#J&R Fan Fiction

[connorsnothereeither]

in a hyperthetical modern au, what tv shows or music you think your characters would like?

hmmmmm I’ve been cooking on this question since you sent it-

Ulysses: I feel like Ulysses is very folk music and blues, leaning into jazz maybe, when it comes to what he listens to. Maybe some classic rock in there, and I sometimes picture him listening to big band music from like,,, early 20th century, for some reason. I honestly really think,,, that Ulysses loves sitcoms and soap operas. I think he likes things like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, maybe even leaning into things like the Office. I think he fucking ADORES Grey’s Anatomy. If it’s not his favourite it’s close. Ulysses would find them comforting: long running shows with endless episodes. Something he could put on as a safety blanket because they’re like familiar friends. A season by season chronology of these characters lives; learning, growing, falling in love, discovering themselves. It’s the find of thing he writes about, after all. The history of peoples lives.

Virgil: Music wise, I think he listens to classical music a lot of the time honestly? I think he just likes it as background noise. The obvious answer feels like it would be true crime… but I don’t think so. I think Virgil knows true crime would be harmful for him to watch because it would feed his paranoia. But I think he LOVES quirky procedural dramas and monster of the week shows. Psych, Bones, Elementary, veering into the realms of Twin Peaks, X-Files, Buffy and Supernatural, even Gravity Falls. Things where there’s enough meat for him to sink his problem solving conspiracy brain into the lore, and the magic systems, and the week by week whodunnits, but fictional enough that he can, if he needs to, pull himself away.

Daniel Thorns: I think Dan in a modern AU would dig folk music a lot. I also think he’s a big fan of… whatever kind of horny yearning modern alt rock shit the can Dan & Neph playlist has going on lmao- but he probably has a soft spot for 2000s pop rock. In terms of TV… I don’t know honestly. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy to watch TV much. I think he likes,,, cooking shows. Great British Bake-off type beat. I think he puts them on in the background while he crafts and does leather working :)

Leopold: points at this 1920s bitch. That’s a Jazz Man. He likes Jazz. Even in modern day. In terms of TV shows, I think Leopold has a guilty pleasure for cosy mystery shows. Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Murder She Wrote, maybe even something like Only Murders in the Building. He just thinks they’re fun and cosy and he curls up with a hot drink and blankets on his big couch to watch them at night before he goes to bed. I think Daisy and Owen say they hate them and it’s cringey but will also get super engrossed walking by halfway through an episode, and up falling asleep on the couch with him while he watches them, and when he’s finished Leo carries them each to their room, despite the fact they’re like, fully 18 and 16.

C.W. Hare: This is gonna sound like a bad rabbit joke. But genuinely… I think he’d really like hip hop. Hip hop, R&B, potentially rap. I don’t know, there’s an energy to him that just screams it to me. TV show wise is complicated… I’m not sure honestly. I don’t think he watches a ton of TV by himself, but I think he will watch anything his friends put on because he wants to spend time with them and engage with the things they like. He’d watch anything J. Amp, or even Beckett, Artisan, or potentially even Jay puts on. He doesn’t watch the show for the show, he watches it to spend time with people.

[frankiebow]

#SampleSunday at the romance convention with Fortune, Gertie, and Ida Belle

#SampleSunday at the romance convention with Fortune, Gertie, and Ida Belle

Once Upon a Murder

Gertie drags her best friends Fortune and Ida Belle to a romance convention in New Orleans. Gertie wants to advance her budding new career as a romance author; Fortune needs a break from her complicated personal life; and Ida Belle doesn’t think the other two should go out unsupervised. But when Ida Belle runs into someone from her past, it becomes clear that not everyone at…

[travelonlinetips-blog]

New Post has been published on https://travelonlinetips.com/holiday-cottage-inspired-by-hagrids-hut-opens/

Holiday cottage inspired by Hagrid's Hut opens

How do you fancy a night spent in a cosy cottage, snuggled up in front of a warm fire, with a boarhound called Fang curled up next to you and a Blast-Ended Skrewt resting in the corner?

Now your fantasy can become partially true, thanks to the opening of a holiday home which takes inspiration from fictional character Rubeus Hagrid’s Hut in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series.

The Groundkeeper’s Cottage at North Shire near the North York Moors National Park has recently opened ahead of International Harry Potter Day on 2 May, which commemorates the date of the “Battle of Hogwarts” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.

From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

Subscribe now

The aesthetic of the cottage is based upon the appearance of Hagrid’s Hut in the Harry Potter film series, in which the Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts is played by actor Robbie Coltrane.

The cottage can house up to six guests and features a kitchen, dining area, seating in front of a fireplace and a large bathroom, in addition to several subtle wizarding touches such as a decorative ink bottle and quill.

The Groundkeeper’s Cottage has been designed to look like Rubeus Hagrid’s Hut in the Harry Potter film series (Charlotte Graham)

It costs £195 to rent the holiday home per night, with an additional cost should a party wish to bring one dog along for the magical getaway.

The cottage is owned by Carol Cavendish, a long-time Harry Potter fan who found solace in Rowling’s writing after being diagnosed with dyslexia.

“Books have always been an important part of my life even after being diagnosed with dyslexia when I taught myself to read,” Cavendish says.

“They’ve always helped me through challenging times when I would turn to the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings books for pure escapism.”

The bathroom is designed with colours reminiscent of the Slytherin Common Room (Charlotte Graham)

Cavendish explains that she enjoys providing guests with an environment where they can “leave behind everyday life and step into their favourite storybook”.

The Groundkeeper’s Cottage was built by Billy Cessford, a stage and screen prop maker and set designer from Redcar.

Cessford has worked with the BBC and several theatre productions on various creative projects.

The Harry Potter-inspired cottage cost £195,000 to build, part of which was funded through a grant from the Rural Development Programme for England.

The replica of Hagrid’s Hut isn’t the only holiday location at North Shire that’s taken inspiration from the pages of fiction.

One of the other spots that holiday-goers can stay in is the Shire House, based upon the houses of the hobbits in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

For more information about the Groundkeeper’s Cottage, visit the North Shire website here.

Source link

[avanneman]

Baby Driver: Jon Hamm doesn’t know Shakespeare

Actually, that should read “Edgar Wright, writer/director of Baby Driver, doesn’t know Shakespeare”, but Big Jon said it in the picture, and who knows Edgar Wright, amirite? But it’s all Edgar’s fault that poor Jon (aka "Buddy") is stuck with the line “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” when it should be “Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” And, therefore, entirely inappropriate for the scene, in which Hamm is seeking to find, and murder, “Romeo”, aka “Baby Driver”, in a parking garage.

It’s inappropriate because, of course, Juliet is not asking “Where are you, Romeo?” No, she’s asking “Why is your name Romeo?” though what she really means is “Why did you have to be a Montague, instead of the scion of some noble family that my family (the Capulets) is not feuding with? Then I could marry you! For what’s in a name?”

Okay, that does require a little unpacking, not to mention some actual knowledge of the play, which, clearly, exceeds Eddie’s grasp.1

So, if you hadn’t already guessed, I’m not a fan of Baby Driver, despite its 98% “Smash” (“Smash” as in “good”) rating from Rotten Tomatoes, which, I guess, is not infallible. Baby Driver is itself a mannered, misbegotten smash of Bonnie & Clyde, about which I’ve raved, Pulp Fiction, and Blue Velvet, neither of which I thought were worth a pixel.

I went to Baby Driver expecting/hoping for some shallow, bad-ass, R-rated summer entertainment, and the film started off well, with “Baby Driver” (Ansel Elgort) as this sweet, silent bad-ass “driver”, a pretty boy version of Michael J. Pollard’s semi-autistic yet good-natured and ever efficient C. W. Moss. A whole film dedicated to a modern-day C. W! Sounds like fun!2

And so it was for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, Baby rockin’ out on his iPod to some golden oldies while waiting for the grown-ups to finish with their bank-robbin’. Grown-ups, well, they don’t always do things right, so that sirens are wailing even before Baby can pop the clutch3, but that ain’t no matter. We’re in for some serious, serious rubber burnin', without the sense of moral and aesthetic shame that inevitably comes from watching a Vin Diesel movie.4

But after that great beginning, the film starts going sideways. Seems Baby only does his driving because he’s in hock to suavely evil crime lord Kevin Spacey, who may as well be sleep walking for all the nuance he brings to the part. Even worse, Baby takes his hard-earned cash home to his deaf black foster dad Joseph (CJ Jones), who, fortunately, is not Morgan Freeman, though he’s so nobly suffering he may as well be. Baby signs with Joe, and anybody who watches movies knows that anyone who can sign and speak is part angel.

Yeah, this is kitsch on top of kitsch—as a matter of fact, it’s superkitsch—but why stop now? Only sissies quit when they’re ahead. Baby’s creative too! He records what people say, adds some percussion and riffs and turns it all into a sort of “found art”, kind of like an aural Joseph Cornell!

Of course, this idyll has to be busted, though it’s hardly Baby’s fault. He meets this really sweet chick (Lily James as “Deborah”), a chick as sweet as he is, and if you guessed she’d be a waitress, well, you guessed right. Yeah, it’s young love, true love, like a fifties Chevrolet ad come to life, if you know what one of those was.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you, Baby still owes Kev “one more job.” Yes, one more job! You have to hit those clichés on the head, boy! Otherwise, they’ll get away from you!

The gang for the last job includes the seriously bad ass “Bats” (Jamie Foxx), an obviously slumming Jon Hamm,5 and his crazy bitch wife “Darling” (Eiza González), a hundred and seven pounds of implausible, gum-poppin’ malevolence. So what could go wrong?

Well, everything, of course. But the twists, the double crosses, and the blow outs just don’t have the bang of the first fifteen minutes. We’re deep in Quentin Tarantino land, with repetitive outbursts of unlikely, mannered violence—though, to be fair, Wright entirely lacks Tarantino’s compulsive sadism, and I mean that entirely as a compliment.

But the real killer for me is not Wright’s stylized violence (Elza blazing away with an Uzi in either hand, for example, which would pretty much guarantee that she couldn’t hit anything),6 but his pathetic sentimentality. Very much unlike Tarantino or David Lynch, Wright lacks the nerve to kill off a single sympathetic character. The Baby/Debbie lovey-dovey dialogue is so syrupy that you half wonder if Debbie is setting him up—if the film is setting you up. Is Debbie going to take Baby’s cash and blow his head off as a final twist? Nope. She waits five years for him to get sprung from the federal pen so they can ride off into the sunset together. What a letdown!

Afterwords Like Tarantino, Wright is seriously into retro cultural references—music, films, etc. That’s because a director’s “world” is limited to old movies. They can’t make contemporary cultural references because no one’s made a movie about that yet. The most egregious occurs when crime boss Spacey tells the gang to pick up some “Michael Myers Halloween masks” for the heist, leading to some confusion. Did he mean “masks of the character Michael Myers in the 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis classic Halloween” or “masks of Michael “Austin Powers” Myers for Halloween”? If you thought that was funny, you probably call Mom’s basement “home”.

It's "arguable", I guess, that it's supposed to be Buddy's error—that he's a Philistine as well as a murderer—but that strikes me as a stretch. The "correct" reading of Juliet's line was the subject of a Peanuts cartoon sometime near the close of the last millennium. ↩︎

Michael J. Pollard—“the homuncular, elfin, inexplicably popular” Michael J. Pollard, in Leonard Maltin’s bizarrely uncharitable characterization—worked that CW thang to the hilt, “playing virtually the same offbeat, imbecilic character” throughout his career, to Maltin’s further dismay. Jesus, Leo! Did you never get laid? ↩︎

Baby’s almost surely not working a stick, but idioms can’t always keep up with the technology. ↩︎

Still, one has to feel sorry for Vin, having to share “his” franchise with “the Rock”—because it was so successful! ↩︎

It seems very likely that Hamm will simply never get past Don Draper. When you hear that voice, you know the guy is suite smart, not street smart. You’re elegant, Jon, you’re elegant. Just accept it, and get on with your life. ↩︎

The mêlée gets so intense that one of the lenses of Baby's shades pops out, in ridiculous homage to the bit in Godard's über classic À bout de souffle, already too cutely reprised in Bonnie & Clyde. Once was too much! Twice is ridiculous! ↩︎

[frankiebow]

The Lost Weekend #SampleSunday

The Lost Weekend #SampleSunday

The Lost Weekend

Mary-Alice Arceneaux has started a new career at age 70 as the newest member of the Sinful Ladies’ Detective Agency. She is happily learning the principles of detection from Ida Belle, Gertie, and Fortune–and of course, picking up tips from her beloved mystery novels. But Mary-Alice finds herself on the wrong side of the interrogation table when her cousin Celia accuses her of a…

[frankiebow]

The Pajama Murder #SampleSunday

The Pajama Murder #SampleSunday

The Pajama Murder

Local businessman Buford Fontleroy Deale III is found shot dead in front of Harriet’s Books in downtown Sinful. A blood-soaked pajama top is tied around his chest. And he’s wearing only one shoe.

The sheriff wants to talk to Harriet. Sinful’s beloved bookseller was one of the last people to see Deale alive. Fortune, Ida Belle, Gertie, and Mary-Alice need to get to Harriet before…

[frankiebow]

Vampire Billionaire of the Bayou #SampleSunday

Vampire Billionaire of the Bayou #SampleSunday

Vampire Billionaire of the Bayou

The Sinful Ladies’ Detective Agency has just scored a cushy gig: Doing surveillance for a businessman who claims business rivals are after his trade secrets. But just as Fortune, Gertie, Ida Belle, and Mary-Alice are deciding how to spend their easy money, the unthinkable happens. The Sinful Ladies find themselves teaming up with the bewildered Sheriff Robert E.…

[frankiebow]

The No-Tell Motel #SampleSunday

The No-Tell Motel #SampleSunday

The No-Tell Motel

When a young woman vanishes from a roadside motel, Mary-Alice and the gang leave Sinful and head across the border to find her. They soon find that the unprepossessing McCully Inn holds some Texas-sized secrets, which the influential McCully family would prefer to keep hidden.

But with the missing woman’s life at stake, the ladies decide to keep poking around the McCully family…

[frankiebow]

Black Widow Valley #SampleSunday

Black Widow Valley #SampleSunday

Black Widow Valley

Young men have been disappearing in Black Valley, New York–which now has the misfortune of being known as “Black Widow Valley.” As it happens, Mary-Alice Arceneaux has a personal connection with the tiny community, and is called in to help. Mary-Alice is thrilled to be a part of the investigation–but by the time she arrives at the forbidding Kilmer House where she will spend…

[frankiebow]

The Two-Body Problem #SampleSunday

The Two-Body Problem #SampleSunday

The Two-Body Problem

Professor Gwendolyn Jackson’s husband sends her a voice mail from the road, telling her he’ll be home soon. Just one problem…by the time the message was sent, he was already dead.

When the police dismiss her concerns, Professor Jackson turns to her former student, Fortune Morrow, for help.

Naturally, Fortune, Mary-Alice, and the rest of the Sinful gang are eager to solve the…

[frankiebow]

The Vanishing Victim #SampleSunday

The Vanishing Victim #SampleSunday

The Vanishing Victim

Mary-Alice Arceneaux is starting to catch on to the fact that the Sinful Ladies’ Society does more than brew 100-proof cough syrup to sell at the church bazaar. So when Sinful Ladies founder Ida Belle gets into serious trouble, Mary-Alice wants to help the SLS in their quest for justice. But this means that the sweet-natured Mary-Alice will have to endure a visit to the Swamp…

[frankiebow]

Bayou Busybody #SampleSunday

Bayou Busybody

Sinful’s newest resident, Mary-Alice Arceneaux, is thrilled when Gertie introduces her to famous romance author Almira Galvez-Whitbread. But then Gertie and her friends have to leave town, and the very next day, Almira’s husband disappears. With Gertie, Fortune, and Ida Belle gone, Mary-Alice finds that she’s Almira’s only friend…and that Almira’s storybook marriage had been far…

[frankiebow]

Mary-Alice Moves In. #SampleSunday

Mary-Alice Moves In. #SampleSunday

Mary-Alice Moves In

Mary-Alice Arceneaux has decided to make her home in Sinful! Mayor Celia’s sweet-natured and curious cousin is eager to settle into small-town life after moving from the big city (Mudbug, Louisiana). But before Mary-Alice can even unpack her bags, a man of the cloth dies under mysterious circumstances, a device with strange powers turns up in the glove box of her Oldsmobile…

[frankiebow]

Schooled. #SampleSunday

Schooled

CIA operative Fortune Redding signs up for night classes, hoping to ease the boredom of her undercover assignment and update her computer skills. But an  unfortunately-timed murder on the campus of Mudbug Technical College sends shock waves through the town of Sinful. And Fortune’s life is turned upside down when she discovers who the prime suspect is. Now Fortune has to choose between…

[frankiebow]

Cooking up trouble in Tabasco Fiasco #SampleSunday

Cooking up trouble in Tabasco Fiasco #SampleSunday

Tabasco Fiasco

Deputy Sheriff Carter LeBlanc has been seen around Sinful with a beautiful, blonde stranger. But Fortune is fine with it, really. It’s not like she and Carter had a future together or anything. To show there are no hard feelings, Fortune hosts a dinner party for Carter and his new associate, and even volunteers to cook. But when she tries her hand at a spicy gumbo, things start to…