#alex delano

[aru-art]

sourdough rolls with homemade lemon curd what the absolute fuck man

[milliondollarbaby87]

Air (2023) Review

The historic story of how shoe salesman Sonny Vaccaro would lead Nike in its pursuit of the greatest athlete in basketball, before anyone really knew who he was, Michael Jordan. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (more…) “”

[madtomedgar]

So the Economist is using a walker as visual shorthand for ineffectual incompetence on their most recent cover.

1. I'll take "who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt?" for $500, Alex

2. Holy rusted ableism batman!

[akaikali]

Okay so i definitely explained this in the beginning of this fic but I thought I'd write out my thoughts here

So in my headcanon, gerry was born in 1983. Eric delano successfully left the institute in 1996, when gerry was about 11. I know that canonically Gerry was two when Eric died but if Jonny and Alex can fuck with their timeline, so can I. That would put Gerry at roughly 31 when he dies (IF he dies, depending on the fic).

Now for michael, I headcanon him as being born in 1975 and starting to work at the institute as just a normal researcher in 1995. That way he would have met eric at some point before eric left, but it can also line up michael only becoming an archival assistant in 2003 when fiona law died because he only got transferred over after her confirmed death.

I know canonically, gertrude and gerry only met in 2013 so thats after michael's death and in some fics, i might go according to that timeline but im taking liberties here and saying that gertrude found gerry in 2008 not long after eric asked her to.

So yes, in my headcanon, gerry and michael have an 8 year age gap. if that bothers you, my interpretation may not be for you, and that's totally fine! For me, they're both adults when they meet for the first time do I don't see any problem with it

Anyways yeah gerrymichael timeline thoughts

(Also gonna plug my fic here too bc it goes according to this timeline)

[riverageleis]

Jfc. I wasn't nearly queer enough to appreciate Krycek/Mulder when I was younger. Now? Jfc.🥵 You know they invited Scully for a three-way and she was like 🤷‍♀️ "Ok."

Put your on your red Speedo! This week we're reviewing the X-Files episodes Duane Barry and Ascension! Why does nobody talk about the Krycek/Mulder/Scully love triangle? Why doesn't Mulder go to jail for hijacking a sky tram? Watch our YouTube review now: https://youtu.be/3-UZM4OZC54

[oliverwolfboy]

My Magnus archives sells pitch (check the comments it has a much more coherent summary)

Why hello there my fellow bsd fans, listen to me as I tell you about the wonders of the Magnus archives while trying my best not to spoiler all of you. Do you want to have even more emotional damage, which I am sure you have plenty of after the latest chapter? Well come along for the ride as Alex and Jonny cheerfully remind us that this podcast is a tragedy. The Magnus archives is in fact a podcast, an amazingly crafted horror Podcast at that. The Magnus Archives is at first a anthology podcast, with our protagonist Jonathan Sims working at the Magnus Institute, a place dedicated to researching and archiving paranormal events as what they call statemants. Jonathan Sims or Jon as people often call him, is the new head archivist of the Magnus Institute, after the old one Gertrude Robinson died on the job. Jon is left to sort his way though an absolute mess of an archive, Jon however is not alone in this task as his assistants, Timothy Stoker and Sasha James, are there to help him, and Martin too i guess but he is barely any help. That is until an actual threat appears. Of course there are more characters then just our archival crew. The head of the Institute Elias bouchard is your classic asshole manager (even tho he isn't a manager), he really couldn't give a shit if his employees are in danger, but fine sasha i guess i will install more CO2 fire extinguishers and a CO2 fire system. Melanie King, the proprietor of the YouTube channel Ghost Hunt UK, anger issues if you want to know more you're gonna have to listen to the podcast. Basira Hussain and Alice ”Daisy” Tonner are both police officers, again if you want to know more listen to the podcast. Georgie Barker the host of the podcast What The Ghost, again listen to the podcast. If you want to be able to say, if I had a nickel every time I have been in a fandom where one of the villain characters have been a slavic clown with nikola in their name i would have two nickels which isn't a lot but it is weird that it happened twice, congrats you can now do that. Some of the tma characters are also named after horror writers. Tim stoker after Bram Stoker, Martin Blackwood after Algernon Blackwood, Elias Bouchard after J.W Bouchard, Melanie King after Stephan King, Eric Delano after Jamie Delano, Georgie Barker after Clive Barker, Sarah Carpenter after John Carpenter, Michael Shelley after Mary Shelley, and the Institute's American sister location the Usher Foundation is name after the short story The Fall of the house of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure if you go looking you can find even more connections. So come along if you will, The Magnus Archives can be found on YouTube, Spotify, and anywhere you get your podcasts. Now i am just gonna tag as many characters as i can to send out the message and recommendation I am sorry about that. If you want a better coherent summary then go check the comments.

[somanyfuckedupiftruebooks]

TMAGP8

Oh fuck liminal spaces that drive you insane. What does that remind me of?

Brutal liminality babeey I love it.

I wonder if any of these sources are actually real or if they're all fictional?

'Architectural hunger' 😘

Woah these spaces are disconnected from the human mindscape that's so cool.

This epsode would probably be hitting me harder if I had any idea what this place looked like.

Paused the episode to try googling it and couldn't find anything. Is it not a real place??

Hmmm. Empty spaces. Hunger. Hallucinating lights. Hiding from miasma. So far it's been feeling like most of these statements are combinations of a couple of entities, like they've become blurred with each other by travelling between dimensions. This one could be Spiral and Lonely? Fear takes many forms.

Oh shit no time for meta speculation there's a sharply dressed woman becoming you through an open door!! Run the other way my dude you have got to get out of there!!

'You are here'??

Yeah you should not have gotten in that lift. Terrible mistake.

Cool ghost restaurant.

Oh creepy they're all fake talking. And they have the same features! It's like in the Matrix when all the background chaarcters are identical twins. Or that Lonely statement about the tourist who gets lost in the featureless crowd.

'Stay a while' nope gtfo.

Ah!! They're gonna eat him!!

Yuck they're eating him alive.

Did Jonny write this episode? Reminds me of that game he played about the house that eats you alive. (Alex wrote it)

Oh yeah lol this was supposed to be an academic paper. Kinda lost the plot there.

Oh Gwen you have no idea what you're getting into, I wouldn't be so smug about it if I were you.

Uh oh, see ya Colin. Enjoy your mental health leave.

Where are Sam and Celia?

Gerry??

GG??

AHHHHHHH OMFG OMFG IMFNFGMFJF???????

IS THIS GERRY AND GERTRUDE

AHHHH HUSBAND BACK FROM THE DEAD?????? I DIDN'T RECOGNISE HIM BECAUSE HE SOUNDED HAPPY AHHHHHHH

But that's Gertrude for sure. I may not know my goths but I know a bitch when I hear one.

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHSHAHAH

why are they living together what the FUCK

What is going on??

Oh Gerry is painting 🥰🥰🥺🥰🥺🥰🥺🥰🥺🥺 he has so many he has to give them away

GRANDSON????

Wait does that make Eric Delano her son? That's insane. WHAT IS GOING ON.

YEAH GERTRUDE. DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE.

(Also seriously what the fuck is Sam up to? Did he get this job just to investigate the Institute? Why is he so obsessed with it?)

Oh shit he was in one of their gifted kids programs. That's why he's so obsessed with it. Hmm. Maybe I would have less questions if I listened to the episode for more than two seconds at a time, but this is how I'm choosing to record my thoughts so.... no.

Gerry was in the program too??

Ahhhh he's so happy!!! I'm dying!!!

Please please please let his happiness be real and fine and good and normal and not a symptom of something terrible going on. Don't hurt me like this. Please. I need there to be a version of him that's okay.

I've only had cheerful Gerry for two minutes and if anything happens to him I will kill everyone in this podcast and then myself.

Why is he living with Gertrude. Why is she pretending to be his grandmother. Why doesn't he remember anything about the gifted program. Does Sam not remember anything either. Is that why he's investigating it. What the fuck happened to them when they were kids.

Gerry is so genuine and Gertrude is so obviously dodging their questions and hiding shit. Something's up. She's weirdly indulgent and playing along with him. She knows something.

IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO MY BOY I WILL RIOT.

Big painting <3

Oh it was Celia's idea? What's she up to?

Ahahah she's investigating time travel and other dimensions. I wonder what that could possibly be about. Trying to travel back home or confused about how she got here in the first place? How much does she even know?

Podcast??

GEORGIE??!!

What is up with this episode and bringing back characters whose names start with the letter G?

Okay okay okay. Like. Our Georgie or this dimension's Georgie? (she's a podcaster in every dimension)

The presence of Gerry and Gertrude menas that this dimension has doubles of people we knew from TMA, so is there another Jon and Martin here?

Is Celia looking for them? Is Georgie?

AHHHH SO MANY QUESTIONS

But who gives a shit about that I got to hear a happy version of my HUSBAND hahahhahaha 🥰😘🥰🥰🥰🥰😘😬🥰🥰🥰😘

(Gerry and Gertrude's voice acyors not credited? Why would that be?)

[goalhofer]

2023-24 Colorado Eagles Roster

Wingers

#10 Riley Tufte (Coon Rapids, Minnesota)*

#11 Ryan Sandelin (Hermantown, Minnesota)**

#14 Chris Wagner (Wellesley, Massachusetts)*

#24 Oskar Olausson (Stockholm, Sweden)

#28 D.J. Busdeker (Dexter, Michigan)*

#36 Matt Steinberg (Halifax, Nova Scotia)**

#38 Spencer Smallman (Summerside, Prince Edward Island)

#73 Dalton Smith (Oshawa, Ontario)

#74 Alex Beaucage (Trois-Rivières, Quebec)

Centers

#20 Tanner Kero (Hancock, Michigan)*

#26 Ondřej Pavel (Prague, Czech Republic)**

#59 Ben Meyers (Delano, Minnesota)

#65 Cédric Paré (Lévis, Quebec)

#68 Cal Burke (Boxborough, Massachusetts) A

#71 Peter Holland (Caledon, Ontario)*

#82 Ivan Ivan (Ostrava, Czech Republic)**

#93 Jean-Luc Foudy (Toronto, Ontario)

Defensemen

#5 Wyatt Aamodt (Hermantown, Minnesota)

#7 Brad Hunt (Maple Ridge, British Columbia) C

#15 Gianni Fairbrother (North Vancouver, British Columbia)*

#18 Jack Ahcan (Burnsville, Minnesota)*

#22 Josh Wesley (Raleigh, North Carolina)*

#44 Corey Scheuneman (Milford Township, Michigan)*

#67 Keaton Middleton (Stratford, Ontario) A

#84 Nate Clurman (Boulder, Colorado)

Goalies

#31 Arvid Holm (Ljungby Stad, Sweden)*

#50 Trent Miner (Souris-Glenwood Municipality, Manitoba)**

#60 Justus Annunen (Kempele, Finland)

[brightbeautifulthings]

Happy New Year, lovelies! These are the best books I read in 2022. (Many of them didn’t actually come out this year, and I don’t count rereads.) I read and fell in love with a lot of graphic novels this year, along with a lot of my usual horror! I participated in two challenges for Forgotten YA Gems (now on Discord!): the Annual Reading Challenge and the Summer Bingo Challenge. I also did a horror challenge for Books in the Freezer and participated in a group readalong of The Pale King by David Foster Wallace at the DFW Discord.

I also kept to my blogging goals of participating in at least one prompt for Tell Me Something Tuesday and posting one Readalike each month! It was a much better blogging year for me than the last, and it's been nice to enjoy reading and reviewing again. For now, I'm not setting my goals any higher in the hopes that it stays fun!

My favorite books of the year, in order of category and then favorite:

YA: Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall The Wicker King by K. Ancrum Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall Even If We Break by Marieke Nijkamp House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

Adult: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher A ​Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas The Goblins of Bellwater by Molly Ringle The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning The Whisper Man by Alex North

Graphic Novels: Hawkeye, Volume 1: My Life as a Weapon by Matt Fraction Captain America: Winter Soldier, Ultimate Collection by Ed Brubaker Castaway In Dimension Z, Book One by Rick Remender Runaways, Vol. 1: Find Your Way Home by Rainbow Rowell Runaways, Vol. 2: Best Friends Forever by Rainbow Rowell Winter Soldier: The Complete Collection by Ed Brubaker Hellblazer, Vol. 1: Original Sins by Jamie Delano

Fanfiction: Not Easily Conquered by dropdeaddream & WhatAreFears

Happy reading in 2023!

2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016

[passivelypurple]

Random thought on a RQG re listen,

Currently re-listening to 169 nice and the result of Hamid and Cel’s Knowledge Arcana checks, and getting the information about the spell Magic Jar, made me think about the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead, the book that the Eric Delano, and Mary and Gerry Keay are/ get bound into.

(Yes it’s sheets of skin and has their final moment written on, but…)

It made me think what if someone had used Magic Jar to do it, then I’ve no doubt quite a few of the fear entities could and would use the bodies, The Stranger, The Flesh and The Corruption are the ones I think probably get use out of them though.

But also, how would that work, or would it work at all?!? Because the description of Magic Jar that Alex gave in 169 said that you could take the soul out of a person’s body and put it in a jar, (or maybe a book???) then you would be able to put your soul inside that body. But would that work if the thing trying to do it, Didn’t have a soul?

[kevrocksicehouse]

Air.

D: Ben Affleck (2023).

The best thing about Air, the story of how Nike landed Michael Jordan as spokesman for what became the “Air Jordan” line of basketball shoes, is its lack of pomposity. There’s barely a whiff of a Great Moment in History or the Triumph of an Underdog. Instead, it’s the story of a wild hunch, and the many hurdles it takes to play it through, each more precarious than the last until faith is rewarded. It’s ultimately about the satisfaction of being right.

Of course, like so many nonfiction stories that satisfaction is a rigged game. At one point Nike talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) makes the point that his certainty that third pick in the NBA, Michael Jordan will be the greatest player of all time is shared only with his mother Deloris (Viola Davis), and I couldn’t help but think “Yeah, and everybody who bought a ticket to the movie.”  But Affleck (who plays Nike head Phil Knight as a visionary-flake) working off Alex Convery’s Aaron Sorkin-worthy screenplay, pulls off the kind of balancing act between suspense and inevitability that Ron Howard managed with Apollo 13 and Spielberg with Lincoln, highlighting the many ways the deal could have gone sideways. Nike was mostly a running shoe company, and had less money, clout and access than its rivals Converse and Adidas. Vaccaro had to sell an idea of putting Nike’s entire basketball promo budget behind one NBA rookie just to match the bigger boys. Damon wisely plays his insight not as an obsession than as a mental itch he can’t scratch (combined with a gambler’s love of playing a longshot) even as he has to convince his bosses (Jason Bateman alternating faith and dyspepsia), Jordan’s agent (a hilariously profane Chris Messina) and Deloris (whom Davis plays as a shrewd world-weary shark). Damon and Davis’s two scenes together are both an acting showcase for both the least and most theatrical great actors, and a nifty side-stepping of the film’s “So what?” problem (as to how an endorsement deal can be worth a whole movie). The importance of Jordan (played by Damian Delano Young as an untouchable icon in long shots with little dialogue) being a symbol of ADEQUATELY COMPENSATED greatness is put across not as self-interested cynicism so much as simple common sense. That the film closes with Affleck and Damon (who jump-started their careers with the longshot hit Good Will Hunting) sharing a congratulatory moment doesn’t seem gratuitous. They earned it.

[barragerofarrows]

Plans

The Delano: Loft | 20 Rooms | Alex D: (Andy!!!) Nguyen: BOOKED

4,500 STEPS PER LOFT

[zooterchet]

Colella's Supermarket (America's Special Mission Force)

Colella's Supermarket, located in Hopkinton, Massachusetts (now shut down), was modeled to help employees, of highschool (highschool jobs allowed for military cadet or police informant or state police status at college) and town labor (those found in poverty but allowed to live in town, the generous support system found through the Ludlow family, the "Spiders", descents of Queen Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen"). The model, is to survive Buchenwald, a famous death camp in Italy during World War 2, intended for political opponents of Benito Mussolini (the man who invented "Dro", poisoned marijuana, instrumental in Hitler's election to the German Chancellorship).

Through Colella's, ATF operatives (those dealing in grocer's union rules, to counter Canada) are trained and outfitted in cross multitasked operation skills, and a work disorder called "Vladivostock", hated by the French nationals in New England for producing lithe, thin, muscled, and burly men, and vivacious women, however with the same food intake as French prison guards (large, obese men, and greasy ugly women).

Here are my five special operations, using Blockbuster Video, a Trump owned company, now shut down and transferred to Rotary Presidential Association ownership (YouTube) due to my acts of valor in the field, against Canada.

"Death Race 2000": The resistance to the Boston Mafia, while infiltrating the police services of Canadian Mounted Patrol, and the removal of the Boston Mossad office, the alleged State Police control; actually located on highway stations, with police living in apartment complexes out of Chestnut Hill Realty.

"Run Ronnie Run": The resistance to the Haitian "Negro" movement, to label all of anyone's skin color as black, however inside the stance and sphere of the white man's rights; for the common rumor, to become industry, without the complex dynamics that make these things work. A better labor, for the past physical plant worker at a college, now a warehouse or factory laborer, where books and texts are now illegal, leaving only "A Farewell to Arms", by Ernest Hemingway; seeking to produce the same childhood as the famed Malcolm X, a fetal alcohol syndrome baby.

"CB4": The shutdown of the clad feminist, those women who demand independence and power, however are infirmed under severe physical handicap. The "Pink Panthers" movement, they are found in every walk of life, and they are "walking", at all times, in the words of famous Hopkinton crime boss, Alex "Wheels" Danahy, his label by local police authorities. The hunt for "Wheels", through his alias tags of those disabled online, continues, to catch each of the "enabled" community, for their dream, the American Dream, of running people off the road in traffic at screaming speeds, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's special car. Once all the disabilities were cured, they believed they could be immortal, with cybernetics and slaves in the French, Israeli, and Taiwanese Maoist enclaves of INTERPOL, run by the Mainland Red Chinese. Sadly, the CS Lewis dream, has been shut down, and "The Matrix", is at an end; now, merely a movie, about what could've been.

"8MM": The creation of a new arts movement, where only wealthy envoys from foreign countries are killed, and on reality TV, if they volunteer to represent their homeland, "The Croatan Society", the Titoist movement supported by the famous "Boston Strangler", the De Salvo family and DC Comics. Previously, actresses were murdered, for reporting a lesbian haze from a female homosexual, a guidance law student, however now those women are saved, and become attorneys at law instead, with the haze artists kicked out on the streets, to be supported by their home countries; where their language is garbled, without the UN Law Academy to assist them. Suspecting their famous friend, "Riker", but not the cad, "Xanatos", they are in a state of misery, losing their top volunteer envoys, "The United Nations Mossad", and other Persian Jews, to the streets, with famous investments like Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks Coffee, the "barista" job, a share owner in the Vietnamese coffee trade, shut down. No longer can Reagan Foundation purchases of businesses occur, for those little yellow girls, "Hello Kitty". Now, the kitty can't eat human flesh, a dead drama club champion; "cat", in the Chinese boneless spare ribs.

"Bowfinger": The end to the internet supremacy of France and Israel, with the recovery of women marked with disabilities through claimed "household accidents", actually Apple technology from Steve Jobs, employed on timed circuits for the "Holocaust History Museum", the radio promotions industry; "the champagne room". All those stolen children from police officer fathers, taken to strip clubs in prison towns, returned to the life meant for them, that of euthanization, and their fathers freed from their long duty, no longer victims of the National Hockey League and the radio promo guys, "Bobby Brown", his ballad made famous by Frank Zappa, the man himself. Now, lesbian marriages to men are over, and women can marry whom they presume to choose, without mob threats from Sheriffs Unions, B'nai B'rith, and we can return to some semblance of life; the days of MUSH, are over. 4chan, is gone, and 8chan, is the future, of the modern internet, where nobody pays attention if you post on "chan", the Waters Foundation; you wanted the Holocaust, Islam; Small Penis Humiliation.

[xtruss]

Staging Nuclear Dread in “Oppenheimer” and “Doctor Atomic”

How do you depict an event that has left a psychological scar—in some cases, physical scars—on almost everyone on the planet?

— By Alex Ross | July 25, 2023

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photograph courtesy Universal Pictures

The late Daniel Ellsberg, in his book “The Doomsday Machine,” drew attention to a curious conversation that took place between Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1942, on the subject of atomic apocalypse. Speer had asked Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the faltering German nuclear program, whether an atomic explosion could lead to an uncontrolled chain reaction. Heisenberg did not rule it out. Speer wrote in his memoir “Inside the Third Reich”:

Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star. Occasionally, however, he joked that the scientists in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might someday set the globe on fire. But undoubtedly a good deal of time would pass before that came about, Hitler said; he would certainly not live to see it.

In fact, as Ellsberg pointed out, Hitler killed himself less than three months before the first atomic device was detonated, on July 16, 1945, at what is now the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. The physicists of Los Alamos, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, had also pondered the prospect of an atmosphere-igniting chain reaction, although they put the chance of such an outcome at less than three in a million. (Enrico Fermi, less sanguine, reportedly placed the odds at 10–1.) Ellsberg noted that these dire discussions were never shared with civilian authorities. It’s unlikely that either Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Harry Truman would have called off the atomic program as a result, yet the withholding of information struck Ellsberg as symptomatic of a moral void. The scientists were “engaged in a longer-term gamble imperiling the survival of humanity.”

Several times in the past eight decades, the world has come shudderingly close to losing that gamble—closest of all during the Cuban missile crisis, when the Air Force general Curtis LeMay urged a strike on Soviet missile positions in Cuba. Richard Rhodes, the author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” wrote in this magazine, in 1995, “If John Kennedy had followed LeMay’s advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide.” To which one can add: if any historians remained. The fact that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since August 9, 1945, is the result more of pure chance than of accumulated wisdom. Ellsberg concluded tersely, “This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons.”

The test shot that Oppenheimer named Trinity, in an allusion to John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has been reënacted many times onscreen. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is the latest in a series of attempts that go back to the stiff Hollywood docudrama “The Beginning or the End,” released in 1947. Three adaptations appeared in the nineteen-eighties, a time of renascent nuclear alarm: the BBC miniseries “Oppenheimer,” the television movie “Day One,” and Roland Joffé’s film “Fat Man and Little Boy.” But Nolan’s most formidable competition is, perhaps surprisingly, an opera: John Adams and Peter Sellars’s “Doctor Atomic,” which had its first performances in 2005, in San Francisco.

In the months before the “Atomic” première, I chronicled the making of the opera and visited major locales of Manhattan Project history, including the Trinity site. No sulfurous atmosphere lingers at the place: it’s a patch of high desert like any other. If you look down, though, you see a couple of sheared-off metal stubs—all that remains of the hundred-foot tower that held the bomb. The top of each stub is rippled, like whipped cream. I thought back to the early nineteen-eighties, when I was a teen-ager in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan was cracking jokes about global thermonuclear war—“We begin bombing in five minutes”—and my classmates and I were discussing what we would do if the sirens began to sound. One friend said, “I’m going to walk toward the Washington Monument and close my eyes.”

How do you stage an event that has left a psychological scar—in some cases, physical scars—on almost everyone on the planet? Mushroom clouds long ago became pop-culture signifiers, detached from the hellish violence that they represent. Stanley Kubrick made them the concussive punch line of “Dr. Strangelove.” In Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” they become one more knickknack of nineteen-fifties décor, alongside Formica countertops and red-and-white checkered tablecloths. What’s impossible to capture is the awe that the sight induced in its first observers, even though most of them had a reasonably good idea of what to expect.

“Oppenheimer,” despite the huge resources that are put into play, presents an oddly rushed, jumbled vision of Trinity. Part of the difficulty is that the Manhattan Project occupies only the middle third of a sprawling bio-pic, one that combines the stylistic incoherence of Oliver Stone (“JFK,” “Nixon”) with the didactic insistence of William Dieterle (“The Story of Louis Pasteur,” “The Life of Emile Zola”). The fraught hours leading up to the explosion—an overnight thunderstorm, bets on the size of the blast, nagging fears of Armageddon—are confined to about eight minutes of screen time. Nolan’s preference for hectic cutting and closeups means that we never fully register the blank immensity of the landscape. The score, by Ludwig Göransson, tries to heighten the tension with insistently driving string textures, which may owe something to Adams’s early minimalist piece “Shaker Loops.” But the sequence is no more suspenseful than dozens of other countdowns in cinematic history, going back to Fritz Lang’s “Woman in the Moon,” from 1929.

“Doctor Atomic,” in contrast, confines itself to the weeks leading up to Trinity, arriving at the eve of the test before the end of the first act. Both the opera and the film include a scene in which Oppenheimer is seen alone at the tower, communing with the tentacled bomb. Cillian Murphy, who plays the physicist in the movie, gazes at it silently, his face wavering between fascination and terror. In “Atomic,” Oppenheimer sings a gravely lamenting aria titled “Batter my heart,” which the baritone Gerald Finley has delivered with matchless intensity in various productions. (Oppenheimer was a voracious reader, and the “Atomic” libretto intermingles documentary material with a selection of his favorite texts.) Opera’s capacity to voice interior monologues has redoubled force as we confront the sheer weirdness of the association: Donne’s poem of divine assault and ravishment renders Trinity as the site of some sort of masochistic ritual.

Oppenheimer’s florid literary self-stylizations are essential to the legendary status that he has acquired. His most grandiose gesture was to claim, years after the fact, that the detonation had put him in mind of the Hindu god Vishnu: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This loose translation of the Bhagavad Gita is recited twice in “Oppenheimer,” the first time during an inadvertently hilarious sex scene. “Atomic,” wisely, leaves the line out. Mythological allusions have proliferated in tellings of the physicist’s life. In Nolan’s film, he is called an “American Prometheus,” in keeping with the title of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Oppenheimer biography. “Atomic,” for its part, arose in response to San Francisco Opera’s request for a work about an American Faust figure. Such narratives risk personalizing a historical situation that has little to do with one man’s pretentious inner demons. Oppenheimer capably led the building of the bomb, but he did not conceive it, perfect it, or order its use.

“Atomic,” in its final minutes, resolves the Oppenheimer problem by letting him recede into the background. In a nod to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Adams bends time during the countdown so that five minutes are stretched out to almost fifteen. The orchestra sputters and clicks through overlapping, irregular pulses. The music seems at once to accelerate and slow down, devolve into noise and fade to silence. The explosion takes the form of a darkly shimmering chord for massed strings, with a flash of winds and muted brass on top. This, Adams told me in 2005, was the test seen from afar. It evokes what Dorothy McKibbin, the all-knowing gatekeeper of Los Alamos, witnessed from a peak two hundred miles to the north: “The leaves of the green native trees were kind of shining with the gold.” After that false dawn, quiet bell chords toll, and we hear the voice of a Japanese woman begging for water, some of her words taken from John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” Music’s unparalleled capacity to generate dread leaves a deeper mark than any visual effect could achieve, and the abrupt shift in sonic geography wrenches our anxieties away from the Los Alamos perspective.

In the film, too, Trinity is implicitly transmuted into Hiroshima: at a celebratory gathering at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer hallucinates radiation burns on his colleagues’ faces. Yet Nolan generally pays little heed to the issue of fallout, which Los Alamos doctors tried to raise and which Leslie Groves, the chief of the Manhattan Project, dismissed. “Doctor Atomic” takes note of Groves’s indifference—he asks a physician, “What are you, a Hearst propagandist?”—and Adams’s music depicts radioactive scourings of the body. Sellars, in a revival of the opera in Santa Fe in 2018, heightened the theme by bringing onstage members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who are seeking compensation for the suffering that fallout inflicted on communities downwind of the blast. The toll of Trinity is difficult to measure, but a steep rise in infant death in New Mexico in 1945 speaks for itself.

Whether any of this work, cinematic or musical, truly honors nuclear victims or contributes to a recognition of American infamy is a matter of debate. Casting the story as the tragic arc of a mythic individual not only obscures the collective nature of the effort but amounts to an exercise in scapegoating. Yet myths can sometimes show us the recurrence of fatal patterns that a more unsentimental approach might overlook. And Faust, who made a contract with the Devil, is surely a better archetype than Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. Even on a hundred-degree day, Trinity possesses a chilly aura: in that place, a new kind of evil came into the world. ♦

[garudabluffs]

Adding to unsettling pattern, Trump promotes threatening video

As a rule, when someone says, “I’m not for violence at all, but...” there’s a rather obvious problem.

This week, Trump kept this going. Asked about the prospect of incarceration as a result of his many alleged felonies, the former president added, “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”

It was the next day when the Republican promoted a video that quoted him saying, over an image of his face and his campaign logo, “If you f--- around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before."

As part of an analysis of his incendiary rhetoric, a recent Washington Post report added, “There is now no denying that such language, even if you somehow regard Trump’s intentions as innocent, can lead to a very dark place.”

READ MORE Maddow Blog | Adding to unsettling pattern, Trump promotes threatening video (msn.com)

one's "blast shadow" How The Hiroshima Shadows Were Created By The Atomic Bomb (allthatsinteresting.com) won't provide any shade during climate change catastrophe/ crisis

One popular post-war narrative holds President Harry Truman as making the decision to drop the bomb rather than launch a massive invasion with US forces. History is more complicated than that tidy tell, which itself was a postwar justification. What is notable instead is that President Truman, when he succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inherited a bomb program that was nearly ready for testing, and which was producing a weapon the Army expected to use. As historians like Alex Wellerstein have argued, there was never a specific moment at which a singular decision was made to drop the bomb.      “The day after Nagasaki,” writes Wellerstein in an article for The New Yorker, “Truman issued his first affirmative command regarding the bomb: no more strikes without his express authorization. He never issued the order to drop the bombs, but he did issue the order to stop dropping them.”https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/what-oppenheimer-doesn-t-tell-you-about-atomic-bombs/ar-AA1eb5gE?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=3aef3ca7aeed4cae9326333d25ff3ff6&ei=191

North Korea warned it will be wiped off map if it fires nuke in WW3 threat

11h ago  

North Korea warned it will be wiped off map if it fires nuke in WW3 threat (msn.com)

U.S. officials defend nuclear sub visit to South Korea amid rising tensions

U.S. officials defend nuclear sub visit to South Korea amid rising tensions (yahoo.com)

[somethingnewdance]

RAYE 070 Shake - Escapism | Jazz Choreography by Marissa #dance #jazzdance #houston

Something New Dance is a dance company based out of Houston, TX. We host all styles of dance such as: Majorette, Hip-Hop, Jazz, and much more...! 🎹Song / RAYE, 070 Shake - Escapism. (Official Music Video) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dll6VJ2C7wo ⭐Dance Instructor: Marissa https://www.instagram.com/marissamari... 🖋️Class Style: Jazz 📟 Studio Address / 𝟗𝟔𝟎𝟎 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐁𝐥𝐯𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐞. 𝟏𝟏𝟑, 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧, 𝐓𝐗 𝟕𝟕𝟎𝟑𝟔 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 "𝓢𝓸𝓶𝓮𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓝𝓮𝔀." 🏆 Register Class: https://linktr.ee/somethingnewdance 🏠 Studio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somethingnewdance 📸Videographer/ Editor https://www.instagram.com/andoksberms/ _______________________________________________________________________ Debut album 'My 21st Century Blues' feat. 'Black Mascara', 'Hard Out Here' & 'Escapism' available 3rd February 2023. Pre-Order/Pre-Save: https://raye.orcd.co/m21cb Listen to Escapism: https://raye.orcd.co/escapism-thrilli... Follow RAYE TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@raye Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raye/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/raye Twitter: https://twitter.com/raye Written by: RAYE, Otis Dominique & Mikey Robbins Creative Director: Mikey Robbins Directed by: Otis Dominique & RAYE Artist Management: Tia Ferguson Production Company: Kode Media Exec Producers: Danielle Wright & Nathan Killham Producer: Andre Wooz Line Producer: Liz Adeleye Production Manager: Oscar Stewart Production Assistant: Anita Okpongete Production Assistant: Luke Philippou DOP: Joe Douglas Editor: Phoebe May @ FMLY CRTV Colourist: Stef Colosi 1st AD: Akay Delano 2nd AD: Lucia Ritucci 1st AC: Jeff Vine 2nd AC: Tom Watson Camera Trainee: Flynn Denderson Steadicam Operator: Jay Gomez DIT: Vanya Chulkova Grip: Johnny Donne Grip: Simon Ward Gaffer: Dave Nye Spark: Nathan Scott Spark: Nic Britt Art Director: Joe Munro Art Assistant: Jake Garrett Stylist: Lauren Groves Hair Stylist: Alex Price Make-Up Artist: Bea Sweet SA MUA: Babyface Choreographer: Paleta (CalmQuality) Choreographer’s Assistant: Robia Milliner Runner: Andrew Sin Yu Yat Runner: Harry Tomlin Runner: Lindsey Reilly Runner: Aaliyah O’Sullivan Runner Driver: Abu Dumbuya Stunt Coordinator: Ian Kay Medic: Elton Alexander BTS Photographer: Shot By Nee Post Producers: Ed Chambers, Amy Ramussen & Liz Adeleye VFX: Ikki Dhesi Special thanks to: One Stop Films, Shoot Blue & Pilot Lighting A KODE PRODUCTION. https://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx4C0L8A_T8