find them funny to listen to. Alongside this, using the band and concert to ground us is a lot of fun; I enjoy the backgrounds and how suddenly the tone changes from a fun little song to the band deciding they want to recite an ancient chant. Tonal whiplash like that is always a lot of fun in these early Scooby shows where the animation is fairly barebones. If this were to appear in a newer show, it would be matched with shading, fun colouring and composition, but here we get the same flat angle we always get, everything feels so much more nonchalant as a result, and while the newer seasons style is better, there’s a certain charm to this.

However, the shift in settings to a plantation is less enjoyable. There’s a certain relationship with early Scooby and plantations, they appear a fair few times, and in some stories, the character’s families owned them - the death of Shaggy’s plantation owning uncle is the inciting incident of the TV movie Scooby Doo Meets the Boo Brothers. Here the location isn’t necessarily glorified, so I won’t bother diving too much more into the relationship here, however, there is a certain prestige put on this style of location in other episodes or pieces of Scooby Media. 

However, given the monster of this episode, I do want to briefly discuss the way Native American characters are portrayed in the series. Several of the series villains are either Medicine Men (as is the case for this episode) or generally Native Americans, often in designs that are evocative of early depictions of Cowboys fighting indigenous people. For the most part, this style of depiction paints Cowboys as the interesting characters - they wear more westernised clothing, they wield guns and ride horses. As such, young boys were typically taught to align themselves with Cowboys, and Scooby Doo shows a very similar angle. The characters are often caricatures, and there is a certain element to them crafting the “monsters” Native American caricatures that is evidently hateful and built on harmful stereotyping born from colonisation. No other groups of people are painted directly as the “monsters” of an episode, usually instead, they wear costumes. 

However, this episode's villain, Mamba Wamba, is a medicine man or a Shaman. His face is painted red and white, his hair is long and streaked with a dusty shade of yellow. Within the intro to the show, a (presumably) early design for the character is shown, and there, he has dark skin in contrast to the final design, where he’s white, matching the skin colour of the culprit. In two episodes time, a more direct medicine man design is used, he is directly labelled as such, and to avoid repeating my ideas there, I’ll discuss them as a pair. Presenting these cultural figures as Scooby Doo villains is a curious subject, and reading about depictions of them yields two answers: such depictions are of the time and fairly offensive, built on harmful stereotypes, or, there is nothing wrong and the show is simply using these figures from different cultures. Regardless, the characters under the masks are always white, they are appropriating these cultures.

In my eyes, people can still love these episodes yet recognise that they’re oftentimes built on harmful stereotypes, that therefore, shouldn’t be used again. In my eyes, this is so much more interesting of a way to engage with pieces of media than blindly ignoring faults and proclaiming those who point them out are wrong. You are not at fault for enjoying an episode like this, but the moment one starts acting as if they are the victim because this piece of media they enjoy is coming under a genuine examination of its representation, then there becomes a problem.

I think that, inadvertently, the episode offers an interesting look into cultural appropriation, with this band of white teenagers deciding to recite an ancient curse during a set, despite warnings that they should not. So frequently people are asked not to do something, yet visions of what free will and free speech are will lead certain groups to purposefully do so, and I think this episode highlights this inability to listen, and how, had they simply not recited this chant, the band could have just played their gig and continued on with their careers. 

This episode actually takes a lot of inspiration from Cornell Woolrich's short story Papa Benjamin, which has been adapted several times for use in various anthology TV shows and films, and is undeniably laced with an underlying theme of racism. I think knowing this therefore makes it easier to tell the writer's intentions with this episode, similarly to how they use a character from Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. They take directly from the source material, which is steeped with racist and colonial views, and therefore, these ideals are always going to make their way into the episode, intentional or otherwise. 

I do enjoy the way Mamba Wamba turns those he captures into zombies, which leads to the other pair of villains in this episode. Firstly, there’s zombie Lila, who has such a cute design, she’s obviously less marketable than any other Scooby villain. Lila was one of the band members, and one of this episodes culprits, and her design is a very simple recolour of her regular 1970s teenage girl design, there are hints of hippie to her through the dress and hairband, and this shade of forest green goes on to compliment the ashy shade her skin turns. 

Alongside Lila, is a more generic zombie, a design that is a recolour of the zombie from Which Witch is Which (Scooby Doo Where Are You? S1 E13). Here the design switches the lime skin of the zombie to a similarly ashy grey as Lila. His once forest green jacket becomes pink, and while I kind of love this colouring, I do hate when Scooby uses Recolours in these early seasons. I guess at the very least it’s more interesting than simply making the characters a stark ghostly white like with the pirates in The New Scooby Doo Movies The Ghostly Creep From the Deep. 

Also there is for some reason a frog in the majority of this episode and I like him quite a lot. He just tags around with the gang, mostly Scooby, and he’s very sweet. 

10. A Frightened Hound Meets Demons Underground

The gang learn of a demon terrorising a construction site, and while investigating him, learn of an underground city. 

Before diving into anything about the episode itself, the model for Templeton from Charlotte's Web is used in this episode, he scares off Scooby. The 1973 movie the model is ripped from was made by Hanna Barbera, so it makes sense they’d have it, but this is such a weird and minor detail I’m so glad someone noticed. It’s not really important, I just find it fun. 

As for the actual episode, I think it’s good! This episode and the episodes before and after are some of the weakest in the season, and despite that, I still have a good time watching them!

Something really enjoyable about this episode is the unique setting - an underground city. Of course, it’s abandoned, but there’s an eerie falseness to the entire place, it’s constructed without any intentions of living there, it reminds me a lot of the town in House of Wax (2005). Planted around the city are several statues, some odes to classic monsters (which are mostly model reuses, but it’s fine) but one of the five we see is presumably an early design for The Rambling Ghost who appears at the end of this season. 

The episode takes place in Seattle, and the city itself is based on a real underground city there, although the fictionalised version is far larger and more sprawling. 

Another aspect of this episode I enjoy is the demon, a fun design that draws many typical demon motifs - horns, wings, scarlet skin (with a main body that’s far lighter, almost salmon pink). However, the fur on the creature is an incredibly unique addition, and I love the hooked feet of the beast, they’re almost talon-like, and little details like this crafts a far more interesting design to me. 

On a side note, there’s some really cool shadow work in this episode! I was pretty impressed!

11. A Bum Steer for Scooby

Much like the previous episode, while I like this one, I think it’s good, it’s definitely one of my least favourites of the season and leaves me with little to discuss despite not harbouring much boredom while watching it!

As mentioned in episode nine, here we see a Medicine Man (ghost), who is fine! His design is conventionally similar to the one seen in Decoy for a Dognapper, albeit a little less interesting, the character here uses a fairly plain snowy white design, it compliments the grey yet crafts an overall plain feeling character, which shouldn’t be the case when the mask is such a powerful canvas. 

Alongside him, we also have the “talking bull”, who is simply a costume fit for two people designed to look like a bull, as well as the far more interesting Tamuka, a ghostly bull. Unlike most Scooby villains, this character acts more as an omen, the large beast runs through the sky, its ashy form and bright crimson eyes contrast perfectly against the blue backgrounds. Taking a bull and escaping traditional jokes one would expect (such as red cloth being thrown) is a lot of fun, even if the reveal that Tamuka was in fact a helicopter the whole time is kind of silly. Honestly, I think it’s the perfect amount of stupid. 

I don’t have much more to say here! I like the constant infighting of the locals over land and cattle. Also, this is technically the first time we learn Daphne’s surname is Blake, this comes through her uncle (who is fairly boring as to why I’ve neglected to mention him), however it wouldn’t be confirmed they share the same surname until 1983 in the The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show episode "No Thanks Masked Manx". 

12. There’s a Demon Shark in the Foggy Dark

We end on a really fun episode!

After a real shark attacks Scooby and the gang while water skiing, the five find themselves at Aqualand, where a shark frozen in ice had been brought the previous night, and, despite the shark remaining in its icy prison, he’s the only possible suspect for a pearl robbery. 

It is incredibly surprising to me that this episode’s opening scene isn’t alluding to the Happy Days episode that inspired the term “jump the shark” - Scooby is water skiing, and his paddles are eaten by a shark, the sequence is even used in the intro, so in my mind, it made perfect sense. Yet the episode hadn’t aired by this point, and instead, what else but Jaws served as the major inspiration for this episode.

I’ve discussed Jaws and its negative effect on sharks culturally in the episode The Secret of Shark Island, so rather than repeat myself (although I do recommend either reading that segment or looking into the effects yourself) I want to discuss just how huge Jaws was, and the ongoing effect it still has, particularly in the horror genre. 

Jaws was released in 1975, with this episode releasing the following year. It was the highest grossing movie of the year, led to a change in the age rating system for movies, and is often regarded as the first blockbuster, forever altering the way films were made and distributed. It crafted a larger fear of sharks, and more broadly, the ocean, and it went on to inspire a variety of films, from Nope and Tremors (both of which I adore), to The Meg and Shark of the Corn. It’s impact was huge, and its place as a genre film is still debated to this day (although I would firmly argue it as a horror movie). 

Scenes like the water ski opening make a larger sense culturally with this in mind, because at its core, this episode is about Jaws. Bringing in a completely unrelated shark, that is real, is a curious idea, but in context of its release, it’s the gang in the ocean, and at this time, the ocean was a terrifying place in the cultural zeitgeist. As such, there is a real horror here of Scooby getting eaten, a little mechanism to get the gang to the aquarium. 

As for the Demon Shark, the storyline surrounding it is evocative of the Where Are You episode Scooby's Night With a Frozen Fright, given the frozen monster. However where this differs is that the shark truly is a frozen shark, and the monster we see takes on the disguise of the monster, only, the villain never bothers dealing with the shark frozen in the ice, and as such, there’s never really any question whether they’re the same shark, at least, not to the audience. 

Given that this episode’s villain of a somewhat anthropomorphic shark is near identical as the aforementioned Secret of Shark Island, I am glad that they designed a new model, with this shark having a navy blue shade to him, his hands are webbed and an arrow like pattern is scrawled across his torso. Personally, I prefer this design a lot, I think possibly because of the circular eyes, it breathes a different kind of life into the design. 

Beyond all this, I like how strong the mystery is in this episode, it constantly feels like it’s progressing in a natural way, there are unique clues and plot twists regarding said clues, fun set pieces such as the crab infested treasure pit and an enjoyable monster following closely on their tail. Other episodes sometimes lay out an inciting incident, drop the gang in a location, and then allow the mystery to unfold around them, rather than giving them the urgency to pick around at clues and unravel the mystery for themselves. I like this episode a lot!

Thankyou so much for reading this review! Happy new year! I've had a very hectic week and so I wasn't sure whether I'd manage to write these in time, but I'm glad I did! This is being released on my birthday which is fun! If anyone is interested, I've recently released my debut novel! Any support is greatly appreciated!

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[mediaevalmusereads]

A Canticle for Leibowitz. By Walter M. Miller Jr. Harper, 1959.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Genre: science fiction

Series: St. Liebowitz #1

Summary: In a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz. From here the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism, viewing through a sharp, satirical eye the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its grievous mistakes.

***Full review below.***

CONTENT WARNINGS: implied cannibalism, torture, and violence

OVERVIEW: This book has been on my TBR for a long time. I can't say what prompted me to pick it up now, but I'm very glad I did. I liked this book way more than I thought I would - probably because of my background in medieval studies and my fascination with the neo-medieval. Miller's work is incredibly imaginative and skillful in the way it deploys its imagery, and so, because I could hardly put this book down, it gets 4.5 stars from me.

WRITING: I very much appreciated the craft that went into making this book. Miller is a master as balancing telling and showing, creating complex characters that come to life on the page and an environment that feels fully real.

The worldbuilding is especially admirable for the way it reimagines the post-apocalyptic world. I loved the way Miller blended premodern Christianity with post-apocalyptic Christianity, redefining relics and incorporating nuclear war into its catechisms. I also appreciated that the exposition was minimal; because the story focuses on one monastery, we're given only enough worldbuilding details to make sense of the world as it relates to the monastery. We don't need a full explanation of how each government operates or what individual lives are like. We just focus on the monks and their relationship to the world, and I loved that lens of looking at the post-apocalyptic landscape.

But perhaps the thing I admired most about this book was the way Miller incorporated recurring imagery. This book is told in 3 parts, and each part is separated by a few hundred years. However, the narrative feels more coherent both because it stays centered on the one monastery and because a number of images keep popping up to create a sense of consistency. Some examples include the buzzards, the statue of St. Liebowitz, the old man in the burlap sack, etc. It made me think of the narrative as a kind of puzzle to solve while also reminding me that things stayed the same even as time moved on (perhaps reflecting one of the themes of this book?).

PLOT: The plot of this book examines the (re)development of human civilization following nuclear war through the eyes of a handful of monks at a single monastery in the American southwest. The (re)development is told in three parts with the events separated by a few hundred years: part one follows Brother Francis, a young novice who finds an untouched fallout shelter in the desert during his Lenten vigil; part two follows Dom Paulo, the abbot, who must navigate the political and technological consequences when a secular scholar takes interest in the monastery's relics (found in the shelter from part 1); and part 3 follows Dom Zerchi, who is in charge of the monastery when humanity inevitably redevelops nuclear weapons and threatens war once again.

I loved these three narratives, mainly because the scope was both limited and implied a more broad significance. We focus exclusively on events tied to the monastery, which means we're invested in the things that affect the lives of the monks, but also, we are made to understand that what is happening at the monastery has a wider impact on the world (without Miller having to bluntly tell us so).

I also loved that each section had an impact on the next, even if the events were separated by centuries. Because of the "relics" found in part one, a new scientific Renaissance is allowed to take place in part two, which allows mankind to redevelop weapons in part three. It made for a constant sense that the narrative was building towards something, and by the end, I was absolutely satisfied by both the cyclical nature of human civilization and the sense of hope that endured in the monks.

If I had any criticism, I would say that there were a couple moments when the pace seemed to drag in part two. However, this book is relatively short and we don't spent enough time in each section for the pacing to be a problem. I can also see how the Latin might be annoying for some readers; because we're following monks, a significant percentage of their dialogue is in Latin. Despite having rusty Latin, I was unbothered by the multilingualism, but your mileage may vary depending on whether or not you want to let the language wash over you.

CHARACTERS: There are a number of characters in this book, so I'm only going to focus on a few primary ones, for brevity.

TL;DR: A Canticle for Liebowitz is an impressive book. With a richly imagined post-apocalyptic world, deftly deployed recurring imagery, and memorable characters, this novel explores the cyclical nature of human civilization through a religious lens and questions whether humanity is, at its heart, doomed to destroy and remake itself over and over.

Brother Francis, the protagonist of part one, has a few personality traits that make him rather endearing. When we meet him, he's fairly young and has a timidity that is almost humorous. He is also deferential to authority but firm in the way he speaks about what he saw, and I thought this made him an interesting choice for being the person that finds the relics. Because of his timidity, he doesn't fully explore the fallout shelter himself (which kept me in suspense), and because of his youthful devotion, we get a lot of innocent (or naive?) interpretations of the world around him (which was amusing).

Dom Paulo, the protagonist of part 2, is a bit more confident and was interesting for his relationship with secular scholar Thon Taddeo. I especially loved the debates between the characters, most of which centered on learning and knowledge, and the mutual respect between enemies was complex and refreshing.

Dom Zerchi was fairly forceful and preferred action over thought, and this trait made him a good choice as a protagonist in part 3. I liked that he was presented as a character with fairly strong convictions, especially about suffering, life, and death, and that these convictions were challenged as the narrative progressed.

Memorable side characters include the man in the burlap sack (who showed up in each part, causing me to wonder if he was the same man or three different men), the Poet (from part 2, who played the role of the Shakespearean fool), and Mrs. Grales (a woman in part 3 who has two heads). All characters felt sufficiently developed and didn't overshadow the main narrative; in fact, they were just on the periphery and their presence did a lot to enhance the main story.

[mywavesyourshore]

Red White and Sexy Blue

From the premise, this appears to be a modern day romance akin to Disney fairytales designed to make readers swoon. And while it partially delivered on that front, cheeky fluffy romance and all, what happened in between never went in any directions l had expected. By the time I finished the book, I was left with a sense of uncertainty and raised eyebrows, in the end, what was all that about?

Was it a fairytale? maybe. Was it an advocate for social injustice? Maybe. Was it about bisexual inclusivity and representations? Maybe that also. The book bears an incredibly intriguing and sexy premise, but Casey Mcquinton's attempt to tackle every social justice issues under the sun sometimes bogged the central love affair . At times, it can seem as though the entire book is being used as a platform to make political statements rather than to tell a compelling not-your-everyday romance between a prince and first son of the president.

But amidst the political noise, the books maintain and delivered its romanticism. The novel's most quiet and vulnerable moment comes in when Henry sneaked Alex into the Victoria and Albert Museum, which reminded me of the Planetarium scene from La La Land, in timely pauses like this that the book finds itself right back where it started, as a love story between two confusing teenagers trying to find their place in the big big world.

The characters are well-rounded and complex, and their humors as well as struggles feel genuine and relatable enough (even if our protagonist comes off as unbearable sometimes). The novel (while briefly) explores themes of bisexuality identity, family in a way that feels fresh and engaging, also addresses issues like homophobia and racism, making it a timely and relevant read. There's lot to redeem if we leave out the political ranting.

Overall it still it serves its purpose of being a young adults novel that intend for you to swoon over. Though hardcore "enemy to lovers" fan might feel underwhelmed, as tension was laid out but never pushed to its full potential. The build-up between Alex and Henry lacked the necessary intensity to create friction between them. (spoilers: it took them about 100 pages to get to sex). Personally the book doesn't owe anyone to adhere to the typical enemy-to-lover formula, but in settings like these, smart exposition will go a long way in crafting timeless chemistry.

At it's best it's a sexy, fluffy contemporary romance, that (occasionally) nails teen-angst, witty coming-of-age humor, and the crisis of being in love and confused in your 20s. At it's worst it's a predictable rose-colored view of society infused with on-the-nose political propaganda. Final Rating: B-

____________________________________________________________

(Spoilers ahead)

What I like The humor (Henry trying to hum God Save the Queen to get rid of a boner was hysterical) The witty bantering, not just Henry and Alex, but also June, Nora and Ellen create fantastic chemistry, and really portrays politicians as comical and troubled as all of us normies are.

My favorite characters undoubtedly Henry, but what's attractive, beyond his intelligence and wit, is our insight into his complex personality. There is certain endearment in seeing the depth that someone kept hidden behind their reserve and guarded public appeal, a kind of wonderfully earned intimacy, the more sexier when its the prince of England.

What put me off Given the context that Casey McQuiston was motivated to created this perfect liberal world (according to the book' note, she felt hopeless after the 2016 election's results) it makes sense that she would draw up this magical rose-colored political landscape as a way to cope with the situation. It is undoubtedly the world we all hope to live in, but the overall execution felt forceful, even for someone who isn't well-versed in American politics like I am. Even I can tell, some of the UK's representation sounds rather stereotypical and misleading.

It would be better if had it been a piece about the cultural clash between American and English's culture. Both Alex and Henry have very rich and fascinated background, they are both knowledgeable in their respective nationality and heritage. It's gonna be fascinating to see to see these two banter on their differences.

Would I read it again? Yes, the book is generally quite entertaining and Henry and Alex have impeccable chemistry, the overall premise is simple enough to get me off my reading slump (if you only include the spicy parts and exclude whatever migraine-inducing politics there was in between)

This is perfect for when you need to pick up a hopeful, lighthearted and enemy-to-lovers story that will make you inevitably blush not recommended for Republican, conservatives, or someone who hates getting involved in politics at all.

[whileiamdying]

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” Transcends the Holiday-Movie Genre

Tyler Thomas Taormina’s comedy drama about a Long Island family boasts some of the year’s sharpest characterizations and a strikingly original narrative form. By Richard Brody November 8, 2024

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form. But this paradoxical blend turns out to make perfect sense in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” a finely crafted and achingly romantic memory piece, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina. It’s set sometime in the two-thousands in the fictional Long Island town of the title, where members of a large Italian American family, the Balsanos, come together to celebrate the holiday. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, who both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since middle school, the movie checks the genre’s boxes—long-awaited reunions and poignant separations, hearty festivity and romantic intimacy—but it does so in a way that provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence.

The clan’s matriarch, Antonia (Mary Reistetter), at whose house the Balsanos have gathered, is physically and mentally deteriorating, spending most of her time parked in an easy chair, offering wan greetings. The house teems with at least twenty family members—siblings, cousins, grandkids, other halves, and in-laws, ranging from toddlers to the elderly—plus some friends. Amid the revelry, fundamental relationships are drawn with a clarity that lays bare suppressed anguish, smothered disputes, and painful secrets. Antonia’s four grown children are gradually introduced. There is the poised and pensive Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), who’s there with her husband and two kids, one of whom, a teen named Emily (Matilda Fleming), biliously resents her. Kathleen’s sister, the energetic Elyse (Maria Carucci), is married to the flamboyantly domineering Ron (Steve Alleva), who cooks up the holiday feast while inveighing against the looming prospect of “chaos and insurrection.” Their brother Matt (John J. Trischetti, Jr.) is their mother’s caregiver, living in the house with his wife, Bev (Grege Morris). Matt instigates the film’s main conflict when he proposes selling the house and moving their mother into a nearby nursing home—a plan that surprises his sisters and enrages his brother, Ray (Tony Savino), a widowed blowhard with a hidden artistic streak.

It’s a mark of Taormina’s audacious way with narrative architecture that the scene in which this conflict bursts forth—which includes the piquant detail of Ray yelling at Matt while on an exercise bike—is the movie’s only traditional scene of overt exposition and constructed argument. Mostly, Taormina proceeds in fragments and snippets, with exquisitely rapid touches of dialogue and behavior which bring to life a house that is full of stories and long-standing tensions. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of the individual and the group; it’s a coming-of-age tale about many ages but also a reckoning with the frustrations of adolescence, the many varieties of loneliness in adulthood, and the struggle to define oneself against the identity assigned by a tight-knit family.

Taormina’s idiosyncratic artistry, which was evident in his first feature, “Ham on Rye” (2019), has now, in his third, developed into uninhibited cinematic self-assertion. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” bolsters my belief that a great movie usually reveals itself quickly, in its first scenes and even in its first shots. The film’s distinctive combination of sharp, nuanced writing and enticingly original visual compositions grabs the viewer almost instantly. In moments seemingly caught on the fly, characters flit through the house and out of it, meeting and separating, sharing laughs and exchanging confidences, giving voice to dreams and troubles in casual remarks and offhand gestures. The cinematographer, Carson Lund, festively ornaments the screen with points and streaks of color and light, and his drifting camera conjures murmurs of the past, recalling shots in classic memory films by Max Ophüls and Alain Resnais.

Taormina punctuates the familial drama with several spectacular set pieces, such as a festive meal at which an elderly woman named Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati) delivers a loving litany of the departed; a scene of teary-eyed melancholy in which the family turns off the lights and watches home movies; and a Christmas Eve tradition in which the family joins neighbors to watch the local fire department’s procession of fire engines festooned with Christmas decorations. Yet even such large-scale pageantry gives rise to brisk strokes of high drama, as when Emily unleashes adolescent hostility at the dinner table or when Kathleen becomes the bearer of a burdensome secret.

Meanwhile, at the edges of the action, the movie features micro-incidents of the sort that burrow deep in the mind, a whole box of madeleine moments in the making: a bunch of kids playing video games in the basement realize that the family iguana is missing, and one goes into a dark storage room to look for it; a waggish guest finds Isabelle asleep in a stair lift and presses a button to send her gliding downstairs unawares; Ray, on the patio, talks business into a landline with a very long cord; Ron declares that society is “survival of the fists,” a malapropism that he reinforces by putting up his dukes; Kathleen tries to cheer up an ailing boy with a little dance of uninhibited joy.

The overwhelming profusion of incidents and details, of sidelong glances in crowded frames and notable actions occurring in the background, is reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s films. Taormina’s ornamental sensibility is far less artificial—he adorns a largely realistic cinematic world with seemingly spontaneous touches and serendipitous observations—but, as with Anderson’s work, the movie should be viewed at least twice to be truly seen: the action moves fast, its connections are implicit, and the talk is brilliantly epigrammatic, leaving viewers to look back and catch up while risking missing out on new pleasures as they speed along.

Taormina, like Anderson, also encourages a distinctive mode of performance. Few of the actors in the Balsano clan have long résumés—Dizzia is the most prominent, and her attentive, eloquent performance deftly meshes with Fleming’s, as Emily—but Taormina’s perceptive direction grants everyone moments in the spotlight. The movie seems to create actors along with characters.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” pivots on a twist of sorts that’s too good to mention but also too good not to. Emily and a cousin, Michelle (Francesca Scorsese), who’s a little bit older and a little bit bolder, sneak out of the house to meet their friends and take a car ride that Kathleen has forbidden. With this leap into the unknown, the movie instantly becomes a story of teen-age discovery, by turns passionate, tender, and goofy. It begins with a comedic wink at a young driver’s inexperience, and includes the motormouth intellectualism of a local boy, Craig (Leo Hervey). In an extended sequence of late-night snacks and seductions at a bagel shop, featuring a memorable cameo by Elsie Fisher, Craig’s smarty-pants riffs take on an earnest weight as Emily deems Christmas gifts “capitalist propaganda” and ponders what to do with hers. As the night progresses from jollity to intimacy, Taormina discovers wondrously discreet and delicate visual correlates for teen lust, including at its most fumbling. (The end credits give a sense of the comedy of the teens’ tussles, listing such characters as Bubble Gum Gal and Kiss-Marked Dope.)

At this point, the story brings Emily and the other teens into contact with two other groups—three postadolescent slackers who hang out at a graveyard, sullenly smoking (the most voluble of whom is played by Sawyer Spielberg), and two police officers with the misfortune of working on Christmas Eve (played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington). They provide a sense of a wider world that may look absurd to the teens—they mock yet fear the slackers and hardly notice the sad-eyed officers—but which for Taormina, older and wiser, is full of pathos. (This is perhaps laid on a bit thick, these older characters’ identities subordinated to the meaning that Taormina assigns them.)

Those streaks of exaggerated melancholy in the grubby ordinariness of suburban life don’t detract from the exalted tone of Taormina’s suburban reveries. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of gimlet-eyed nostalgia. An image of Emily taking refuge in the woods at night connects her teen life with the grandeur of classic-era melodrama, and few movies ever tap the kind of intense emotion that Taormina stirs with a bag of dumpster-dived bagels. Without losing sight of what’s banal and petty in suburban life, he imbues it with a sense of grace that emerges both from personal relationships and from the aesthetic of daily life—transcendence despite itself. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Yule Rules.”

[mooresmithtreecare]

Nashville’s Architectural Wonders: A Guide to the City's Iconic Buildings

Discover a city that seamlessly blends history with modernity through its architectural wonders. Welcome to Nashville, where iconic buildings captivate both locals and visitors alike. In this guide, we will take you on a virtual tour of the city's most celebrated structures, each showcasing a unique piece of Nashville's rich architectural heritage.

From the majestic Tennessee State Capitol building, with its stunning Greek Revival style, to the grand Ryman Auditorium, hailed as the "Mother Church of Country Music," there is something to marvel at in every corner of Nashville. Explore the sleek lines of the Frist Art Museum, housed in a former post office building, and be transported back in time as you step into the opulent interiors of the historic Union Station Hotel.

Designed to both inspire and educate, this guide will not only introduce you to Nashville's architectural wonders but also delve into the stories behind each building, revealing the significant contributions they have made to the city's culture and identity.

Join us as we uncover the hidden gems and cherished landmarks that define Nashville's captivating architectural landscape. Get ready to be amazed by the city's extraordinary blend of past and present.

The Parthenon: Nashville's Replica of the Ancient Greek Temple

Nashville's Parthenon stands as a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens, Greece, embodying an unparalleled blend of art, culture, and history. Erected in 1897 as part of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, this architectural marvel serves not only as a monument to ancient Greek civilization but also celebrates Tennessee's rich cultural heritage.

Inside, the Parthenon houses an art museum featuring a collection of 19th and 20th-century American paintings. At its heart lies a towering statue of Athena, meticulously crafted to mirror the ancient original. This structure is a testament to Nashville's moniker, the "Athens of the South," showcasing the city's deep appreciation for classical beauty and architectural grandeur.

The Parthenon’s presence in Nashville goes beyond mere aesthetics; it represents the city's commitment to education, culture, and the arts. Its enduring legacy continues to inspire visitors, drawing parallels between ancient civilizations and modern society, and highlighting the timeless nature of architectural excellence.

The AT&T Building: Nashville's Iconic "Batman Building"

Dominating Nashville's skyline, the AT&T Building, affectionately known as the "Batman Building," is a modern architectural phenomenon. Its distinctive twin spires, resembling the ears of the iconic superhero's mask, make it one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city. Completed in 1994, this skyscraper is not only a testament to contemporary design but also marks Nashville's foray into the era of modern skyscrapers.

The building's significance extends beyond its unique silhouette. It represents Nashville's growth and development as a major urban center, mirroring the city's evolution while respecting its historical roots. The AT&T Building is more than just an office tower; it's a symbol of Nashville's dynamic progress and its thriving future.

At night, the building comes alive, with its spires illuminated, casting a watchful eye over the city. This visual spectacle adds to the building's mystique, making it a beloved feature of Nashville's nightscape. The AT&T Building encapsulates the spirit of innovation and ambition that drives the city forward.

Ryman Auditorium: The Historic Home of Country Music

Ryman Auditorium, often called the "Mother Church of Country Music," is hallowed ground for music lovers worldwide. Originally built as a tabernacle in 1892, it evolved into a cultural institution, hosting the Grand Ole Opry for decades. Its intimate setting and exceptional acoustics have made it a favored venue among musicians and fans alike.

The Ryman's Gothic Revival architecture adds a sense of timelessness to its concerts and events. This historic venue has seen performances by legends of country music, cementing its place in the annals of music history. It's a living museum where every concert feels like a journey through time.

Today, the Ryman Auditorium serves as a beacon for aspiring artists and a pilgrimage site for music enthusiasts. Its preservation as a National Historic Landmark underscores its importance not just to Nashville but to the heritage of American music. The Ryman is a testament to the enduring appeal of country music and its ability to bring people together.

Exploring Nashville's Architectural Treasures

Nashville's architectural landscape is a vivid tapestry that weaves together threads of history, art, culture, and innovation. From the classical grandeur of the Parthenon to the modern majesty of the AT&T Building, and the historical significance of the Ryman Auditorium, these structures tell the story of a city that honors its past while boldly marching into the future.

Exploring Nashville's architectural wonders offers a glimpse into the soul of the city. It's an invitation to experience the harmony between the old and the new, the traditional and the contemporary. Each building, with its own story and significance, contributes to the rich cultural tapestry that makes Nashville unique.

As we conclude this guide, it's clear that Nashville's architectural treasures are not just buildings; they are landmarks of human creativity and spirit. They stand as testaments to the city's resilience, its vibrant culture, and its unwavering commitment to excellence. Nashville invites you to explore, to discover, and to be inspired by its architectural wonders—a journey that promises to be as enriching as it is unforgettable.

How to Choose the Right Tree Service and Tree Trimming in Nashville, TN

Are you looking for a reliable tree service and tree trimming provider in Nashville TN? Look no further! I am the owner of Moore & Smith Tree Care, and I am dedicated to providing top-notch tree care services to the residents of Nashville and its surrounding areas.

Choosing the right tree service is crucial for the health and safety of your trees, as well as the aesthetics of your property. With my years of experience in the industry, I understand the unique needs of each tree and strive to deliver tailored solutions that meet your expectations.

When it comes to selecting a tree service, there are a few key factors to consider. First, ensure that the company is licensed, insured, and certified. This will give you peace of mind knowing that the service provider adheres to industry standards and practices. Additionally, it's important to choose a company that has a proven track record of delivering high-quality work and has positive reviews from satisfied customers.

At Moore & Smith Tree Care, we take pride in our exceptional customer service and attention to detail. Our team of skilled arborists is passionate about trees and will go above and beyond to ensure your trees are healthy, safe, and beautiful.

Importance of Choosing the Right Tree Service

Selecting a reputable tree service provider is not just about maintaining the aesthetics of your property; it's about ensuring the health and longevity of your trees. A professional tree service can advise on the best care routines and treatments for your trees, helping to prevent diseases and pest infestations that can cause long-term damage.

Moreover, experienced arborists have the knowledge and equipment necessary to perform tree trimming and removal safely. Improper tree care can pose significant risks to your property, your trees, and even personal safety. Therefore, choosing the right tree service is an investment in the well-being of your entire property.

Researching Tree Service Providers in Nashville TN

Nashville, TN, is home to a diverse range of tree species, each with its specific care requirements. When looking for a tree service provider, start by researching companies with experience in handling the specific types of trees on your property.

The internet is a valuable resource for finding and comparing local tree services. Most reputable companies have websites and social media profiles where you can learn about their services, experience, and customer feedback. Additionally, local community boards and forums can be great places to ask for recommendations.

Considerations When Choosing a Tree Service

Checking for Proper Licensing and Insurance

One of the first steps in choosing a tree service provider is to verify their licensing and insurance. A licensed company has met the state or local municipality’s requirements to operate as a tree service provider. Insurance, particularly liability and workers' compensation insurance, protects you and your property in the event of accidents or damages.

Evaluating the Experience and Expertise of the Tree Service Provider

The experience and expertise of a tree service provider are crucial to ensuring the health of your trees and the safety of your property. Inquire about the qualifications of the arborists on staff. Certified arborists have undergone rigorous training and examination to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in tree care.

Reading Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Customer reviews and testimonials can provide insight into the quality of service and customer satisfaction. Look for reviews on independent websites, as well as the company’s own site. Pay attention to how the company responds to both positive and negative feedback, as this can indicate their level of customer service and professionalism.

Requesting a Free Consultation and Estimate

Most reputable tree service providers offer free consultations and estimates. This is an opportunity for you to meet with an arborist, discuss your tree care needs, and get a sense of the company’s approach. It’s also a chance to ask questions and clarify any concerns you may have about the services offered.

Understanding the Services Offered by the Tree Service Provider

Comprehensive tree care encompasses more than just trimming and removal. Inquire about the range of services offered, such as disease management, pest control, soil care, and emergency services. A provider that offers a full spectrum of tree care services can better meet the diverse needs of your trees.

Comparing Prices and Getting Multiple Quotes

While price should not be the sole factor in choosing a tree service provider, it is an important consideration. Get quotes from several companies to compare prices and understand what is included in their services. Be wary of quotes that are significantly lower than others, as this may indicate a lack of experience or insurance.

Making the Final Decision and Scheduling Tree Trimming Services

After considering all the factors mentioned above, it's time to make your final decision. Choose the tree service provider that you feel most confident in, based on their expertise, reputation, and the value they offer. Once you've made your choice, schedule the necessary tree trimming or care services to ensure your trees remain healthy and beautiful for years to come.

Conclusion

Finding the right tree service and tree trimming provider in Nashville, TN, requires careful consideration and research. By choosing a licensed, insured, and experienced provider like Moore & Smith Tree Care, you can ensure the health and safety of your trees and property. Remember, your trees are a vital part of your landscape and deserve the best care possible. Don't hesitate to contact Moore & Smith Tree Care today for all your tree care needs.

This condensed version serves as a foundation for creating a comprehensive 3000-word blog article. To expand it further, delve deeper into each section, providing detailed examples, additional advice, and possibly incorporating more specific information about the services offered by Moore & Smith Tree Care. Learn more.

Moore & Smith Tree Care LLC 301 S Perimeter Park Dr #100, Nashville, TN 37211, United States (615) 877–8733 https://nashvilletntreeservice.com/

[fearsmagazine]

BLACKWATER LANE - Review

DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate

SYNOPSIS: Following a traumatic incident on a perilous rural road, Blackwater Lane, Cass encounters a spectral entity, leading her to question her own mental stability. As these paranormal occurrences escalate in intensity, Cass's sanity begins to unravel, compelling her to piece together the fragments of a sinister conspiracy against her.

REVIEW: Derived from B.A. Paris'Jeff Celentano bestselling book, "The Breakdown," BLACKWATER LANE presents a complex mystery with supernatural elements at its core, weaving a classic gaslighting narrative.

I am unfamiliar with the novel, so I cannot provide any insight into it. The screenplay employs the classic stately British manor setting, complete with rumors of haunting. Renovations undertaken by the new American expats, Cass and Matthew, seem to stir up supernatural occurrences. While the story has a supernatural tone, it also suggests that Cass' mother's mental illness may be contributing to Cass’ experiences. The plot strikes this balance between a Scooby Doo-like mystery and cozy mystery, notably lacking any feline or canine companions. The film's opening scene depicts Cass performing a tarot card reading, establishing her spiritual beliefs, establishing her mindset but never fully exploiting that. Subsequent supernatural elements and allusions remain minimal. The PG-13 rating restricts the film's potential impact, resulting in a lack of gravitas. Although a death occurs, Cass' reaction appears bizarre and unrealistic. The plot suffers from excessive exposition, as Cass explains not only the motivations of those attempting to harm her but also the actions she and her allies took to expose them. Just when the narrative appears to have concluded, a voiceover emerges to end the story.

The plot revolves around Cass, her husband Matthew, and her best friend Rachel. Rachel's actions seemed forced and artificial, given the complex and absurd nature of her storyline. Matthew, on the other hand, comes across as a weak and unprincipled character. Among Cass's supporting cast, some characters suffer from shallowness, cliches, and rigidity, mostly due to simplistic and obvious dialogue. Certain scenes led me to boredom, as the narrative's progression became predictable.

BLACKWATER LANE presents utilitarian production elements. While the locations, sets, and costumes are visually pleasing, the cinematography and framing lack atmosphere. The editing, although adequate, fails to generate energy or create suspense and terror. Nathan Halpern and Robert Pycior's score, while commendable, struggles to elevate the film's emotional state. Consequently, the overall feel of the film resembles a made-for-television production.

Regarding the cast, Minka Kelly's performance took some time to resonate with me, which is peculiar because I've admired her portrayal of Dove in the DC series "Titans." There was an unusual aspect to her voice, perhaps an accent, that was initially off-putting. Additionally, I struggled to connect with her character due to the combination of her performance and the dialogue, which distanced me from the emotional impact of the drama.

Dermot Mulroney's performance also left something to be desired. While his character is portrayed as manipulated, he came across as spineless and devoid of any substantial presence. The character should ultimately evoke a sense of villainy, but I didn't feel any genuine connection or trust in him from his initial appearance on screen.

On the other hand, actress Maggie Grace, a seasoned performer with notable credits such as the "Fear the Walking Dead" series and the "Taken" film trilogy, delivers the strongest performance among the three leads. However, there seems to be something lacking in the role itself. I didn't perceive a clear core justification for her actions or any malicious intent. While the character possesses a certain strength, it feels superficial and lacks depth.

As a fan of well-crafted gaslight and mystery films, I was intrigued by the 1944 classic "Gaslight" featuring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. The emotional scars inflicted by the 1964 film, "Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte," starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead, remain vivid in my memory. However, "BLACKWATER LANE" falls short of expectations. It lacks the captivating elements that make a film in this genre truly memorable. The pacing seems tailored for commercial television, with moments that feel convenient breaks for advertisements.

The performances in "BLACKWATER LANE" are puzzling. Although there may have been issues with the script, the actors appeared disengaged and off-key. Despite these shortcomings, I'm still curious about B.A. Paris' novel, which served as the inspiration for the film adaptation. Perhaps there is something inherent in the story that enticed filmmakers to bring it to the big screen.

CAST: Minka Kelly, Maggie Grace, Dermot Mulroney, Natalie Simpson and Judah Cousin. CREW: Director - Jeff Celentano; Screenplay/Producer - Elizabeth Fowler; Based on the novel “The Breakdown” by B.A. Paris; Producers - Warren Ostergard, Shaun Sanghani, & Lucinda Rhodes Thakrar; Cinematographer - Felix Cramer; Score - Nathan Halpern & Robert Pycior; Editor - Douglas Crise; Production Designer - Steven Legler; Costume Designer - Arianna Dal Cero; Special Effects Supervisor -Errol Jarc & Mike Knights; Visual Effects - MOD VFX & LipSync Post. OFFICIAL: www.lionsgate.com/movies/blackwater-lane FACEBOOK: N.A. TWITTER: N.A. TRAILER: https://youtu.be/Vxf3wp5aOm0?si=lb5fV3A1f-1yYMRB RELEASE DATE: In Theaters and Digital/OnDemand on June 21st, 2024

**Until we can all head back into the theaters our “COVID Reel Value” will be similar to how you rate a film on digital platforms - ���� (Like), 👌 (It’s just okay), or 👎 (Dislike)

Reviewed by Joseph B Mauceri

[heywoodsays]

Animated Short: War Is Over!

The nominees are:

Letter to a Pig

Ninety-Five Senses

Our Uniform

Pachyderme

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko is almost certain to walk away with this year’s Oscar for Best Animated Short. And… it’s fine. Really, it’s an okay short, but it’s (by far) my least favorite of the five nominees. While War Is Over! seems like it was crafted to win an Oscar, the other nominees each offer something unique to the field.

Our Uniform, a 7-minute short from Iran, uses stop motion on fabric to tell its story about schoolgirls wearing the hijab.

France’s Pachyderme is the most conservative in its animation technique yet is still highly creative in the way it uses those techniques to tell its difficult, heart-wrenching story. It’s cleaned up all the European awards.

The Israeli/French Letter to a Pig has been a favorite at North American festivals. Its themes surrounding the holocaust and generational trauma may resonate strongly with American Academy members, especially in the current political climate.

But my favorite animated short this year was Ninety-Five Senses, featuring the voice of Tim Blake Nelson of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs fame. The film uses different animation styles in its exposition of each of the five senses, and its poignant story keeps you gripped for the full 14 minutes.

Who will win: War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko

But look out for: Letter to a Pig

Who I’d vote for: Ninety-Five Senses

If I could add one more: Humo

◄ Previous: Live Action Short | Next: Documentary Short ►

2024 OSCAR PICKS | FEATURES AND SHORTS: International Feature | Animated Feature | Documentary Feature | Live Action Short | Animated Short | Documentary Short | TRADE CRAFTS: Cinematography | Film Editing | Production Design | Costume Design | Makeup and Hairstyling | Sound | Visual Effects | Original Score | Original Song | TOP CATEGORIES: Original Screenplay | Adapted Screenplay | Supporting Actor | Supporting Actress | Actor | Actress | Director | Picture | TOP 10 FILMS OF 2023

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black: For A World Without Gold - Chapter 5 is now live!

In this chapter... shit gets real. Like, it's even more real than was thought previously possible, with a new fight scene and the introduction of an Anti-Knight Saber powersuited-cyborg kill team, all in the winding decks of a cargo ship lost at sea. That kind of real.

AG Fabrikraft: A wholly original megacorporation I drew up for this fic, one of several that will be a part of the Concern. To exposit in here without expositing out in the main fic, Fabrikraft is a cross-Scandinavian industrial titan, funded with the last of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund's oil money (petrochemicals are barely used now for, like, anything unless there's political reasons to keep them around) to make a giant focused around industrial, commercial, and consumer-grade additive manufacturing. There might be a bit of Chinese money in there, too, the same way the Chinese own Volvo IRL, but if there is it's laundered through too many intermediaries for anyone to tell. Most people in the 2060's know Fabrikraft as a sort of bastard cross between IKEA and Walmart, rapidly printing and assembling anything a consumer could want on-site or in the comfort of a consumer's home. Furniture, appliances, toys, weapons (print-a-gun vending machines are a depressingly common sight on American streets), feedstock-based food, things like that. Nothing as complex as a Boomer or even a neuromorphic computer, but Fabrikraft tech is used pretty prolifically in light industry to build parts of a whole. More and more, creators and inventors are turning to Fabrikraft's ManaCast network to provide blueprints for objects and gizmos to people around the world - from my CAD system to your CAM system, basically. The big catch is that Fabrikraft owns every blueprint uploaded to ManaCast, no exceptions, and as such they will copy and genericize anything developed by smaller organizations, then promote their own cloned products to kill competitors. Since their business is based on turning the ethereal into the physical, they're behind serious IP restrictions on digital content worldwide. No competition is allowed. So... yeah. That's Fabrikraft. Hopefully they're a cleverer Evil Megacorp business model than the kinds that usually populate cyberpunk settings.

A Brief Note On The Lagoon's Construction: I never did cover this, did I? Well, I'm covering it now, to detail that the Black Lagoon in this timeline is not a century-old WW2 Elco torpedo boat. However, it fulfills a very similar function by virtue of being a slightly larger Fast Attack Craft from World War Three. So! The Black Lagoon. A Halcyon-class Fast Attack Craft with light-stealthy features, a fancy fiberglass-and-armor hull, and two main weapons: An eight-shot HASh-M missile launcher, and an anti-air / anti-drone swarm laser gun. It was originally meant to be a cheap, semi-autonomous way to deliver ship-killing missiles into the heart of Chinese naval fleets around the Pacific Rim, either acting as an escort for bigger ships like cruisers and carriers or to damage the bigger ships on the enemy's side. In other words, it filled the same function as a WW2 Elco torpedo boat, but with more range and more survivability. Now, how did Dutch get his hands on one of these? Who knows. I've got secret backstories planned out for pretty much everyone of note except Dutch for this fic. Man's a goddamn enigma. Too bad.

Aaditri Nath: This a Bengali name, IIRC, with Aaditri being a derivative of the name of the goddess Lakshmi. Nath is just a surname. I think. I don't remember what exactly what was going through my mind beyond 'find a good Bengali name for this ship' for... reasons. You'll see in the next chapter.

More Details About the Space Development Bubble: Yeah, this is a sci-fi plot beat I'm pretty proud of, inspired by old-timey financial crises such as the South Sea Bubble, when the sinewy structure of capitalism was still mutating and evolving with a mix of a certain kind of technocynicism. So, since there's no real room to exposit on what happened in the mainline fic (though I had plans to do so in previous abandoned projects), let's go for it. So! It's after World War Three, and the financial system where Chinese and American debt (government bonds) are the bedrock of the global financial system is kaput. Both empires have spent nearly five years fighting each other to a bloody standstill and accelerating climate change beyond reasonable limits (while also making it clear that fossil fuel infrastructure is infinitely more fragile than renewables, so the one good thing that comes from the war is accelerating the death of petrogarchy), and no one wants to trust their money. So now there's a big void in the global financial system, and even if Cold War Two is gearing up, and even if Belt and Road / IMF financial imperialism is no longer really feasible, there still needs to be a bedrock guarantee in investor portfolios. What to do? Enter the Space Public Development Corporation, a semipublic / semiprivate conglomerate of space agencies and aerospace companies, washing their wartime excesses with Muskian 'planet's fucked let's go to Mars' rhetoric. Given nearly a trillion in seed funding, they propose a simple plan to get even more money to build a fully-fledged Lunar Colony by 2069, a fully-functional Space Elevator a little before or after that, and Lagrange Point O'Neil Cylinders by the end of the century. Armstrong Bonds: Invest now, and within decades you'll have your money back in kind, ensured by orbital manufacturing and asteroid mining's infinite bounty. So once earnest space exploitation (not exploration lol) starts to pay dividends to some people around the 2050's or so, the SPDC becomes an inadvertent anchor of the global financial system. And once the SPDC becomes dependent on GENOM for Boomer labor for orbital and lunar development, that just extends GENOM's power. One could track this, so it's said, by the way Anchorpoint went from an industrial town, a megastructure disguised as a city, to a city with luxury and financial districts for the rich and powerful to enjoy the promise of the future. And then, on July 20th, 2069 - a century from the lunar landing - the grand opening of the Lunar Expo and Tranquility City is bombed. The entire colony just goes up. What follows is a secretive week known as Orbit War One, a mess of battles between the SPDC's assets and rampant Boomers hellbent on disassembling those assets. The lunar massdriver is almost hijacked to Moon-is-a-harsh-mistress major Earth cities; the skeletal Lagrange point space stations go down for the count; satellites both military and civilian are vaporized. In other words, trillions of dollars in investments are just gone. And it gets worse, because then a cascade of leaks reveal how behind schedule and over budget most of the big development projects are, how many lies have been told, how the SPDC has become one big pyramid embezzlement scheme. Suddenly Armstrong bonds are worthless, the cyberpunk equivalent of the US or China defaulting on their debt in the present. Suddenly deflation is starting to set in, because there is no other stable anchor for hyperfinancialized capitalism. Suddenly a lot of people don't have the money they were promised. Why do I like this as a plot point? Because I think cyberpunk writers dealing with megacorps seem to think that megacorps and quasifeudal capitalism are a stable, unmovable system. It isn't. Witness the 2008 crash, witness Japan and now China's real estate bubbles, witness any number of points where faith in capital's wisdom lead to collapse.

Sail Kite: This is a real thing, launching giant parasail-shaped kites out into the air to 'sail' the titanic cargo ships that are key to the delivery of goods in our globalized world, and thereby reduce their emissions.

Huginn / Muninn: Avimorph 'drones' are basically birdlike Boomers that can hover like hummingbirds despite their size, replacing quadcopter drones everywhere. Huginn and Muninn are Nene's surveillance drones that she uses to scope out an area if the Sabers have 'prep time', to borrow a phrase from Batman fans, named after the ravens that sat on Odin's shoulders, from Norse Mythology. Nene named them thus not because of any connection to the Nords, but out of sheer chunni energy. Awhile back, by the way, I had a very stupid idea: Fujoshi Nene. "I have written half a dozen friendfic doujins about Leon and Daley, they have sold impossibly well at Neo-Cyber-Comiket, you cannot stop me."

The Anzio: Yes, 20mm Vulcan anti-materiel rifles are real. No, a real-life Anzio would not be the kind of thing you could run across a slippery deck with, they're fuckin' huge and I mentally scaled them down to the size of a Barrett fiddy-cal for this fight scene. I am genuinely sorry for this inaccuracy, but the scene still works regardless. I think. I might be wrong. I have been wrong about my own writing before, ask anyone who's ever read Divine Patronage.

The Zombie Squad: So! Here we have the Evil Knight Sabers Be Like moment, framing a Sinister Squad of Supervillains who can oppose the Sabers so that the Saber-oriented fight scenes aren't just fighting various teams of Boomers. So let's break them down. First off, the name came from one of my favorite Chapo Trap House episodes, where they review Stallone's Cobra, a film where the Super Cool Cop Man is on something called the 'Zombie Squad', which in turn was inspired by spec-op-ish squads of Belgian police who would practice vigilantism. Nasty stuff, but cool to the 80's attitude of 'why don't the cops just kill all the bad guys'. Yeesh. But the name takes on extra dimensions here, not just because of the ancient Egyptian god names (the pantheon is called the... Ogdoad, or something like that? I forget) referencing a culture obsessed with death, but because, in case you haven't noticed, all the ZS members refer to each other as corpses of one sort or another. Now, as to the identity of each squadmember? I'll reveal them bit by bit, trickle by trickle, but I'll give you a hint for now: No Member Is An Original Character. That's right, they All Come From Crisis And Lagoon Genre-Adjacent Properties, If Not The Properties Themselves. Moreover, They Have All Died Once. The hunt is on. See if you can figure out who's who! Message me if you know! Or just hang out in the BGC Discord where I'll probably spoil it all very aggressively.

Squad Suits: Heavily based off of this image from the Bubblegum Crisis EX RPG expansion, which itself used pre-production concept art willy-nilly:

Anyway, take away the tread feet and specialize each mech a bit and that's the approximate size and shape of a Squad powersuit.

Piledriver Weapon: I have not played Armored Core 6. Yet.

Ba Xing Chong: Yes, that is a reference to the gun you get when you kill Adam Smasher in Cyberpunk 2077, the homing explosive-slug volley gun that might as well be a minimissile launcher, which it essentially is here. And, yes, it's mounted under something very close to the MK.31 HMG from Cyberpunk 2077, although not really that. Intersections with CP2077 / 2020's world and BGC2069 are, as evinced by my two abandoned projects Witch of Tranquility and Handful of Dust, still very much present here. Ugh, I need to orphan or delete those projects someday, they're a mark of immense shame for me.

Koko Hekmatyar: Whoo boy. I've set myself a challenge here. That's right, folks, Jormungand's Koko Hekmatyar, charismatic arms dealer, megalomaniac, and probable shotacon (ick), is one of the main villains of this fic, the shadowy face of GENOM's involvement with the sinister plot to take over Roanapur! And that's right, folks, I haven't seen Jormungand and don't really plan to anytime soon, because it looks somewhat drab as an anime absent Koko! But look. Plenty of Lagoon fics will drag Koko into their shenanigans just for funsies. Bullets, the fic I reviewed so highly awhile ago, just throws her in there like that to make more jokes, mostly at her expense. So is it a big deal if I throw her in there to perform the role of maniacal antagonist? I don't think it is. We'll see more of her in chapters to come, though. Make no mistake about that. Her goals are her own, and her power is unmistakable. She might have left Daddy's company, but she still wields forces that can level nations and lesser empires.

I should also mention that Chapter 6 might not come out until after my usual monthly posting deadline, just so people aren't surprised. I had plans for the chapter, wrote a great deal of them, then scrapped them when I realized they didn't work, so now it's back to the drawing board. Ah well.

[thelondoninsider]

The Western Classic: Iconic Cowboy Hats and Their Story

In quest of an emblem embodying unyielding self-reliance, the quintessence of American legacy, and enduring sartorial finesse, cast your gaze toward the legendary cowboy hat. Within this exhaustive exposition, we shall embark on a profound odyssey into the annals, handiwork, and abiding allure of this iconic headwear. From its unassuming origins to its elevation as a global vogue statement, the cowboy hat has indeed withstood the trials of temporal flux.

Discover the rich narrative behind the cowboy hat, from its humble beginnings in the 1860s to becoming an emblem of the American frontier. Delve into the exquisite craftsmanship that makes each hat a masterpiece, whether crafted from felt or straw. Explore the diverse styles, from the classic Western to the iconic Stetson.

But that’s just the beginning. The cowboy hat’s influence extends beyond ranches, reaching Hollywood screens and high-end fashion runways. Join us on this journey through history, craftsmanship, and style, and learn why the cowboy hat preserves its timeless and iconic character. Don’t miss out; it’s a tale that spans epochs and geographies.

Source: The London Insider

Also Read: Discover Jake DeVito's Journey from Legacy to Stardom

[oxboykev]

This President's Day, William McKinley, the 25th President of the US (1897-1901), comes to mind because of the historical streams running through his administration, Southeast Asia, and Buffalo and Rochester, NY, all of which are intimate to my own Being.

When the Spanish-American War jumped off in early 1898, McKinley rode the wave of Manifest Destiny and led the American military to victory against Spain. As a result of the Treaty of Paris in December 1898, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were ceded to American control. During the Philippine-American War the American military gained experience in waging counter-insurgency warfare within a foreign land and crafted better techniques in putting down an indigenous independence movement. Many of the methods used in that war were put to use in America's intervention in the civil war in Vietnam during the '50s and '60s.

McKinley was overwhelmingly popular among much of the American public because of the brevity and ultimate success of the Spanish-American War which catapulted the US into world power status. But on September 6, 1901, he was assassinated in Buffalo, NY during the Pan-American Exposition. The assassin, Leon Czolgosz, claimed he was inspired to act because of a speech made by Emma Goldman, famed American anarchist, in Cleveland a couple days prior. Here's where the Rochester, NY connection comes in: Goldman had emigrated to Rochester from Russia in 1886 and lived there until 1888 when she moved to New York City to begin her life's ambition to be an anarchist firebrand. 

[scribblesartcollective]

Sargent Claude Johnson is hard to categorize. He worked with so many mediums. Oil, stone, clay, watercolor... and more. He is probably best known for his ceramic and sculpture works, his masks and figures in the round. The third of 6 children, he was a mixed race man. His father of Swedish ancestry and his mother of Black-Indigenous ancestry. Both of his parents would die before he was an adult. He and his siblings would move to live with their aunt and uncle in Washington DC. His aunt, May Howard Jackson, was a skilled sculptor working largely in portraiture and a prominent figure in DC's black intellectual culture. Her work must have influenced and inspired Sargent. But, he was not there long. His brothers and himself were sent to an Orphanage while his sisters went to a Catholic School for racialized peoples. What happened between then and the beginning of his career as an artist, isn't known. What is known, is in 1915, he moved to the Bay Area, married and began attending the A.W. Best school of Art, all in the same year. He would also attend the San Francisco Art Institute then called the California School of Fine Art. His first show was with the Harmon Foundation, and he was met with success, even winning the $150 prize for the best work. But he would win many more awards garnering national attention. At this time, he was primarily showing his ceramics works. In the 1930's he hit his creative stride. He began to push the stylization in his work even further and began to explore other mediums including wood, copper, etchings, drawings, terra cotta, and porcelain. He also received several large commissions from the WPA Federal Art Project. One an 18 by 24 foot carved relief organ screen, the other the interior of the Maritime Museum and Aquatic Park in San Francisco. For the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939) he completed two massive 8 foot cast stone sculptures of Incas riding atop llamas. He did many more projects, his animal series, cast in terrazzo and his other large works for exhibition. Toward the end of his life, his works became very abstract. Yet, they always retained his signature simplicity. He separated from his wife in 1936, their daughter also going to live with her. But despite their separation, they remained on good terms until her death. His work, always heavily influenced by his wife and daughter. Sargent has suffered from angina, and settled in a hotel in downtown San Francisco in 1965. He would die there of a heart attack in 1967. Sargent Johnson was an artist that never stopped exploring his work, truly embodying the craft as having no peak. His work was inspired by many different artists and styles, blended through him into something truly unique and special. If you'd like to learn more about Sargent Johnson: Smithsonian American Art Museum -Sargent Johnson San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Sargent Johnson Works

African American Registry - Sargent Johnson Sargent Johnson : African American modernist

[to-the-head-of-the-line]

You've got Assassins but it's a Six-style musical (by yours truly), Assassins Fight Club, and even Assassins dating sim.

Meet Assassins the historical RPG first-person or third-person shooter game. Think historical and sort of fantastical Fallout New Vegas (cause it's the only similar game I've played). Or Assassins Creed (the game that keeps invading the tags)? Or Hitman.

Main game mechanics

You start a few days before the assassination

Planning the assassination

stealth/speech/other skill checks

Buying items

Minor crafting elements

Mini games (shooting booth to practice, lockpicking, stock books as Lee, wind wires/put away bottles as Leon)

Interactions with citizens, learning historical facts by clicking on highlighted text/meeting historical figures that make the game educational as to convince people we do not condone assassination

choosing to go through it/or not/different time and location affects your ending

you can try to escape after you shoot. It's quite hard though.

The four main levels, featuring the successful assassins:

John Wilkes Booth

We start with him monologuing to David Herold and the other members in the conspiracy about how Lincoln destroyed the South, that's why they're killing him and a bunch of other people

So this is pretty much a scheming strategy level, planning locations, dates, job allocations. Building relationships with your teammates causes your plan to be more likely to succeed. Convincing the guards to let you through. Depending on your route you may get extra scenes with the doctor or in the barn.

High charisma, lots of money.

Charles Guiteau

Uhh no idea. This is a weird level because he's weird. Funny visuals I guess. Think Wild Wasteland from FNV.

His stats are pretty shit but he has the element of surprise

Leon Czolgosz

You could try to kill McKinley at the speech event at the Pan American Exposition days before the actual date. He tried to, but there was too many people. This makes a good achievement. You get to visit the fair. Emma Goldman flashback.

Low money, low charisma, high stealth.

Lee Harvey Oswald

The sniper level. You can try to dodge the bullet by Jack Ruby (not sure if he could).

High stealth, high accuracy.

If you end the level the canonical way, you get a slide talking about that event. It's after the ending slide that talks about what happened next.

If we're basing it on the musical, the Proprietor's going to give you tips and walk you through the tutorial. The balladeer may appear and try to dissuade you from assassination. If you die or get caught, he's going to be super disappointed/mock you/idk and sing a song. Also you get to hang out in the carnival.

If you save Oswald for last, you get Another National Anthem and the Oswald level is replaced with the book depository scene.

After you finish all the levels for the first time. you can play as cops/spies trying to stop the assassination.

Also creative mode where you get access all the guns and modern weaponry. Machine guns anyone?

DLC: Adds Richard Lawrence, John Schrank, and Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo.

Bonus: you're the CIA and you're killing JFK and blaming Oswald.

[harringroveheart]

Heyyyyyy Hi <3

I’ve never been more deeply moved by a work of fanfiction than your what you’ve done with your story. I’m trying to develop as a writer and was wondering if you could share any tools, or books, or courses that you feel had an influence in how you work/craft. I really need to read more but I just feel overwhelmed. (Writing books? English/American/Russian classics? Free Uni courses?) I just want to be able to communicate at the level you’ve achieved. Recommendations of any kind would be a gift. You are a marvel, thank you for writing this story, and thank god this fandom got you. I have been hEalinG. Ok. 🤍 x a million

Thank you so much for this massive compliment <3 I'm going to be totally useless to you in terms of writer development tools/guides/courses etc because I've never used any. I just read a lot of fanfiction and know what I like (and don't like) and I kind of lucked out in that I love poetic prose and have this total dunce character that really puts the bumpers on that shit. So, it really depends on what you want to write, but in terms of process for writing a particular character voice, my only real tip is to spiral out all the indulgent pretty exposition and then cull it back if the character wouldn't "think" like that--or find a way to frame it in terms that would make sense to them. For Billy he thinks his heart is a car part : ( Anyway I'm so sorry I couldn't be more helpful! If anyone has recommendations to make, feel free to jump in!

[nopizzaaftermidnight]

I made this for work, but y’know what. I’m proud of it so I’ll post it here too.

Graphic Novels and the Fate of Literacy

(Bone, American Born Chinese, Robot Dreams, Artemis Fowl 2007, Amulet, Drama)

CASE STUDY: New Kid by Jerry Craft. This story has won multiple awards. It honestly addresses issues like racism, social status, and bullying. The narrator, seventh-grader Jordan Banks is an artist, and so the graphic novel format feels natural. I would say that Craft’s distinct artistic style is not the most aesthetically appealing, but it doesn’t need to be. The graphic novel format is the vehicle of communication for a story that is jam packed with nuance and heart and truth.

CASE STUDY: The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick (2007). This groundbreaking book alternates between short passages of text and wordless illustrated sequences. Unlike a traditional book in which an illustration reiterates a written scene, Hugo’s pictures carry the story forward on their own. Selznick invokes the visual experience of the soundless movies from the early 1900s. To follow the narrative, one must learn to “read” the pictures.

CASE STUDY: The History Smashers series by Kate Messner. These nonfiction books aren’t technically graphic novels. However, they use comic-style graphics to explain historical topics. The lively art and clear language is more engaging than picture-less text.

CASE STUDY: The Giver graphic novel adapted by P. Craig Russell (2019). Some stories lend themselves to the graphic novel medium. Given the importance of color in the original, the graphic novel can communicate visually what the text could only describe. It is also a relatively short book, making a faithful graphic adaptation more feasible. And faithful it is! Scenes, themes, expositional details, and dialogue are all carefully converted to the graphic novel format. The integrity of Lowry’s original story is excellently preserved in a brand-new format. This truly is a remarkable feat.

CASE STUDY: Awkward by Svetlana Chmakova (2015). This may be my personal favorite middle grade graphic novel. The story is a perfectly normal slice of middle school life. What elevates this book (and its sequels) is the art. The soft coloring and thoughtful character design make the story comforting and sweet, even as the characters navigate a variety of troubles. Based on plot alone, this would make a pretty average chapter book, but as a graphic novel, it shines.

[aic-american]

Lock, Frank L. Koralewsky, 1911, Art Institute of Chicago: American Art

Frank L. Koralewsky served as a traditional ironworker’s apprentice in his native north-German town of Stralsund. After obtaining journeyman status, he worked in various German shops before immigrating to Boston in the mid- 1890s. By 1906 he was a member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, specializing in locksmithing and hardware. This extremely intricate lock, which took seven years to complete, exemplifies the early-20th-century taste for sentimental medievalism and represents the pinnacle of the metalworking tradition at the turn of the 20th century. Exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where it won a gold medal, the lock illustrates Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Gift of Mr. Richard T. Crane Size: 50.8 × 50.8 × 20.3 cm (20 × 20 × 8 in.) Medium: Iron with inlays of gold, silver, bronze, and copper on wood base

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28869/