#Dead Man's Journey

[denimbex1986]

It’s one thing standing in line to watch the blockbuster film “Oppenheimer.” It’s another thing entirely queueing up in a remote desert to experience the location of the film’s most pivotal scene.

But if you’re a fan of atomic history and can swing central New Mexico this October, your pilgrimage through the Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey) will be so worth the effort.

Saturday, October 21, presents a rare opportunity to visit not just one but two scientifically significant and movie-famous destinations on the same day – each occupying opposite ends of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Trinity Site is the national historic landmark that’s home to mankind’s first nuclear blast on July 16, 1945, where plutonium gamma rays lit up the night sky. It hosts only two open house events each year.

And while you’re in the area, an extraordinary bonus is a second, free-of-charge open house aimed specifically at Trinity Site adventurers who are willing to drive another 100 miles to take in a second mind-bending experience.

It’s the Very Large Array Radio Observatory (VLA), which was dramatized in the 1997 alien-life movie “Contact.” The VLA telescope can spread wider than New York City, able to capture the whispers of distant radio waves as they undulate across our cosmos.

Rare access to Trinity Site

Trinity Site opens only two Saturdays a year. Once in April, and lucky for “Oppenheimer” enthusiasts, again in October.

The exact dates are announced in advance each year by the US Army.

The site is a secure military installation within the forbidding White Sands Missile Range, where live weapons are regularly tested. The terrain is high desert plateau, dotted with creosote brush and not much else.

In our everyday crush of crowds, traffic and strip malls, the Land of Enchantment’s sheer miles of open landscape and soul-nourishing cobalt vistas inspire. Buzz Aldrin’s impression of the moon’s surface parallels Trinity Site, a “magnificent desolation.”

When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” led his Manhattan Project team to Trinity, it wasn’t just for the isolation. He had history with New Mexico, attending summer boys’ camps during his youth. Because of the popularity of the movie “Oppenheimer,” a surge of visitors is expected on October 21.

The open house event, hosted by the US Army, is free but limited to the first 5,000 guests, on a first-come, first-served basis.

How to get there

From Albuquerque International Sunport airport, your best bet is a rental car for the two-hour drive south. It’s easy to get disoriented while navigating, so stick to the Army’s directions, as GPS instructions can be wonky. Take screen photos of the route mapped on your phone – as you may lose cell service – and have an actual roadmap as backup.

Aim to arrive at Trinity’s Stallion Gate before 8 a.m., when the gate opens. There will already be a line. Be early, and you’ll still have plenty of time for the day’s second adventure. Army officials will check your ID at the gate, and from there it’s a 17-mile (27-kilometer) drive to a parking lot located a quarter-mile walk from the reason you came – Ground Zero.

Trinity Site’s atmosphere during an open house is reminiscent of a small-town carnival from a bygone era. Vendors selling souvenir trinkets. Kids in strollers. Dogs wagging tails. Porta Potties. That’s until you notice the pop-up tent displaying Geiger counters. And another with radioactive Trinitite, the mysterious green-glass rock that rained down from the bomb’s blast.

Ominous fence signs remind guests that it’s against the law to remove any pieces of Trinitite they spy on the ground because ingested fragments retain enough radioactivity to be dangerous.

The famed 1918 McDonald adobe ranch house, where the bomb’s critical plutonium core was assembled in the master bedroom, survived the shock wave two miles away mostly intact. Buses shuttle visitors back and forth free of charge from the Trinity parking lot to the McDonald house.

Venture in farther to stand next to a life-size replica of Fat Man, the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Visitors can pose for photos inside Jumbo, the 216-ton steel cylinder scientists contemplated detonating the bomb – nicknamed the Gadget – within to contain its plutonium core if the full detonation failed.

Experiencing Ground Zero

The moment arrives to approach Ground Zero, marked simply by a black stone obelisk that’s 12 feet (3.66 meters) high.

Step back in time to the pre-dawn of July 16, 1945. Glance north, west and south where Oppenheimer’s team hunkered down in three bunkers, five miles away. You stand where the course of humanity shifted. Where the boundaries of physics and possibility stretched.

Picture the 100-foot-high steel tower that stood where the obelisk stands now. A few feet away only nubs of the tower remain, the bulk annihilated in the blast.

See in your mind the mattresses hauled in and stacked high to cushion the fall should the chains snap as they winched the heavy Gadget high into the air. And young scientists rotated throughout the night babysitting the bomb as crackles of lightning threatened to strike.

Oppenheimer wrote the poem “Crossing” two decades before Trinity. His words contained the prophetic passage, “…in the dry hills down by the river, half withered, we had the hot winds against us.” He could not have imagined the heat to come.

Now close your eyes.

Ignore what you do see to imagine the history you cannot see.

The storms over the mountains. New Mexico Gov. John Dempsey is at home asleep, oblivious to when the blast will occur. Finally, the mists of rain clear. The countdown to fission begins. There’s a sense of dread, however remote, that Earth’s atmosphere might ignite in a cataclysmic chain reaction.

And finally, the detonation.

Man’s first nuclear genie shatters its bottle, unleashing the ferocity of the atom, with an explosion 10,000 times hotter than our sun. Thirty-seven minutes later, the wounded sky brightens again, to the dawn of man’s first atomic sunrise.

Reflect on the glaring omission that while the area surrounding Trinity was remote, it was not unpopulated.

Civilians termed “downwinders,” subjected to radioactive fallout fluttering down from the sky, were assured that the flash and fury some saw and heard was an ammunition explosion at nearby Alamogordo Air Base. After atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month, they realized the stark truth.

Jim Eckles, an Army historian who oversaw decades of Trinity open house events, shared the site’s significance: “The ‘Oppenheimer’ movie resurrected concerns we’ve lost sight of. That thousands of nuclear warhead missiles are still out there, able to launch. We need clever intelligent people to deal with the sequence that began at Trinity.”...'

[figtreegif]

Wardrobe // Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) // Doctor Who Seasons 3 & 4 (2007-2008) + Torchwood Season 2 (2008) + specials

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Let the revenge games begin.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[yea-baiyi]

i keep thinking about the odyssey i am THINKING about wei wuxian as odysseus. you were dead. its been years since you’ve seen your family. the child you left behind is almost a man. you wear a face they don’t recognise, you sneak in through the back door. the dog gives your identity away. the world knows it’s you when you draw your weapon. the person you love recognises you by the original symbol of your love—a secret that no one else in the world knows about, still, because they kept it safe for all these years. you get the chance to go back and despite everything, you found home waiting for you; he kept your place and raised your son and he was still there waiting for you when you got back. tell me o muse, about a complicated man i am extremely not okay

[fluffypotatey]

“i am the prophet / with the answers you seek”

and boy does he! is it at all clear? to you maybe, BUT WHEN I, ODYSSEUS OF ITHCA ASK HIM—

[wr1t3w1tm3]

Look, I understand people are upset about the end of Will and Elizabeth's arcs in the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. I won't lie and say I didn't want to see some Will as the Dutchman's captain and some Pirate King Elizabeth BAMF on the high seas. I'm not even saying the writers are right... I'm just saying that the way they set up Will and Elizabeth's arc's, it makes sense.

They're tragic heroes: it's like John Proctor or Reverend Hale in the Crucible or Iron Man during the Infinity Saga or even Thackery Binx from Hocus Pocus. They're heroes working towards a noble goal, but they either can't obtain it or when they can, it doesn't go according to plan, and they have to make some sacrifices.

For Elizabeth it's a little more obvious. She's the girl who's trapped in her social status. In the first movie, her corset, a very real symbol of her status, literally suffocates her. It nearly kills her. Only once she sees the world of piracy and gets swept up in that world and allows herself to be changed by it does she see any smattering of freedom. Her whole goal is to get freedom, for her people (Port Royal) and her love (Will) in CotBP, even at the price of her own freedom (agreeing to marry Norrington if he saved Will). In DMC it's for herself (literally), Will again, and her father. That whole movie she is constantly fighting to keep herself and Will out of prison and danger. In AWE, she's fighting for her own freedom at times, but she soon finds herself the harbinger of freedom for a new golden age of piracy against Cutler Beckett and the East India Trading Co, who in the Pirates universe are canonically slave runners. She is searching for freedom in a very wide scope.

For Will, it's a little less obvious. He is also striving for freedom, but often not his own. He fights to help free Elizabeth during CotBP, and in DMC he's literally fighting to keep his own freedom and win the freedom of Elizabeth. Even when that means turning in a (sort of) friend (Jack). When he meets his father in DMC, his mission of freedom for those he loves expands in two parallel directions, Bootstrap tells Elizabeth as much in the brig of the Dutchman in AWE. The director and writers of AWE made that very clear in Elizabeth and Will's direction. One of my biggest pet peeves with that movie is the lack of a relationship between Will and Elizabeth, but it does make sense. It demonstrates Will's dilemma. His search for freedom is much more tangible, and on a very narrow scope. It also demonstrates Elizabeth's dilemma, where she feels that the freedom Will craves for his father will separate them for good. So, she turns to piracy, because freedom is all she has left by act II of AWE.

Both are searching for freedom, but both are tied down by duty. Elizabeth becomes the Pirate King, Will the Captain of the Dutchman. Both bound by their own duty, although the only duty we see them both bound too tangibly is Will's. Isn't it ironic that in the end, the choice to kill Davy Jones isn't Will's? Sure, it was his intention, but Jack wrapped his hand around the knife and dropped the hand that felled the heart. Jack - the pirate - an embodiment of freedom for both characters in CotBP (he saves Elizabeth from her corset and is the inciting incident into Will beginning his quest for Elizabeth) is the one who chains them to Will's curse? Narratively, it makes sense. Elizabeth has just become the free-est we've seen her in any of the movies (and I will die on this hill) and Will's only just literally been freed from the clutches of the EICo. And even if you did argue that Elizabeth still had her freedom as Pirate King, it can be easily argued that she lost her freedom the day she decided to keep and raise Henry. Both of them end up chained by Will's curse - one to land, one to the sea. All on their search for freedom. And Jack, that symbol of freedom (or rather, a symbol of piracy that for both characters ends up being a symbol of freedom), is the one who chains them to land or sea.

Now I am all for Henry, I actually think he had some great potential pre-Deppo-osition trial, and I think it speaks to Elizabeth's character that she was willing to wait and stayed on land for her child (who she easily could've taken her anger out on, though that doesn't appear to be the case). It can even be argued she stayed on land for Will to, as he gave her his heart to guard, a very fragile heart that if stabbed, ended her husband (this is one of the final demonstrations of their mended relationship, but that's a different topic for another time). Will got a very short stick in this fight, but Elizabeth got an equally short, if not shorter stick. Chained to the sea, destined to see your wife a max of seven more days before her death, and the reverse true for Elizabeth, instead she is arguably forced by society to keep and raise the boy who reminds her of the husband she'll never be sure she'll see again.

That's why William and Elizabeth Turner - The Captain of the Flying Dutchman and the Pirate King - are tragic heroes. In striving for freedom, they became trapped by duties, obligations, and burdens that they didn't even get a say in. In the end, not every happy ending is a good ending. And while the original Pirates trilogy didn't have a happy ending, it had a good one, as far as the narrative was concerned (Do I like this ending? Yes. Personally, I think it works and it gives me that kind-of-icky-kind-of-satisfying pit in my stomach that Hocus Pocus did back when there wasn't a sequel. Maybe it's not the ending everyone wanted, but for the story being told, it's the right one).

Thanks for coming to my little rant! I used to love doing these literary analysis essays in English my junior and senior years of high school. Over analyzing media, especially film and tv, is something I quiet enjoy. Plus, I might do a foray into video essays one day, so I figured I could use some practice. This is something that's been bouncing around in my head since I first watched AWE. The original Pirates Trilogy is just so good at symbolism, I'll probably put more stuff out here eventually raving about it. For now though, this is it.

[haru-chi]

(I don't read their manga so all I'm gonna say is purely my theories and assumptions or maybe wishful thinking on my part to suit my taste, so I'd be really grateful if manga readers don't spoil anything for me be it I hit the nail or not)

in this anime the story really starts from Himmel's death and the impact his death left on Frieren more than she actually thought resulting in her being left with deep regret. His death left no impression on me at first tbh. I mean we don't know anything about him enough to care, Heiter's death was more impactful at least to me ...

but then the more I watch the more I realize the core of this story as much as it's Frieren's journey to understand human's emotions so not to repeat the same mistake twice as much as it's about getting to know Himmel's with her so it's gonna be the death that breaks you down later on kind of way.

I thought it was cleaver that we were put in the same boat as her, we actually know nothing about him like her, so through this journey we're also gonna get to know the "real" Himmel with her.

the more she'll learn about human's emotions the more she'll understand alot of things she might've brash it away cuz she either never pay attention or don't get the real meaning of his words/actions like the fact that he actually LOVED her :)

something else that got me thinking is this ..

at the end of his funeral, she was left staring to this ring for a while ... so LISTEN TO ME .. what if this ring here is a gift from him to her ...

what if it was from the time he confesses his love to her or even worse he proposed to her but she either didn't get what he actually meant or declined or something between those lines aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa STOP ME FROM DIGGING DEEPER OMG

so, through this journey she'll learn the true meaning of those words and feelings the more she learns about human's emotions .. and the worse part what if she realized she was in love with him too by the end of the story but never understand her own feelings ????

she said she's gathering new magics cuz he was praising her whenever she learned something new, also the ghost she saw was Himmel's ghost not her teacher as she was expecting so that proves she actually care about him more than she herself realize ><

this gonna be very tragic, yet I wants this to be the core of the story since I'm just weak for those kinds of stories AND I'M ALREADY CRYING EVEN THOUGH I DON'T KNOW IF I'M RIGHT OR NOT YET I GET EMOTIONAL SEEING THEM TOGETHER YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND !!!!

I don't know how and why my mind decided to go wild with those ideas that now I see the anime and its story differently than what I signed up for at first ... WHY AM I IN LOVE WITH A DEAD MAN YET AGAIN !!!!! I THOUGHT I SURIVIVED WHEN HE DEAD BEFORE I DEVOLOP ANY EMOTIONS FOR HIM YET HERE I AM IN THIS HELL BECAUSE OF HIM AND FRIEREN !!!!! T^T

Did I hit the nail ?? did I ?? please say I did so that I can be happy this shaping up to be my kind of tragic story .. but then I don't wanna know or hear any spoilers ... I'm tempted to jump to the manga to see if I'm right or not but I must resist till the anime end at least ><

[anewbrainjughead]

armand is one moment of desperation away from faking a pregnancy terri schuester style in a frantic last-ditch effort to keep louis from leaving him

[empty-dream]

Himmel: *opens mouth*

Me:

[mastercontrol123]

Happy 65th Birthday, to the man who will forever be my lifelong crush, Bruce Campbell! 😍❤️

[ilovereadingandstuff]

In Honor of Izuku Midoriya

The Greastest forgotten Hero

How will...

...The Story End?

Edit: I updated the drawing I made by fixing the hair and shading.

[cringelordofchaos]

h how do I sct normal when wh om im reminded of omori final duet how do k not burtst out in tearas

[xtruss]

The First Light of Trinity

— By Alex Wellerstein | July 16, 2015 | Annals of Technology

Seventy years ago, the flash of a nuclear bomb illuminated the skies over Alamogordo, New Mexico. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

The light of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. This is because the heat of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. Seventy years ago today, when the first atomic weapon was tested, they called its light cosmic. Where else, except in the interiors of stars, do the temperatures reach into the tens of millions of degrees? It is that blistering radiation, released in a reaction that takes about a millionth of a second to complete, that makes the light so unearthly, that gives it the strength to burn through photographic paper and wound human eyes. The heat is such that the air around it becomes luminous and incandescent and then opaque; for a moment, the brightness hides itself. Then the air expands outward, shedding its energy at the speed of sound—the blast wave that destroys houses, hospitals, schools, cities.

The test was given the evocative code name of Trinity, although no one seems to know precisely why. One theory is that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the U.S. government’s laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the director of science for the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the bomb, chose the name as an allusion to the poetry of John Donne. Oppenheimer’s former mistress, Jean Tatlock, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was a professor there, had introduced him to Donne’s work before she committed suicide, in early 1944. But Oppenheimer later claimed not to recall where the name came from.

The operation was designated as top secret, which was a problem, since the whole point was to create an explosion that could be heard for a hundred miles around and seen for two hundred. How to keep such a spectacle under wraps? Oppenheimer and his colleagues considered several sites, including a patch of desert around two hundred miles east of Los Angeles, an island eighty miles southwest of Santa Monica, and a series of sand bars ten miles off the Texas coast. Eventually, they chose a place much closer to home, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on an Army Air Forces bombing range in a valley called the Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man,” an indication of its unforgiving landscape). Freshwater had to be driven in, seven hundred gallons at a time, from a town forty miles away. To wire the site for a telephone connection required laying four miles of cable. The most expensive single line item in the budget was for the construction of bomb-proof shelters, which would protect some of the more than two hundred and fifty observers of the test.

The area immediately around the bombing range was sparsely populated but not by any means barren. It was within two hundred miles of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and El Paso. The nearest town of more than fifty people was fewer than thirty miles away, and the nearest occupied ranch was only twelve miles away—long distances for a person, but not for light or a radioactive cloud. (One of Trinity’s more unusual financial appropriations, later on, was for the acquisition of several dozen head of cattle that had had their hair discolored by the explosion.) The Army made preparations to impose martial law after the test if necessary, keeping a military force of a hundred and sixty men on hand to manage any evacuations. Photographic film, sensitive to radioactivity, was stowed in nearby towns, to provide “medical legal” evidence of contamination in the future. Seismographs in Tucson, Denver, and Chihuahua, Mexico, would reveal how far away the explosion could be detected.

The Trinity test weapon. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

On July 16, 1945, the planned date of the test, the weather was poor. Thunderstorms were moving through the area, raising the twin hazards of electricity and rain. The test weapon, known euphemistically as the gadget, was mounted inside a shack atop a hundred-foot steel tower. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of wires, screws, switches, high explosives, radioactive materials, and diagnostic devices, and was crude enough that it could be tripped by a passing storm. (This had already happened once, with a model of the bomb’s electrical system.) Rain, or even too many clouds, could cause other problems—a spontaneous radioactive thunderstorm after detonation, unpredictable magnifications of the blast wave off a layer of warm air. It was later calculated that, even without the possibility of mechanical or electrical failure, there was still more than a one-in-ten chance of the gadget failing to perform optimally.

The scientists were prepared to cancel the test and wait for better weather when, at five in the morning, conditions began to improve. At five-ten, they announced that the test was going forward. At five-twenty-five, a rocket near the tower was shot into the sky—the five-minute warning. Another went up at five-twenty-nine. Forty-five seconds before zero hour, a switch was thrown in the control bunker, starting an automated timer. Just before five-thirty, an electrical pulse ran the five and a half miles across the desert from the bunker to the tower, up into the firing unit of the bomb. Within a hundred millionths of a second, a series of thirty-two charges went off around the device’s core, compressing the sphere of plutonium inside from about the size of an orange to that of a lime. Then the gadget exploded.

General Thomas Farrell, the deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, was in the control bunker with Oppenheimer when the blast went off. “The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” he wrote immediately afterward. “It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.” Twenty-seven miles away from the tower, the Berkeley physicist and Nobel Prize winner Ernest O. Lawrence was stepping out of a car. “Just as I put my foot on the ground I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant,” he wrote. James Conant, the president of Harvard University, was watching from the V.I.P. viewing spot, ten miles from the tower. “The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me,” he wrote. “The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world.”

In its first milliseconds, the Trinity fireball burned through photographic film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Trinity was filmed exclusively in black and white and without audio. In the main footage of the explosion, the fireball rises out of the frame before the cameraman, dazed by the sight, pans upward to follow it. The written accounts of the test, of which there are many, grapple with how to describe an experience for which no terminology had yet been invented. Some eventually settle on what would become the standard lexicon. Luis Alvarez, a physicist and future participant in the Hiroshima bombing, viewed Trinity from the air. He likened the debris cloud, which rose to a height of some thirty thousand feet in ten minutes, to “a parachute which was being blown up by a large electric fan,” noting that it “had very much the appearance of a large mushroom.” Charles Thomas, the vice-president of Monsanto, a major Manhattan Project contractor, observed the same. “It looked like a giant mushroom; the stalk was the thousands of tons of sand being sucked up by the explosion; the top of the mushroom was a flowering ball of fire,” he wrote. “It resembled a giant brain the convolutions of which were constantly changing.”

In the months before the test, the Manhattan Project scientists had estimated that their bomb would yield the equivalent of between seven hundred and five thousand tons of TNT. As it turned out, the detonation force was equal to about twenty thousand tons of TNT—four times larger than the expected maximum. The light was visible as far away as Amarillo, Texas, more than two hundred and eighty miles to the east, on the other side of a mountain range. Windows were reported broken in Silver City, New Mexico, some hundred and eighty miles to the southwest. Here, again, the written accounts converge. Thomas: “It is safe to say that nothing as terrible has been made by man before.” Lawrence: “There was restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.” Farrell: “The strong, sustained, awesome roar … warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” Nevertheless, the plainclothes military police who were stationed in nearby towns reported that those who saw the light seemed to accept the government’s explanation, which was that an ammunition dump had exploded.

Trinity was only the first nuclear detonation of the summer of 1945. Two more followed, in early August, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as many as a quarter of a million people. By October, Norris Bradbury, the new director of Los Alamos, had proposed that the United States conduct “subsequent Trinity’s.” There was more to learn about the bomb, he argued, in a memo to the new coördinating council for the lab, and without the immediate pressure of making a weapon for war, “another TR might even be FUN.” A year after the test at Alamogordo, new ones began, at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. They were not given literary names. Able, Baker, and Charlie were slated for 1946; X-ray, Yoke, and Zebra were slated for 1948. These were letters in the military radio alphabet—a clarification of who was really the master of the bomb.

Irradiated Kodak X-ray film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

By 1992, the U.S. government had conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests, and other nations—China, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—had joined in the frenzy. The last aboveground detonation took place over Lop Nur, a dried-up salt lake in northwestern China, in 1980. We are some years away, in other words, from the day when no living person will have seen that unearthly light firsthand. But Trinity left secondhand signs behind. Because the gadget exploded so close to the ground, the fireball sucked up dirt and debris. Some of it melted and settled back down, cooling into a radioactive green glass that was dubbed Trinitite, and some of it floated away. A minute quantity of the dust ended up in a river about a thousand miles east of Alamogordo, where, in early August, 1945, it was taken up into a paper mill that manufactured strawboard for Eastman Kodak. The strawboard was used to pack some of the company’s industrial X-ray film, which, when it was developed, was mottled with dark blotches and pinpoint stars—the final exposure of the first light of the nuclear age.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

I did something completely out of my comfort zone and I lived!

[agentravensong]

post-hamlet thoughts

tl;dr my college did hamlet and i was in it and it was cool

first of all, in case i hadn't made this clear already, this was entirely student-produced. i mean, we got some money from the theater department, but people-wise, it was all students.

i've told the rest of the cast this time and time again, but they're so good. insanely dedicated and humbling in their talent.

our hamlet, horatio, ophelia, and laertes were all freshman, and they were all stellar. ophelia and laertes broke my heart every night in the second half with their anger and their sadness. horatio always brings top energy to scenes and had lots of funny moments (espec counting his doubling as the second gravedigger) but also made me feel things (we staged act 4 scene 6 as him alone on stage reading hamlet's letter to the audience and he killed it every time). and our hamlet was just incredible; a pleasure to act against as guildenstern and a pleasure to watch / listen to in their more emotional scenes.

and everyone else was great too! our polonius was always funny but also had genuine moments of connection with his kids; our cladius brought some great depth to the role (his take on the monologue in act 3 scene 3 was great) while still being despicable, especially in his manipulation of laertes; our gertrude brought our director's take on her to life impeccably; and, of course, i had a wonderful and hilarious partner in our rosencrantz :)

not to mention our quartet of players (who also filled out the other miscellaneous roles) who had a ton of great moments. shout-outs in particular to the guy who doubled as the first gravedigger and sang his sung lines as a sea shanty (honestly, i think he could have been a great guildenstern or rosencrantz in another universe).

the crew, of course, was also amazing. there were like 150 cues? my friend (the writer i mentioned in this post) did a fantastic job with the lights. the people behind the staging and makeup did just as well. and the costumes were so fun! everyone looked great; we had a consistent black-white-red-brown color palette that tied it all together. special shout-out to the player king wearing a white shirt with a black cape while cladius wore a zipped-up leather jacket and a white cape.

oh, and me and ros? we got fedoras :) i may share a photo later. maybe.

we did our show in the college black box theater (inside the fine arts building), which i do not currently have the brain cells to try and explain the layout of. it's a kind of weird space, but i think we made the most of it. for the majority of the show i was off stage left, meaning i was hanging out at the top of the stairs which serve as the main entrance and exit to the theater (sitting/standing where i couldn't be seen by the audience obv). you can't really see the stage at all from there but you sure can hear the actors, and by the time of the show that was (mostly) enough for me.

as far as how the actual shows went?

friday was our most engaged audience. their laughter was greatly appreciated in the early scenes ...slightly less so when everyone was dying in the final scene. i mean, i get it, people start dropping like flies and actually foaming at the mouth and spitting out (fake) blood; it's a lot. i applaud hamlet and horatio for staying in character through it. everyone did a great job that night; it was probably better than all our dress rehearsals as a whole.

saturday, at least from my pov, had kind of weird vibes at the start? i don't know how much of it was people getting to bed late the previous night, how much of it was overconfidence, and how much of it was people getting in their own heads, but it was our lowest energy show. the audience wasn't as audibly engaged either, but they did give us a big applause. i felt more good than bad about it by the end, for sure.

especially in retrospect, because, despite us having a smaller crowd at today's matinee, everyone was back on the ball. the ending in particular i think was the best we've ever done it. it was probably my best performance as well.

to be clear, i wouldn't rate any of our three shows below an 8 out of 10, for what that's worth. everyone gave so much to their performances; the funny bits were funny even when the audience didn't seem to think so, and i was always getting caught up in my feelings in the second act. you can't ask for much more than that.

now, here's a compilation of things from the production in no real order:

i already posted about this, but having the blood stains on stage where people die from the beginning of every show? *chef's kiss*

i'll also restate the thing i mentioned in the tags of that post: characters who were murderers had symbolic blood makeup after they killed someone. cladius had a bloody ear from the start of the show, the meaning of which becomes clear once you see the player king get poison poured in his ears; hamlet got blood on their face during intermission that's meant to be polonius's blood; and, arguably most significantly, gertrude had bloody handprints around her neck when she entered at the end of act 4, which, in addition to her hair and arms being dripping wet, is meant to suggest that the story she tells about ophelia's death is, in fact, a cover for something less accidental.

as mentioned above, our director's take on gertrude in general was, from my understanding, pretty different from the standard. to quote from his character spines, "you fundamentally want to prepare your son hamlet to be king; you are playing essentially a game of chess to do so." it was really compelling to see in action. the way she performed act 4 scene 7? chilling.

speaking of those character spines, the first line of horatio's is literally just, "You are in love with Hamlet." and boy howdy did that come through

prime example of that (other than just, all of his and hamlet's interactions, which were wonderful): when horatio finished reading the letter from hamlet, he sniffed it, in a very sweet and very not-platonic way

it was an unintentional running gag throughout the whole process that other cast members would forget between ros and me which character we were playing - to the point that every performance, when hamlet first greeted us, even though i would get to them first, they addressed me first, and it's written that they say my name first, they would call me rosencrantz and our ros guildenstern. ...someone should write a play about that.

i might have posted about this already, but in ros and i's first scene with hamlet, when the two of them start talking about child actors, hamlet made us sit in the thrones, and we would make moves to leave of varying boldness that they, of course, never let us follow through on. this then got basically repeated in act 3 scene 2 except that horatio got to join in on the fun of relentlessly mocking us

(the thing where hamlet handed me their copy of william shakespeare's complete works while they dud the "what is a man" mimi monologue got dropped at some point in the dress rehearsals, unfortunately. they did flip through it with the players though)

during the play within a play, polonius would keep falling asleep and ros and i would keep waking him up

(we also got to do some fun silent banter back in act 2 scene 2 while hamlet and the players were doing their thing)

then the bit after that with the recorders, aka guildenstern's defining moment, was just so fun. hamlet and horatio basically sandwiched ros and me between the two of them, and hamlet and i played off each other very well (at least imo), and though i couldn't see what horatio and ros were doing behind me i know that it got some good laughs. and i could tell every night that the scene landed despite the shakespearean language barrier, so i can't help but be satisfied.

my other best moment was when the king told me to go get polonius's body from the stairs and i got to slump and make a "do i have to?" face before my (final) exit. i managed to actually get some chuckles from that tonight, from the crowd that, again, laughed the least in general, and i can't put into words how euphoric i was to have that be my last moment playing guildenstern.

from the rest of the second half of the show, which i am not in, i will highlight a) the gravedigger eventually realizing after shoveling for minutes on end that he's been shoveling literally nothing (love me a good little fourth wall break) and b) when hamlet and laertes come to physical blows over ophelia, horatio, on his line, steps between them, draws laertes's sword, and takes a stance pointing it at laertes to hold him off, all in basically one glorious motion.

oh, and the ending, of course.

as i alluded to way earlier, we had fake blood and alka-seltzer tablets that the people who died in act 5 scene 2 used to great effect (particularly the people who died via poison)

speaking of that scene, the sword fight was very neat! well-choreographed and well-enacted. real foils btw

and the way hamlet and horatio performed the ending? more than anything, the way hamlet said "give me the cup; let go!" - that shit hurt, in the best way, every night. (and though hamlet died in the king's throne (with the king's crown on), horatio held / clung to them the whole damn time)

for a lighter final note: our polonius doubled as fortinbras and came on at the ending in this huge, heavy, vampire-ass cloak, accompanied by our director as the messenger from england who announces my and ros's death :)

thankfully, we did record our last dress rehearsal, so we do have a version of it that we'll get to watch back in the future. i won't be able to share it with any of y'all (we will apparently be in BIG trouble if we post it anywhere online) but it'll be nice to have for me.

funny thing that happened while i was typing this long-ass post out: i kept using present tense and then realizing i had to change it to past tense. and by "funny" here, i mean, uh... oof.

we never got a perfect run-through where no lines were skipped over, but, i mean, it's fucking hamlet. we did this shit in like a month and a half (with a week lost to spring break); it's more than impressive that the show turned out how it did. it was a group labor of love, and one of the best things i've ever gotten to be a part of.

and i miss it already.

...at least there's movie night on tuesday :)

[thatgeekwiththeclipons]

Happy 65th Birthday to cult movie legend Bruce Campbell! ^__^