#You are adapting a book series with over 150 books and you still can’t find a way to make that into an original movie

[sunsetthedragon]

I have mixed opinions on the Fear Street movies. On the one hand, I think the movies tell an interesting and compelling story with a lot of potential. On the other hand, they seem actively disinterested in their source material and have a very different tone (the original books were definitely not slashers).

I think it’s a good example of good movies, bad adaptations.

[sharkselfies]

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 1

Since some folks requested it on Twitter, I’ve started transcribing The Minds Behind The Terror podcast episodes! Below the cut you’ll find episode 1, where showrunners Dave Kajganich and Soo Hugh talk to Dan Simmons, the author of the novel The Terror, about episodes 1-3 of the show. They discuss Simmons’s initial inspiration for writing the book, the decisions they made to adapt it into a television series, and the depictions of some of the characters such as the Tuunbaq, Hickey, and “Lady Silence.”

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 1 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

Dave Kajganich: Hello! Welcome to Minds Behind The Terror podcast. I’m Dave Kajganich, I am a creator and one of the showrunners of the AMC show The Terror, and I’m here in the studio with executive producer and co-showrunner Soo Hugh.

Soo Hugh: Hello!

DK: And we welcome today the author of the sublime novel The Terror, on which our show is based, author Dan Simmons, calling in from Colorado. Welcome, Dan! Hi! 

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave, thank you. 

DK: So let’s start with the very beginning. This was a mystery from actual naval history that you decided to transform into a novel that was crossed with Gothic horror. Can you tell us a little bit about where you got the idea from this, how you went about preparing to write it, anything that can give us insight into how you blended all of these remarkable genres into this incredible book.

DS: I’ve known since I was a kid that I wanted to tell a story about either the North or South Pole. And the reason is in 1957, 58, when I was very young, actually I was just a fetus, they had the international geophysical year, and that really caught my imagination. Now the international geophysical year saw cooperation between American and Soviet scientists, it was the height of the Cold War, that’s the first time they submit(?) a permanent base at the South Pole, and I fell in love with Arctic stories. I had one book left on a book contract with a publisher I really liked, and we hadn’t decided what that book was, and I wanted to write a scary story about the Arctic, in this case the Northern Arctic, and that happened because I was doing a lot of research on Antarctica and just couldn’t figure out what the macabre, Gothic, scary part would be. I wanted to put it in, but I didn’t think they’d go for, you know, an eight foot tall vampire penguin. 

[laughter]

DK: You might be surprised! 

DS: There was a footnote on a book I was reading about the Franklin Expedition, which I had never heard of, and I decided that’s what I was gonna write about, and it had a tremendous amount of the unknown that I could fill in, that’s what novelists love. And so I told my editors excitedly that this was what I was gonna do, I would call it The Terror after the HMS Terror that went with the Erebus, got stuck in the ice, all the crew disappeared in history… And they said no. 

[laughter]

DS: ...it was the first time the publishers did that. I said, “Why not? I think it’s gonna be a pretty good novel.” And they said, “Look, nobody’s interested in a bunch of people that’ve been dead for 150 years.” 

SH: That sounds like some of our meetings.

[laughter]

DS: So I did what maybe you do, in such a meeting, I just thanked them, and I liked them all, and I had a good dinner(?) and I said goodbye, and bought back my last book on the contract and went out and wrote it on spec. 

SH: Well why don’t we take a step back, Dave, and why don’t you tell us about how you found Dan’s book and that experience?

DK: Sure! Dan, you might remember some of these steps from your side of it, which is that originally this was auctioned by Universal as a feature, and I sort of tried to get the rights and was a bit too late, and tracked them down to the producers at Universal who were running the project and got myself hired as the screenwriter for a feature adaptation. By the time I was ready to start actually committing an outline to the paper, Universal had let the rights go because there was a competing project. It was interesting to sort of rack up reasons why people wanted to make it but didn’t feel that they could pull the trigger, and we were so grateful when AMC finally called us back and said, “Look, we’ve figured out a model where we can do this as a limited series,” it really felt like ten episodes was a great length for this, because we could blend genres in a way that, you know, we could unpack sort of slowly, more slowly than a lot of shows would’ve done, and drive the plot as much as we could, like the novel, with character choices and decisions as opposed to just horror kind of entering the frame and taking over for one set piece after another. So it was a long journey, getting this to AMC, but at the end of the day I think we found the right home for it.

DS: I can no longer imagine a two hour version, feature film version of this story, and I can’t imagine a second season of this story, I think it was just right.

SH: It does feel like we did a ten hour cinematic novel. 

[audio from the show]

Crozier: Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There’ll be no melodramas here--just live men, or dead men. 

SH: Dan, Dave and I talk about how addictive the research gets for this when you start going down the rabbit hole, how did you approach the research?

DS: I think most novelists run into that, but since I write a lot of quasi-historical novels, at least set in history, I get totally addicted to going down the rabbit hole. Readers say, “Well, Simmons’ book is too long, and the descriptions of things are too exhausting,” but I watch your characters go on deck and there are all the things and views and everything that I tried so hard to describe and then people tell me, y’know, “talky, verbose,” and in print I have to do it that way, but you just pan the camera a little bit. 

DK: You have words, we have images! For every thousand of yours, we get one!

DS: Yeah.

SH: But I remember this passage in your book where it talks about all the different ices, and you vest it with so much psychological import. We talk about that passage a lot in the writers room, it was one of our highlights, of this is how you do great descriptive writing.

DK: And you made so many parallels between things like the environments of the ships and characters, you built a kind of code book for the show without realizing you were doing it, which is making visual metaphors out of a lot of these things that would normally just be exposition or historical detail.

SH: Well especially between Crozier and the ship, I mean when you hear about Crozier’s relationship with Terror, and you have so many amazing passages about, you know, the groan of the ship and how it, y’know, and you cut to a scene with Crozier and how you feel that the bones of Crozier is embedded in the ship, and we really took a lot from that. 

DS: Well I noticed that on one of the episodes where Lord Franklin [sic] is trying to get back in touch with Crozier, you know, trying to be friends with him again, I think it’s a brilliant episode you guys wrote.

[show audio]

Franklin: You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.

Crozier: I’m a captain. I’m--I’m peevish off my own ship. I leave it and I hear disaster knocking at its door, before I’m ten steps away.

DS: And that was beautifully written, that. You got so much of Crozier right there.

DK: It was a pleasure to write these characters on the backs of your writing of these characters, because you really--I mean, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you know, from having written, you know, a whole long string of historical books, is to make these people’s psychologies feel as modern as they must have felt in their day, while still being able to articulate some of the blind spots of being from the eras they were from. 

I’m curious from sort of a history nerd point of view, if people watch the series and like the series, and read the book and like the book, and want to know more about this expedition, what’s the first book about the Franklin Expedition you would point people to? What was most helpful or most interesting in your research? 

DS: I apologize, I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s a collection of stories about both the South and North Pole, and so it’s a short section on the Franklin Expedition, but it didn’t make mistakes, and most of the other books that I read, uh, keyed, and videos for that matter, like PBS did a story about the Franklin Expedition, but they keyed off a 1987 attempt by several doctors to figure out what happened to the crew, and they exhumed three crewmen’s bodies from the first island where they stayed the first winter, and those crewmen had only been on the ship a couple of months, but they decided because of a high lead content that the lead had poisoned them and then made them stupid, and made them paranoid and everything, but they didn’t compare that test of lead with any background people in London at the time, and later they did, so I didn’t believe the lead thing.

DK: Well that’s the fascinating thing about a mystery with this many parts and pieces, kind of in flux, is, you know, you can create all kinds of competing narratives about it, and what’s fascinating about writing a fictional version is you can’t have that kind of ambiguity, you have to make a decision. I think people will enjoy very much ways that the show and the book have a similar point of view, and also ways that they diverge in their points of view, because there are so many ways to tell this story--

SH: Well you know how much we invest responsibility in the audience as well, right?

DK: Sure.

SH: In terms of your book and our show as well, we’re not against interpretation, that there’s a responsibility on the audience’s part to put together--we’re not gonna hand feed them. There’ll be some people who put more of an onus on Franklin, and others who would say, “You know, if I was in that position, I probably would’ve made the same decision,” “Oh no, this definitely killed the men,” “No, this killed them!” and that dialogue is exciting, you know, when you read fans talk about your show and your books and really smart, insightful ways. 

[show audio]

Franklin: Would it help if I said that I made a mistake? 

Crozier: You misunderstand me, Sir John, I--I only meant to describe why I brood, not that I judge.

DS: I don’t worry about who or what my reading audience is. People ask me about that and I don’t imagine a certain reader. But I’ve always tried to write for somebody who’s more intelligent than I am. My perfect reader would be just smart as hell, speak eight languages, you know, have fantastic world experiences, and I want to write something that will please that person, and I think your show does the same thing.

DK: Well we were--that was our motto! We wanted to be sort of the dumbest members of our collaboration and there’s a sort of horrifying moment when you realize that’s come true. 

[laughter]

[show background music]

DK: Tell us a little bit about why you made the decisions to tell the story in the order you told it, and whether you sort of felt like there was anything from the way you had told it that we were--or a missed opportunity. We’d love to know sort of what your experience of that was. 

DS: I don’t think there were any missed opportunities in terms of not adapting my way of telling it, and I can’t remember all the reasons for why I broke it down that way, some of them were just very localized to, you know, when I was writing that particular bit. But I do know that it gains a lot by being told chronologically the way you’re doing it, so for me that seems now the logical way to tell it again.

DK: Have you ever read the novel in chronological order? When we hired writers for the writers room, we gave them a list of what the chapters were like in chronological order, and I think we asked half the room to read it in your order and half the room to read it in chronological order so we could have a discussion, a meaningful discussion about whether there were things about telling it without being in chronological order that we wanted to embrace or not. It was a fantastic experience and I wonder if you’ve ever read your chapters in chronological order? ‘Cause it’s also a fantastic book!

[laughter]

DS: I haven’t read it that way, they were that way in my mind before I started getting fancy and breaking them up and moving them around in time and space, but I would love to have seen that experiment.

DK: The reason we can get away with it in the show is because there is a loved book out there that people trust, and you know, it is a classic in this genre, so I mean this is a perfect example of, you know, the amount of gratitude we owe the book, because we got away with a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get away with because you came before us. 

SH: And speaking of those rabid fans, Dan, it’s been really interesting reading audience reactions to the show from people who’ve loved the books and who just naturally will compare the two, and we’ve been heartened by just how supportive our fans have become--are of the show. There is this controversy, some people like our choice to give Lady Silence a voice and some people feel it was sacrilege to your book, where do you fall on that? DS: At first I was surprised. In fact when you were hunting for an actress for Lady Silence and I read about that, it said somebody who’s fluent in this Inuit language and this Inuit language, and I said, “What the hell?”

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut to her dying father] 

DS: Having seen her with the tongue and heard her, and knowing the different reason they call her Lady Silence, it all works for me and I was also surprised when Captain Crozier could speak fairly fluent, you know, dialect, ‘cause I had him just not understanding a thing.

[show audio]

[Crozier speaking Inuktitut to Silna in the same scene as above]

DS: I love it when readers get rabid about not changing something from a book, and I have to talk to them sometimes, not ‘cause I have a lot of things adapted, this is the first one, but I love movies. They say “Aren’t you worried it will hurt your book?” and first I explain Richard Comden(?)’s idea that you can’t hurt a book anyway, except by not reading it, I mean the books are fine, no matter how bad some adaptation becomes. Books abide, and so I wasn’t concerned. With the changes that I see, I get sorta tickled, whereas some readers get upset, and they just have that set. So I think that the vast majority of viewers haven’t--well, I know the vast majority haven’t read the book, haven’t heard of the book, probably, they’re gonna keep watching because of the depth of the characters, and that’s based on the first two episodes, and I agree with them completely.

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut]

Crozier: She said that if we don’t leave now, we’re going to “huk-kah-hoi.”

Blanky: Disappear. 

SH: We get asked a lot of questions about the supernatural element of the show and the way a monster does or does not figure in the narrative, and seeing our episodes, did it feel surprising or did it feel faithful to the way you imagined it as well to your book? 

DS: It was surprising to me at how well it was done, because it’s hard, I know, to show restraint in a series like this, and certainly in a movie, but it’s hard to show restraint at showing and explaining the monster. 

[show audio]

[ominous music, Tuunbaq roaring, men screaming]

DS: The way you did it in the first few episodes to me were just lovely, just, you know, a hint of a glance at something and then you see the results of this creature, so that’s what I tried to do in the novel, one of the reasons I moved around through space and time, part of what I wanted to do was not cheapen the story and not cheapen the reality of these poor men dying by just throwing in a monster, and so I tried to do it in a way that would not disrespect the true tale, and I believe you’re doing it the same way I tried. 

DK: The way you incorporated the supernatural into the book, I mean, I was a fan of it when I first read it. It was jaw dropping the way that it fits so well on a level of plot, on a level of character, and on a level of theme. So when we got the green light to adapt it I was so confident that we were going to be able to do something with it that would be able to be nuanced because the bones of it are so organically terrific.

SH: It helped us know what we didn’t want to do. That formed so much of our conversation, of “this is what we do not want, this is what we do not want,” and slowly you whittled down to getting down to the essence of what this thing had to be.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling]

DK: Another character from the book that really stands out for fans that they are wondering what in the world we’re doing with is Manson. [laughter] And I was curious what you made of the fact that he is pretty invisible in the first three episodes of the show, and that some of his plot beats have been given to a character called Gibson, who I don’t remember is--I don’t think he’s featured very much in the novel. And I wondered if that caught you off guard or if you sort of intuitively had a sense of what we were doing in making that change? 

DS: Any discussion of Manson to me leads to Hickey converting him to his future, his tribe, the tribe he wants to have, group of worshippers, that I think Hickey wants to have, but he does it by sex below decks. Hickey’s not gay at all, he’s a manipulator, to me, and he was manipulating Manson who was big and dumb, in my book, he’s manipulating him by this sexual encounter. But I was curious whether you were worried about showing that?

DK: Well, we weren’t worried about showing characters having same-sex affairs or relationships. We wanted to make room in Hickey’s character for actual affection, or if not affection then companionship, or some kind of connection.

[show audio]

Hickey: Lieutenant Irving! I was hoping we’d meet. 

Crewman: Mind the grease there, sir. 

Hickey: I wanted to... thank you… for your help. For your discretion, I mean. 

Irving: Call it anything but help, Mr. Hickey. Please. I exercised clemency for a man abused by a devious seducer.

DK: We wanted to make sure that Hickey had access to command in some way that a steward, an officer’s steward, would be able to provide him, that an able seaman wouldn’t be able to provide him, and that was really valuable to us in terms of charting out all of these character stories, was how does he know what he knows about how command is dissatisfied or where the fractures are if he can’t see them from where he’s sleeps in his cot in the forecastle. 

SH: I mean we know that there were relations between the same sex on ships, it just was part of this world. Not to belie that there was serious consequences for it, but you know, we have 129 characters, and we wanted them to feel fully fledged and rich, and, you know, passions do naturally develop and have no characters engaged in sexual relations would have felt just as odd and perhaps even more controversial, and when Irving discovers Gibson and Hickey, his shock is from such a subjective point of view of his moral center. It’s not the camera’s perspective, right? Our camera’s very neutral in that scene. It’s Irving, that character at that point in the show, that is infusing a sense of horror, that’s his horror moment.

DS: I’d like to add that it’s not the gay connection that would cause criticism, but I was flayed alive because the most openly quote “gay” unquote character, that is, Hickey, you know, maybe hunting for affection but definitely hunting for power, he’s the only one they said in reviews, and he’s a killer and a bad person, so I’m homophobic, but I was flayed alive for that. The word homophobic appeared in about 80 reviews. Nobody mentioned the purser, who uh--

DK: Right, Bridgens and Peglar.

DS: Yeah. I thought he was a fascinating character. I loved getting glimpses of him in the series because he’s super smart, he’s super wise, he’s probably wiser than any of the commanders, ahd he’s obviously in love with--who is it that he’s in love with in the show?

DK: Peglar. 

DS: Yes, that makes sense. And, uh, so Peglar says, you know, “Is this another Herodotus?” and, “No, I’m giving you Swift now,” he’s educating the man he cares for. 

[show audio]

Hickey: I understand you cleared up our “association” for Lieutenant Irving? Gibson: You spoke to him.

Hickey: Mhm.

Gibson: Directly?

(beat)

Christ, Cornelius, I’d reassured him.

Hickey: Cornelius Hickey is a “devious seducer.” That was your--that was your reassurance? You’ve got some face, you know that? 

DK: We wouldn’t have dramatized Hickey’s story if we weren’t also going to pull in Peglar and Bridgens’ story, because we knew that people, you know, are predisposed to sort of make that kind of quick assumption, and we just wanted to make sure that the show didn’t have that blind spot and reflected the book, which also doesn’t have that blind spot. 

SH: We had those same questions with Lady Silence, and I’m sure you did as well. When we meet her, she’s a frightened young woman who’s about to lose her father, and that’s a universal character moment that anyone can relate to, and the otherness is sort of--is secondary, but then once--in the end scene of 1.02, when she’s sitting there grieving her father and then you have that language barrier with everyone else, we worked with Nive on this because we wanted to make sure the language itself was as accurate as possible, so when you say disappear making sure that the disappear in our language means the same thing as disappear in her language. I think whenever you have characters that feel othered in most media and you’re bringing them into your show, Dave and I also just wanted to make sure we weren’t swaying on the pendulum on the other side and being almost too careful about touching them, and with Nive I think when you have an actor of that talent, she was strong, she was representing a voice that she felt very confident in, and that was very reassuring for us.

DS: And it works well, and when her father’s dying, she throws herself on his chest and says “I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I’m not ready,” and I love that in the show because if she’s gonna become a Shaman he’s dying you know it’s not reached that point of education yet where she feels secure and later on you know beyond what we’re discussing today she becomes to me in the show I see her as more and more majestic.

SH: I do love the word majestic ‘cause I think it describes pretty much all of our characters. I agree, I do think there is something very sublime about who they have become at the end because when you go through that much trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful human spirit to endure. 

DS: I think that’s one of the central themes of the story that you’ve brought out so clearly. In most post-apocalypse, you know, terrible situation movies and shows, everybody turns nasty as hell, they start shooting each other, it’s just like WWIII when they should be helping each other survive, and I found even though there was controversy, even though there was opposition in this story, people opposing against each other, still that they rose to the occasion. And that is so rare I think in much media these days or even books where the characters are themselves and they do the best they can, and when things get bad they rise to the occasion.

DK: The first conversation you and I had about the book, you know, I was basically pitching you sort of what I thought thematically the book was about, and I talked a lot about, that in a disaster like this, a kind of moral emergency, that we would get a chance to unpack what is sort of best and worst in these characters’ souls.

DS: I confuse readers often when I was on book tour for this book, and it was a long time ago, I’ve written a few million words since then, but I confused people by saying that if you want a theme for the survival story of The Terror, it’s love. It’s love between the men. And just unstinting love. And this came out in a piece of dialogue, in the first two episodes.

[audio from the show]

Franklin: I’ll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. If something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man. 

Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John. 

Franklin: For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong. 

DS: That to me was right the theme I was working with, and with Crozier who shows it a different way, with Fitzjames who’s struggling to show leadership, and between the men despite their hierarchy and the British hierarchy, the rank and lieutenants and so forth, eventually they come down to loving the men they try to save. And I found that lovely. 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

DK: Thank you so much for listening to The Minds Behind The Terror, join us in our next edition when we talk about episodes 4-6 with the additional guest Adam Nagaitis phoning in from London. We will see you soon!

[preview snippet from the next episode plays]

DS: I’ll confess something else to Adam, the first time I watched it, I thought your character was a good guy because he jumped down in that grave to put the lid back on.

[laughter]

[olderthannetfic]

It's really surprising that you're so well versed in older fandoms and yet participate in new popular ones (that cdrama, kpop) is this by design? Im in my twenties and my interest turnover is already way slower than it used to be

You know, that’s a really interesting question. I wouldn’t say it’s by design exactly in that I do tend to just follow what strikes my fancy, and I can’t force myself to want to write fic for just anything. (I find it easier to like reading fic without serious involuntary emotional investment, but writing takes more. Vidding I can do on command most of the time, but I don’t usually bother unless I have a lot of feels or I’m fulfilling someone’s prompt.)

However, me getting into BTS was 100% due to me wanting to understand BTS enough to explain to people who weren’t very interested but wanted to know what was going on in fandom lately. Under normal circumstances, I run the dance party at Escapade, the oldest extant slash con. We borrowed vividcon’s thing of playing fanvids on the wall--all of them set to dance music--as the soundtrack for the dance party. This means I’m creating a 3-hour mixtape of fannishness, which has amazing potential to make people feel in the know about Fandom Today... and equal potential to make them feel alienated if nothing they care about shows up. Only about 100-150 people attend the con, so it really is possible to make a playlist that feels inclusive yet informative--it just takes a huge amount of work.

Every year, I do a lot of research on which fandoms are getting big and look for vids from vidders people won’t have heard of, so there is an element of consciously trying to keep up with things. Generally, I only get into these fandoms myself if I had no idea what they were and then suddenly, oops, they’re my kryptonite, like the buddy cop android plot in Detroit: Become Human, which sucked me in hard for like 6 months on the basis of a vid.

(So if you’re into cross-fandom meta and associated stuff as one of your fannish interests, you tend to have broader knowledge of different fandoms, old and new, than if you’re just looking for the next place you’ll read fic. It’s also easier to love vids for unfamiliar things than fic.)

But though I was only looking for a basic primer on BTS, BTS has 7 members with multiple names and no clear juggernaut pairing, not to mention that AU that runs through the music videos and lots of other context to explain. The barrier to understanding WTF was going on at all was high enough that to know enough to explain, I had to be thoroughly exposed... And once I was over that hurdle, oops, I had a fandom.

--

In terms of old vs. new, here’s the thing: kpop fandoms in English and c-drama fandoms in English right now feel a lot like anime fandom in English did in the early 00s. I had a Buddy Cops of the 70s phase in the middle, but my current fannishness is actually a return to my older fannishness in many ways.

What do I mean about them being similar?

Yes, I know some wanker will show up to say I think China, Korea, and Japan are indistinguishable, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the way that I used to routinely meet Italian and French and German fans, Argentinian and Mexican, Malaysian and Indonesian and Filipino too. English-language fandom of SPN or MCU may have all those fans from all those countries, but it feels very American most of the time. English-language fandom of a non-English-language canon is more overtly about using English as a lingua franca.

It also tends to attract people who as a sideline to their fannishness are getting into language learning and translation, which are my other passion in life after fanworks fandom. (I speak only English and Spanish and a bit of Japanese, but I’ve studied German, French, Russian, Mandarin, Old English, and now Korean.)

Nerds arguing about methods of language learning and which textbooks are good and why is my jam. This is all over the place in English-language fandoms of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean media. Those fandoms also tend to be full of speakers coming from a Germanic or Romance languages background who face similar hurdles in learning these languages. (In other words, if you’re a native Japanese speaker trying to learn Korean, the parts that will be hard for you are different than if you’re an English speaker, but you’re also usually not doing fandom in English.)

There’s also an element of scarcity and difficulty of access and a communal attempt to construct a canon (in the other sense) of stuff from that country that pertains to one’s fannishness. So, for example, a primer explaining the genre of xianxia is highly relevant to being a n00b Untamed fan, but just any old thing about China is not. A c-drama adapted from a danmei webnovel is perhaps part of the new pantheon of Chinese shit we’re all getting into, but just any old drama from decades ago is probably not... unless it’s a genre precursor to something else we care about. Another aspect here is that while Stuff I Can Access As A N00b Who Doesn’t Speak The Language may be relatively scarce, there’s a vast, vast wealth of stuff that exists.

This is what it felt like to be an anime fan in the US in 2000. As translation got more commercial and more crappy series were licensed and dumped onto an already glutted market, the vibe changed. No longer were fans desperately trying to learn enough of the language to translate or spending their time cataloguing what existed or making fanworks about a show they stuck with for a bit: the overall community focus turned to an endless race of consumption to keep up with all of the latest releases. That’s a perfectly valid way of being fannish, but if I wanted that, I’d binge US television 24/7.

Anime fandom got bigger, but what I liked about anime fandom in English died, and I moved on. (Okay, I first moved on to Onmyouji, which is a live action Japanese thing, but still.)

Hardcore weeaboos and now fans of Chinese and Korean stuff don’t stop at language: people get excited about cooking, my other other great passion. Times a thousand if the canon is something like The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, which is full of loving shots of food preparation. People get excited about history! Mandarin and Japanese may share almost nothing in terms of grammar or phonology, but all of East Asia has influence from specific Chinese power centers historically, and there are commonalities to historical architecture and clothing that I love.

I fell out of love with the popular anime art styles as they changed, and I’m not that into animation in general these days. (I still own a shitton of manga in art styles I like, like Okano Reiko’s Onmyouji series.) I’ve become a filmmaker over the last decade, and I’m very excited about beautiful cinematography and editing. With one thing and another, I’m probably not going to get back into anime fandom, but it’s lovely to revisit the cultural aspects I enjoyed about it via live-action media.

BTS surprised me too, to be honest. I really dislike that early 90s R&B ballad style that infests idol music (not just Korean--believe me, I resisted many rounds of “But Johnny’s Entertainment though!” back in the day). While I like some of the dance pop, I just don’t care. But OH NO, BTS turn out to be massive conscious hip hop fanboys, and their music sounds different. I have some tl;dr about my reactions in the meta I wrote about one of my fanvids, which you can find on Dreamwidth here.

--

But back to your comment about turnover: I know fans from the 70s who’ve had one great fannish love and that’s it and more who were like that but eventually moved on to a second or third. They’re... really fannishly monogamous in a way I find hard to comprehend. It was the norm long ago, but even by the 90s when far more people were getting into fandom, it was seen as a little weird. By now, with exponentially more people in fandom, it’s almost unheard of. I think those fans still exist, even as new people joining, but we don’t notice them. They were always rare, but in the past, only people like that had the stamina to get over the barriers to entry and actually become the people who made zines or were willing to be visibly into fanfic in eras when that was seen as really weird. On top of that, there’s an element of me, us, judging the past by what’s left: only people with an intense and often single passion are visible because other people either drifted away or have seamlessly disappeared into some modern fandom. They don’t say they’re 80 or 60 or 40 instead of 20, so nobody knows.

In general, I’m a small fandoms and rare ships person. My brain will do its best to thwart me by liking whatever has no fic even in a big fic fandom... (Except BTS because there is literally fic for any combination of them, like even more than for the likes of MCU. Wow. Best fandom evar!) So I have an incentive to not get complacent and just stick with one fandom because I would very soon have no ability to be in fandom at all.

My appetite for Consuming All The Things has slowed way down, but it also goes in waves, and a lot of what I’m consuming is what I did back in 2000: journal articles and the limited range of English-language books on the history of m/m sex and romance in East Asia. It’s not so much that I have a million fandoms as that I’m watching a few shows as an expression of my interest in East Asian costume dramas and East Asian history generally.

I do like to sit with one thing and experience it deeply rather than moving on quickly, but the surface expression of this has changed depending on whether I’m more into writing fic or more into doing research or something else.

But yes, I do do a certain amount of trying to stay current, often as a part of research for fandom meta or to help other people know what’s going on. Having a sense of what’s big doesn’t automatically mean getting into all those things, but I think some fans who are older-in-fandom and/or older-in-years stop being open to even hearing what’s new. And if you’ve never heard of it, you’ll never know if you might have liked it.

[shinrasfirst]

-> Mun meme <-

Repost rather than reblog, thanks!

Basics

name (or preferred online name): min. age: 28. birthday: november 15. fluent in: english, german. and soon portuguese. watch me.

Writing details:

preferred genres/tropes/aus: horror, angst, psychological, thriller, dark genres in general, romance. <-- i’m stealing this answer 1:1 from kay because it’s perfect. disliked genres/tropes/aus: domestic fluff without a purpose, pregnancy and childbirth, fight scenes, social media aus like wtf do you even do there write out youtube videos??, religion themed things (based on real religions), “celebrity” aus, college aus without any further plot (that’s a setting), hogwarts based aus (again, what’s the plot that is just a setting). preferred writing styles: multi-para to novella. tho i don’t usually write novella because it takes me long enough to write multiple paragraphs. sometimes it happens though. i don’t really do one-liners anymore. personal icon preferences (do you use them? do you prefer certain sizes? ect.): mine are like 75x75 to 100x100. i like using them because i think they complement the post, but i don’t always have one that fits or even any for certain characters, so i also write without them. i don’t mind when people use no icons. any other details about your writing preferences you want to include: i like both present tense and past tense (i tend to write present tense). i kind dislike first person narrators, but i can live with them. what i really fucking hate is second person narration, that’s only acceptable in homestuck. i don’t like double small text because i can’t read it; seriously i already zoom in to 150% sometimes on the regular dash. i also can’t deal with these posts that are so formatted every other word has a different font size, italics, boldness or color. it LOOKS great, but it’s annoying to read, tbh. that, and it’s usually accompanied by purple prose which i absolutely despise. i find it laughable that some people consider that “high quality writing” like no. it very often doesn’t make sense, it’s overly complicated, it sounds like the writer had a sentence in their head and then looked up an archaic synonym for every single word just to sound cool. and it usually creates long paragraphs in which literally nothing happens but someone dropping a pen and saying “ur dumb” but in very fancy. i’ll let this slide as poetry, but not as epic writing. stop making people feel inferior for (luckily) not being “able” to write like that, it’s seriously not better at all. go back to college and ask any literature professor (who doesn’t specialize in poetry - or maybe even them) if they think this is good writing. i dare you.

Get to know me:

what fandoms do you consider yourself a part of, even outside of this blog?: SO MANY! just gonna give you the ones i rp or rped in the past (and haven’t rage quit). star wars, the originals, harry potter, tmi, the witcher, dragon age, baldur’s gate, gentleman jack, lord of the rings, sailor moon. what fandoms are you entirely uninterested in?: 50 shades of misrepresentation, 13 reasons why not every book should be adapted for tv/cinema, game of ra/pe and torture, overwatch (i don’t hate it i’m just not interested), steven universe, adventure time, american horror story, ... favourite foods: pasta asciutta favourite drinks: coffee, sprite, hot chocolate, elderflower spritz hobbies: writing, video games, watching series/movies, spending time with my doggo, drawing, hiking/going for walks list ten things you want to do in the future: be healthy, finish my stupid studies, pay back my debts, live in brazil for 1+ month, visit new zealand, learn how to use worbla, buy a better car, meet bts, meet monsta x, become better at baking what do you wish would change in the rp community?: i want to go back to how it was when i first started out rping on tumblr. where people still understood that fanon is not canon. when everyone still remembered how to mind their own business. when anon hate was a rare and unusual thing. when witch hunts were a thing of the dark ages. i’ll take back the gigantic gifs and unformatted, uncut, messy posts filled with all the fanfic tropes, if you take back all the vile fake social justice bullshit and the sky-high anxieties it causes. literally, take me back to the start. what are some of the things you love about the rp community?: the shared excitement over certain things. the memes are fun. the birth of bizarre ships and dynamics (incl. crossovers). generally the possibilities of meeting great writers and lovely people. anything else you’d like to add?: please proceed into android hell. 🙃

[laterpeaches]

The 30 Best Movies for Kids on Hulu

This post is updated regularly to reflect the latest movies to leave and enter Hulu, which you can sign up for here. *New additions are indicated with an asterisk.

You’re stuck at home, pushing the remote control through so many options on your smart TV, looking for something, anything, that you can use to distract the kids and not make you feel guilty. Let us help.

The truth is that none of the streaming services are particularly great at family options now that Disney+ has cornered that market, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some great choices on Hulu. Here are 30 worthy films to distract the little ones or schedule an entire family movie night around (if you have the energy after homeschooling).

It may have some familiar story elements, but this 2019 film has some of the most gorgeous visuals in any recent animated movie, including a wave of flowers and the design of its lovable main character, a Yeti who needs the help of a girl and her friend to get back to his home at Mount Everest.

The weirdest animated story of the early days of the CGI form was the competition between DreamWorks with Antz and Pixar with A Bug’s Life — two films that the detail lives of the Earth’s smallest creatures in clever ways. Pixar seems to have won the longer battle, but there’s more to like here than you remember, including a strong voice cast and fun visuals.

Nancy Meyers co-wrote this clever family comedy about a successful woman who finds herself the unexpected mother of a 14-month-old baby girl when her long-lost cousin leaves her the child after her death. This may be for the slightly older kids, and some of its gender politics are dated, but Diane Keaton keeps it moving with her ace timing.

Exactly which titles Disney allows to jump from its streaming service to others doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but here’s the adventures of a sweet stunt dog named Bolt, the leading pup of this fun movie from 2008. John Travolta voices the dog who believes he actually has superpowers, which allow him to head out on a cross-country journey to save his owner, Penny.

Travis Knight of Laika fame (Kubo and the Two Strings) directed the best Transformers movie in this unexpectedly joyous spinoff of the massive Hasbro series of films. It’s a movie with the same kind of family-adventure spirit as ’80s classics of the genre, buoyed by fun performances from Hailee Steinfeld and John Cena.

Remember when movies were as simple as pitting felines and canines against one another? This 2001 family flick has been pretty much forgotten by history, but it was actually a pretty big hit at the time. Maybe you’re old enough to have some nostalgia for it or want to introduce it to your little ones now. Which side will they pick?

We don’t deserve Aardman. The geniuses behind Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and others made their biggest cinematic splash with this 2000 hit. A clever riff on prison-break movies like Escape From Alcatraz (but with chickens!), this is actually the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time, a title it’s held for almost 20 years now.

Who doesn’t love the Man in the Yellow Hat and his lovable primate? This is the 2006 theatrically released version of the book series by H.A. Rey and Margret Rey that have been popular around the world for generations. With voice work by Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Eugene Levy, and many more, it’s a sweet adventure story for the whole family.

This live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon has no right to be as funny and clever as it is. It helps that newcomer Isabela Moner is a delightful lead as Dora, but there’s also a delightfully self-aware tongue-in-cheek tone to this film, one that’s funny without every taking itself too seriously. It’s a sweet family adventure movie that works equally for parents and little ones.

Maybe wait for the real little ones to go to bed first, but there are certainly some families that can handle this coming-of-age story from the master Steven Spielberg. Christian Bale stars in the story of a young boy whose life is changed forever when he becomes a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp.

It became something of a punch line, but this family film was huge when it was first in theaters. Who can’t relate to the story of trying to free a gorgeous animal like the orca that gives this movie a name? It made over $150 million on a $20 million budget and launched a franchise. Willy was freed to run all over pop culture.

From the director of Mad Max: Fury Road! The family filmmaker side of George Miller directed this musical comedy about penguins who basically have to stop the apocalypse with their dancing and singing. It’s not as good as the original, but it has some clever visuals, incredible voice work, and some good tunes to boot.

People often point to the Toy Story movies as the model for a great animated series, but credit should be given to the trilogy of movies about a boy named Hiccup and his dragon Toothless. The third and final film in this blockbuster series is already on Hulu, and it’s a gorgeous, heartfelt, moving final chapter to one of the best franchises of the 2010s, animated or live-action.

The LEGO Movie is one of the most creative and enjoyable animated films of the 2010s. The sequel may feel a bit too cluttered at times, but it retains enough of that energy to make it worth a look on Hulu, especially as all of our creative faculties have been reduced by the insanity of 2020.

This is not the Danny DeVito–voiced recent version but the 1972 short original that aired on TV about a thousand times when you were young. One of Dr. Seuss’s most beloved books gets a loving adaptation in this classic, a story of responsibility and environmental consideration that will never grow old, and should spark some memories for parents of the right age.

Look, a documentary! Yes, non-fiction films can be family ones too. In fact, it was that cross-demographic appeal to the story of the annual journey of emperor penguins in Antarctica to find their breeding grounds that made this such an amazing success, winning Best Documentary at the Oscars after making over $120 million worldwide. Having Morgan Freeman narrate always helps too.

Will Ferrell voices the title character, the supervillain who wants to get some of the credit and adoration of his superhero counterparts. After actually killing his superhero nemesis, Megamind learns that life isn’t worth living for a villain without a hero and ends up creating a villain even worse for him to defeat. A clever spoof of the superhero genre that would dominate the next decade of blockbusters, this movie plays even better now than in 2010.

We don’t give Laika enough credit. They don’t make nearly as much money with films like Paranorman and Kubo and the Two Strings as companies like DreamWorks and Pixar. Their latest is already on Hulu, dropping less than a year after its theatrical release. It may not be their best, but it’s gorgeous to look at, revealing the company that made it as arguably the most visually fascinating animated studio around.

My Dog Skip

This family dramedy from 2000 adapts the autobiographical book of the same name by Willie Morris. It’s the story of a 9-year-old who is given an adorable Jack Russell terrier on his birthday, whom he names Skip, and some formative chapters of his life that he shares with his pup. It’s a sweet coming-of-age movie with added interest for dog lovers.

Listen, this movie is kind of a disaster, but it’s always a fascinating disaster. Joe Wright directs this prequel telling of a new origin story for Peter Pan and Captain Hook, played by Garrett Hedlund. Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara, and Levi Miller co-star in this undeniably strange blockbuster that seems to be gaining a reappraised following over the years. Why are people still talking about Pan? Check it out on Hulu and report back.

The Pink Panther 2

Let’s just politely call this one a gateway to better things. The sequel to the Steve Martin–led reboot of the Pink Panther series isn’t objectively “good,” but it may intrigue your kids enough to watch the brilliant Peter Sellers movies or even some of the original cartoons. And, heck, even if it makes them want to see more of Steve Martin, that’s probably a good thing too.

This was the first DreamWorks feature to be traditionally animated back in 1998 and was a bigger hit than you probably remember. It’s the story of the Book of Exodus and how Moses went from being just the title character to leading the children out of Israel. It’s a very pretty film visually and features some good music as well, but history seems to have forgotten it in the wake of how much Disney dominated the ’90s.

Gore Verbinski directed one of the best animated films on Hulu, this Oscar-winning featuring voice work by Johnny Depp in the lead role and some of the most inspired visuals in any animated film this decade. Rango is a chameleon who stumbled into a town called Dirt in this inventive riff on the Western genre that plays equally to children and adults.

Smallfoot

Channing Tatum wonderfully voices the lead character in this musical comedy from 2018. He plays a Yeti who descends from his cloudy mountain village and encounters a human — both realizing that the other species thought them a mythical creature. The visuals are engaging and the jokes are just clever enough to work for all ages.

Disney+ has stolen almost all the superhero movies but Sam Raimi’s original version of the webslinger is still on Hulu. Starring Tobey Maguire, this blockbuster doesn’t get enough credit for revitalizing the entire superhero genre in a way that plays to both parents and kids. It still rules.

This 2016 animated film is the story of how storks work to deliver babies, assisted by humans at a distribution center in the sky. One of those humans gets involved in a mistake when she creates a baby they’re not supposed to and end up having to help care for it with her stork partner. The visuals here are strong even if the story is slight. Still, it’s a creative story that you haven’t really seen before.

Not only is the beloved Tiny Toons series on Hulu, but so are several movies from the franchise: 1992’s Tiny Toons Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, 1994’s Tiny Toons Spring Break Special, and 1995’s Tiny Toon Adventures: Night Ghoulery.

Yes, they made a movie about a creepy line of toys. No, it’s not a modern animated classic. But it is something recent that may get the attention of your kids. You can’t make them watch old shows and movies all the time. And sometimes they just want to see something that was in theaters not that long ago, especially given they can’t go out to one in 2020. So, what’s this about? You probably know. Dolls. They’re kind of ugly.

This 1988 TV movie actually landed 14 years after the end of The Brady Bunch, and reunited almost all of the original cast members (Cindy was recast. Poor Cindy). It’s pretty simple — reunite with the Bradys, this time around Christmas! With the kids all grown, Carol and Mike buy airline tickets so everyone can get together around Christmas, in-laws and grandchildren included. It’s likely to make you jealous in 2020.

Wonder Park

Paramount released this computer-animated flick in early 2019, which feels like a lifetime ago now. It’s a bit simple and silly, but that’s kind of all right in our current stuck-at-home situation. Wonder Park is the story of a girl who puts her imagination away when her mother gets sick and how an imaginary amusement park helps her find that creative spark again.

[filmstruck]

Six Questions With FilmStruck: Josh Boone 

Writer-Director Josh Boone’s filmography includes indie romance STUCK IN LOVE (’12), blockbuster adaptation THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (’14), and coming soon comic book adaptation THE NEW MUTANTS (’18). A cinephile to the core, Boone spoke to FilmStruck’s Marya E. Gates about his early love of film, how he discovered the Criterion Collection, and what films he thinks everyone should stream immediately. 

FS: What was the movie that made you fall in love with movies? 

Josh Boone: There’s so many. Could you name just one? 

FS: No. 

JB: Right? You’d have to name a couple I think. 

FS: You can name a couple. 

JB: My dad had a very large collection of movies on Beta that he taped off HBO when I was a kid in the 80s and he had a lot of those movies from the 70s, those Jack Nicholson movies like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and FIVE EASY PIECES and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. He had all these old Jack Nicholson movies, so I watched those a lot. Jack Nicholson was always my favorite actor. Those 70s Jack Nicholson movies got me into Bogdanovich and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and all the BBS stuff. When you learn about movies it’s like one thing leads to another. Back then I had to buy Video Watchdog books every year, or an Ebert guide to try to find stuff that I hadn’t seen. I remember seeing E.T. vividly as a kid. It was the 80s, so all those Spielberg movies and THE GOONIES. THE NEVERENDING STORY was one of my favorite movies of all time. That was a big deal when I was a kid. I saw that in theaters a couple of times. I watched movie after movie after movie and then I amassed over the years laserdiscs and DVDs. I didn’t go to film school, I really learned everything from DVD commentaries, behind the scenes documentaries, reading books about movies, and just watching movies. So I watched thousands and thousands of movies when I was a kid. I’d say I watch much less now because it takes so much time to make movies you have much less time to study them. You use them for reference and things like that and you watch them, but not with the same passion that you watched them with when you were young because you have to let that go a little bit to go do the job you have to do, and put the time in to do it. You build it all up and then you hold it inside you and then you go and make movies. 

FS: That’s a great segue to the next question. What was the movie that made you want to make movies? 

JB: I was obsessed with directors when I was young and I would keep file folders with every magazine clipping about David Lynch or Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. I had all these files on them. It’s hard for me to think back to before I even wanted to make movies because my best friend (Knate Lee) and I who I wrote THE NEW MUTANTS with, we’ve known each other since we were little kids. Since we were little Muppet Babies or whatever. Our moms were best friends. We made movies on home video growing up all the time. Really as early as like 7 or 8 because my dad had one of those over the shoulder Beta cams and his parents had a Hi8 or something and we would shoot movies and edit in camera. We started making BATMAN rip-offs where my dad would play the Joker or a BACK TO THE FUTURE rip-off and that gradually led to us writing our own scripts and things like that. It was sort of an organic, long-term process so it’s hard to say the specific movie. But I can say the movie-going experience of my life when I was 12 years old my dad took me to see J.F.K. and that was maybe one of the great movie events I had at the theater when I was young. I remember gripping the armrests of my seat so tightly that there are probably still impressions of them there today. I think Oliver Stone’s run From SALVADOR to NIXON is one of the greatest runs a director has ever had. Those ten movies he made with Bob Richardson, all those movies were really big in our lives when we were young. We’d spend our lives reading comic books and watching movies and listening to music, and Oliver Stone movies were some of the first movies that made us want to go and read history books. Movies opened us up to the entire world because we were raised by very religious parents, like evangelical Christians, so like Paul Schrader – who I think wasn’t allowed to watch movies until he left for college – it was a bit of a forbidden fruit. We watched them all the time and they were an escape and a good way to see what the world was actually like beyond the crazy religious stuff. 

FS: What was your first introduction to the Criterion Collection? 

JB: I used to have a friend named Bill Kelley who worked at newspaper called the Virginian Pilot, which was the main newspaper in Virginia Beach. He was a big movie buff and he had a laserdisc player and we would all go over to his house on Sunday nights and he always had this massive collection of laserdiscs that we would pour over - religious, and old Hollywood classics, and even Spielberg movies. He had a couple of Criterions and he had a big glossy, like a brochure almost, like a 50-page Criterion catalogue that they would send out back in the day, before you could go online and just scroll through everything. It was full color and it was as big as a vinyl record. It had pictures from all the movies and all the extras. You just started to want to check all those boxes off and watch them all. So I got a laserdisc player for Christmas one year and I think the very first one I had was SE7EN, which was one like 8 discs or something. It was ridiculous. It weighed a ton. So I started collecting laserdisc and Criterion editions and listened to commentaries and all that. Oliver Stone did big pioneering laserdisc editions. I have one of PLATOON and THE DOORS. They cost like $150 dollars and they were so heavy. I loved all of that stuff. 

FS: What was the first film you streamed on FilmStruck? 

JB: I think I streamed some extras before I actually watched a movie. Then I watched some Kurosawa and Bergman that weren’t released on disc yet. I like that Criterion has all these titles in their catalogue and they can’t get them all out immediately so they’ll have them on the site so you can stream them even though it might be a couple of years before they come out on disc. There were so many things on their that haven’t been released. Kieślowski is one of my favorite directors and I love Annette Insdorf’s books about him, so she wrote this book called Double Lives, Second Chances, which I have read a couple of times. She just released a book about movie opening scenes (Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes), like what great movies do them well and what a great opening scene is. I love that video series [on the Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes theme] where she goes over the opening of BADLANDS and a bunch of other movies. She’s so eloquent and a great historian. She’s a hero a little bit. 

Those Kieślowski movies certainly meant an awful lot to me. I always loved those because I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick and when I say Philip K. Dick, I do love BLADE RUNNER and MINORITY REPORT and TOTAL RECALL, but those really are no way representative of what reading one of his books is like. The only movie that really feels like Philip K. Dick is A SCANNER DARKLY, which is really like a word for word adaptation of the book. Some of those metaphysical ideas that were in Philip K. Dick I found in Kieślowski as well and I thought all of that stuff was really interesting. I love Tarkovsky movies, as long and boring as some of my friends might think they are, they blow your mind and make you think of things you hadn’t thought about before. I love things that are imaginative. Like LA JETÉE, I love watching that and it’s inspiration on 12 MONKEYS. 

FS: If the world were about to end what movies on FilmStruck would you recommend everyone stream before we all died? 

JB: I’d put a Kieślowski on there. Certainly THREE COLORS: BLUE. I fucking love Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD with the arrows and all that. That one is amazing. A Cronenberg. 

FS: We have THE BROOD. 

JB: That is one of the scariest movies ever. Those little kids beating that lady to death. It’s pretty awful. I’d put that up if you really want to barf one night. This will do it for you. I love all those music docs like DONT LOOK BACK. I love Robert Altman. The fucking  THE CONFORMIST for sure. I love love love [Jean-Luc] Godard’s stuff with Anna Karina. I love MASCULIN FÉMININ, even though she’s not in that, I love PIERROT LE FOU. I love all the Kurosawa stuff. THRONE OF BLOOD especially I love. The movie I would recommend the most right now because it’s not on Blu-ray is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 CURE. It’s one of the scariest, best horror movies ever made. I’m so glad it’s on here because I can’t watch it anywhere else. I’m a huge Terry Gilliam fan. TIME BANDITS is one of my favorite movies from back when I was a kid. I love IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, THE GRADUATE. All this stuff. It’s all just such great stuff. 

FS: Have you found anything while you’re browsing FilmStruck that you’d never heard of but just had to watch it? 

JB: I go into the directors and I look through different filmmakers and I look through all of the ones that have introductions. Like, I will go through all of the ones that Guillermo Del Toro did an introduction for. I like when people come and talk about their favorite movies. I go through all the extras, all the additional things that you guys do that are exclusive and add context. When you guys had all those [Mario] Bava movies up, we just let those play. It’s good in the background. You don’t have to pay super close attention, but it’s like those movies look so amazing.

Shot by cinematographer Peter Deming (long-time David Lynch collaborator), and co-written by Knate Lee, director Josh Boone’s latest film THE NEW MUTANTS hits theaters on April 13. 

[sveareads]

Unpopular Opinions Book Tag

As I said, in celebration of this blog getting 100 followers I’d do this tag! It’s one of my absolute favourites to watch/read, and I hope you’ll enjoy my version of it. This tag was created by TheBookArcher (original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYfgq8HgDc0&t=68s). Thank you all so much again for following this blog; I never expected that a sideblog would be able to attract so many peoples’ attention!

And now, without further ado, let’s get into the tag!

1. A popular book or series that you didn’t like?

I have two for this; first, A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab. I actually finished this book, and the ending disappointed me so much that it took me about two months to pick up the second book in this series, which I do plan to finish by the way.

The second book would be A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, which I DNFd after 150 pages or so. I was so bored while reading this, the writing wasn’t for me, and I hated almost all of the characters. Not planning on picking this one up again any time soon.

2. A popular book or series that everyone else seems to hate but you love?

For this question I’m going with one of my favourite books of all time: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I feel like a lot of people hate this book because they don’t like the characters, but to me, that isn’t really a priority for my enjoyment of a story. The thing I love most about this book anyways is the style, which is the main reason I like it so much.

3. A love triangle where the main character ended up with the person you did NOT want them to end up with OR an OTP that you don’t like?

No spoilers, but I didn’t like the result of the love triangle (or rather love quadrat) in The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo. If you’ve been following my blog for a while you know what I’m talking about and who I wanted to be endgame in the last book.

4. A popular book genre that you hardly reach for?

Again, I have two answers here. One is YA contemporary, especially YA romance books, and the other is sci-fi. I love sci-fi movies, but can’t really be bothered to read a book from the genre. With YA contemporary it’s the case that I mostly don’t care about someone’s relationship drama, so I tend to avoid this genre as well.

5. A popular or beloved character that you do not like?

I’m not sure how popular he really is, but I’m choosing Will Herondale from The Infernal Devices Trilogy by Cassandra Clare. I just find him annoying and don’t know why he and all of the other characters for that matter, are so well loved. BUT this may change, considering that I’m still reading Clockwork Angel at the moment.

6. A popular author that you can’t seem to get into?

Definitely Maggie Stiefvater. I’ve tried to read The Raven Boys almost four times now, but it just was not for me. I don’t like her writing, the plot was boring to me, and I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy reading about any of the characters.

7. A popular book trope that you’re tired of seeing (examples “lost princess”, corrupt ruler, love triangles, etc.)?

I’m going with love triangles, especially in fantasy books. It’s just so unnecessary and annoying to have to read about drama like this when there are much higher things at stake to be honest.

8. A popular series that you have no interest in reading?

Again, I have no interest in continuing The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater, and also nothing pulls me to The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare.

9. The saying goes, “The book is always better than the movie”, but what movie or TV show adaptation do you prefer more than the book?

This has to be the show Hannibal, and the book it was based on, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. I couldn’t even finish the book, but I love the show so much and would always watch it over trying to pick up the book again.

I hope you enjoyed this tag; it was a lot of fun to do, and I’d love to repeat it a year from now to see how my unpopular opinions have changed!

[art-angels]

40 Things to Do in L.A. This Week While You’re Safer at Home [4-30-2020 to 5-6-2020]

APRIL 30, 2020 BY WE LIKE L.A. STAFF

We used to tell you about all the things you could go out and do in Los Angeles on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Then, the coronavirus pandemic changed life for all of us, in a thousand small and massive ways. These days, there are no events for us to post about and, even if there were, state and county orders prohibit gathering. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t find entertainment, education, and most importantly, community online. From now on until this whole thing’s behind us, we’ll be posting virtual things you can do from home every Thursday morning. We hope they keep you busy, make you laugh, teach you something, or help you feel less isolated.

This week, we’ve got fitness raves, witchy cocktail shows, magical hotlines, online film fests, so much theater, and more. Have something you want to submit for next week? Hit us up: tips@welikela.com.

On April 30, join KCRW DJs for This Album Saved My Quarantine. Get some inspiration on what to listen to as they each discuss an album that’s making their quarantine a little easier, one song at a time.

WWOZ New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Station presents Festing In Place, an online jazz festival featuring archival sets from the New Orleans Jazz Festival. Listen April 30 through May 2. More info here.

Check out a digital tour of The Autry’s “Women of the West” or virtually stroll through the museum’s ethnobotanical garden.

Get in on Atlas Obscura’s weekly trivia night on May 1 (and several Fridays to follow). Games kick off at 7 p.m. EST (so late afternoon here) and cost $7 per screen. Gather a team of up to five people, preferably those well-versed in “trivial knowledge and fascinating ephemera.”

Microtheater consists of four short quarantine-themed plays you can watch from home every weekend through Safer at Home. This weekend, plays include “Time is Meaningless,” “The Dog Who Fell Into a Mineshaft,” “Well, Well, Well,” and “Rain, Bow, Connect, Shin.” Shows kick off on May 1 and May 2 at 6:05 p.m. and 7:05 p.m. Register to watch as many as you like on Zoom here. Donations welcome.

On May 1 at 7 p.m., LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes will host Keeping the Música Alive…And Well with Louie Pérez of Los Lobos on Zoom. He’ll discuss his work and how the music industry can adapt to the world as we now know it. Register here.

Art Beyond The Glass presents “Sipping at Home,” a live telethon streaming on The Hospitality Life Twitch and Facebook channels on Sunday, May 3. The annual fundraiser gathered some of the best bartenders in L.A. to collaborate on “To-Go Cocktail Kits,” each featuring four special cocktails and some other surprises. Pre-orders are available now for pickup April 30 through May 2 at select locations across the city. The proceeds will benefit the ABTG COVID-19 Relief Fund, which supports local bartenders impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Venice Family Clinic’s Art Walk Auction is now online. You can start building on available pieces on May 3 on Artsy here. Final bids must be placed by May 19 at noon. Proceeds will raise funds for the clinic’s COVID-19 response.

The Pack Theater is uploading some of the best livestream comedy shows on the internet. The next few days include SET LIST, an improv comedy standup show, and Casting Call, where improvisers audition for roles in real-life terrible projects being made right here in Los Angeles.

LACMA is hosting a digital premiere of Arkansas on its YouTube channel followed by a conversation between LACMA Asst. Film Curator Adam Piron and director Clark Duke. The film’s synopsis: Kyle (Liam Hemsworth) and Swin (Duke) live by the orders of an Arkansas-based drug kingpin named Frog (Vince Vaughn), whom they’ve never met. Posing as park rangers by day, they operate as low-level drug couriers by night under the watchful eye of Frog’s proxies (John Malkovich, Vivica A. Fox). However, after one too many inept decisions, Kyle and Swin find themselves directly in Frog’s crosshairs, who mistakenly sees them as a threat to his empire. Arkansas weaves together three decades of Deep South drug trafficking to explore the cycle of violence that turns young men into criminals and old men into legends.

Check out Los Angeles Public Library’s Storytime at Home every weekday at 11 a.m. on Studio City Library’s Instagram. Each episode, Miss Lauren offers a book, songs, and felt board stories for children.

L.A. Theater Works currently has several audio plays available for streaming, including over 30 sci-fi plays within its Relativity Series. Check out their complete offerings here.

Artist PunkMeTender has launched his exhibit, A Battle Won, online. Click around this virtual gallery to see each piece.

Join the Tonga Hut for a tiki party on Zoom on May 1 at 8 p.m. You’ll have to make your own drinks, but you’re welcome to get dressed up.

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival has moved online, offering film screenings and filmmaker discussions and talk-backs. The fest opens on May 1 with two episodes of the upcoming PBS series, Asian Americans. Check out the complete lineup here.

The Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Connect 2020 opens online on May 5 with a screening of The Last Rafter with a Q&A and performance from Lupita Infante to follow. The fest runs through May 29 on LALIFF’s website. All events are free.

Still Life Ceramics will teach you how to make a clay pot on April 27 at 7 p.m. and April 29 at 6 p.m. For $45, they’ll mail you a chunk of clay and postage so that you can mail it back for firing. May 3 at 2 p.m., May 4 at 7 p.m., and May 6 at 6 p.m. On May 7, they’ll host an online teapot masterclass. For $150, you’ll receive clay, basic tools, and firing and glaze for up to two teapots. You’ll need to already have your own wheel and basic knowledge of throwing. 

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) has launched some cool virtual programming, including salon conversations from its archives, art-making activities, and more. See what they’ve got going on here.

Beside Itself is Hauser & Wirth’s first entirely virtual reality-based exhibit. It opens on April 30 and features work from Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Luchita Hurtado, Mike Kelley, Glenn Ligon, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Lorna Simpson, and Lawrence Weiner. Access it on the gallery’s website using your computer, phone, or VR headset.

Intramersive’s Magic Help Desk is a one-on-one interactive show over Zoom. You’re a magical tech support professional who will help a member of the Magic Defense Force with their mystical object, be it a crystal ball or a wand. Sounds simple enough, right? Bookings are available through May 3. Ticketsare $25.

Mister & Mischief have a free answering service you can call for inspiration, commiseration, and more. Just dial (888) 691-3111 any time to choose which messages you’ll hear. Check back often as extensions are updated almost daily. More info here. Speaking of phone messages, check out the Department of Social Distancing website, where callers can leave voicemails about anything they’re feeling right now.

The Corita Art Center rolled out an online arts education program inspired by Corita Kent, the “rebel” nun and teacher famous for her colorful Pop Art interpretations of religious art. Corita 101 is free to download. It’s designed for a K-5 arts curriculum and is available in both English and Spanish.

Dezeen’s Virtual Design Festival brings canceled festivals around the world together in one place now through June 30. The next few days include an exclusive series of video interviews with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen and an interview with British architect Alison Brooks.

Eva Longoria and Enrique Santos co-host Altísimo Live, a Cinco de Mayo celebration and virtual concert featuring Latin music stars Gloria and Emilio Estefan, Luis Fonsi, J Balvin, Diane Guerrero, and Ana Brenda Contreras. The performances will stream live on Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and iHeartLatino’s radio stations and social media platforms on May 5 at 2 p.m. The event is free to view. A donation of $5 to the Farmworker’s COVID-19 Pandemic Relief Fund is encouraged.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI) and HAMILTON just launched EduHam at Home, a free digital program for students and their families to explore the world of HAMILTON and America’s founding era together. Students are also encouraged to create and perform their own narrative in the form of a song, rap, spoken word, or scene and submit their creations to be shared on the HAMILTON app, social media, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s website.

The gently whispering, paper-crinkling folks at WhisperLodge now have a free ASMR scene up on Audible designed to help you fall asleep.

Check out The Light House, a delightfully creepy new horror radio drama from author Jeff Heimbuch and audio engineer/composer Kori Celeste. According to the synopsis: Tara Hollis was supposed to get a fresh new start at her ancestral home, Light House. But when Tara and her family moved into Light House on that warm, winter’s day in 1963, they did not suspect the horror that awaited them; a horror that lurked in the shadows, biding its time to quench its hunger. There is a darkness that dwells in the heart of Light House…one that will tear Tara’s family apart. Do you believe in ghosts? Tara didn’t…until she moved into Light House. Listen on iHeartRadio here.

Get your body pumping with a fitness rave. HyperBody® at Everybody Gym in Glassell Park is now offering HD streams of its offbeat fitness classes, starting with five of its most popular workouts, including the Fitness Rave and Cyborg Abs. An all-day pass costs $5 and an unlimited week pass costs $20.

SCI-Arc’s Main Event 2020 returns in spectacular virtual form this year on May 2 at 6 p.m. The school’s annual gala benefits the SCI-Arc Scholarship Endowment. This year’s festivities include a live dance party with a DJ, digital cocktail lounge experiences, and a few other surprises.

Try a Trap-style Zumba class. Created by @hoodfaory.co, the classes take place on the Trap z*mba Instagram live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. and Thursdays at 8 p.m.

On Thursday, April 30 at noon, join author and Asst. GM at Rappahannock Hope Ewing for a little day drinking. She’ll teach you how to make a savory martini on Instagram.

[mastcomm]

Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions, the Aboriginal Way

COOINDA, Australia — At a time when vast tracts of Australia are burning, Violet Lawson is never far from a match.

In the woodlands surrounding her home in the far north of the country, she lights hundreds of small fires a year — literally fighting fire with fire. These traditional Aboriginal practices, which reduce the undergrowth that can fuel bigger blazes, are attracting new attention as Australia endures disaster and confronts a fiery future.

Over the past decade, fire-prevention programs, mainly on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia, have cut destructive wildfires in half. While the efforts draw on ancient ways, they also have a thoroughly modern benefit: Organizations that practice defensive burning have earned $80 million under the country’s cap-and-trade system as they have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the north by 40 percent.

These programs, which are generating important scientific data, are being held up as a model that could be adapted to save lives and homes in other regions of Australia, as well as fire-prone parts of the world as different as California and Botswana.

“Fire is our main tool,” Ms. Lawson said as she inspected a freshly burned patch where grasses had become ash but the trees around them were undamaged. “It’s part of protecting the land.”

The fire-prevention programs, which were first given government licenses in 2013, now cover an area three times the size of Portugal. Even as towns in the south burned in recent months and smoke haze blanketed Sydney and Melbourne, wildfires in northern Australia were much less severe.

“The Australian government is now starting to see the benefits of having Indigenous people look after their lands,” said Joe Morrison, one of the pioneers of the project. “Aboriginal people who have been through very difficult times are seeing their language, customs and traditional knowledge being reinvigorated and celebrated using Western science.”

In some ways, the Aboriginal methods resemble Western ones practiced around the world: One of the main goals is to reduce underbrush and other fuel that accelerates hot, damaging fires.

But the ancient approach tends to be more comprehensive. Indigenous people, using precisely timed, low-intensity fires, burn their properties the way a suburban homeowner might use a lawn mower.

Aboriginal practices have been so successful in part because of a greater cultural tolerance of fire and the smoke it generates. The country’s thinly populated north, where Aboriginal influence and traditions are much stronger than in the south, is not as hamstrung by political debates and residents’ concerns about the health effects of smoke.

The landscape and climate of northern Australia also make it more amenable to preventive burning. The wide open spaces, and the distinctive seasons — a hot dry season is followed by monsoon rains — make burning more predictable.

Yet despite these regional differences, those who have studied the Aboriginal techniques say they could be adapted in the more populated parts of the country.

“We most certainly should learn to burn Aboriginal-style,” said Bill Gammage, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. “Our firefighters have quite good skills in fighting fires. But for preventing them, they are well short of what Aboriginal people could do.”

Last week, Victor Cooper, a former forest ranger in northern Australia, lit a wad of shaggy bark to demonstrate the type of fire that burns at temperatures low enough to avoid damage to sensitive plants that are crucial food for animals.

The preventive fires, he said, should trickle, not rage. They must be timed according to air temperature, wind conditions and humidity, as well as the life cycles of plants. Northern Aboriginal traditions revolve around the monsoon, with land burned patch by patch as the wet season gives way to the dry.

“We don’t have a fear of fire,” said Mr. Cooper, who burns regularly around his stilt house nestled in woodlands. “We know the earlier we burn, the more protection we have.”

This year, he will become certified to join the carbon credits program. Money earned through that system has incentivized stewardship of the land and provided hundreds of jobs in Aboriginal communities, where unemployment rates are high. The funds have also financed the building of schools in underserved areas.

NASA satellite data is used to quantify the reduction in carbon emissions and do computer modeling to track fires. Modern technology also supplements the defensive burning itself: Helicopters drop thousands of incendiary devices the size of Ping-Pong balls over huge patches of territory at times of the year when the land is still damp and fires are unlikely to rage out of control.

Those taking part in the program say they are frustrated that other parts of the country have been reluctant to embrace the same types of preventive burning. The inaction is longstanding: A major federal inquiry after deadly fires more than a decade ago recommended wider adoption of Aboriginal methods.

“I have many friends in other parts of Australia who can’t get their heads around that fire is a useful tool, that not all fire is the same and that you can manage it,” said Andrew Edwards, a fire expert at Charles Darwin University in northern Australia. “It’s hard to get across to people that fire is not a bad thing.”

Nine years ago, Mr. Gammage published a book that changed the way many in Australia thought about the Australian countryside and how it has been managed since the arrival of Europeans in the late 18th century.

The book, “The Biggest Estate on Earth,” uses documents from the earliest settlers and explorers to show how the landscape had been systematically shaped by Aboriginal fire techniques.

Many forests were thinner than those that exist now and were more resistant to hot-burning fires. Early explorers described the landscape as a series of gardens, and they reported seeing near constant trails of smoke from small fires across the landscape.

As Europeans took control of the country, they banned burning. Jeremy Russell-Smith, a bushfire expert at Charles Darwin University, said this quashing of traditional fire techniques happened not only in Australia, but also in North and South America, Asia and Africa.

“The European mind-set was to be totally scared of fire,” Mr. Russell-Smith said.

As the fires rage in the south, Aboriginal people in northern Australia say they are deeply saddened at the loss of life — about 25 people have been killed and more than 2,000 homes destroyed. But they also express bewilderment that forests were allowed to grow to become so combustible.

Margaret Rawlinson, the daughter of Ms. Lawson, who does preventive burning on her property in the far north, remembers traveling a decade ago to the countryside south of Sydney and being alarmed at fields of long, desiccated grass.

“I was terrified,” Ms. Rawlinson said. “I couldn’t sleep. I said, ‘We need to go home. This place is going to go up, and it’s going to be a catastrophe.’”

The area that she visited, around the town of Nowra, has been a focal point for fires over the past few weeks.

The pioneering defensive burning programs in northern Australia came together in the 1980s and ’90s when Aboriginal groups moved back onto their native lands after having lived in settlements under the encouragement, or in some cases the order, of the government.

Depopulated for decades, the land had suffered. Huge fires were decimating species and damaging rock paintings.

“The land was out of control,” said Dean Yibarbuk, a park ranger whose Indigenous elders encouraged him to seek solutions.

The Aboriginal groups ultimately teamed up with scientists, the government of the Northern Territory and the Houston-based oil company ConocoPhillips, which was building a natural gas facility and was required to find a project that would offset its carbon emissions.

According to calculations by Mr. Edwards, wildfires in northern Australia burned 57 percent fewer acres last year than they did on average in the years from 2000 to 2010, the decade before the program started.

Mr. Yibarbuk, who is now chairman of Warddeken Land Management, one of the largest of the participating organizations, employs 150 Aboriginal rangers, part time and full time.

“We are very lucky in the north to be able to keep our traditional practices,” Mr. Yibarbuk said. “There’s a pride in going back to the country, managing it and making a difference.”

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[kmalexander]

Vischer: A Free 17th Century Cartography Brush Set for Fantasy Maps

For December, I am releasing my thirteenth free fantasy map brush set of the year and it’s the most extensive collection I’ve ever assembled. I think you’ll dig this one.

Today’s topographic set is based on the Archiducatus Austriae inferioris, an incredibly detailed map of lower Austria created by Georg Matthäus Vischer in 1697. The style is unique and features a few stylistic touches that really help set it apart. Hills do double duty serving as forests, and the skylines of the cities, towns, and villages are rendered intricately, giving each their own individual look.

There’s also the matter of the Schlösser—the catchall German term for a château, manor houses, or palace. Vischer drew and labeled each of these. Often these buildings were moated, and while German has a word for “castle” (burg), it wasn’t uncommon for castles to also be dubbed “schloss.” (I recommend reading the linked page, there’s fascinating history surrounding those buildings, and it goes into much more detail.) For the sake of organizational sanity, I divided the schlösser into those that looked more manor-like and those that appeared more castle-esque.

Vischer included a key, in both German and Latin, and I did my best to follow it when labeling the signs and symbols. However, he didn’t always do the best job sticking to his own legend. Towards the latter plates, the symbol marking the schlösser changes, and it begins to often include an arrow (typically used to indicate a fortified location). I’m also half-sure that the mark for “town” might be more of an indicator that there is a market in that particular village or city. Likewise, he lists bathhouses on the legend, but they never showed up in the map itself! Those sorts of aberrations aren’t uncommon on old maps, and it’s part of what makes cartographic antiquities such fun.

This is a beautiful set, with a style that sets it apart from other maps of the era. I’m excited to be bringing it to everyone. I can’t wait to see what you do with it. With over nine hundred and fifty brushes, Vischer is my largest set of the year. There is a TON here allowing the map designer to make a really unique looking topographical map quickly and effectively. It includes the following:

20 Small Settlements

165 Villages

20 Elevated Villages

40 Towns

25 Cities

50 Manor-style Schlösser

20 Elevated Manor-style Schlösser

40 Castle-style Schlösser

20 Elevated Castle-style Schlösser

10 Monasteries

15 Monasteries w/ Other Settlements

30 Combined Settlements

20 Houses

10 Churches

25 Unique Settlements

20 Open Fields

20 Furrowed Fields

20 Hedgerow Fields

20 Hedgerows

20 Vineyards

30 Wetlands

20 Scrub

20 Individual Trees

15 Forests

150 Regular Hills

20 Steep Hills

30 Cultivated Hills

10 Mountains

3 Windmills

5 Glass Kiln Markers

15 Postal Markers

5 Transport Cartouches

10 Ruins & Monuments

5 Crosses

5 Unique Cartouches

The button below links to a ZIP file that contains a Photoshop brush set (it’ll also work in GIMP). I normally include a set of transparent PNGs in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support Adobe brush files, but I’ve separated them out this time to save on file-size. You can download them via the link below. They’re black, and they’ll look broken if viewed in Chrome, but trust me, they’re all there.

DOWNLOAD VISCHER

Download all the PNGs

As with all of my previous brush sets, Vischer is free for any use. I distribute my sets with a Creative Common, No Rights Reserved License (CC0), which means you can freely use this and any of my brushes in commercial work and distribute adaptations. (Details on this decision here.) No attribution is required. Easy peasy!

Enjoy Vischer? Feel free to show me what you created by sending me an email or finding me on Twitter. I love seeing how these brushes get used, and I’d be happy to share your work with my readers. Let me see what you make!

Vischer In Use

Want to see this brush set in use? I put together a sample map using Vischer. There are three versions, a black and white version, one colored, and a decorated sample. Click on any of the images below to view them larger. Perhaps this will inspire you in your projects!

            Supporting This Work

If you like the Vischer brush set (or any of my free brushes, really) and want to support my work, instead of a donation, consider buying one of my speculative fiction novels. The first book—The Stars Were Right—is only $2.99 on eBook. I think you’ll dig it. You can find all my books in stores and online. Visit bellforgingcycle.com to learn more about the series. Tell your friends!

Not interested in my books but still want a way to support me? Buy me a coffee.

 More Map Brushes

Vischer isn’t the only brush set I’ve released. You can find other free brush sets with a wide variety of styles over on my Free Stuff page. Every set is free, distributed under a CC0 license, and open for personal or commercial use. I’m sure you’ll be able to find something that works for your project.

Braun: A 16th Century Urban Cartography Brush Set

The brushes within this urban-focused set are based on the incredible work of Georg Braun taken from his Civitates orbis terrarum—easily one of the most significant volumes of cartographic antiquity. The detail and density represented in these symbols give an extra layer of texture and is perfect for the right fantastical city map.

Ogilby: A Free 17th Century Road Atlas Brush Set

Taken from John Ogilby’s 1675 book Britannia, Volume the First, this set allows the creator to recreate road atlas from the 17th century in stunning detail, placing the traveler’s experience front and center. With over 800 brushes, this is my most extensive set to date and useful for a variety of projects. Several bonus downloads are also available, as well.

Van der Aa: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

This regional map set is based on a map by Dutch cartographer and publisher, Pieter Van der Aa. It’s a beautifully rendered version of the Mingrelia region of northwest Georgia. While not as extensive as other sets, the size of the map allowed for larger brushes that helps highlight the uniqueness of each symbol. It also features a failed wall!

Gomboust: A 17th Century Urban Cartography Brush Set

My first brush set to focus on creating realistic maps for fantastical urban environments! Gomboust is a huge set, and its symbols are extracted from Jacques Gomboust’s beautiful 1652 map of Paris, France. His style is detailed yet quirky, isometric yet off-kilter, packed with intricacies, and it brings a lot of personality to a project.

Harrewyn: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

Based on Eugene Henry Fricx’s “Cartes des Paysbas et des Frontieres de France,” this set leans into its 1727 gothic styling and its focus on the developed rather than the natural. It’s hauntingly familiar yet strikingly different. If you’re looking for more natural elements, Harrewyn works well alongside other sets as well.

Popple: A Free 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

This set has quickly become a favorite, and it’s perfect for a wide variety of projects. The brushes are taken from 1746’s A Map of the British Empire in America by Henry Popple, and it has a fresh style that does a fantastic job capturing the wildness of a frontier. Plus, it has swamps! And we know swamps have become a necessity in fantasy cartography.

Donia: A Free 17th Century Settlement Brush Set

While not my most extensive set (a little over one hundred brushes), Donia boasts one of the more unique takes on settlements from the 17th century. If you’re looking for flora, I suggest checking out other sets, but if you want to pay attention to your map’s cities, towns, castles, churches, towers, forts, even fountains, then this is the right set for you.

Blaeu: A Free 17th Century Cartography Brush Set

Based on Joan Blaeu’s Terræ Sanctæ—a 17th-century tourist map of the Holy Land—this set includes a ton of unique and varied signs as well as a large portion of illustrative cartouches that can add a flair authenticity to any fantasy map. Elegant and nuanced, everything works within a system, but nearly every sign is unique.

Aubers: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

An 18th Century brush set based on a map from 1767 detailing the journey of François Pagès, a French naval officer, who accompanied the Spanish Governor of Texas on a lengthy exploration through Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico. A unique southwestern set with a few interesting deviations—including three volcanos!

L’Isle: An 18th Century Battlefield Brush Set

A departure from the norm, this set is based on the Plan Batalii map, which was included in a special edition of The First Atlas of Russia in 1745. A detailed view of a battle during the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Canon! Units! Battles! Perfect for mapping out the combat scenarios in your fantasy stories.

Widman: A 17th Century Cartography Brush Set

A 17th Century brush set based on the work of Georgio Widman for Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi’s atlas published in 1692. A fantastic example of Cantelli da Vignola’s influence and a solid set for any fantastic map. This is the workhorse of antique map brush sets—perfect for nearly any setting.

Walser: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

An 18th Century brush set based on the work of Gabriel Walser with a focus on small farms and ruins and a robust set of mountains and hills. This is a great brush set to see how Vignola’s influence persisted across generations. It was etched over 80 years after the Widman set, but you’ll find a few familiar symbols within.

Lumbia: A Sketchy Cartography Brush Set

A sketchy style brush set I drew myself that focuses on unique hills and mountains and personal customizability. My attempt at trying to channel the sort of map a barkeep would draw for a band of hearty adventurers. It includes extra-large brushes for extremely high-resolution maps.

Lehmann: A Hatchure Brush Set

Named after Austrian topographer Johann Georg Lehmann creator of the Lehmann hatching system in 1799, this is a path-focused brush set designed for Adobe Illustrator that attempts to captures the hand-drawn style unique 19th Century hachure-style mountains. This set works perfectly in conjunction with my other sets from the late 18th century.

Want to stay in touch with me? Sign up for Dead Drop, my rare and elusive newsletter. Subscribers get news, previews, and notices on my books before anyone else delivered directly to their inbox. I work hard to make sure it’s not spammy and full of interesting and relevant information.  SIGN UP TODAY →

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[bookedsuccess]

DAY FORTY ONE

The Book “Sapiens” in Three Sentences

Summary by James Clear

Human history has been shaped by three major revolutions: the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago), and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). These revolutions have empowered humans to do something no other form of life has done, which is to create and connect around ideas that do not physically exist (think religion, capitalism, and politics). These shared “myths” have enabled humans to take over the globe and have put humankind on the verge of overcoming the forces of natural selection.

Sapiens summary

This is my book summary of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

Human cultures began to take shape about 70,000 years ago.

There have been three major revolutions in human history: the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the scientific revolution.

Prehistoric humans (2 million years old or so) were no more important and impressive than other mammals.

Homo Sapiens means “wise man.”

Humans first evolved in Africa about 2.5 million years ago.

The author believes it is unlikely Homo sapiens will survive for another 1,000 years.

From about 2 million years ago until 10,000 years ago, multiple human species roamed the earth together. The depiction of man evolving from hunched over to upright incorrectly displays human evolution as a linear trajectory. In fact, the species lived simultaneously.

Humans have huge brains for their body size.

Human brains account for 2-3 percent of body size, but use 25 percent of energy.

Human kind was very much in the middle of the food chain until 400,000 years ago and didn't leap to the top of the food chain until 100,000 years ago.

Most animals at the top of the food chain made it there gradually over millions of years. Humans, however, jumped to the top relatively rapidly. This means that the rest of the food chain wasn't ready and neither were we. Hence we feel anxious and stressed because we aren't used to being at the top.

The advent of fire and cooking food may have opened the way for the evolution of a smaller intestinal track and a larger brain.

There are two theories of how Homo sapiens evolved: Interbreeding theory and Replacement theory. The reality is probably a combination of both theories.

Perhaps this is why Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals: “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”

The last dwarf species of humans died out 12,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens conquered the world because of its unique language.

The Cognitive Revolution occurred between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. It allowed Homo sapiens to communicate at a level never seen before in language.

As far as we know, only Homo sapiens can talk about things we have never seen, touched, or smelled. Think religions, myths, legends, and fantasies.

The telling of myths and stories allow Homo sapiens to collaborate in large numbers in extremely flexible ways. This separates us from all other animals.

Chimps can't form groups of more than 50 or so. For humans, the group size is usually 150 or so. Beyond that, you can't rely on gossip and personal communication. You need something more to get large numbers of people working together.

Large numbers of people can collaborate by sharing common myths and beliefs.

In academic circles, stories are known as fictions, social constructs, or imagined realities.

An imagined reality is not a lie because the entire group believes it.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, humans have been living in a dual reality: the physical reality and the imagined reality.

The way people cooperate can be changed by changing the stories as myths we tell.

Because Homo sapiens shared myths were not genetically based, they could adapt and change their behavior as soon as they adapted their new belief. They didn't have to wait millions of years for a genetic change.

Homo sapiens are the only animals that conduct trade.

As far as we know, the humans of 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities that we have today.

Evolutionary psychology claims that most of our psychology was developed during the period before the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago.

The instinct to gorge on high calorie food is wired into our DNA.

Ever since the Agricultural Revolution, there hasn't been one predominant way of life for all humans. There have only been options from a variety of cultures.

The dog was the first animal domesticated by humans around 15,000 years ago.

In ancient human groups (over 10,000 years ago) there was very little privacy, but also very little loneliness.

Most of our ancient ancestors had much wider and deeper knowledge of their physical surroundings than we do. They were not unintelligent at all.

The human collective today knows far more overall than the whole population of 15,000 years ago. However, at the individual level we are much more specialized today. Ancient foragers were the most knowledgable and skillful people in history.

It is far easier to pass “unremarkable” genes along today than it was 10,000 years ago.

Our lack of knowledge about prehistoric religions and beliefs is one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.

Humans traveling across the sea and landing in Australia was one of the most important expeditions in history. It marked the moment humans cemented themselves at the top of the food chain.

Homo sapiens first made it to America about 16,000 years ago.

The settling of America – across the Siberian peninsula through Alaska into Canada and the United States down through Mexico and Central America into the Andes and the Amazon and all the way to the tip of South America – was one of the most rapid and incredible invasions by a single species the world had ever seen.

Incredibly, the Agricultural Revolution sprang up independently in many different parts of the world.

There is no evidence modern humans have become more intelligent with time.

The Agricultural Revolution actually didn't make the life of the average human better at first. It did, however, allow humans to collect more food per unit area and thus the overall population multiplied exponentially.

Fascinatingly, the first few thousand years of the Agricultural Revolution actually made life harder for humans by creating more work, less leisure, and a ballooning population that created more mouths to feed. Each individual generation didn't see how their life was becoming worse because the small changes were so tiny.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people begin to enjoy new luxuries they tend to become expected and then count on them.

The evolutionary success of the Agricultural Revolution (greater population) was actually cause for much suffering on the individual level. Not just for humans, but for domesticated animals like cows, sheep, and chickens as well.

The advent of the Agricultural Revolution marked the time when worries of the future became prevalent: the weather, the crop yield this year, etc.

The myths that surround us and make up our lives dictate so much of what we believe and what we do.

Like the ancient Egyptians, most people dedicate their lives to building pyramids. It's just that the names, shapes, and sizes of the pyramids change from one culture to another.

In order to change the imagined order, you must first find a group that believes in a current imagined order. New myths must build upon or evolve from previous myths.

The main purpose of writing is to record numbers, which our brains did not evolve to manage well. Our brains are much better at remembering biological, zoological, and social information.

There is an ancient writing system used by the Incas known as a quipu. They are not written words at all, but a series of knots of different colors and strings that represent words and numbers.

Writing has actually changed the way humans think. We can use writing and record keeping to think far more categorically than ever before.

Numbers are the world's most prevalent language.

Social hierarchies, inequality, and so on are human inventions.

Most rich people are rich because they were born into rich families. Most poor people are poor because they were born into poor families.

Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time.

As of 2006, there were still 53 countries where a husband could not be legally prosecuted for raping his wife.

When it comes to gender inequality: biology enables, culture forbids. The idea of “unnatural” behaviors is actually a result of Christian theology, not biology.

If it is possible biologically, then it is natural. From a scientific perspective, two men having sex is natural. Traveling at the speed of light is not natural.

Why are men valued in many cultures more than women?

All human cultures are filled with inconsistencies. For example, America currently values individual freedom and equality. But these two ideals don't always play nicely. It is part of the human experience to reconcile them. These inconsistencies aren't necessarily bad. They force us to think critically. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

History is moving relentlessly toward unity. The whole planet is moving toward one world culture.

The creation of money was purely an intellectual revolution. It doesn't exist except in our minds.

More than 90 percent of all money is just electronic data, not physical money.

Everyone always wants money precisely because everyone else always wants money.

Empires have been the world's most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years.

In general, empires do not fall because of uprisings. They almost always succumb to outside invasion or splits from within the empower class.

Most of what we firmly believe is part of “our culture” was actually forced upon us by other empires who conquered our ancestors.

Despite the obvious negatives of empires taking over a culture, there are many benefits too. Art, music, governance, and more are the result of empires forming. Often, they blended new together with the conquered people to create a new culture.

It seems obvious that we are moving fast toward a singe global empire. Global markets, global warming, and commonly accepted concepts like human rights make it clear we all need one collective entity, not man states and countries.

Religion is the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.

The Agricultural Revolution was accompanied by a Religious Revolution.

Interestingly, polytheism is more open and accepting of multiple beliefs even though we often look at it as more barbarian and uneducated than our current beliefs.

Monotheism seems to push away polytheism, but actually is very similar to polytheistic gods with the use of patron saints. Praying to the patron saints of farmers isn't much different than praying to the god of rain.

The central tension with monotheism is how to deal with the fact that there is evil in the world while the omnipoten God is believed to be good and caring. If God is good why would he allow evil things to happen?

Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied.

According to Buddhist tradition: the mind naturally craves more in all situations. And all suffering arrives from craving.

There are a variety of “natural law religions” that are popular today like communism, capitalism, and liberalism.

Over the last 200 years, science has increasingly revealed that human behavior is determined by hormones, genes, and neurological synapses. If this is true, then for how much longer will we ignore that biology does not agree with the concept of free will?

To describe how something happened means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another.

To describe why something happened means to find causal connections that led to this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

The deeper your knowledge of a particular area of history, the harder it becomes to explain why one particular outcome occurred and not another.

It is an inevitable rule of history that what seems obvious in hindsight is impossible to predict beforehand.

The are level one and level two Chaotic Systems. Level one does not respond to predictions about it, like the weather and weather forecasts. Level two does respond to predictions about it, like the stock market and analyst reports about rising oil prices.

There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans or that human well being increases overtime. It's good for the victors, but is it good for us all?

The Scientific Revolution started in Europe around 500 years ago. The last 500 years have witnessed an unprecedented growth of human impact.

One difference between religion and science is that science assumes humankind does not know the answers to many of life's biggest questions. Religion, however, assumes that the important stuff is already known. Science assumes human ignorance.

Modern culture has been able to admit ignorance more than any previous culture.

Previous cultures and belief systems compiled their theories using stories. Science compiles its theories using mathematics.

The story of how Scottish Widows was founded is an awesome example of the power of probability.

Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.

The military arms race drives science forward in rapid fashion. The truth is war prompts many scientific discoveries.

In the past, the best minds of the day worked on finding ways to give meaning to death. Today, our best minds work on preventing death through biological, hormonal, and genetic means. Science does not take death as an inevitability.

The economic, religious, and political interests that impact the flow of money into scientific and technological research have a huge impact on the output of science.

It is not enough to consider science in a vacuum. Economic and capitalistic interests, for example, determine what we research and what to do with the research findings.

Why did Europeans discover and conquer the Americas? Why not the Chinese or those from India or the Middle East who possessed just as much knowledge and technology as the Europeans? The European ideology to explore the world was the primary difference.

For most of human history, per capita production remained the same. Since the launch of capitalism, however, per capita production has skyrocketed.

Modern capitalism has exploded the growth of humankind thanks to the creation of credit, which allows you to borrow money now because we collectively trust that the future will be better than the present.

Adam Smith's brilliant insight about capitalism in The Wealth of Nations was that increasing private profits is the basis for increasing collective wealth and prosperity. In other words, by becoming richer you benefit everyone, not just yourself. Both parties get a bigger slice of pie. (Note: this only works if profits get reinvested, not hoarded.)

For capitalism to work, profits must be reinvested in new production.

The “religion” of capitalism says economic growth is the supreme because justice, freedom, and happiness requires economic growth.

All credit is based on the idea that science and technology will advance. Scientists ultimately foot the bill of capitalism.

The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from nearly zero in the early 17th century to 18 pounds in the early 19th century.

The life expectancy, child mortality, and calorie intake are significantly improved for the average person in 2014 compared to 1914, despite exponential population growth.

Until the industrial revolution, human behavior was largely dictated by solar energy and plant growth. Day and night. Summer and winter. Everything was determined by man power and animal power, which were determined by food, which is determined by photosynthesis.

“This is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction.”

Harlow's infant monkey studies from the 1950s (and a variety of followup studies) have shown that animals have strong psychological needs as well as purgative physical needs. Note to self: never disregard your psychological needs.

Each year the United States population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry in the rest of the world.

Most people don't realize just how peaceful of the times are we live in.

In recent years, more people die from suicide each year than from war and violent crime. The same can said for car accidents.

Live a safe community, drive as little as possible, and love yourself. Violent local crime, car accidents, and suicide are some of the biggest killers of humans.

War is at an all time low because the costs of war have increased because of nuclear weapons, the benefits of war have decreased because physical resources drive less of the economy and international trade is more lucrative than conquest, and the tightening of international connections because a worldwide culture is less likely to battle itself.

Our view of the past is heavily influenced by recent events.

Researchers have investigated nearly all aspects of history, but have rarely have asked whether historical changes have made humans happier.

Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

If happiness is based on pleasurable feelings, then increasing our happiness is a matter of increases biochemical release. If happiness is based on meaning, then increasing our happiness is a matter of deluding ourselves about the meaning of our lives.

One uncommonly cited benefit of religion: belief in the afterlife gives meaning to your life in the present.

Buddhism has studied happiness for over 2,000 years. Interestingly, Buddhism shares many viewpoints on happiness with science. Most notably, that happiness results from processes within the body and not from the outside world.

The Buddhist philosophy of happiness centers around the idea that you are not the events that happen to you, but you are also not the feelings you have. You are not your feelings. They are just feelings. Thus, if you understand this, you can release the needs to keep chasing the need to feel happy or to not feel angry or to not feel sad. In other words, you have to understand yourself.

For close to 4 billion years, every organism developed according to evolution. But in recent decades, humans have begun to evolve according to intelligent design. In other words, there are people who would have been selected out of the gene pool millennia ago, but not today.

Genetic engineering is allowing humans to break the laws of natural selection.

The next stage of human history will not only involve biological and technological changes, but also changes in human consciousness and identity. Changes that are this fundamental will call the very term “human” into question.

Many people think the question we should ask to guide our scientific pursuits is, “What do we want to become?” However, because we seem to be on the path to genetically engineering and programming nearly every facets of our wants, desires, and consciousness, the real question we should ask is, “What do we want to want?”

In the past 1000 years, humans have evolved to take over the world and are on the verge of overcoming natural selection and becoming gods. Yet, we still seem unhappy in many ways and we are unsure of what we want. Is there anything more dangerous that dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

[1977thecomic-blog]

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