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always-is-always · 1 year ago

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bts enlistment...

This post grew from feeling compelled to comment, and offer support to one of my peeps, here. I was typing away under the post, and it turned into a thing, as I let the words flow.

So... like @irishhorse-blog , this is my opinion, and mine to bear. It’s not up for any debate. This is not coming from any place of judgement at all.

When people are forced to enlist in a military, it is life-altering in ways that cannot be predicted, on every level. Everything changes. Freedom is taken away, and a person is forced to comply with a way of living, behaving, thinking, and Being that is completely different from life outside of that military. Pick any country in the world, and it is the same in their military.

When a person is forced to enlist, their basic Human Right to make choices for themself is taken away. A way of life is imposed, that requires that person to alter their most innate Self and to become what they are taught they must become. (I’ll stop here, with this particular part of this post, as it is a VERY deep subject that isn’t pleasant.) My bestie is a Veteran of two recent wars. She would agree with my words above, as well as with the post that I’ve referenced from @irishhorse-blog. She went in by choice, and that is a whole different type of experience. She was a bad-ass paratrooper, and jumped out of more airplanes than one can imagine. She’s seen first hand what war is, and what it does to Human Beings. It left her with a host of physical challenges, ptsd, and other things that we can never understand as civilians, yet she doesn’t regret the choice.

I have friends in Israel, where both men and women have to serve in their military for two years. It is just a part of their lives in their country, just as it is in Korea. Yet, it is very different when the people don’t have a choice to serve.

Two years is a long time. Even at the shortest duration of 18 months, it is a long time to put one’s “regular” life on hold.... To be separated from family, friends, lovers... And, it being forced, and not by choice.

There’s an energy that comes with enlistment that is one of enforcing compliance upon a human being. It’s like a huge thumb pressing down upon a person’s Crown chakra (if you get the visual). That’s what I am seeing in Hobi and Jin’s energy fields now. You can see it on their faces. It is subtle, yet there all the same.

The other thing that just literally dropped into my mind as I type is this very profound thought: These young men are going to enlist in the military where they will be taught to strictly follow orders, AND where they will be taught how to use firearms, and how to kill another human being. Yeah. Let that sink in...

Humans aren’t born with the ability or desire to kill one another. It is learned behaviour for most, and in more rare situations it is learned (taken on) for pure survival. It goes against the very Nature of a Human Being to have to take the life of another, on purpose. That in itself creates deep trauma, within the person who pulls the trigger...

Humans have been at war for thousands of years. At this point on Earth’s Timeline, it has become a business, with a whole industry built around it. There are people who have made more money than all of us put together, in one war. It is the real reason why countries never really quite stop, and never quite establish peace. It’s big business, unfortunately.

There are so many levels and aspects to this subject. I dare not attempt to go much further with this as I’m not a wordsmith, and it would become a very very long post. I’ll begin to bring this to a close.

Again, as I’ve been writing this and thinking about these things, it has become much clearer that Seokjin, Hoseok, Yoongi, Namjoon, Taehyung, Jimin and Jungkook will be changed at the core level, during their enlistment. The version of them that we are familiar with and love will cease to be. The men who return on the other side may seem to be the same, outwardly..... yet the truth is that they will be navigating from a new place, within their psyches, and in their understanding of the world. I pray that their Souls remain intact. The most we can hope for is that they choose to rejoin and begin to make music together again. They will probably need the healing that music can bring to them, as they re-adjust to life after the military.

As ARMY, the best things that we can do for them is to hold Space for them, and to send them Love throughout their enlistment. It will be hard to wait for them, yet it is the Promise that we have made. We will be there for them, on the other side. With open Hearts and open arms. 💜

#bangtan forever #bangtan enlistment #yoongi is next #bts and army forever #apobangpo #seokjin #hoseok #yoongi #namjoon #jimin #taehyung #jungkook #we will wait for you #send them love

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mephinomaly · 1 year ago

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[TL] PYSCHOBREAK/Chapter 6

[ This post uses Ois~su ♪ ]

Time: That day at night

Location: In a training room in ES

Rei: Wanko~♪ Do you want the ball~?

Go fetch~ ☆

Koga 2: Ruff ruuuffffff ☆

Adonis 2: …(Fidgeting around like he wants to play too.)

Rei: Kukuku. He looks human but in reality he’s a newborn baby, such an adorable thing ♪

Kaoru: You get on surprisingly well with the fakes which is pretty good.

—But is that really a good thing, Rei-kun?

Rei: Okay, it’s Adonis-kun's turn now ♪ Why don’t you try to catch this piece of string? You can build up physical strength whilst having fun, isn’t that the best?

Adonis 2: ...♪

Kaoru: I’m happy you’re getting on but hey, are you listening? Can you not ignore me please?

Rei: Of course of course. I will never again allow my gaze to be ripped away from my beloved children who adore me.

Kaoru: Who adores who, did you say?

Rei: —I’ve been thinking.

Kaoru: Hm?

Rei: No matter how much I desire it, I can never be an omnipotent, benevolent god. I suppose that’s clear as I could not predict this situation unfolding.

However, I am slightly older than you all, and it is not as if I spent all my time overseas playing around.

I’m just a tiny bit more experienced onii-chan than you all.

Kaoru: What are you trying to say? You just want to brag about being older? Or do you hate being seen as an old hag?[1] Is this a type of power harassment?

Rei: Kukuku. It’s weird for me not to, Kaoru-kun. Well, there’s nothing I can do in this situation.

We must keep our minds as tranquil as a mountain peak. If our juniors see us seniors fumble, it will create anxiety for them.

Kaoru: Uhuh. Being a senpai is hard work.

So? What are you thinking about?

Rei: Umu. I have no evidence regarding this, all I can do is make guesses on the sequence of events that brought us into this and why it even began to start with.

I have an overall understanding of this situation.

In other words, we now know the truth behind this mysterious set of circumstances.

Kaoru: Wa～, well done! You’re an amazing detective ♪

Rei: Kaoru-kun could have guessed it as well. You are the son of a wise scholar after all.

However, you are a pragmatic child. This case is a bit of an anomaly, and contains unrealistic aspects.

Kaoru: Unrealistic, hm… Ah, I guess that describes it well.

Rei: Umu. Now the question is; how do we escape this situation?

You will understand this analogy, but we are in a locked room. There is only one exit and entrance, and a specific key is required to open them.

However, the key is hidden amongst an endless amount of objects scattered around said room.

Kaoru: It’s like a super difficult ‘escape the room’ game.

Rei: There aren’t any hints though. Unfortunately, there is not enough time to carefully examine each and every item in the room in order to find the key.

We must somehow escape, before the reality we live in warps and breaks down.

Kaoru: Since it’s you, I’m sure you’ve come up with a way to get us out of here. I say that half jokingly ♪

Rei: Umu. I must respond if someone asks something of me, as superstar Rei Sakuma-senpai.

—There is one thing I want to do.

However, it is a dangerous gamble. I am concerned that there may be burdens on the mind and body, primarily on the brain.

Kaoru: Don’t you dare say something all stand-offish like “so that's why I’ll handle it by myself.” If UNDEAD has a problem, then it’s all of our problem. We should share that burden together.

Rei: Kukuku. That’s something old Kaoru-kun would never have said. Now we have been reminded of our past selves, those words deeply move me.

Kaoru: Don’t make fun of me. So, what’s this thing you want to do?

What should we do to get out of this weird situation?

Rei: We need to dream.

When I investigated the AIIE experiment facilities the other day, I happened upon the machines we were connected to, the manuals on how to operate them, and the drugs we were prescribed.

As one could expect, the manuals contained a lot of technical lingo, but with help from a family member who is good at those sorts of things, I was able to come to grips with how it works.

Therefore, if we desire so, we can dream of those days once again.

Visit the memories of when Deadmanz disappeared, and us, UNDEAD, arose.

I suspect our answers will be there.

Kaoru: It’s embarrassing to see me back then being so uptight, but if there’s nothing else we can do, I suppose I can comply.

Rei: Kaoru-kun is still an inexperienced cute boy, hm? I am but a lump of shame.

You may be ashamed of your past self now, but in ten years you may feel the same about your current self.

Let’s do everything in our power now so we do not regret anything in the future.

Will you help me, Kaoru-kun?

Kaoru: Of course I will. I’ve said this a lot already, but this is all of our problem.

Rei: Wonderful… This is also just a guess, but I believe I am the cause behind everything.

Seeds from the past left unwatered grow out of spite. I must reap what I sow, before they can grow anymore.

So this doesn’t happen again. So that I don’t lose anyone again.

[ ☆ ]

Kaoru says 年齢マウント. Not sure if we have a word like that in english but it’s when the eldest of a group of girls (whether idols or just friendship groups) is seen as an old woman despite only being slightly older than the others

Chapter 5

Chapter 7

#ensemble stars #enstars #translation #rei sakuma #kaoru hakaze #adonis otogari #koga oogami #undead climax

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manysmallhands · 11 months ago

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Top 10 Albums of 2023!

This was all supposed to work out differently. As i recall from the now long distant past, my original plan was to do a countdown where i put up one post a day throughout December. However, I got Covid on December 1st and that plan immediately became lame and useless. After that, my assumption was basically that i wouldn't be able to do any of this, but i got better more quickly than i'd anticipated and found myself working on these reviews in bits as the month has gone on. So, having rushed through all the the song blurbs that i wanted to do, here i am on New Year's Eve with a more or less finished Top 10 albums to put up.

The only problem is that there are ten quite lengthy reviews here and the vibe is already pretty tl:dr. But tbh that's fine: there really is only my girlfriend who ever reads everything (and i believe her, trust is what love is all about after all) so for anyone looking at this and thinking blimey, that's a lot of text, my advice is: you don't have to read any of it. Just look at the albums, scan thru to see if it sounds like something you might like and give one or two of them a listen if that looks like the case. The words are really just to keep me occupied but i'd like to hope that someone likes some of the records.

I said yesterday that i would reveal what the best one is and so I am now delivering on that important promise. The best one is Scarlet by Doja Cat. Anyone who follows me on whatever platform already knows that the best one is Scarlet by Doja Cat. Don't make me say it again.

Barbie - The Album

Few people have seemed much interested in the Barbie soundtrack, other than the punters who kept it atop the compilations chart for four months. I, as ever, channel the spirit of the populous. The sound is basically 80s synth pop updated for a modern audience - the likes of Haim and Ava Max slot in predictably well - but its the extra dimensions created by how the artists interact with the film that provide some of its more interesting aspects. Sam Smith’s Man I Am reflects a surprisingly LGBTQ Ken despite protestations (certainly its "I'm not gay bro, but..." T-shirt is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the shirt), while Billie Eilish dwelling on life as a manufactured product makes for interesting and uncomfortable parallels in What Was I Made For. Mark Ronson’s plasticky production suits its subject to a tee, further cementing the conceptual unity of the project.

Star turns abound throughout the album as A-listers like Dua Lipa and Lizzo bring their best games alongside some terrific and unlikely downcard cameos. What Was I Made For? and Dance The Night were both deserved #1s, but the pacey pop punk of GAYLE’s Butterflies and Dominic Fike’s breezy, hook laden Hey Blondie are as much highlights as any of the bigger names here. Special mention should be made for Ryan Gosling’s I’m Just Ken, a blockbuster 70s rock number that, whilst puncturing the wider stylistic template, is batshit and hilarious enough to more than justify its place as well as netting him a surprise hit too. The quality lapses once or twice (Tame Impala in particular are bloody awful) but by the time Ava fires the final laser I’m generally happy to go back and start all over again. With banger after banger here, my verdict is in: the Barbie soundtrack is *Charli voice* HOT!

Claire Rosinkranz - Just Because

While this has been a year that I’ve gotten more fully into pop, it took a while for me to find many new albums that I’ve been interested in. This may partly be to do with me clinging to an idea that LPs ought to be substantial beyond having good hooks and charm. In truth, all I needed to do was revert to my indiepop training, where bands have never knowingly been fussed about having any great weightiness. But even so, it took Just Because to make it clear to me that no, you really don’t need any grand vision at all: a high number of great if frothy pop songs will do just fine. It’s a record which bounces from banger to banger in an endearingly sunny style, with each tune so catchy that their lightness becomes a strength rather than a weakness.

Rosinkranz’s voice seems to mark her out as one of the many Billie clones who populate the current pop scene but her musical ambitions are both simpler and more instantly engaging. Not yet 20, her songs have an element of schoolyard whispers which add a welcome silliness here and there, but she also plays with the intensity of youthful emotions to make them a little heartrending even as she goofs off. Highlights include Dreamer, a break up song where the vocal makes it clear that she’s far from as done as she says she is, and Wes Anderson, which offers some sombre advice but packages it in a song so sweet that you’d never know. But in spite of all this it makes no end of year lists (well, maybe just the one), being merely a lovable set of songs that are very hard to forget. Need it be more? I don't believe so.

Doja Cat - Scarlet

Mired in discourse throughout the year, Doja Cat still found time to make a chart topping single (Paint The Town Red) that took the world by storm and a cracking album which, sadly, did not. Scarlet was in my opinion the better of the two: largely ditching the afrobeat pop of Planet Her, Doja staked her claim as an old skool rapper and brought it off pretty well, mixing hard rhyming with her more scattershot pop delivery and sounding entirely comfortable wherever she landed. While flitting musically between modern RnB and neo-soul grooves, her subject matter was largely taken up by how much she hated her fans, a bold strategy that found her shedding support even as blistering tracks like Fuck The Girls shaped up as some of my favourites of the year.

Whilst I’ve found myself uncomfortable with both the company that she keeps and the views which she may or may not subscribe to (i feel safe in saying that she's a right wing edgelord but i suspect that’s the least of it), Scarlet is such a good album that I’ve found myself, if not making excuses for her, then at least deftly navigating around my distaste in order to keep listening to it. While Agora Hills often reminded me how serious she is about her scumbag of a boyfriend, it’s still a song that can submerge me in its beauty entirely; while some of the complaints from her online audience are less easily dismissed than others, it’s more comfortable just to think about the morons calling her a devil worshiper, especially when she mocks them so wickedly on the elegant Skull And Bones. Am I the problem? Maybe I am: it’s a place I often find myself in with hip hop, where faves are frequently problematic and exceptions beg to be made. As such, I can not wholeheartedly recommend this record to people who might want to take a principled stand against some of her bullshit. I can only say that, as a musical talent, there was no one better all year.

Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard?

After 2021’s fairly middling brace of albums, Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd always felt like it was going to be a return to form and this time the faithful were not disappointed. It was another epic and sprawling record which unfolded like a cross between The Bible and a 50s musical. While changeable in style, ranging from hammy country ballads to trap beats and beyond, the thing that springs to mind most often is the Great American Songbook, as Lana takes the melodramatic grandeur of those standards and soaks them in her own messy and complicated worldview. This draws in family, romance, the future, her relationship with religion and how it all scrappily fits together, ranging widely and wildly across 75 extraordinary minutes.

Much of the album feels like it’s being broadcast from a kind of dreamworld, although one that overlays with reality neatly enough. Lana’s dismissive “if you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Centre and find her” line undercuts the mood on the otherwise lush and evocative Sweet but the impact is hilarious rather than jarring, a perfect marriage of the strange and mundane. In contrast, the brooding A&W initially brings that realism to a far more uncomfortable level, before goofing off wonderfully in the second half in a way that only Lana ever really dares to do. Much of the record feels like it's creating its own language, as key phrases (“let the light in”, “when you know, you know”) are repeated and musical themes come back around in strange modulations. All in all, while perhaps less satisfying as a pop record than Norman Fucking Rockwell, Did You Know… feels like her most complete statement on a personal level yet, whilst still working well within the broader world that she’s spent over a decade constructing.

Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We

Despite liking the odd song or two, I have until now been largely immune to Mitski over the full length of an album. But The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We has a much more organic sound than I’m used to hearing from her, well adrift from the polished guitar rock of her big 10s records. Instead, it takes many of its cues from classic folk and country, occasionally lush and expansive, often determinedly sombre but always at a distance from the areas where she’s generally been at home. Opener Bug Like An Angel is a brooding scene setter, where Mitski unveils the terse and grumpy presence we will grow familiar with over the next half hour. The main elements of the album are already in place - the spare instrumentation; Mitski’s extraordinary voice, hard and intransigent but still full of yearning; the occasional, overwhelming interjections from the wings. It all creates a distinctive atmosphere, extremely intense but intimate too: we’re allowed into Mitski’s world but there’s a lot to take in.

Lyrically, the songs are both heavily allusive and extremely personal, like hearing ancient parables told by the characters from the story. Surprise hit My Love Mine All Mine seems to sit apart as a relatively standard love song but a closer listen reveals deeper layers; the placing of her love as something independent from its object makes it feel more of a piece with the album’s other enigmas. At a time where Mitski seemed to be cooling on being a rock star, The Land Is Inhospitable adds a new twist to her long musical journey, seemingly presenting a more intimate portrait while in fact retaining most of her essential mystery. As an album, it really is quite something: what that is I’m less certain of but I like it regardless.

Olivia Rodrigo - Guts

Tho I wouldn't have called myself a hater (I don’t think I would have been bothered enough), I don't really like Olivia’s all conquering debut Sour, which I thought a bit too one-note and overpopulated with slushy ballads. But by the time Guts came around I was open to listening again, drawn in by its excellent singles and primed for a different experience. Vampire, the best of them and more or less of this year, was a fantastic example of taking something that Olivia is clearly very accomplished at (the grand piano lament) and then, rather than running that into the ground, instead using it as a springboard for an entirely different idea. Get Him Back and Bad Idea Right hark back to earlier guitar based tracks like Brutal, but on Guts they form a much more substantive part of the album, cementing its brand of addictive pop grunge and working up a much goofier version of her messy teen persona.

Elsewhere, the ballads did in fact return. Some have speculated that this may have been a bad idea (right?) but for me they’ve been growers, particularly the likes of Lacy and The Grudge, where Olivia explores the bitterness of youth and uses it to tear holes in the people who’ve wronged her. But if I’m honest, it’s the rockers that I’m usually waiting for: whether the new wave pastiche of Love Is Embarrassing or autumnal Cure homage Pretty Isn’t Pretty, each one feels like a mini-revelation and it’s the style that I hope she leans on most in the future.

Palehound - Eye On The Bat

Palehound have been around for a while now and every so often I’ve given their records a try and haven't really managed to connect with them properly. Eye on the Bat has been the first exception, though whether that's because it’s any better than the others or I just made more of an effort with it I don’t know. Its template is certainly well worn in the indie world - country rock with varying degrees of aggression or melodic sweetness - but there’s still a lot here that grabs my attention, especially in the charming indie pop of the title track and the heart-rending melancholy of Route 22.

But the thing that caught my ear the most was Ellen Kempner’s disarming honesty, with much of the album spent documenting what sounds like a deeply messy break up. Whether she’s bitterly picking through the fall out on Independence Day or remembering some hilariously embarrassing bedroom scene on opener Good Sex, Eye On The Bat's almost diaristic view is mesmerising throughout, making you warm to Kempner even as she works thru some of her own worst traits. And aside from anything else, her understanding of relationships underlines her strengths as a lyricist, as she dissects their complexities with wit, sympathy and occasional anger to capture all the stuff that transcends whatever we were hoping for in the first place.

Poppy - Zig

After the wild ride that commenced with 2020’s extraordinary pop/metal mash up I Disagree, Poppy has journeyed thru indie rock, goth and punk to wind up back where she started, only not quite. Zig may represent a return to pop - indeed it’s produced by Weeknd affiliate Ali Payami - but it’s one that’s filtered thru all of the places she stopped off along the way.

The crepuscular grind of Church Outfit and Knockoff sound like more danceable versions of the I Disagree sound, while the crunching title track suggests that she can still go as hard as ever. But there are nods to a lighter side here as well, particularly in the strong trio that wind up the album: The Attic recasts her sound in a euphoric drum n bass clatter whilst closer Prove It kicks up a remarkable blend of manic hyperpop and gentle electro-balladry, whilst still working in the rich emotional palette that she’s developed in recent years.

In one sense this is a huge departure from the frenetic punk of last year’s Stagger EP but the vibes here stake out territory that you’d still find oddly familiar. Some of the gothy ballads are less immediate than other songs but nothing on Zig is boring, just varying refinements on her ever evolving musical journey. The critics were split, occasionally rattled and sometimes just plain baffled, but that’s only to be expected by now. Poppy follows her own plan and rarely sticks to the same tune: in truth it’s a privilege just to be a witness to the chaos.

Sweeping Promises - Good Living Is Coming For You

One thing that I find missing in a lot of modern guitar based music is snappy songs with good catchy hooks. While Sweeping Promises appear to place their focus elsewhere - their high concept sound is best understood as someone broadcasting direct from 1979 through a wristwatch speaker - their second album still finds time to deliver fully on the tunes. Good Living Is Coming To You is steeped in bubblegum melodies and memorable choruses, with songs that become earworms before you’ve even registered how catchy they are.

More than anything, it's dominated by Lira Mondal’s imperious vocals: whether it’s in the cascading harmonies of Throw Of The Dice, the fierce yells and hisses that close out the title track or her sweet voiced switch-outs on Ideal No, her character springs out of every song in a way that few singers ever really manage to impose. While you might think that the post punk era has been mined to death by now, Sweeping Promises drag new life into it by going back further: their sound may be heavily rooted in a specific moment but the elements of songcraft often have more in common with 60s girl group classics than gnarled art rockers. Ten bangers and no filler: Good Living Is Coming For You is everything I wanted from it and more.

Wednesday - Rat Saw God

While the queasy vibes of 2021’s Twin Plagues are still high in the mix here, it was the welcome injection of melody on Wednesday's third album that managed to alert the media. That lightness was more apparent in Karly Hartzman's lyrics than you might notice on a passing listen too: though often praised for her grimly amusing takes on middle American backwaters, the key to them was her deceptively soft touch, casting a sympathetic eye over grisly scenes even as she retained their gnarlier undertones.

Single Chosen To Deserve, with its crunching chorus and heartwarming romantic turnaround, feels like the designated big moment from the record but in reality Rat Saw God has an embarrassment of riches. Quarry in particular, with its Waterloo Sunset-esque signature and matter-of-fact dissection of grim local gossip, is an almost pop version of the most haunting aspects of Hartzman's craft, while the washed out bounce of closer TV in the Gas Pump pitches a lonelier scene in a similarly gorgeous manner.

This is not to forget that Wedneday can still rock extremely hard when they want to, especially on the brutal 8 minute Bull Believer, an ambitious multipart epic that ends with Hartzman screaming “FINISH HIM!!!” repeatedly over the chaotic finale. But while Rat Saw God brought this kind of sawtoothed sound back to widespread acclaim, its real trick was how it sugared the pill just enough to get it past even the most determinedly sweet tooth.

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timeagainreviews · 1 year ago

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The Eve of the 60th Anniversary-ish

My ability to name things isn’t the best. I overthink and end up with a five-year-old blog called “Time and Time Again.” Terrible name. “I should change it,” I’ve said for five years. Well, I am going to do just that. But in the meantime, I need to find a name for this type of article. As is tradition around here, I like to write a short article about my predictions, expectations- nay, hopes for the incoming series or era of Doctor Who. I usually label them as “Thoughts Leading Up to…” which is fine. But is there a word or phrase out there that says it succinctly? A sort of Whatchamacallit, Marsupilami, Raxacoricofallapatorius? If I do find a better name for this series, do I call it part five or part one? Davies is calling season 14 “Season 1.” Why can’t I?

In considering a new name, I have decided to return to the very first article of this type- “The Eve of the Thirteenth.” So from now on, I’m calling this my “Eve of Series.” Hopefully, you’re reading this article on the Eve of the 60th Anniversary special “The Star Beast.” Or you’re way late to the game and it’s August. In that case, enjoy your view from Hindsight Bias Tower, as you laugh at my fatuous forecasts or marvel at my prognostic aptitude. So in no particular order, here’s a list of some shit I’ve been thinking about.

RTD2

Where else to start but the man himself? And what a controversial man he’s been (especially this week!) Not five minutes into the new RTD era and we’ve already had a massive retcon in the form of Davros. While, the discourse on this situation has been its usual abysmal self, I expect this to be par for the course. From Chibnall stans hoping their aggressors end up with egg on their faces to the far worse transphobes and ableists decrying every decision thus far, Davies is right there in the centre of it. Pushing people’s buttons. He seems like a man on a mission and if I had to guess, it is to shake the cobwebs out of our collective Doctor Who-themed sheets and duvets.

Davies has a monumental task ahead of him. Make something both the Chibnall stans and his haters would like to watch. He could ignore the haters, but they help keep the lights on. And just as important, you don’t want to alienate the people who have enjoyed the show for the last five years. In many people’s eyes, mine included, Chibnall left a broken show in his wake. It’s my opinion that Russell T Davies plans to break it further. I’ve thought about this a lot lately, and I think it may be time for us as a fandom to question why the Doctor has so many rules. Because let’s be honest, Doctor Who’s canon is a mess and it barely matters. Why not embrace that? You think the Cushing movies and the Past Doctor Adventure books are canon? Sure, why not. You still incorporate the Faction Paradox into your version of Doctor Who? Go for it. We all have our own version of Doctor Who, why not embrace that?

The Whoniverse

Considering the popularity of muti-verses in media right now (get ready for multi-verse fatigue) it makes sense that this new Whoniverse may start embracing the many directions Doctor Who branches. This is an opportunity to explore different avenues of the Whoniverse while simultaneously fueling the ever-ravenous Mouse’s need for Content™. In other words, Doccy Who is about to get crammed down our throats like nobody’s business. If you’ve ever had someone’s business down your throat, it can be nice but can also wear out its welcome. Short breaks help.

If you’ve read this blog, you’ll know I’m a rainy-day fan. I’m here for the long haul. I am not so much worried about overexposure to Doctor Who as I am the diluting of story. So long as the stories are good, I’m happy. So far, the Whoniverse has extended in the form of “Tales of the Tardis,” a sort of saccharine introduction to classic Doctor Who for beginners than an actual series in its own right. But in its short span, this unassuming nostalgia trip introduced us to an aspect that may just be integral to the Whoniverse at large. When Ace notes the Seventh Doctor’s older appearance he replies- “Timestreams are funny things. In some, I regenerate. In others, I don’t.”

Every time Data returns to Star Trek, we have to ignore the fact that Brent Spiner is ageing. Why does the Second Doctor have grey hair in “The Two Doctors?” These issues have bogged Doctor Who down for its entire run. It’s a rigid aspect of an otherwise malleable narrative. Not only does this dialogue explain the ageing appearances of Doctors, but it also gives writers carte blanche to do as they like. In this way, the Sixth Doctor gets a better costume. The Seventh Doctor has grey hair. And Davros has always walked. It’s a show about time travel and we as fans keep treating it like we’re the Time Lords. Time travel should be weird and confusing. As the Eleventh Doctor said- time travel is damage. Perhaps the Whoniverse will allow us to see some of that damage in its own time.

Fourteen’s Familiar Face (and Teeth)

When I had originally heard murmurs of David Tennant returning, I wrote them off as the worst idea possible. It’s not that I dislike David Tennant, but rather it felt like a step back for the show. I’ve always admired the show’s capacity for change and this felt stagnant. No Doctor should be the Doctor forever. Rather cleverly then, the show introduced us to Ncuti Gatwa before David Tennant. Already my curiosity had been piqued. Tennant was returning, but only for a moment. You have my attention, Russell. They knew we would see Tennant filming in his slick new threads, and they got ahead of it. It feels like equal parts stunt casting and clever writing. It would be unfair to any new Doctor to carry the weight of the 60th on their shoulders, so let’s revisit some of the old favourites, eh?

The Children in Need special was our first look at this Doctor, and as my friend Taryn put it- it was great until the Doctor showed up. It was a joke, but the stuff with Davros was genuinely interesting on its own. As soon as the Doctor showed up, the tonal whiplash was jarring. This isn’t to say it was bad. It’s for the kiddies, it should be lighter in tone. The joke about the Kaled anagram that went on too long was evidence early on that we were about to slip into the realm of panto. The main takeaway is that David’s still got it and that Ian Levine needs very little reason to turn on you. Neither of which was unknown to us before.

Donna and Rose

One of the more annoying traits some Whovians possess is the tendency to see a selection of Doctor Who characters and say “You left out so and so.” And usually, more often than not, that so and so is Rose Tyler. There’s always someone out there ready to see more David and Billie. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see the return of Donna Noble. But as a nice little nod to what came before, we get her daughter Rose. I love the entire idea behind this Rose. As Sharon Davies, Doctor Who’s first black companion was first introduced in “The Star Beast,” it’s delightful to know Doctor Who’s first trans companion will be introduced in “The Star Beast.” There’s a nice symmetry to that.

I also like what Rose implies about Donna’s story. When we last saw Donna, she was getting married and about to win the lottery. Her husband Shaun and her are still together all of these years later, and they have a daughter named Rose. As a trans person, I latched on to the name aspect of Rose’s character immediately as trans people name themselves. If she picked the name Rose out of nowhere, is it possible that a dormant Doctor Donna somehow passed attributes onto her progeny? Is there more to the name than coincidence? I certainly hope so. Russell T Davies seems dedicated to telling trans stories and our names are a huge part of our journeys. If he turned that aspect of the trans experience into a wibbly wobbly timey wimey phenomenon, I might love him forever.

I’m also just stoked as hell to see the return of Donna and her family. They’ve been hush on Wilf in the trailers. I suppose they’re trying to keep some surprises for the people out there who haven’t had Doctor Who news pumped intravenously for the last year and a half. I hope that they don’t forget Donna and Shaun’s lottery winnings. It would be a shame to see Donna bumbling around trying to find temp work after all this time. I hope she never had to work another day in her life. What I want for Donna, is a lot of what the trailers seem to imply- for her to feel whole again. Her adventures were stolen from her. I hope they don’t just bring her back to kill her. Donna doesn’t need to die to leave the TARDIS, she has a family. Give her a happily ever after!

Disney+

While we here in the UK will see no Doctor Who on Disney+, the rest of the world will. This is pretty big as many younger international viewers resort to piracy as they don’t have cable and no one in their right mind would pay for HBO Max or whatever the hell they’re calling it now. Recently a bunch of the usual shitty diaper babies shat their shitty diapers over the idea that people in other countries might be able to watch Doctor Who before the UK. I highly doubt that will be the case. Just because time zones exist doesn’t automatically mean that they won’t wait to drop the episode once it becomes available in the UK. I don’t know that for certain, but what I do know for certain is it hardly matters.

I’ve also seen some people worry that Disney will have too much say in Doctor Who’s content. And while they have given RTD the occasional note, it is still Bad Wolf making the decisions. I would like to think that Disney knows to leave well enough alone. They’ve not exactly had a great year at the box office, so it’s not like their advice is valuable these days. They could tell you a hundred ways to tank a franchise, which is technically helpful. Add to that the year they had with SAG-AFTRA and I think they’re probably hurting for a bit of help from their friends in Britain. Disney’s biggest contributions will likely be calling season 14 “Season 1,” as to not confuse subscribers and a higher budget. We appreciate the cash injection, Mickey, but please piss off.

Murray Gold replacing Segun Akinola

I wrote the exact opposite of that sentence five years ago. It’s weird how many aspects of Doctor Who have returned, but this was the first one that actually felt like a step back to me. Murray Gold is a great composer. His theme for The Face of Boe is a gorgeous piece of music. Matt Smith’s theme song might be my favourite Doctor Who theme song ever. But I am a fan of the Radiophonic Workshop and Segun Akinola was tapped into that in an exciting way. I’m just not sure what more Gold can do than more of the same.

Gold’s new intro was the second time I was disappointed by RTD’s Doctor Who. While many people were living for it, a few of my friends and I were disappointed. It gets a bit meandery and the parts you want to go hard simply don’t. I’m going to chalk this up to the poor sound of a live performance and hold my final judgement for the fully mixed version. As it stands, it’s standard Murray Gold. Nothing new. Underwhelming in its sameness. However, as I was tufting a Doctor Who rug the other day, I listened to the first six season soundtracks back to back and found myself pleasantly surprised by some of their offerings. Gold was always doing his best work when it was atmospheric and electronic. That’s the Murray Gold I’m most interested in hearing more from.

The Specials Themselves

For the most part, I’ve stayed away from fan speculation. Even in this blog, I’ve tried to stray from speculating actual plot points (save for Rose). I mostly hate it because it’s all hearsay and ultimately bullshit. There have been the supposed “leaks” about bi-regeneration and even if they’re true, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. Good writing can make just about any concept work. If you were to read out the plot synopsis of any story, it could sound awful. What a synopsis lacks is gripping dialogue, compelling scenes, and filmmakers coming together to achieve the correct tone. You can't gauge how good something is going to be by description alone.

What I can see is Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker, pulling the strings of the Doctor’s fate. Is he the reason for this familiar regeneration? Is Beep the Meep’s status as a comic book character part of it? How meta will this go? Will the Doctor remember Beep the Meep from his Fourth Doctor days or will the Meep be brand new to him? I’ve said before that you don’t want audiences asking the wrong questions. I feel like every question I’ve had since filming began was one of curiosity as opposed to confusion. I’m excited to be excited over Doctor Who again. When they revealed the three posters for the specials, I literally jumped for joy. I was ecstatic. These posters were creative, fun, and they left you wanting more. Fantastic.

My Own Relationship to the Show

My version of Star Wars is the original trilogy. I can’t stand the prequels. But lately, I’ve tried to take a lighter attitude toward them. While I still think they stink, I also recognise that they’re here to stay. That’s kind of where I am with the Timeless Child. I still hate the concept, but I accept it’s here to stay. And I am actually trying to be more open-minded about it. Now that we have better writers at the helm it might even turn into something interesting. As I stated above, the fandom is due a shakeup. As it stands, I am pretty open to a shakeup. This doesn’t mean that I don’t secretly hope Susan will show up and be revealed as the actual Timeless Child, but I’m realistic.

Recently someone also pointed out to me that the Doctor’s watch could have turned the First Doctor into a normal Time Lord, with the usual number of Time Lord regenerations. While this doesn’t explain why the Doctor being the most important Time Lord ever was necessary, it at least helps plug a plot hole. It’s ironic that Chibnall’s questionable writing may actually lead to Doctor Who’s canon being blown wide open. Equally ironic is the fact that he has actually improved my enjoyment of Doctor Who. I call it the Chibnall Effect. After the Chibnall era, middling episodes of the Davies and Moffat era have been bumped up considerably. Sometimes it takes a bad film to help you recognise a good film.

There’s a wrongheaded notion floating around these days that RTD fans are living off of nostalgia. While I don’t doubt there will be someone out there chasing a feeling lost to the winds of time, I should also point out that not all of us watched the Davies era as children. I was in my late 20’s when I got into Doctor Who. I have no little kid nostalgia for it. I was a junior in film school. I’ve been taught how to view art critically and I can say that the Davies era has its flaws and its strengths. I think for an atheist, he has a weird obsession with the Doctor as Jesus. And I found the schmoozy romance between Ten and Rose nauseating. But the man knows character development. He understands human emotion better than Moffat’s stunted women or Chibnall’s stunted everyone. What I’ve found in revisiting the RTD era is a consistent focus on characterisation. Without that, all of the clever writing and stellar effects amount to nothing. I love when Doctor Who is great, but at this point I’ll settle for competent.

A Personal Note

As I stated in my Monster Makeovers article, I will be covering the new episodes as they release. However I have recently started a bit of a project. I have taken up rug tufting and hope to eventually make a living out of it. Because of this, I will have to budget my time. My hope is that I will always have time after episodes to write reviews, but they may occasionally be a day late. If you’re interested in following my rug tufting journey, I started an Instagram account under the name pipedreamfasting. Feel free to drop me a follow.

In other news, I am actually planning on changing my blog’s name. I’ve been mulling a few ideas over, but nothing is final. Maybe I’ll do a poll, that is if my reader base is large enough for a poll to matter. That being said, I hope your Doctor Who anniversary special experience is a happy one! There’s been so much vitriol in the fandom lately that we could all use a positive experience. Happy anniversary to the greatest show in the galaxy!

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slashertalks · 1 year ago

Text

You’re in a Blockbuster. It’s summer, you’ve got no responsibilities and your parents threw you some extra cash so you could rent a movie and buy some popcorn. You’re gonna go home, open that plastic shell case (remember the way the cheap ones would crinkle?) and plug the tape into your VCR for 120 minutes of fun. Or, better yet— you’re not in a Blockbuster. You’re at home, digging through your movie shelf for the one tape you want to watch. Your mom recorded it off the TV, so you’ll have to fast-forward through commercial breaks (and little do you know, it’s probably edited) but you love it all the same. It’s not as high a quality as what you could get from the local rental shop, but there’s something magical about it. The four and a half minutes of the end of whatever TV show was on before your movie started. Ads, captured from a specific time period in a specific region— ads you probably won’t ever see again. VHS artifacts— fuzz, lines. The colors are a little off, the images a little hazy. You’ve got popcorn in your lap and a remote in hand so you can always get to the good stuff fast when the commercials do start. You don’t realize it, but that tape, with the hand-written label already starting to wear away, is a time capsule of your youth.

Youth you’ll never get back. Youth you may not even miss, but which so many people will play up as the best time of our lives. Was it really, though? Teenagers are assholes. Times were different. People are hateful now, yeah, but people were hateful back then too. I miss grunge and Y2K fashion and idogs and inflatable furniture and the freedom of being able to go outside as a kid but I wouldn’t exactly want to live in the fucking 90s or early 2000s. I wouldn’t go back, even if I am nostalgic. And I think there’s some very potent horror in that nostalgia.

I’ve been hyping this up for a while and it��s finally time I tackle WNUF Halloween Special, V/H/S 94, and V/H/S 99 all together— splatterfests, sure, but all poignant time capsules of a specific genre of media: the home recording. Not family movies, though a variety of those certainly plays a major role in both of the V/H/S titles I’ve selected. No, instead I mean tapes copied from local TV channels, ads and all. There’s something very unique about the experience of watching a film on TV. I think few of us would actively choose that route these days, when films are available seamlessly at our fingertips (unedited and uninterrupted). Yet, there is something so universally nostalgic about both local TV channels and VHS tapes for a certain generation of us that all three of these movies capture perfectly (albeit some aspects are captured better than others in each of the films).

The first film chronologically for both release and setting is WNUF Halloween Special. A gem of a film set in 1987, it pretends to be a home recording of a local news channel’s Halloween broadcast. Segments about dentists buying back candy, about Christians protesting the holiday, and the grand finale: a longer special about a news reporter and a team of paranormal investigators exploring a supposedly-haunted house. Things go, unsurprisingly, haywire. The plot of the film is paper-thin and predictable, the acting is sublimely cheesy (exactly what you want and expect from smalltown news personalities), and the effects are alright. A little blood here and there, a dead cat— nothing beyond that.

Where the film shines is its dedication to capturing the experience. The sound of the tape being pushed into the VCR, the blue screen— local commercials, and fast-forwarding through ones you’ve already seen or segments you find boring. “Kids, ask your parents permission before calling!” “Playing with drugs... is playing with DEATH.” “All the rock you could want, on the QUARRY!” — It’s truly a masterpiece. I feel like a little kid sitting too close to the TV screen with my bucket of Halloween candy next to me every time I watch this movie. It has its flaws, sure, but there is something so tangibly charming about a window into my childhood now preserved only on old Between The Lions tapes, captured here in a film released in 2013. I remember that broadcast on my TV. I remember my old Halloween costume, and my orange plastic pumpkin. I was that kid, watching in awe and horror was my local TV anchor hosts a call-in seance live. We all have, I think, if you grew up in that wonderful window from the late 80s to the early 2000s. It’s delightful, and WNUF Halloween Special has cemented itself as one of my favorite holiday films of all time.

V/H/S 94 is second, again for both release and setting (and isn’t that perfect?). Overall, this film takes itself the most seriously. While WNUF is not an anthology film, both of the V/H/S entries are. Our frame story here, Holy Hell, follows a SWAT unit on a drug bust that turns into a snuff film ring bust that quickly goes sour. As the film progresses, so to does our little unit— deeper and deeper into the facility, uncovering more and more eyeless bodies and strange TVs, until it’s finally revealed that the two female officers were the leads of the snuff film cult all along. The take a camera to the head of the final SWAT officer; lenses shatter and brain chunks splatter.

Overall, the shorts in this film are delightful, and all in various ways. Storm Drain is most similar to WNUF, as it also parodies a news broadcast. Being a direct broadcast from the mid-90s, the camera quality has improved distinctly— only to drop again for the next short, The Empty Wake. After all, a funeral home certainly wouldn’t have the same quality cameras as a news station. You could (and people certainly have) argued that The Empty Wake is middling at best; a simple and obvious story that excels mostly with its use of effects and occasionally with its building of tension. Yet the use of three fixed cameras calls back to early survival horror in a delightful way. It feels almost Poe-esque, a sort of 90s Gothic I’ve never really seen before. Overly-haunting funeral music, a raging storm and a sea of brown. Brown chairs, brown carpet, ugly light fixtures that constantly threaten to go out. Its delightfully evocative of the sort of empty beige wasteland of many Midwest baptist churches. The only things unique here are the girl and the casket— and whatever monster lurks inside.

The third short, The Subject, is my second favorite. The effects are stunning and CGI is used sparingly, and I’m a sucker for mad scientist/Frankenstein’s Monster stories. Though it makes the least effort to maintain an “authentic” appearance, the creature and set design elevate it. There’s also a delightful emotional core; the girl becomes a monster of the soldiers’ own creation, and it is Jono’s kindness that helps re-ground her. I can only say it’s unfortunate Jono died, considering they each save the other (and he’d only ever been kind to her, trying to protect her from the start and even lying to his commander about seeing her crawling away before they run into each other again in the midst of her killing spree). I’m not sure whether I would’ve preferred that they both died together, or both escaped together, but having only the girl survived feels... odd. Especially considering the world she is escaping into is likely to hold little kindness for her.

Interestingly, the fourth short (and by far my favorite) has a similar sort of “monster of your own creation” through-line, though with a distinctly more serious twist. A white supremacist extremist group is preparing for a domestic terrorist attack, using vampire blood as a bomb. It’s got the grittiest, most low-quality footage of any of the shorts (which, again, makes sense — they’re using cheap, handheld cameras) and feels the most real to me. It’s set near Detroit, but the snowy wilderness is familiar as someone who grew up in the northern midwest. Each day, at a certain time, the militia members shoot the vampire in the head. One such scene opens the film— the vampire pleads for his life. Each subsequent time, the vampire pleads less and less, until he simply kneels in silence and accepts a bullet through the skull. At the end of the film, through a series of drunken mishaps, the vampire is released and all of the militia members are killed. The vampire uses the militia’s fail-safe to open a large window and expose himself to sunlight, killing himself and destroying the compound. It feels less tragic than The Subject, but remains very understandable. When you’ve spent most of your life being demonized, sometimes you do just want to let yourself become the demon.

The third and final film, V/H/S 99, is more consistent aesthetically than V/H/S 94, as it leans almost entirely into handheld, home movie style film-making. It is also mostly focused on teens suffering the consequences of their actions. There was certainly a specific brand of mean-spirited, Jackass-style “prank” content prevalent in this era alongside the blossoming newgrounds community of shock animations and flash games. All that to say, teenagers of this era fucking sucked.

Shredding, the first short, features a group of irreverent douchebag punks who break into an abandoned music club only to mock the deaths of Bitch Cat, the last band who played there before a fire broke out inside the building. Only one of them shows any concern for their actions, but all of them die gruesomely— and in a delightfully gory bit of effects work, their dismembered corpses are reassembled and puppeteered by the zombified ghosts of Bitch Cat to perform one last song.

This is followed by Suicide Bid, pivoting from punks to bitchy sorority girls who decide a great hazing prank would be burying a desperate girl alive for a night. Of course, as shitty as that would be on its own, there also has to be a ghost involved. The ghost of Giltine attacks Lily as the coffin slowly fills with rainwater after a storm starts, and the sorority sisters come back to a mysteriously empty coffin the next day. Lily gets the last laugh by trapping all the other girls in their own coffins, having made a deal with Giltine to offer the sorority girls in exchange for her own soul.

Ozzy’s Dungeon pivots from revenge against shitty teens to revenge against shitty adults— all while parodying Nickelodeon game shows. It’s gross, it’s sleazy, and it’s wonderfully demented in a SAW-esque way. It’s also an interesting look at failed child stardom. Donna was supposed to be the one who got out, the one who made it big, but now her leg is mangled. Her own mother says it looks like dog meat, goes on this revenge crusade that Donna barely takes part in. When she does, her mother takes over for her. Her father makes token protests but ultimately lets the mother take the lead— and the game show host was always more worried about appearances than anything else. At the end of their little vengeance plot, the host helps Donna and her family sneak back onto the set of the show to meet the titular Ozzy and get a wish granted (the promised prize of the show which no one ever won). Donna’s mother prompts her to wish for for a new car, for 15 million dollars— Donna wishes for everyone who used her to die.

The frame story of this film, stop-motion animated segments of a teen’s home movie made with toy soldiers, feeds directly into the fourth short, The Gawkers. We’ve returned again to the world of shitty teens— this time, to popular teen boys. They think they’re hot shit and treat women as objects, trying to sneak panty shots of girls in a park before being chased off, and later spying on Brady and Dylan’s neighbor. It’s hardly the most enjoyable watch, but it is quite gratifying. The teens who treated women as nothing more than sexual objects are themselves turned into literal objects. It turns out the neighbor is a gorgon, and she caught the boys spying on her through her webcam thanks to Brady’s programming skills. She attacks them all and turns them to stone for invading her privacy, betraying her trust and sexualizing her without her consent. This is the short that relies most heavily on CGI (to create the Gorgon) and it does feel extremely weak. The gorgon doesn’t seem to have any weight to her and the snakes on her head do not move naturally in the slightest— budget constraints are understandable, but this is why I much prefer The Subject’s merging of practical and digital to elevate the practical and execute what couldn’t be physically built.

Last, but certainly not least, is To Hell and Back, a short following to videographers recording a Y2K party hosted by a coven of witches as they attempt to summon a demon into the body of a willing host. A lower demon crashes the party, and as the witches banish it back to hell it grabs onto the two cameramen and drags them to hell with it. The only short that has nothing to do with vengeance (or teens), the two men must instead venture through the pits of hell in an attempt to find the demon being summoned and catch a ride back to earth. They succeed, but ruin the coven’s summoning and are killed for it (one of them using his blood to write the name of another lower demon who had helped them escape in the witches’ book before dying). The film closes as the videographers’ camera runs out of battery.

Each of these films captures a very specific era in the lifetime of VHS as a medium, and captures it extremely well. From the image and color distortion of WNUF’s faux home recording to the differences in camera quality to match the shorts’ settings in V/H/S 94 as we transition from newscasts to funeral homes, to amateur documentaries. V/H/S 99 is more consistent than 94, as stated, but this is inherent to all of their shorts being filmed by amateurs— the most polished segment is the beginning of Ozzy’s Dungeon while the actual show is being filmed. It’s an excellent depiction of the astounding jump in technological quality in such a brief time. At least in what was available to professionals. Perhaps the most charming part of this era of VHS is that while technology got smaller and cheaper for consumers, it did not necessarily get better. A cheap, handheld video camera is still a cheap handheld video camera.

In their commitment to this horror time capsule project, WNUF Halloween Special and most of the shorts from the two V/H/S films rely heavily on practical effects. It is, at times, bad-looking. You know it’s a guy in a rubber suit. The leech-like vampire isn’t really chewing a guy’s face off. Giltine is... well, an unarticulated latex mask with equally unarticulated hands. These monsters are fake and you know it, and that is part of the charm. It is a low-budget 90s film you picked up from the bargain bin, a home-burned DVD your friend gifted you of their high-school slasher created during summer vacation. It’s a guy in a mask, and it might be a guy you know, but you’ve got to suspend your disbelief. You’ve come home from Blockbuster with every intention of seeing that guy in a mask and believing he is a monster out to torment assholes, and it’s golden.

I’ve said it before, seen it said by others, and will absolutely say it again: bad practical effects will always be better than bad CGI. I don’t care how cheap it looks— if there’s a real, tangible thing in front of the actors I’ll buy it so much more than PS1 graphics slapped against the background. Something with weight, something the actors can really react to. A good performance can make bad practical effects passable and passable effects amazing. You forget you can see the wire in certain shots until some dude on IMDb points it out in the trivia section. The actors sell it. The film scares you. You’re 14, 15, 16 and you snuck a horror movie out of the rental place your parents would never let you watch normally. You’re tuning into the late-night broadcast of Ghoulies or Reanimator or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It scares you because it’s not something you’re supposed to see. None of these tapes were something we were ever supposed to see, but here they are.

Here’s death, here’s gore, here’s horror. Here’s a man in a mask. Here’s a cheap video camera and here’s the nostalgic sound of your tape thunking into place in your VCR, whirring to life as a commercial flickers across the screen as that home recording of your favorite movie comes on. The one you were only supposed to see once, that Halloween night, preserved carefully now on your shelf lined with hand-labelled tapes. Maybe it’s not as scary as it used to be, but it’s joyful! It’s a trip down memory lane, an experience not many of us will get back (at least not the way we all individually remember it), but we can still plug in any of these masterfully crafted movies and get a dose of nostalgia whenever we want. They’ll always be there— and you can always be a friend.

Just remember to rewind when you reach the end.

#wnuf halloween special #v/h/s/94 #v/h/s/99 #vhs 94 #vhs 99

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lindszeppelin · 9 months ago

Note

In the press for MOTA (and even a little for D2), Austin often references how out of it and lost he was when he was in London. He even talks in one interview about how he doesn’t remember filming some of the scenes in MOTA.

We all knew he had a tough time “coming out” of his Elvis portrayal, but these interviews I think shed a bit more light on just how scrambled up he really was.

This is the exact time frame when the situationship would have been established. And I bet to him and his camp it seemed like a pretty great idea at the time — low stress, harmless, straightforward. It seemed like it would protect him from questions about V (and it did) and allow him to spend time with someone on mutually agreed upon terms. But…

“When you’re lost, people take advantage.” (Actual dialogue from the Elvis movie.)

Now I am NOT suggesting that he isn’t responsible for his own life and choices. He’s an adult so it’s all ultimately up to him. But based on his facial expressions and body language in the past weeks (months really), it’s quite evident that he is NOT feeling the benefit of being tied to this situation. And I wonder if he had it to do all over again if he would make a different decision. Of course we will never know.

But I suspect he has utterly soured on this aspect of fame and will want nothing more to do with such an arrangement. Or at least not one like this. Apart from the initial shield from speculation about V or another relationship, he’s gotten absolutely nothing back from this. She appears to be too young and spoiled to be anything but a complete drain. In fact, except for Cannes I don’t recall ever seeing her even look excited to be supporting him. I’m not saying I know for sure but from the parts that are visible she just does NOT give off warmth. She gives off needy and self-involved. The most disappointing example of this was Lisa Marie’s funeral. I would bet money that it was not long after that (which was after the Golden Globes), that the whole mess started to feel off to him. Death has a way of cutting through the bullshit. But, of course, the fog of awards season wouldn’t be the time to process that.

It’s so very frustrating to see him stuck in this contract, but I am hoping that when he is finally cut loose, he can actually spend some time in the kind of seclusion/privacy he genuinely wants.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. But I’m also moving this week so I’m insane and haven’t even had time to watch episode 5. There’s more in my head but I just had to stop and take the time to share this much with you Linds.

💕

god MJ i love you and your messages like these, i enjoy them every single time because you provide so much beautiful nuance and depth to your comments. ugh it's so good. and like always i agree with everything you said. we be on the same wavelength like that lol.

that elvis quote you dropped too was PERFECT. like literally, Elvis himself got mixed up with people who were not good for him but he was trapped. and people come through and try to say austin isn't trapped. then what do you call a man who has had no spark in his eyes for the last year+, looking morose every time he is with her, forced to be her pap puppet while she knows he hates being papped, etc? the only time austin feels happy is when he is with his costars and his friends that he loves. but when with her it's like the soul gets sucked out of him and he's mentally somewhere else while his body just goes through the motions. robotic and predictable.

and yes him and kaia met around that time he had finished filming MOTA. this man was barely in hospital for a week before flying over to London and being thrust into a new environment, new characters, new people. these shippers are too young and inexperienced to know how a person who goes through that much stress and quick change can be in a fog for a long time. plus yes, he didn't have to answer anything Qs about vanessa since he was already dating kaia when they were first papped after a gym session.

also let's not forget that this man was put through award season, grueling and 10x more stress for his oscar campaign. all of the events he attended in 2022/2023 were for Elvis and his Oscar nomination. that's an entirely different kind of PR he would be thrust into that he never experienced before. and yes of course while he agreed to do it in the beginning when it was new and different, clearly their dynamic changed and it's never been the same.

but one day when he is able to walk away from it, we will see an entirely vibrant and new austin. i swear to god this man will be totally reborn. it gives the energy of nicole kidman pumping her fits in the air excitedly after divorcing tom cruise lol.

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chacusha · 2 years ago

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Snowflake Challenge #2

Challenge #2 - Write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom.

I am lazy so instead of doing this, I linked (on Dreamwidth, friendslocked) all the manifestos I’ve already written and also add some thoughts about how writing those manifestos made me wonder at my sometimes unpredictable/inconsistent taste in pairings, and how Quodo is simultaneously a very new/unusual kind of OTP for me to have and also kind of at the intersection of multiple dynamics I’ve been drawn to in the past. It’s simultaneously a bizarre OTP for me and a completely predictable OTP for me. The full discussion is over at my journal in a friends-locked post, but here is a part of it I’m fine sharing publicly:

In some ways my obsession with Quodo is simultaneously very weird/unprecedented for me (like, M/M pairing? aliens/xeno? sci-fi canon? rivals-to-lovers instead of friends-to-lovers? these are very weird/new aspects for me). But at the same time, I am also 100% convinced that my taste in pairings has led me straight to Quodo and it's 100% predictable that this pairing would have been catnip to me. Like, I guess one thing you might notice about my shipping patterns is that they seem to be pretty agnostic to the genders/ages/attractiveness of characters, but they strongly gravitate toward romance/pining/romcom type dynamics. Usually such pairings in fiction are het, hence the skew in my OTPs toward het, but in the case of Odo/Quark, they're like a romance pairing on steroids, with basically half a dozen romcom dynamics somehow packed into a single pair of characters. They're enemies-to-lovers; they're friends-to-lovers; they're the disreputable rake and the spirited virgin; they're the dour emotionally-repressed guy pining after the vibrant girl full of life; they're slap-slap-kissing except without the kissing part; they're detective/thief; they're corrupt cop and criminal boyfriend; they're tsundere; they're the guy with a crush on his best friend who has a crush on someone else; they're sharing a bed and stranded together and enemies forced to cooperate; they're running to the airport to confess their feelings; they're both shamelessly flirting with each other; one is shamelessly flirting and the other is oblivious; they're both oblivious; they're already married. They're like a supernormal stimulus, where the stimulus in this case is romcom plots.

I kind of came to this conclusion partly because I was thinking about what do some of my other recent OTPs share in common with Quodo and I came up with something like this:

Shared with Hawkeye/Riesz: One half of the pairing is a shameless flirt; the other half radiates intense never-been-kissed energy. Shared with Sansa/Sandor: Every interaction is a clash between opposing life philosophies. Shared with Alternis/Edea: One half of the pairing is a super repressed guy always hiding feelings. Shared with Mi-na/Yun-seong: Playful teasing friendship with sexual tension. What these dynamics all share is, well, Quodo, but also you might notice that they all create some kind of pining potential: With the shameless flirt + never-been-kissed character, you get plenty of opportunities for romantic/intimate moments initiated by the flirty character but rebuffed by the never-been-kissed character who doesn't quite know whether to take the flirty character's advances seriously at all. Ambiguous feelings! Intimacy while pining! Rejection! With the clash-between-philosophies dynamic, the opposing moral codes create tension and a feeling of incompatibility that keep two characters who are otherwise attracted to each other apart. Will-they-won't-they! Slow burn! A reason why neither character will end our misery and just Spit It Out! Repressed characters -- I mean, this is the bread and butter of pining. Works better the more ridiculously repressed a character is, and Odo is ridiculously repressed for various reasons of his upbringing. Yeah! Just the contrast between the strength of the felt feelings and how little the character expresses them -- that's the good stuff. Again, a good reason why characters attracted to each other just will not say anything or get together -- one guy is repressed and, while the other is expressive, they have no reason to believe repressed guy is interested in them at all. With various friends-to-lovers dynamics, you get all the fun of flirtation but then the mixed messaging where neither person is sure whether affection is platonic or romantic. Like, sometimes this kind of play, these games these friends who are attracted to each other engage in, feel like courtship, but I mean... they're just friends, right? The situation is just waiting for one of the two friends to develop a crush on or be wooed by a third party and then oh NO, the pining hits the fan. Once one character (or both) catches/realizes feelings, then it's Pining Time. Affection that used to feel good now feels painful; its pain is proportional to how good it feels, even! Guilt at having developed feelings! Jealousy while also wanting to be A Good/Supportive Friend!

So yeah, analyzing the connections between Quodo and my various OTPs has led me to conclude that Quodo is the usual pining dynamic I like in fiction... ON STEROIDS. Which maybe explains why it broke my brain while being very unlike the kind of pairing I usually get obsessed with/go for. Because in some sense it is the intersection of a whole bunch of my favorite dynamics in fiction somehow rolled into a bizarre package.

#snowflake challenge #dreamwidth

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thelostroad · 1 year ago

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It feels like it’s not the typical experience sometimes when I’m thinking about my journey towards family estrangement. In so many examples, I think what tends to be a prominent version is someone who does wish they had a better relationship with family, and there are various trials of maybe trying to improve things, or low contact and being apart for the sake of minimizing harm/conflict, but in general maybe a vacillating goal of resolution—sometimes this is escaped in cases of extreme abuse, but other times, tbh, not; it’s perfectly common as well for people from abusive families to still have a torn conviction or choose/want to maintain some level of relationship, or to seek healing or lowest maintainable contact or similar. [A note I forgot to add: this may precede a complete or more severe estrangement/severance, too; it’s not like these are always the only thing and it is forever ongoing and accepted.]

It’s something I’ve become familiar with and have gotten a measure of understanding of, but I also cannot fathom relating that same framework to my own situation. I often feel uncomfortable or at odds knowing this about myself, because there is (I think) so little about my family that could be cast as abusive, if any aspects even were, despite my feelings, and I have certainly not experienced many of the myriad horrific violences, violations, and grievous/injurious harms that many children of abuse have (or continue to). I see these people fighting to get wholly out from often very early on; and I see them going back and forth on how much distance they want from their abusers (some of whom maybe haven’t hurt them actively since childhood, perhaps); and I see them loving or mourning and having attachment to their families; and I see them completely cutting them off in adulthood or having strict low-contact boundaries while also allowing a minimum, or still making an occasional concession, or wishing things could be different. And I feel weird even framing these other experiences; they’re all obviously not actually capturable in these short phrases, and have depth and complexity, and in some places overlap, and for a lot probably don’t represent an actual contentment or satisfaction with a situation just because it is the one present. I know that, and I see all variety of iterations and experiences with people dear to me, and have long since determined that I will in no case judge or question or dismiss any of them.

But I feel dissonant for being different. Not something that I can frame as worse or better; and I don’t think even my actual experiences are anything that probably many of my peers and friends can relate to, contexts and all? But I still can’t understand it in an “I relate”/empathy/would do the same way, which feels uncomfortable and like I’m not sure if I should be guilty or if I’m wrong or what it is. All the pieces, I think, are things that I think will be shared in both cases and with which I am frequently able to relate: guilt, hesitance, trepidation of how one will be seen, worry about the effect it has on estranged person, moral ambiguity, reliance, resentment, tiredness, a distance between the worst harm and the person at the state they are, some measure of appreciation, not sure how it would affect other family members, the concern of giving things up. But the part I struggle to reconcile is that I’ve never not been sure it’s what I want.

Once or twice there’s been points at which I’ve debated whether it will be worth it. There was a period in childhood, I’m not sure for how long—maybe for longer than I think, to be honest—where I wanted, at least sometimes, a version of my family that was better, or where certain things were fixed or healed or better. There’s been a point in my life for which I wanted my parents to love and accept me, and predicted continuing to have a relationship with them. But at some point, I don’t know when, that period ended finitely and completely. And once it did, from whenever that was onward, my entire life ongoing has never once involved wavering or hesitation in knowing—like Knowing knowing, an absolute end goal that was inherent to any vision of my future, in all iterations, no caveats—that the life I intend for myself is to not have my family in it. Period. Always! And I don’t know how to integrate this alongside the narratives I encounter or express it cohesively.

Since deciding to make this an imminent goal earlier this year, the closest I’ve got to capturing it is comparing it to dysphoria. Because to me it does feel the same: the idea of me still being part of my family feels as wrong and incongruous with my self-image as breasts, as gender, as names and terminology that don’t apply to me. And it has for as long as I can recall. When I made the imminence of the intent apparent to various people close to me, literally any element of surprise in their reactions came as a weird punch of confusion and discomfort to me; it had genuinely not been in my cognitive construct to consider that anyone who knows me would not have it embedded within their understanding of me that said Me-ness intrinsically included estrangement, or demanded exclusion, from my family, however one would phrase it. It’s hard-wired; it’s built into the code; it’s a feature, not a bug; the fact of Me is diametrically conflicted from being in my family. In my head it is impossible for both to exist copacetically. (For another existential conundrum sometime, maybe one might find me elaborating on how This truth struggles in conflicted coexistence with the fact that for all these near-30 years of life, I haven’t left them yet.)

I don’t have much of a conclusion to this, or even a particular goal in trying to articulate it. It’s just a thought that I’ve struggled to mold into an easily communicable shape. Today in session we talked about my mother, and things she’s said and what she wants. Do I think she’s genuinely interested, no agenda, in my art, or is there an ulterior motive? Does she expect an answer to her email reply, a response to the message I sent checking in and asking her to not follow-up for any more info? These aren’t things I have firm conclusions on; I have senses and guesses and conditions, but it’s not been a factor in how I think about it. The question envisions a possible answer where the scenario involves her having sincere interest, unburdened by suspicion or judgment, for interest—I just don’t care. It would not make me feel better if that were true; her authentic fondness and investment or appreciation is not on my wish list. If she were purely innocent in this scenario and would to no end appreciate seeing my work and sharing in things I enjoy in life, just because she cares or loves me or for no reason at all, it would not put me at ease; it would discomfit me. Because if she had an agenda or didn’t have one but would use it or had none at all, I would not want to share with her. Yes, because I expect that it will be used against me, and yes, because I infer her judgment. But also because I have no interest in her approval, in conferred appreciation, in stringless sharing, in bonding. A stranger’s interest would have some manner of appeal to me, but all I want from her is separation. (It’s interesting, too, that this conviction holds despite emotions of esteem… I know that if she expressed disinterest it would sting, that if she ignored me I would eventually take it personally, that if she were impressed and full of praise I would have some measure of at least relief or satisfaction, maybe even pride. But forefront to all of that is that I don’t want Her and My Life to be overlapping at all.)

I don’t know that her intentions are bad. I try, sometimes, to err towards the assumption that they are neutral, or even, in some cases, have some seed of Care or twisted attempt towards Good. It’s just that I don’t… care. Not ultimately. Navigating her relationship & contemplating her intent & considerations on what could be better are inherent disinteresting to me.

When something is wrong or bad or flawed, there are a few prospective responses: to fix it, to replace it, to punish it, to reject it. If I am any of these I am the latter. In a dream world I do not envision my family being better, nor do I picture myself having a family that is simply an entirely different animal to the one I have. In the now, I would love justice, yes; I’d like them to be wounded with regret for how they’ve treated me. I do want them to feel bad. But to the paramount end I just don’t want them at all. To envision me happy with a family situation is to envision—just me, no family situation to be spoken of. (Another similarity with gender dysphoria, tbh...) And that’s how it’s been, all my life, for as far back as that line was drawn: the one I can’t remember nor place of, and to which I know there was a before, but of which I only personally know the after. The point upon which my True Ending was sealed into canon, however one wishes to describe it. And that’s what I’ve come out of therapy with, this floating, untethered thought, basically: once I may have wanted a different family, or a brother who was kind to me, or for my mother to understand; but a long time ago, it came to pass that I didn’t want that anymore, and since then, all I have wanted is none at all.

But they are still there.

So no, it doesn’t matter to me what she wants or if he cares or how they might feel about me, ultimately. They don’t Not Matter, but they don’t matter to the actual life I am trying to create for myself. The problem is how they act or are, yes, but in such a manner that the final straw was surpassed years and years and years ago; nothing can henceforth be reformed or undone, it can only succeed to minimize or eliminate furthering what damage exists. The damage was decided sometime back when I was (compared to now) very small: that it had surpassed the line of forgiveness or penance. Now, all I am trying to do is what I’ve wanted to since very long ago—leave.

That’s the fix.

The rest is as meaningless as pruning a tree before uprooting it. All I want is to extract the whole thing, roots and all.

#family estrangement #no contact #parental estrangement #eac #aspiring estranged adult child #uhh idk journal #19 July #2023

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sapphires-and-silver-linings · 1 year ago

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okay I’m sorry I know I already gushed about half-life but I’m thinking of it again and I just freaking love plagas!leon so much you write him so well 😭😭 like I love Leon’s attitude to the reader and how he struggles with his plagas side that just wants to stake a claim yk?

You’re just a fantastic writer.

And don’t even get me started on wolfie (I literally name all of my dogs in video games that????) I would protect him with my life if anything happens to him —

I also love the betrayer! I’m rereading it again and UGH the sadness reader is going through after that shit with Wesker and Chris!!!! He is such a sweetie!!!! I’m really wondering if he’ll eventually divulge how he coped with reader disappearing all those years. I know he spoke a bit about it but yeah!! I know I said this already but you’re just a great writer 🥺

I can’t wait to read the next chapters of both those fics, of course no pressure though! I hope you have a lovely day/night and I’m sorry to dump this on you I just kept thinking of both fics though!

Oh my god thank you so much, this made my night 😭

Like, please, I love hearing people’s thoughts about my stories! I wanna hear people’s opinions on scenes, predictions for future chapters, and even headcanons! That stuff makes me so happy and will often motivate me to write on days I might not be feeling it!

Anyway, something about Plaga!Leon just does something for me, especially morphing the angsty aspects into the typical horny aspects of the infected Leon trope lol.

Wolfie, funny enough, was just gonna be a slight side character, but I couldn’t help but add more to his interactions both for realism and the fact he’s just a good boy 😭 he’s gone from a random addition to a legitimate plot-driver, so take that how you will lol.

As for The Betrayer… oof. I love all my reader inserts, but Lucky is my absolute favorite. She’s relatable but still her own person through and through, and developing her character has been such a joy for me. I definitely put all of my pain and rage in my own life into her, and I feel that’s come across well!

As for Chris, he is just as—if not more so, in some ways—traumatized as Lucky, and I definitely want to tap into his psyche the way I do for Leon in Half-Life. For the next few chapters, we will only get hints of how that trauma manifests, both from him and their friends, but he will eventually have a big focus on him and how affected by everything he is.

And I know it’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted for any of my fics, but I am still writing the latest chapters of both Half-Life and The Betrayer! I really hope to get the inspiration to finish up one or the other soon. I’ve been kind of in a funk because I’m staying with family and they’re keeping me busy lol.

There is more than a slight chance that the next chapters of both fics might be over 15k words, lord help me.

Anyway, no worries, I love getting asks like this! Thank you so much!

#the betrayer #half-life

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duck-era-lexi · 2 years ago

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finished that fucking spencer reid fic and my life is not the same. i am not the same person i was 2 hours ago before reading that ROLLERCOASTER of a fic. i cannot believe persephonesgrace was the person to get me out of my 4 month reading slump. like ive been picking up books for 2 months and just putting them down halfway through because i cannot get through them.

wnwn is enthralling and intriguing and beautiful and it’s genuinely such a work of art. like there’s constant conflict but just the right amount of fluff. i’d say it has somewhat of a slow start but once you get to 25% it gets really good with the mystery factor. gave me massive manacled vibes but i like spencer reid as a character more than i like draco or hermione so i was so much more emotionally attached to this.

it’s 218k words and the sequel’s 24k but it’s unfinished. which is fucking painful and i feel like i’ve felt that before. the sequel is so cute to read but it makes me sad because there is SO much potential. however i don’t have the same attachment to late show reid as a i do to early show reid so i don’t mind the series not continuing. it has a lot of conflict already set up but tbh, it’s a little too much conflict. like it’s bordering on stress with spencer and y/n’s internal struggle, as well as RAISING A CHILD, and how everyone wants to kill them and shit. like i totally understand why the author wouldn’t want to continue that because it’s stressing me out just thinking about all the plotlines trying to be intertwined.

speaking of the author, let’s talk about the ending of the original 218k word fic. literally a fucking masterpiece. i am OBSESSED with thriller and romance, especially when it’s crafted as beautifully as this. as good as dead by holly jackson is probably my favorite book and it also does a combination of that. it’s also a very similar book to that, but this one is a lot more serious. i feel like with this, i realize sincerely that the best stories always leave you wanting more. this story has an ambigious ending that is generally sad, in like the way that it implies a lot of off-screen misery that we don’t see in detail. not to mention the fact that the person who wrote it didn’t have any social media linked. the story hasn’t been updated in a year and a half and i don’t think it will be coming back anytime soon. it’s not hard to see why, as the second project from what has been written looks to be even more complicated than the first. they reached too high for the clouds and got overwhelmed, probably. i wish we just had like a 50k word epilogue or something with mucho fluff, but honestly when you think about the storyline that would’ve been out of place. everytime a dragon head was slayed in the story 3 more dragon heads regrew in its place. we went from love confessions to mafia to corrupt society to soft parenthood to death in one fic.

in conclusion, i have one more thing to note. i don’t think i will ever be able to re-experience how i felt reading that fic because i went in completely blind. the thriller and mystery aspect of it hit me like a truck. like i knew there was mystery but i didn’t know it would be so well orchestrated. the flashbacks were absolutely beautiful and paced so well; my jaw was on the floor the entire time. as i mentioned this fic completely flowed and changed in such a way that i didn’t predict even in the slightest.

tldr: i love spencer reid. xoxo

#criminal minds #ao3 #ale reviews #ale fucking rants is what i mean #ps. i also love y/n in this fic #like she was getting real annoying in the middle but she's actually such a fucking girlboss #dumb as fuck though at the end #i have more to say about this fic but i have to sleep and also process my life #anyways #gooodnighttt

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keishasknowledge · 10 months ago

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Our Future Generation Crumpling? - KK.

One generation crumpled is equivalent to our world being crumpled.

I’ve had a discussion with a fellow friend of mine on how one’s environment could negatively influence a teenager’s life in plentiful aspects. Consequently, this discussion took a massive twist when I came across aghast headlines about the increasing suicide rates among teenagers, mental distress in education, and social influence. In an instant, it seemed like a dilemma that needed to be addressed as well as obtain the appropriate recognition, especially to the public viewers.

Before I proceeded to my observations and suggested measures to solve this “enormous” crisis, I had dealt with an episode likewise to this issue. As a student and daughter who takes account of a wide range of responsibilities, these were a spoke of the wheel for me to plan out events with my acquaintances. “I wanted to live like a normal person, but I hold tremendous obligations surrounding me like an optical illusion” — as I would like to say my typical mood was. I used to think if I was being too hard on myself, or if I would be in that distress as the students in those cases. But then it struck me like a lightning bolt, if I held these obligations, was I then molded by the environment and area that I was engrossed in every single day? Is it entirely my fault to sense that I was too occupied with my interests in life? I thus would like to answer this question straight to the point, with profound and insightful elaboration being made in addition to that.

We, as teenagers especially, tend to withdraw from our families and companions in the seasons of concentrating on our assessments, loitering around with several activities, and so on. By then, we do not have a complete acknowledgment of how balancing our time happens and may ask questions such as — “What exact procedures shall I take?”, “I never had a social life, how am I supposed to know?”. Generally speaking, this fundamental element of one’s life, or its commonly used sobriquet — “leisure time”, must be taught and explored further to other horizons. However, the fact that we don't have one could also lean towards the subject of where we've been placed. For instance, schools may give out daunting tasks for you to finish, leaving you with anxiety and distress. Our guardians may ask us to be more diligent and absorbed in one particular expectation of theirs, which actually may be sickening at times as we are just human-beings who sense curiosity with the world around us, not with the trauma of fitting into someone’s ideals.

According to the SCMP, the motive behind the scenes of the increasing rates of suicide is because of the transformation of post-pandemic life, which indicates that the “surroundings” bring out a large impact on a student’s life. Adaptation of post-pandemic life may not be the only source that delivers a sense of sorrow for students, but may also be for bullying or mocking incidents and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, wellness for a teenager is completely mishandled. The unfitting statistics and pie charts of certain psychological illnesses that one may possess, display that the understanding of mental health and counseling has not been deeply consolidated and learned from healthcare professionals, as teenagers could only achieve the so-called “temporary remedy” but have the trauma that sticks with them wherever they go. Noted from SCMP, healthcare professionals have paid close attention to the emotional needs of students and provided individual advice for healing. However, I suppose these aspects would not create a massive modification, especially with a “caught up and torn apart” student.

Putting all of these ideas into summary, we should have the acceptance that suggested solutions are not long-lasting, as we are being hauled to an imperfect life that has tornados and tsunamis along the way. This memoir I've written for today reflects on the 1960s prediction made where teenagers pointed out that by the 2010s to 2020s, life would be odious and a never-ending cycle of despair, all because of a world where the word “permanent balance and wellness” is never applicable to a teenager’s existence.

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