#best 50 films of the last 20 years

[latestnews69]

Babygirl to Gladiator II and Conclave: The 20 best films of 2024

Read more click here

[pedrospatch]

strawberry

Daddy Dom! Joel Miller x Sub! Female Reader

summary: You feel ashamed for using your safe word with Joel during a session—he assures you you’re his good girl no matter what.

warnings/tags: 18+ only, MINORS DNI. (TW) daddy kink, lots of dd/lg lifestyle elements, reader is collared (day collar) age gap that is self indulgent, reader is mid to late 20’s and Joel is in his 50’s but tweak that to your imaginations if you like. SMUT; p in v sex, rough sex (that reader asks to try), spanking, possible overstimulation (if you squint??) Joel basically fucks reader too much and too hard. USE OF SAFE WORD. aftercare and lots of fluff, references to a pop culture film that i haven’t seen in forever but it’s fine. PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF TAGS AND WARNINGS. if this isn’t your thing, no worries just scroll on by.

MOODBOARD FOR AESTHETIC PURPOSES ONLY, READER HAS NO PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION.

word count: 2.4k

a/n: this is totally self indulgent, all for me as someone who has dabbled in the lifestyle before. if this is not your thing, no problem at all but kindly keep any negative comments to yourself. huge shoutout to the lovely @swiftispunk for inspiring this with the snippets of her own upcoming series that i am oh so excited for, darling han thank you for not only inspiring this, but for listening to me talk about it and encouraging it! and also to sweet mya @cavillscurls because truth be told her own fic brought back so many memories of a time in my life where i was genuinely so happy, in love, and felt safe with a partner. okay, i am gonna run away to the gym now to listen to 1989 tv (again) and pretend posting this is not nerve wracking as hell.

He’s fucked you plenty of times before.

But never like this. No, never, ever like this.

He’s relentless.

His thrusts are coming quicker, sloppier, harsher.

It doesn’t hurt, but it’s intense. Too intense.

Joel Miller is truly testing your limits tonight.

No, he was pushing you past your limits.

Because that’s what you’d asked him to do.

“Alright, sweet girl. This is the last time I’m gonna ask you before we get started. Are you absolutely, one hundred—no, one thousand percent sure that you wanna try this out tonight?” he had asked you beforehand, skimming the strap of your light pink, lace lingerie with his index finger, his feathery soft touch sending a plesant little chill down the length of your spinal column. Of all the sets you owned, it had to be Joel’s absolute favorite. Normally, it was him who would pick out what you would wear, but tonight he’d decided to let you choose for yourself and oh, you did not disappoint. He fucking adored you in the color pink; loved how sickeningly sweet, precious, and innocent you appeared in the hue as you did the filthiest things to him, with him. When you nodded eagerly in reply to his question, a sigh fell from his lips, the doubt written all over his face as he remarked, “I really don’t think you’re ready. I think we should wait just a little a while longer.”

“I’m ready,” you’d insisted, stubbornly. “I promise. I wouldn’t be asking for it if I thought I wasn’t. But I am, I promise, promise, promise I am.”

“Daddy knows what’s best for you, sweetheart—”

Fingers curled around his bicep, you’d batted your eyelashes, giving him those eyes that brought him down to his knees for you a lot more often than he cared to admit, those eyes that made Joel feel like he was learning his role all over again, despite over two decades of experience under his belt. He used to pride himself for his ability to stand firm against pouting lips, fluttering lashes, and pleading gazes. And then you come along and suddenly it’s like he is in his thirties again and he’s navigating this kind of dynamic for the first time. Even after a year and a half with you, he’s still trying to figure out how to completely unwrap himself from your little finger.

“Please? Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

Christ, you made things so goddamn difficult.

“You really think you’re gonna be able to handle it? You think you’re gonna be able to handle me when I get real rough with you, baby? Hm?”

Without missing a beat, you replied, “Yes, Daddy. I can handle it. I know I can.”

You had been so certain that you could.

Confident, even. So confident that when he began going over the rules and reminded you to use your safe word if you needed him to stop, you’d giggled and stated, “I’ve never needed to use it before and I don’t plan on using it tonight.”

Oh, how very wrong you had been about it all.

You’d overestimated yourself, and underestimated Joel. Severely.

His hips snap roughly into yours without an ounce of mercy, over and over, again and again. Beads of perspiration start trailing their way down the sides of his face, the tip of his nose. His chest is flushed, red, and also slicked with a thin sheen of sweat.

You’ve already shattered, unraveled, come undone all over his cock several times—every time with his granted permission, of course. Because you knew better than to come without Daddy’s permission.

Your cunt is swollen, sensitive, too sensitive and at a point where it could start aching if he doesn’t let up soon. However, it seems like Joel’s only getting rougher and rougher as he chases another release.

“Joel—Daddy,” you manage to correct yourself at the very last second through a slew of frantic little gasps for air. “Daddy, please! Daddy please—”

His large hand tightens around both of your wrists pinned to the mattress above your head. Surely he must think you’re begging him for more, when the reality is you’re about to start begging him to stop because it’s just too much and you can’t handle it; but there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to stop, the part of you that doesn’t want to disappoint the man who means the whole, entire world to you.

The man you belonged to, the man you loved.

Even through the haze, you try telling yourself that it’s all mind over matter, mind over matter, mind—

“Stop,” you whine, squirming underneath him. “I—can’t take it anymore, Daddy, I can’t take it—!”

Releasing your wrists, Joel pulls himself out of you and you breathe out in relief, until he flips you over onto your stomach without warning. You let out an audibly loud gasp when his hands reach down and take your hips, pulling them up off his bed, putting you on your hands and knees. He brings down one of his hands on your ass in a stinging slap. “That is just too bad, ‘cause Daddy ain’t done with you yet, darlin’ girl. Not even close to bein’ done with you.” Wrapping his other hand around his base, he grins to himself as he glides the head of his cock up and down your slick folds. When it grazes your clit, you jerk forward, away from him, and he tuts, bringing you back to him, his fingers digging into the pillow soft flesh of your hips. “Oh no baby, you ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

“But Daddy, I just can’t—”

You’re cut off by your own cry when you feel Joel’s length stretching your walls all over again. It’s just too much.

And you really, really can’t.

He leans over you and presses his lips to your ear. “You asked for this, didn’tcha? Asked to be fucked like a big girl, huh?” He bucks forward into you, eliciting another strangled cry followed by a string of pathetic whimpers. Bringing his palm down in a second strike, he demands, “Answer me when I’m takin’ to you. You wanted this, said that you could handle Daddy bein’ rough with you, ain’t that right now?”

“Strawberry.” You say the word so quietly, you can hardly hear it over the ringing in your ears.

Joel spanks you for a third time, in the exact same spot—so hard, there was simply no way you would wake up without a mark in the morning. “I need’ya to speak up. You’re such a big girl after all—”

“Strawberry!” You grasp fistfuls of bedsheets and the signal for it all to end tears itself from the back of your throat. “Strawberry, Joel! Strawberry!”

It’s only a millisecond that he freezes, if that.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Joel curses under his breath, pulling out of you. The bed shifts as he climbs off of it and scrambles to pull on his sweatpants before he’s at your side—you’re still on your hands and knees, an unmistakable look of panic on your face. He puts a gentle hand on your back. “Baby, are you alright?”

Your heart is pounding, your breathing labored but you manage a small, tight nod of your head. “I-I’m fine. I just—” Stopping, you grip the sheets tighter, warm tears brimming your eyes. Shame over what you’ve just done is already creeping in and sinking into your bones.

“Are you hurt, sweetheart? Did I hurt you?”

Joel’s voice is calm, but you can hear the concern that laces his tone.

“No.” Your own voice is small. “No. You didn’t hurt me.”

“Is it alright if I move you?” he asks. When you nod your head, he reaches out for you and helps you to sit on the side of the bed. Dropping to his knees in front of you, he takes your hands and his and feels his stomach sink when he realizes they’re ice cold; he begins rubbing them between his own to warm them up. “Baby if I hurt you, you need to tell m—”

“I promise, you didn’t hurt me,” you reassure him, swallowing the thickness rising in the back of your throat. You clock the skepticism in his dark brown eyes and a tear slips out, rolls down your face, and splatters onto your bare thigh. “I’m not lying, Joel. I swear.” Tugging one of your hands out of his, you reach up and instinctively clasp it around the blue sapphire pendant hanging from the delicate, gold chain around your neck—he’d presented you with his birthstone last year, not only as a symbol of his ownership of you, but also as a beautiful reminder of your commitment to one another. “You believe me, don’t you? You believe I’m telling the truth?”

Joel’s expression softens. “‘Course I do, baby.” He cups the side of your face gently, brushing away a second teardrop with his thumb. “But I’d really like to know what happened so I can figure out how to best help, okay? Can you tell me what happened?”

Embarrassed, you try turning your head away, but he holds your cheek in his hand, gentle but firm.

“S’okay. You can talk to me,” he encourages softly, his gaze meeting yours once again. “Tell me.”

“It was just too much,” you mumble, meekly. “And too intense.” Heat floods your face as you admit to him, “You were right. I just wasn’t—I wasn’t ready for that yet.”

In an effort to lighten your mood, Joel lightly gives your cheek a delicate pinch and chuckles.

“Daddy’s got that real annoyin’ habit of bein’ right ‘bout a lot of things, don’t he?”

“I’m sorry.” Your bottom lip quivers. “I’m so sorry.”

His smile falters. “Sorry for what?”

“For using the safe word—”

Joel’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Y’know you ain’t supposed to apologize for needin’ to use your safe word, right? That ain’t how it works, darlin’.”

Dropping your necklace, you place your hand over his on your cheek. “But I feel bad,” you confess. “It makes me feel like—like I let you down, you know? And that’s the last thing I want to do. I just wanted to be really good for you.”

“Oh baby.” Joel lifts himself from the floor. He sits on the bed and pulls you onto his lap, brushing his lips against your temple. “You are such a good girl for me, sweetheart.”

“But I couldn’t take it,” you sniff. “I had to stop.”

“And that’s okay,” he assures you. He wraps you in his arms and gives your body a gentle squeeze. “It ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed ‘bout. You’re still really new to a lot of this stuff, y’know? S’why I told you I didn’t think you were ready.”

“I should’ve listened to you.”

He winks. “You should always listen to Daddy.”

You offer him a tiny, watery smile. “I know.”

“And say we try this again one day and it’s just not somethin’ you like or that makes you feel good—or maybe you never wanna try it again at all,” he says with a nonchalant shrug. “That’s okay too. You are still my good girl no matter what—my perfect girl. Always. You understand me?”

“Really? You promise?”

Joel holds up his pinky.

“Oh, you’re being really serious,” you tease him.

“Sure as hell am, darlin’.”

You lock your finger around his and he pulls you in for a sweet kiss.

“I love you, Joel,” you murmur against his lips. You giggle again when he clears his throat and smacks your ass lightly, playfully. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, baby.” Joel pulls away and touches the tip of his nose to yours. “How’s ‘bout we get in the bath and get all cleaned up? Hm?”

“A bath?” You instantly perk up. “With bubbles?”

“With bubbles. And I’ll even let you throw in one of those smelly ball things you fuckin’ love so much.”

You swat at his chest. “Hey! My bath bombs smell really good, thank you very much!”

Joel doesn’t particularly like emerging from a bath smelling like a petunia, but for you, he’s more than happy to bathe in a sea of them, glitter and all.

You trace his collarbone with your index finger.

“Daddy? After our bath can we just cuddle in bed? Maybe watch a movie?” He raises an eyebrow and you smile sheepishly, adding, “Please?”

“‘Course. Pick any movie you want, sweetheart.”

“And can we have ice cream while we watch too?”

He pins you with a stern look. “Alright, now you’re just pushin’ it and takin’ advantage.”

You jut your lower lip. “Please, Daddy?”

There’s no arguing with that, not tonight.

Joel decides to let you have your way. “Alright.”

The two of you spend quite some time in the bath; normally a bath together ends with him inside you all over again, but tonight, all he’s doing is running a soapy wash cloth with your favorite shower gel—japanese cherry blossom—all over your body as he sits behind you, lips pressed against your ear. Joel washes you slowly, carefully, and all the while he’s whispering sweet, tender praise.

My good girl.

My perfect girl.

I’m s’proud of you.

I’m the luckiest man in the whole world.

After the bath, once you’re both dried and dressed in comfortable clothes—him in a clean pair of gray sweatpants and you in nothing but his t-shirt, Joel gives you the remote and instructs you to pick out a movie to watch.

“Make yourself real comfortable, baby,” he says to you, kissing the top of your head. “I’ll be back with that ice cream.”

You shoot him a hopeful glance. “Strawberry?”

“You tryin’ to be funny with me, darlin’?”

“No! That’s just my favorite flavor, silly.”

Joel grins to himself as he leaves the bedroom.

He knows that. Of course he knows that.

It’s why he always keeps a pint of it in his freezer.

You hop into bed and pull the blankets around you as your scan through the guide for a movie—you’d just decided on The Notebook when Joel appears again, a bowl and two spoons in his hands.

“You picked The Notebook again, didn’t you?” he asks without even looking at the flat screen that’s mounted on his wall over the fireplace.

“You said I could pick any movie I wanted.”

“Was just hopin’ you’d pick one we haven’t seen a thousand times,” he chuckled, sliding into his bed next to you. Joel places the bowl of strawberry ice cream in his lap and hands you a spoon. “C’mere, my sweet girl. Come closer.”

You snuggle up to him, and the two of you dig into the frozen dessert as the movie begins to play.

“Baby?” Joel speaks after a while, just as Allie and Noah share a passionate kiss in the pouring rain.

“Hm?” you ask, your fixed eyes on the flat screen, your mouth full of ice cream.

“You sure you’re okay?”

Swallowing, you look up at Joel, meeting his gaze.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” you answer honestly.

“‘Cause if there’s anythin’ else I can do for you…”

You purse your lips together and let out a tiny hum as you mull it over for a moment.

“You can hold me closer?” you finally suggest.

Joel shifts in his spot. “I can definitely do that—”

You stop him and point to the empty bowl.

“After you go and get us some more ice cream?”

He exhales an amused snort through his nose and shuffles out of bed, taking the bowl with him.

“Don’t get so used to bossin’ Daddy around,” Joel warns you playfully over his shoulder.

“Too late.”

divider credit to @saradika 🍓

[the-borgias]

hi sole! your sharpening is always so soft and pretty, i was wondering if you would be open to share it? hope you are having a wonderful november so far <3

Hi, Anon! Thank you so much <3 Yeah, sure, tutorial under the cut:

What you'll need:

Photoshop (I use Photoshop 2023)

Basic knowledge on how to make gifs

Camera Raw filter installed

Okay so, first of all, I use two different methods depending on the size of the gif. Let's start with the one I use for most of my gifsets which are big gifs (examples: x x x x.)

METHOD #1: Smart Sharpen + Camera Raw

I started using the Camera Raw filter last year and let me tell you, I'm obsessed! It completely changes the game of sharpening. I use this method for all gifs with a 540px width.

We're going to work on timeline so get your gif ready and convert it for smart filters. I'm using this scene from my last set as a base:

Here's the gif after I color it (I usually sharpen my gifs before I color them but for the sake of the tutorial I'm showing you this so you guys can see the difference):

(1) Smart Sharpen Layer: Let's start by adding a Smart Sharpen layer (Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen) with these settings:

Disclaimer: I didn't come up with these settings myself I got them from these sharpening actions forever ago so I don't know which one it is :/. I also wasn't able to find that person's new blog (if they even have one since they've been inactive since 2021) so if anyone knows please let me know and I'll give them proper credit!

Now we're going to go to the 'Layers' panel and click on this little thingy:

This window will pop up and we are going to change the Opacity to 50%.

(2) Camera Raw Filter: Here's where the fun begins. Go to Filter and click on Camera Raw Filter (you'll need to have the plugin installed for it to show up.) I don't know how the Camera Raw window will look like the first time you open it but good thing you only need to change a couple of things!

If it isn't opened yet click on 'Effects' and we're going to change the Texture and Clarity:

Depending on the scene/show/film I'm giffing, or if I want a stronger or softer sharpening, I'll use two different settings, but 99% of the time they are these:

First setting: Texture (+20) Clarity (+10)

Second setting: Texture (+40) Clarity (+20)

As you can see the difference isn't huge but the first setting gives a "softer" look. As I said I'll use one or the other depending on how I see the scene (it's almost always about the vibes yk.)

Feel free to experiment with these two and see what works best for you (although I wouldn't go higher than 40 on texture because the sharpening will look too fake imo.)

Also this filter is soooo good at making low quality videos look 1080p! Every time I've had to use 720p videos the Camera Raw filter has saved me 🫡

METHOD #2: Smart Sharpen

I use this method for smaller gifs. For example, 8 gifs of 268px x 180px sets (like these) or small-ish gifs in complex sets (like the second gifs in this set.)

This process is much simpler since it's the one I explained before but without adding the Camera Raw filter. That's it that's the method. Just a Smart Sharpen layer with the Opacity turned down to 50%.

As I said this method looks best on smaller gifs but to be honest it looks good on big gifs too? Depends on what you like most!

Anyway I hope this was easy to follow and if anyone has any questions please feel free to dm me or send an ask! ♡

[twig-tea]

2024 BL/GL/QL Round-Up Post

Since I did this last year, I thought for posterity I'd post another reflection on everything I watched that completed in 2024. For me, that means anything that started in 2023 but the last episode was in 2024 is on this list, but anything that was still be airing after 31 December 2024 11:59 my time (EST) is not on this list, even if the bulk of the show did air in 2024.

A few stats:

[The image is TL;DR for what follows lol]

I watched ~150 discrete pieces of new QL content in 2024 (series/films) that I tracked [It gets complicated with specials and split seasons but I did my best to be consistent]; plus 10 things that I would consider "adjacent". For contrast, I listed 110 pieces of discrete content in 2023; that's a 45% increase year over year!

This clocked in at an est. 900 hours of new BL/GL and adjacent content (up from ~600 in 2023--which also tells us that the content I tracked was a little longer overall because that's a full 50% increase in terms of hours spent).

The new content I watched came from 9 different countries [same as 2023]: (Cambodia [1], Philippines [2, down from 3], Hong Kong [1], Japan [32, up from 18 in 2023], Korea [20; was 19], Myanmar [2, up from 1], Taiwan [12, up from 6], Thailand [75; up from 56], Vietnam [4, down from 7]), China [5], and then 3 joint effort productions from Thailand/Korea [2] and Thailand/Taiwan [1]

This means just under ~47% of the content I watched on this list is from Thailand [close to the 50% in 2023]

So many more shows had multiple or varied distributions this year, but like last year ~85% of my content was on 3 platforms: YouTube [38%; down from 40%], GaGaOoLaLa [30%; up from 23%] and iQIYI [17%; down from 21%] Note: I'm in Canada and my access routes are sometimes affected by that.

As unbelievable as it sounds with all that, I did actually drop shows this year! I dropped 9 shows, which is I think more than I've dropped in my entire previous 20+ years watching queer asian media combined (that might be an exaggeration but I do really hate dropping shows); 4 Thai, 3 Filipino, 1 Taiwanese and 1 Japanese (listed at the very bottom of this post if you want to be messy). I didn't track any dropped shows in 2023.

And if you're wondering how many shows there are in the world in total, I am aware of an additional 11 shows I just did not have time to even start (2 from Cambodia, 4 from the Philippines, 3 from Thailand, and 1 each from Korea and Myanmar). That does not include the vertical short reels that I didn't track this year--see @ellsieee 's tracking post for these--as well as several GL shorts from JPC media YouTube channel and Sastra film app YouTube channel that I just have not had time to try or even keep track of, though I do peek in on them to see if there's anything that looks particularly good, and I do always link these folks in my GL round-ups.

All of this doesn't include re-watches or catching up on old shows, or non-QL queer media, or non-queer media (the hets sometimes do deserve rights); but does include films as well as shows.

I hope you all appreciate that with this much content, and with my general brand of being unable to make decisions, I really struggled to narrow down a top 10 list. What follows is the best I could do lol

Top 25 QLs I'd Recommend From This Year:

[Links are self-indulgently to what I thought was the most relevant post I'd made this year relevant to that series/media, mostly spoiler-free pitches]

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat S2 (Tsukutabe) [GL]

Love in the Big City

Love For Love's Sake

Tadaima Okaeri [anime]

Ossan no pantsu ga nandatte ii janai ka (Oppan)

Marahuyo Project

Knock Knock Boys

Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo

Love is Like a Poison (Doku koi)

Ossan's Love Returns

Twilight out of Focus [anime]

At 25:00 in Akasaka

Cooking Crush

Cherry Magic [anime]

Cherry Magic Thailand

Takara no Vidro

Soul Sisters / Twin Rabbits [GL]

Perfect Propose

Unknown the series

Paradise of Thorns [film]

Blue Canvas of Youthful Days

The Secret of Us [GL]

Mr Mitsuya's Planned Feeding (Mitsuya-Sensei)

The Time of Fever

A Man Who Defies the World of BL S3

I tried to put these in some kind of order but honestly if you asked me to rank them the numbering would change all the time and I would combust. The ones I liked best are closer to the top of this list. I also debated back and forth on whether Paradise of Thorns counts as QL so many times. But in the end I decided the main character was queer and queer romance of a sort was at the heart of the drama, so I've left it in this list even though technically it should probably sit with the 'adjacent's.

Worth noting that though only ~20% of the content I watched was from Japan, ~45% of my favourites were from Japan.

+5 notable pulp offerings worth mentioning:

Bagan Beginning (Myanmar)

City of Stars (Thailand)

Gym Affairs (China)

To the Ex Who Hated Me (Korea, GL)

Under the Oak Tree (Vietnam)

I think I'll do a top 10 GL post separately since we had enough content to warrant a top 10 (yay!) but this is already long enough. I just want to take a second to acknowledge that this year was so much better than in 2023 when I didn't feel like I could recommend any of the new GL shows. Thank you content creators for better and more GL in 2024, please keep that energy for 2025!

Bonus: Not a QL but worth calling out:

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (Thai film)

I saw both this and Paradise of Thorns in theatres during the Toronto International Film Festival and they were both so powerful! Extremely different tones but they surprisingly hit on similar themes, and very beautifully filmed. HTMMBGD was a complicated film filled with very rounded and complex characters, and I still think about it all the time. Very excited for more folks to have access to both of these soon.

Sidenote: The fact that I watched 45% more shows in 2024 than I did in 2023 and still managed to keep my rec list to 30 (*cough1cough*) does seem to back up the general feeling that though we had more content, we didn't have a proportional rise in good content. I do want to crunch those numbers in another post.

Double Plus Bonus: Best Older QL Content I watched for the first time in 2024:

Life as a Girl / Joshi-teki Seikatsu (Japan, 2018; I'm so sad I missed out on this one for so long due to misinfo, it is fantastic! Thanks to @so-much-yet-to-learn for helping propel me to this one)

Iron Ladies (Thailand, 2000; thank you for the rec, @happypotato48)

Nacchan's Secret / Himitsu no Nacchan (Japan, 2023; thank you @furritsubs for making this watch possible)

Can I Buy Your Love From a Vending Machine / Sono Koi, Jihanki de Kaemasuka? (Japan, 2023; thanks to @nicks-den for making this watch possible)

I Fell In Love with the Villainness (Japan, 2023; watched because of a convo with @pilanthitasanilaphat)

Doi Boy (Thailand, 2023; this one I had on my list and just had to work up the energy to watch, but it was a beautiful film and I'm glad I did)

BL Metamorphosis (Japan, 2022; another thank you to @furritsubs)

Dear Dad (India, 2016; thanks to @neuroticbookworm for the rec!)

Salty Blue / Kakenuketara, Umi (Japan, 2023, thank you again @nicks-den!)

[I can't believe I forgot this at first] The Miracle of Teddy Bear (Thailand, 2022, thanks for going on that journey and writing great meta with me and for calling me out for forgetting @lurkingshan!)

There is so much good content in the world and despite my best efforts I haven't seen everything! So grateful to the fansubbers and people who write about past shows so that those of us who missed them the first time still get a chance to see them.

In terms of my output based on all this input, I continued not lurking this year, and have enjoyed it very much; see my Top 10 posts from 2024 here as well as the content I linked in my recommended shows above--going through the process of adding those links really highlighted to me how much more I've written this year, and how much more motivated I am to write about shows I love. It's no surprise I had dedicated posts for most of my top shows! To highlight a few specific projects this year that I'm proud of, I participated in the Love in the Big City Book Club read and watch-alongs organized by @lurkingshan, which was such a fun project that I am grateful for, and I started my GL Odds and Ends posts (tagged with #gl recs) that I am still feeling out but am really enjoying seeing the impact whenever someone watches a show because they found out about it through one of my posts. I also made an appearance on several episodes of @the-conversation-pod and had an incredible time trying out different things in a quarterly 'Dispatch' and having some really rich conversations with @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup. I love this corner of tumblr that we've carved out for ourselves as a QL watching community, and I just want to say to everyone I've interacted with in 2024: Thank you, and wish good things for you all in 2025!

Full list of 2024 shows under the cut for anyone curious! [Mostly in order it completed but may be slightly off--if a special aired immediately after the final episode I only list them as one thing and count the airing of the special as the end date, for example].

Bagan Beginning

Love Senior the Series

After SunDown

VIP Only

Twins the Series

Last Twilight

Night Dream the Series

My Universe

Bake Me Please special episode

Sahara Sensei to Tori Kun / Mr Sahara and Toki-kun

Love for Love's Sake

7 Days Before Valentine

Happy Ending

PitBabe the series

For Him the series

Cooking Crush

The Sign

Chaser Game W

Playboyy the series

Perfect Propose

Ossan's Love Returns

Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna S2 / She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat

Cherry Magic Th

Dead Friend Forever

Sukidoya / Although I Love You and You / Sukiyaken kedo dou yaroka?

Healing Thingyan

Love You in Every Multiverse

Cherry Magic (anime)

Please Teach Me

Anti Reset

Jazz for Two

Blank the Series

A Secretly Love

To Be Continued the series

Love is Better the Second time around / Koi wo Surunara Nidome ga Joto

City of Stars

Sea You Soon

Human Too

Man Who Defies the World of BL s3

Gray Shelter / Gray Currents / Grey Current

Gym Affairs

1000 Years Old the Series

Love is Like a Cat

To the Ex Who Hated Me

Lady Boy Friends the series

Deep Night the series + Special Episode

Unknown the series

Memory in the Letter

You are My Star

Lonely Girls

Boys Be Brave / Roommates / I Can't Confess

Blossom Campus

Two Worlds

VIP Only special episode

Pray In Love

I Fell In Love with My Male Best Friend

Friend With Benefit

Stay By My Side special episode

23.5

You Made My Day

Living With Him

City Boy Log pt3

Anti-Reset special episode

The Time of Huan Nan

Xiao Xiang Yi Jiu

Inverse Identity

At 25:00 in Akasaka

Only Boo!

Tadaima Okaeri

Love Bully (Club Friday)

Blank the Series S2

Marahuyo Project

The Two of Us

Blue Boys

OMG Vampire!

My Stand-In

We Are the series

Ossan no pantsu ga nandatte ii janai ka / Oppan

Wandee Goodday

Under the Oak Tree

The Rebound

Love Enemy

Love in the Apocalypse

Bad Guy

My Marvellous Dream is You/ Dream the Series

Century of Love

Knock Knock Boys

Be Your Star

Meet You at the Blossom

BOYTOY

The Secret of Us

Ayaka is in love with Hiroko / Ayaka-chan wa Hiroko-sempai ni koi shiteru

My Love Mix-Up!

This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans

Love Sea the series

Cosmetic Playlover

City Boy Log s4

Sunset Vibes

Mr Mitsuya's Planned Feeding

Takara no Vidro / Takara's Treasure

Paradise of Thorns

I Hear the Sunspot

The Time of Fever / when your temperature reaches my fingertips

4 Minutes The Trainee

Twilight out of Focus

Happy of the End

The On1y One

Live in Love

Heaven'sxCandy

The Two of Us s2

Addicted Heroin

I Saw You In My Dream

Monster Next Door

Our Golden Times

Affair

First Note of Love

Battle of the Writers

Reverse 4 U

Unlock Your Love

Chaser Game W s2

Let free the Curse of Taekwondo

Uncle Unknown

The Hidden Moon the series

Love in the Big City [the series]

Smells Like Green Spirit

Red Whisper

Eccentric Romance/PT is Love

My Damn Business

Apple My Love

Dominant Yakuza and Wimpy Corporate Slave

The Nipple Talk

Kidnap the series

Every You Every Me

Jack & Joker

People Come Later

Blue Canvas of Youthful Days

The Loyal Pin

Let's Eat Together Aki and Haru 2

Love is Like a Poison / doku koi: doku mo sugireba koi to naru

Bad Guy My Boss

Haunted Hearts

Seoul Blues

The Renovation

Love Sick 2024

Love in the Big City [the film]

Spare Me Your Mercy / Euthanasia

Soul Sisters / Twin Rabbits

My Hot Butch Roommate

Whisper Me a Love Song / Sasayaku you ni koi wo utau

Boys' Christmas

Bonus: FuFuKnows bi-weekly shorts [every other week they post a short film, almost always a QL storyline; there were 23 in 2024]

And those QL-adjacent shows I mentioned [these are all adapted from QL media or starred QL actors or were part of a QL franchise but did not have a canon queer romance at the core of its storytelling]:

The Spirealm

Close Friend 3 - Soju Bomb

How to Make a Million Before Grandma Dies

Man Suang

High School Return Of A Gangster / I, a Gangster, Became a High Schooler

Kimi to Yukite Saku: Shinsengumi Seishunroku

Hoshikuzu Telepath

A Balloon's Landing

Peaceful Property

My Strawberry Film

The shows I dropped:

Time the series

Beside You

Sugar Dog Life

The Whisperer

Kiseki in Tokyo

Q18

Sky Valley

The Fate Trap

Dear Miss Becky

And as a shout-out in penance, the shows I had on my list to get to but haven't yet watched:

A Blue Sky (Cambodia)

Ending Friend (Cambodia)

Pretty Boys (Philippines - requires an access fee on VivaMax+)

Oh My Boo (Philippines)

The Perfect Heartbreak (Philippines)

Where I found You (Philippines)

My_ the series (Myanmar)

What's In My Bag (Korean GL - requires an access fee on Vimeo)

Complicated (Thai)

Club Friday: Hot Love Issue (Thai)

2nd Chance (Thai; not to be confused with Second Chance, this was a smaller 3-episode short series from this year)

Thank you for reading!

[scotianostra]

The Scottish actor David McCallum was born on 19th September 1933.

Born as David Keith McCallum, Jr in Maryhill, Glasgow, the second of two sons of Dorothy Dorman, a cellist, and orchestral violinist David McCallum Sr. When he was three, his family moved to London for his father to play as concertmaster in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Early in the Second World War, he was evacuated back to Scotland, where he lived with his mother at Gartocharn by Loch Lomond.

McCallum won a scholarship to University College School, a boys’ independent school in Hampstead, London, where, encouraged by his parents to prepare for a career in music, he played the oboe.In 1946 he began doing boy voices for the BBC radio repertory company. Also involved in local amateur drama, at age 17, he appeared as Oberon in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Play and Pageant Union. He left school at age 18 and was conscripted, joining the 3rd Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, which was seconded to the Royal West African Frontier Force.In March 1954 he was promoted to Lieutenant. After leaving the army he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (also in London), where Joan Collins was a classmate.

David McCallum’s acting career has spanned six decades; however, these days he is best known for his starring role on the police procedural NCIS as medical examiner as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard. I first really remember McCallum for his role in another US show, The Invisible Man which ran for 13 episodes in the 70’s. McCallum by then was a veteran of many TV and Film roles, starting in the 50’s including Our Mutual Friend and The Eustace Diamonds, in the 60’s he was in several ITV Playhouse shows before moving across the Atlantic to take roles in The Outer Limits and his big break as Illya Kuryakin in several incantations of The Man from Uncle.

His most notable films were The Greatest Story Ever Told as Judas Iscariot and of course Ashley-Pitt ‘Dispersal’ in The Great Escape.

As well as the aforementioned Invisible Man in the 70’s he took time to pop back over to our shores to star in two quality series, as Flt. Lt. Simon Carter in Colditz and Alan Breck Stewart in an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Kidnapped.

The 80’s saw him team up with the lovely Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel and several guest roles in the likes of The A Team, Hart to Hart and Murder, She Wrote as well as a one off reprise of Illya in the TV movie The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair.

The 90’s saw David in Cluedo and Trainer on our TV screens over here and American science-fiction series VR-5 in the states..

During the last 20 years or so he has been in the kids TV show, Ben 10: Omniverse as the voice of Professor Paradox and of course Donald Horatio “Ducky” Mallard in a remarkable  436 episodes of the popular NCIS.

David has been married twice. He married his first wife Jill Ireland in 1957. They met on the set of the movie Hell Drivers. Together, they had two sons and a daughter, Paul, Jason and Valentine, with Jason being the only one who was adopted. In 1963, David introduced Jill to his co-star on The Great Escape, Charles Bronson, and she left David and married Charles in 1968. In 1967,

David McCallum passed away aged 90 on September 23rd last year, he is survived by his wife of 56 years, Katherine McCallum, his sons Paul McCallum, Valentine McCallum and Peter McCallum, his daughter Sophie McCallum and his eight grandchildren. NCIS paid tribute to him in an episode called The Stories We Leave Behind when the tagents find comfort in working on one of his unfinished cases. The episode features clips from several old shows.

[oceanpulls]

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. “But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

-----------------------

The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

-----------------------

Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

-----------------------

The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

-----------------------

Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

[ladyinrainbowglasses]

could you not have thought of a single other movie?

This seems like a good place to explain my reasoning:

First off, I was raised in a Christian dominionist cult. I went to school in one and attended youth group in a different flavor of one.

The suggestions have been for things like die-ins, which is the absolute worst idea for impressing upon a literal death cult trying to engineer a mass human sacrifice to summon their god and end the world that things are bad. A bunch of queer people pretending to be dead in prominent places IS A VISION OF WHAT THEY WANT. Do YOU want a bunch of smug-ass pastors assuring their cultists that Glory Hallelujah, Satan just got them gross queers to act out exactly what will happen when God's Army finally murders every human being in Palestine?

It is, to put it mildly, a terrible idea.

Second, the left is currently labeled a bunch of hysterical killjoys who hate fun. The disgusting hatred Fueher Scheisshosen offers can be FUN. It is an unevolved lizard brain kind of fun, but we are a species just stumbling out of considering public executions, public torture, and public animal cruelty fun.

The majority of Americans sat this one out. The fear on our side is not working. They are not scared of what Trump might do, but they are scared of being told that they are horrible, awful people who are inherently bad because they do not actually know anything that isn't problematic.

The battle is for hearts and minds, like any good propaganda war. Constant fear and constant outrage do work. But so does instilling "Why are you persecuting these people who are giving me a good time?"

We need to be operating from the base assumption that those who are not foaming Nazis are actually scared and tired and battered from 9 years of constant fear porn on one side and constant scolding from the other. If the average American is roughly as smart as the average 12 year old in a system that actually nourishes human potential, everything becomes a lot clearer. The best way to engage a 12 year old-level intelligence is through showing them you are really enjoying yourself quite a lot.

Third, why I landed on "Rocky Horror" as a first choice.

Yes. The movie is 50 years old. It is outdated. It is offensive. It is also nostalgic in a war that is being fought on weaponized nostalgia. Shadowcasts and interactive participation were rights of passage for both Boomers and Gen X. It is a thing that people who did not bother showing up to vote are actually likely to show up for. It is a place where they come to have fun, but they are greeted with the fun of, "This is our last possible party - see, the government you just voted for or didn't bother to stop wants to ban you from being able to do this fun, silly thing that you remember doing as a 20-something. Sorry, this is our last chance to do this! Enjoy yourself!"

That gets THEM upset.

That makes THEM feel targeted.

That makes THEM feel like THEIR leisure choices are threatened.

And yes, I know that it is sickening that most people care more about THEIR leisure time than they care about OTHER PEOPLE'S HUMANITY, but it is the unfortunate reality we are living in.

The threat that all the queer people are going to be dragged off to camps is not a real, extant threat to them.

The threat that they won't be able to relive their 20's for two hours around Halloween every year is.

That said, the exact choice of film is less important than the idea that a lot of people enjoy said film, have fond memories of watching it, that it has some form of participation element, and that the people organizing are blatantly whistling past the graveyard.

Again, I was raised in a cult. The only openly queer film I had heard of was "Rocky Horror". None of the leaders went to see it, but plenty of people who were not locked in had seen it and found it fun. They knew "The Time Warp". I danced to "The Time Warp" at a youth group event, because it was the only taped song that explained how to do the dance that we had. Thank Dr. Demento for that.

If you have suggestions for any film that includes the three important elements of nostalgic fun, participation, and the threat of it being removed by Scheisshosen, I would love to hear them! Let's work together by pooling our knowledge, not eating each other alive because we are not all coming from the same starting point.

The TL;DR:

We are dealing with a death cult, mental children, and people who cannot be persuaded of the stakes with lecturing.

Every move we make as organized resistance needs to target the weak links.

After 9 years of being with an inescapable emotional batterer abusing the entire country, the Left has to stop offering snippy lectures and needs to start offering circuses that are more enjoyable than the circus the Right is offering.

IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE ROCKY HORROR.

BUT IT DOES HAVE TO BE A THREE-RING CIRCUS.

[mofffun]

New scenes in King-Ohger movie full cut

(lines by ear)

01:08 +line, Rita (to Gira): いつまで待たせる　始まるそう (How much longer are you gonna keep us waiting? It's about to start.)

01:34 shugoddom square establishing shots

04:19 extended orphange meal scene + lines. Gira brought out a pot and asked Debonica to help set the table. She refused and stole a piece of bread.

05:21 +line, Gira: 相変わらずうたうまい。([Debonica] is still good at singing like before.) Himeno walked closer and poked Gira vs. voiceover

09:39 (portal closed leaving Yanma and Rita stranded) +line, Yanma: 帰るだって　どこからだよ (Talk about leaving, how?)

10:29 Guided by a light beam from her tiara, Himeno crossed a long bridge on the sea

10:43 Kaguragi called for Racles. "Racles-dono, please answer if you're here!" A portal appeared and he crossed it to find himself in front of a burning Takitate Castle. Iroki's voice only "Long time no see, Kaguragi." "嫌なものを…" (~I don't like this.)

11:14 Underwater N'kosopa: longer establishing shot: top-down pan vs. forward dolly, + longer rita run

15:51 + Himeno exepctant reaction shot as she waited for her parents to materialize

17:05 Iroki: You dirty your hands for this throne. What did you get in return?

Kaguragi: People and country, and peace.

18:21 "These are all, Moffun." Close-up of Rita looking up vs. voiceover. Ghost swarm: +line "やっば無理だ!" (Nope, I can't take it [after all]!)

20:06 Yanma pulled on the spider thread until he reached a thick strand encasing a cable.

23:05 Ishabana and N'kosopa team shocked the retainers back to life

30:11 +line, Himeno: 醜い死に損ない (She called Rainoir an ugly thing who won't stay dead, while smiling)

30:24 Yanma: What ae you doing here?

Jeramie: 王を歓迎する場合に、狭間の王が仲間外れはいただけな (This is an occassion for kings, how could you exlude the king of the in-betweens?)

30:50 calibur roll call

34:00 Debonica's look at Gira. They got back climbing on Jeramie

Rainoir's last words:

だが　シュゴッドムの王は常に一人。ラクレスハスティーは生きでいる。勝負をつけたら、また来るがいい。その時、このチキューのすべてを話そう。

(However, there can only be one king of shugoddom. Racles Husty still lives. When a winner is decided, come see me again. Then, I will tell you everything about this Chikyuu.)

(note: the making uses 決着 (decision) instead of 勝負 (win/loss))

Gira smiled and walked away.

34:57 Coronation restart. Rita put down their sword at the altar, the kings reaction shots + Jeramie narrating.

35:32 Kings comments as Gira walked down the aisle

Yanma: よっ！元指名手配犯！(Yo! Former fugitive!)

Shiokara: Shhhh!!

Kaguragi: しかし 子とものお遊戯会見えんなくもう (However, he no longer looks like a child in dress-up.)

Hineno: 王冠　私がもらっちゃうかしら (Should I take the crown?)

Rita: 王位簒奪は重罪だ。奪うなら今こそ。(Usurping the throne is a serious crime. If you want it, do it now.)

37:21 Debonica cake scene moved to pre-credits

40:07 Post-credit scene #1

Rainoir: 死の国にまでもやってくるか (You found your way into the Land of Death?)

*transformed to block a beam attack, roll call speech*

今こそ、2000年前の仇怨(きゅうえん)を返す！ (2000 years... Now is the time for revenge!)

The beam vaporized him and camera cuts to Dugded crouching on a transparent disc hovering, "つまんね" (Boring.)

(note: the two characters are never in the same frame so i'm pretty convinced they are filmed separately. otherwise Rainoir's actor would've known about Dug/Ch2 in May. The post-credits scene are not specified as filmed during the original production so the suit part might be the advertised "newly-filmed scenes".)

41:13 Post-credit scene #2 (おまけ bonus scene)

The retainers' lies to shock them into the underworld:

Shiokara: 喧嘩最強 ヤンマくん! (Best at brawls is Yanma-kun!)

Sebastian: ヒメノ���はブズでございます (Himeno-sama is ugly.) *Thundercracker hesitates*

Morphonia: 働くて最… ([I love my] job..) (lightning before the sentence is finished)

Kuroda: 我こそはトウフの王… (I am Toufu's Lo[rd]..)

[constantfragmentation]

Since I'm back on my Arcane shit, and read your posts. I'm gonna fangirl the shit outta you rn.

I found your Silco fic and what the fuck did I just read? One of the most amazing fics EVER. Like seriously, I never would have put Silco in a gothic setting and holy f*ck does it work!!!

Put this mf in regency or victorian clothes and he walks around like Peter Cushing serving cunt. Because that's what you wrote. I'm DYING. It's soooooooooooo good.

I know it's a terrible thing to ask a writer, but will you finish Bend and Not Break? I have to know how it ends. You've twisted it enough away from Jane Eyre to make me wonder where you're going to take it.

This is like crack. I need it.

You are a gifted writer and should do it professionally. You have a knack for writing gothic/victorian settings. Do you write for other fandoms or just Silco?

Are you ok with DMs to discuss?

Oh wow. I'm speechless. Thank you. I admit I'm not the greatest at receiving compliments, and I feel humbled when anyone likes anything I write. I've only been writing fiction for a couple of years and I'm still learning.

I'm a huge gothic/horror/romance junkie so this is right up my alley. I've only written for one other fandom. Some fics were canon for both book/tv and some AU styles, including gothic regency. You can DM me if you want a link. I don't know if those stories are or if the ship is cool with my fellow Arcane/Silco simps so I'll keep those stories separate. But one in particular is a huge (going on 50 chapters) gothic/ghost/horror/romance story if that's your jam.

Silco is a character who can fit into almost any scenario and time period. I really liked how he, Jinx, and the Arcane World managed to mesh with Bronte's dark and foreboding Regency/Victorian Era. I'm shocked I've managed to make it work. I wasn't too sure in the first few chapters, but I'm so glad readers liked it.

Yes, I will finish it. I'm re-reading the whole thing right now to get myself back up to speed on where I was when I left off. I think I may want to make some changes in the most current chapter posted before I write a new chapter. Plus, I'll have to refrain from wanting to edit every chapter as I read. I hate being a writer and finding 'mistakes' everywhere.

I apologize to all readers for the long hiatus. Some know I've been dealing with medical issues and I'm really trying to get my headspace back.

I can't remember who convinced me that Peter Cushing is like the perfect live-action Silco and now that I've seen a few films, I'm inclined to agree.

You are so very kind. I'm not near good enough to consider writing professionally. I have an original story I've mostly written but still haven't finished because I'm slow as hell to write. Plus, it's a complicated plot. I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Only time will tell if I can get it done. I wish I had better self-esteem, but I've always been overcritical, too.

I'm always open to DM and Asks. Please feel free to contact me with questions, etc. I'm always happy to discuss anything Silco.

I'm not taking requests right now since another person asked me recently. The last request I wrote was Two Masks (my other Regency Silco fic) and I still need to finish that one too. Like I said, I'm a slow writer in general.

Plus, I have another story I need to write and there's a new Silco story I want to write (putting him in the Roaring 20's era).

Thank you again so much. I really appreciate and I'll try my best to get back to whatever my new normal is and get back to writing.

[iskrzyk]

get to know me questions!! for every note i get ill answer the corresponding question

stole the questions from kaydean

1. selfie

2. what would you name your future kids?

3. do you miss anyone?

4. what are you looking forward to?

5. is there anyone who can always make you smile?

6. is it hard for you to get over someone?

7. what was your life like last year?

8. have you ever cried because you were so annoyed?

9. who did you last see in person?

10. are you good at hiding your feelings?

11. are you listening to music right now?

12. what is something you want right now?

13. how do you feel right now?

14. when was the last time someone of the opposite sex hugged you?

15. personality description

16. have you ever wanted to tell someone something but you didn’t?

17. opinion on insecurities.

18. do you miss how things were a year ago?

19. have you ever been to New York?

20. what is your favourite song at the moment?

21. age and birthday?

22. description of crush.

23. fear(s)

24. height

25. role model

26. idol(s)

27. things i hate

28. i’ll love you if…

29. favourite film(s)

30. favourite tv show(s)

31. 3 random facts

32. are your friends mainly girls or guys?

33. something you want to learn

34. most embarrassing moment

35. favourite subject

36. 3 dreams you want to fulfill?

37. favourite actor/actress

38. favourite comedian(s)

39. favourite sport(s)

40. favourite memory

41. relationship status

42. favourite book(s)

43. favourite song ever

44. age you get mistaken for

45. how you found out about your idol

46. what my last text message says

47. turn ons

48. turn offs

49. where i want to be right now

50. favourite picture of your idol

51. starsign

52. something i’m talented at

53. 5 things that make me happy

54. something thats worrying me at the moment

55. tumblr friends

56. favourite food(s)

57. favourite animal(s)

58. description of my best friend

59. why i joined tumblr

60. ask me anything you want

[cinenthusiast]

my Top Ten By Year Zine: 1930 is now on sale! i am not expecting any traction here but i figured what the hell! i have spent the last many months working on this 20-page zine dedicated to a year from one of film history's most fascinating micro-eras (Sound Gets Situated). having ten films to write about is both a jumping off-point and culmination but it's about so much more than that. it's about traversing through a year in film to the best of my ability, picking up memories and observations along the way. this zine features original collage work on every page, an essay, memories across over 50 films from 1930, and writing on 10 films of my choosing (people on sunday, city girl, king of jazz, madam satan, "dance of the hands", the big house, au bonheur des dames, ladies of leisure, laughter, and liliom). this is a labor of love for anyone who loves or appreciates film.

[aliteraryprincess]

January 2025 Wrap Up

Is it me or was this the longest month ever? This is my least favorite time of the year. The weather is crap and there's nothing to do. Only two more months of it...

Books Read: 5

Not my finest reading month quantity wise, but at least I really liked all of them! My favorite was The Secret Place, and I really need to get the rest of the books in that series. There was no least favorite.

Holly by Stephen King - 4 stars

Pascarèl by Ouida - 4 stars

The Secret Place by Tana French - 5 stars

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe - 4 stars

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - 4.5 stars

Books DNFed: 1

L'Étranger by Albert Camus - I'll be coming back to this sometime later in the year. I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to read in French while also trying to finish this dissertation.

On Tumblr:

There's a respectable amount here, though nothing too crazy. You should definitely check out the photos of my pets because they are adorable.

December 2024 Wrap Up

Book Photography: The Secret Place by Tana French

Book Photography: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Book Quotes: The Secret Place by Tana French

Book Quotes: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Tagged: Pet Photos

On YouTube:

It's mostly end of the year content here, which I always find fun to film.

Best Books of 2024

December Wrap Up | the last 7 books of 2024!

Did I Read My 50 Books to Read in 2024?

2024 Reading Stats

The New Year, New Me Book Tag

Currently Reading 1/20/25

February TBR | FebRegency, the Robinson Readalong, & more!

[msclaritea]

Box Office: ‘Civil War’ Starts Off With Impressive $2.9M in Thursday Previews

Alex Garland's controversial movie about the political divide in America easily scored the best preview number ever for A24.

BY PAMELA MCCLINTOCK

APRIL 12, 2024 9:18A

Alex Garland‘s dystopian action movie Civil War has started off its North American box office run with an impressive $2.9 million, a record for indie studio and distributor A24.

The $50 million movie about a divided America is a big swing for A24 as it tries to produce bigger movies, and is its most expensive production to date.

Civil War is tracking to open north of $20 million, although one leading tracking service has a slightly lower range of $19 million to $20 million. As with the preview number, that would be record for A24, beating the $13.6 million opening of A24’s horror pic Hereditary in 2018.

A24 and writer-director Garland held the movie’s world premiere last month at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival, an ideal venue since many of the attendees are younger adults, the film’s target demo.

Set in the near-future, the story follows a wartime photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleagues as they make their way across a hostile and divided United States of America that has been torn apart under the authoritarian rule of a three-term president (Nick Offerman). Yet the film shys away from red state/blue state divisions, and the politics behind the conflict are generally left unexplained, other than to say that one of the president’s first first actions was to disband the FBI in an apparent nod to former President Donald Trump, who has called to “defund” the Bureau.

Civil War‘s timing surely isn’t a coincidence as it hits cinemas amid a contentious election year in which President Biden and former President Trump are once again the leading candidates for their respective parties as Trump seeks to return to the White House

At a SXSW panel following the film’s premiere, Garland said it made sense to release Civil War now, although it’s not as if there is anything new about the contentious political discourse gripping the country.

“I think all of the topics in in [Civil War] have been a part of a huge public debate for years and years. These debates have been growing and growing in volume and awareness, but none of that is secret or unknown to almost anybody,” Garland said. “I thought that everybody understands these terms and, at that point, I just felt compelled to write about it.”

Cailee Spaeny, Jesse Plemons and Wagner Moura also star.

2012–2013: Founding and early years

A24 was founded on August 20, 2012, by film veterans Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges. Katz formerly led the film finance group at Guggenheim Partners, Fenkel was the president, co-founder and partner at Oscilloscope, and Hodges served as "Head of Production and Development" at Big Beach. The name "A24" was inspired by the Italian A24 motorway Katz was driving on when he decided to found the company.

Guggenheim Partners provided the seed money for A24. The company was started to share "movies from a distinctive point of view". In October 2012, Nicolette Aizenberg joined as head of publicity from 42West where she was senior publicity executive.

The company began its distribution of films in 2013. The company's first theatrical release was Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, which had a limited theatrical release. Other 2013 theatrical releases included Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, James Ponsoldt's The Spectacular Now, and Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa.

In September 2013, A24 entered a $40 million deal with DirecTV Cinema, where DirecTV Cinema would offer day-and-date releases 30 days prior to a theatrical release by A24; Enemy was the first film to be distributed under the deal. That same year, A24 entered a deal with Amazon Prime, where A24-distributed films would be available on Amazon Instant Video after becoming available on Blu-ray and DVD.

2014–2017: Television and later productions

In May 2015, A24 announced that it would start a television division and began producing the USA Network series Playing House, as well as working to develop a television series that would later become Comrade Detective, produced by Channing Tatum. The company also announced that they would also finance and develop pilots.

In January 2016, Sasha Lloyd joined the company to handle all film, television distribution and business development in the international marketplace. The company, with cooperation from Bank of America, J.P. Morgan & Co. and SunTrust Banks, also raised its line of credit from $50 million to $125 million a month later to build upon its operations. In April, the company acquired all foreign rights to Swiss Army Man, distributing the film in all territories, and partnering with distributors who previously acquired rights to the film, a first for the company. In June, the company, along with Oscilloscope and distributor Honora, joined BitTorrent Now to distribute the work of their portfolio across the ad-supported service.

Eileen Guggenheim Breaks Silence, denies Introducing Women To Epstein

New Court Documents Reveal More About Epstein's Relationship With JP Morgan Chase

Beef is Criticized After star's Resurfaced Rape Comments B

Does HBO's Euphoria Really Glamourize Drug Use?

Euphoria Season Two Review: Far Too Much Nudity, Sex and Violence

Michelle Yeoh Says Hot Dog Fingers Scene With Jamie Lee Curtis Was ‘Most Beautiful Love Story

Not much time is shown in this universe. All the audience knows is that Evelyn works at a pizza shop. She is shown wearing a ridiculous costume and waving around a sign.

"A24 and writer-director Garland held the movie’s world premiere last month at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival, an ideal venue since many of the attendees are younger adults, the film’s target demo..."

Penske Media Corporation (PMC /ˈpɛnski/) is an American mass media, publishing, and information services company based in Los Angeles and New York City. It publishes more than 20 digital and print brands, including Variety, Rolling Stone, Women's Wear Daily, Deadline Hollywood, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Boy Genius Report, Robb Report, Artforum, ARTNews, and others. PMC's Chairman and CEO since founding is Jay Penske.

President Trump awards Medal of Freedom to Roger Penske | Fox News Video

In addition to media publications, Penske Media Corporation owns the Life Is Beautiful Music & Art Festival and is a 50 percent stakeholder in South by Southwest. It is also the owner of Dick Clark Productions which includes the award shows Golden Globe Awards, American Music Awards, Streamy Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards, and the Billboard Music Awards.

Jay Penske--NACSCAR Heir ARRESTED...and It's A Pisser

@aeltri I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. What was that you told us, recently, about Pizza and Hotdogs?

[twig-tea]

Twig's GL Recs for March-July 2024

[Here’s my rec list for GLs through to Feb 2024 ]

Fake Buddies Korean, YouTube, 7 episodes (one ep BL, one ep GL, one ep crossover, and then 2 more BL prequel eps and two more GL prequel episodes), approx 45 minutes when compiled, Apr 27-Jun 28 2024

At first this was a little three-part series in which it turns out both members of the couple are secretly in a homosexual relationship with their best friends and using the other as a beard. Lots of comedy of errors and puns (“I like lilies better than roses”) as the characters try to make each other understand the situation they’re in. The backstory prequels were really cute friends to lovers, and it was really nice to see these couples land in solidarity! This series is short and cute and pure fluff.  

To the X Who Hated Me: YunO x Jane Korean, YouTube, 3 episodes ~6 mins each, aired May 22-29 [microseries complete, X who hated me series may be ongoing]

When the previous 2-ep miniseries under this umbrella landed (which I wrote about here: ), I had no idea it was going to be a series of microseries! These are all short but good second chance romances. This one has a “reality”-show-within-a-show format, with a frustrating misunderstanding, and a good kiss. Be sure to always watch past the credits for this series! 

You Are My Star, Thai, YouTube, 1ep 37 mins (aired as 3 12-min eps and then they compiled into this one short film), May 18 [complete]

This was a cute Thai GL that I enjoyed mostly because of the very clear cribbing of specific scenes from recent BLs. It was mostly trope-y (both cuteness and drama), with good kissing. See if you can spot the BL references.

Xiao Xiang Yi Jiu, Chinese, YouTube, 7 episodes 2 mins each, May 20-June 3 [complete]

This little microseries is about a girl becoming an intern for her crush/idol. Happy ending, and they do become explicitly girlfriends! No kiss because censorship.

Lonely Girls Korean, YouTube, 4 episodes 8 minutes each (32 mins compiled) May 14 [complete]

This is about a couple that struggles with the closet, lack of communication, and how to make their relationship last in the face of uncertainty. Also there’s good kisses. SukFilm have done other series before and since, but this is my fave GL of theirs so far. 

The Two of Us Deep Night spinoff, Thai, YouTube, 6 episodes, 15 mins each, airing May 30-July 4 [complete]

I was so confused at first, because I didn’t realize this was supposed to be their story during the events of Deep Night that we didn’t get to see. I was excited about this one but bummed that we started the miniseries with a health scare and then a threat by Meiji to marry some guy just to make Freya jealous? I found it a little frustrating that two women in their 40s could not be honest with each other. The couple is so cute, but the storytelling is not, so take this rec with a grain of salt. Still, it’s so nice to see women in their 40s being super cute and in love in between the drama so I’m keeping it on this list! I am very glad to have gotten the dance sequence and the bath sequence. 

******

And of course currently airing right now so take with a grain of salt because i don’t yet know how they end, but 

Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko Japanese, 8 episodes, 25 mins, airing July 4- August 22 [ongoing]

This is a laugh-out-loud funny office comedy in which Akaya flirts desperately with her senior colleague at work, Hiorko, who then spends her evenings complaining to her friends at the lesbian bar about oblivious straights who don’t understand the meaning of what they say. I've written a little more about this show here. It is my favourite GL of the year so far and if it stays this good is on its way to being one of my favourites of all time!

The Secret of Us Thai, 8 episodes, 50 mins each, airing June 24-August 15 [ongoing]

This series starts with the cutest episode of all time and then devolves quickly into serious drama lol but it did a good job avoiding pure “noble idiocy” so I’m hopeful it will continue to hold up. As of ep3 things are happening that I did not expect, so I’m really curious how this one will go. In the meantime, it is also worth noting that these actresses are excellent kissers.

[UPDATE: Of these two that were airing, I ended up thinking I was going to have to retract for The Secret of Us but instead retracted for Ayaka Is In Love With Hiroko. I had way more fun with Ayaka week to week but the ending was really disappointing; The Secret of Us in contrast nailed the ending. I wrote about it a bit here. ]

[scotianostra]

Happy 90th Birthday Scottish actor David McCallum.

Born as David Keith McCallum, Jr on this day 19933 in Maryhill, Glasgow, the second of two sons of Dorothy Dorman, a cellist, and orchestral violinist David McCallum Sr. When he was three, his family moved to London for his father to play as concertmaster in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Early in the Second World War, he was evacuated back to Scotland, where he lived with his mother at Gartocharn by Loch Lomond.

McCallum won a scholarship to University College School, a boys' independent school in Hampstead, London, where, encouraged by his parents to prepare for a career in music, he played the oboe.In 1946 he began doing boy voices for the BBC radio repertory company. Also involved in local amateur drama, at age 17, he appeared as Oberon in an open-air production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Play and Pageant Union. He left school at age 18 and was conscripted, joining the 3rd Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, which was seconded to the Royal West African Frontier Force.In March 1954 he was promoted to Lieutenant. After leaving the army he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (also in London), where Joan Collins was a classmate.

David McCallum’s acting career has spanned six decades; however, these days he is best known for his starring role on the police procedural NCIS as medical examiner as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard. I first really remember McCallum for his role in another US show, The Invisible Man which ran for 13 episodes in the 70's. McCallum by then was a veteran of many TV and Film roles, starting in the 50's including Our Mutual Friend and The Eustace Diamonds, in the 60's he was in several ITV Playhouse shows before moving across the Atlantic to take roles in The Outer Limits and his big break as Illya Kuryakin in several incantations of The Man from Uncle.

His most notable films were The Greatest Story Ever Told as

Judas Iscariot and of course Ashley-Pitt 'Dispersal' in The Great Escape.

As well as the aforementioned Invisible Man in the 70's he took time to pop back over to our shores to star in two quality series, as Flt. Lt. Simon Carter in Colditz and Alan Breck Stewart in an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's, Kidnapped.

The 80's saw him team up with the lovely Joanna Lumley in Sapphire & Steel and several guest roles in the likes of The A Team, Hart to Hart and Murder, She Wrote as well as a one off reprise of Illya in the TV movie The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair.

The 90's saw David in Cluedo and Trainer on our TV screens over here and American science-fiction series VR-5 in the states..

During the last 20 years or so he has been in the kids TV show, Ben 10: Omniverse as the voice of Professor Paradox and of course Donald Horatio "Ducky" Mallard in over 350 episodes of the popular NCIS.

David has been married twice. He married his first wife Jill Ireland in 1957. They met on the set of the movie Hell Drivers. Together, they had two sons and a daughter, Paul, Jason and Valentine, with Jason being the only one who was adopted. In 1963, David introduced Jill to his co-star on The Great Escape, Charles Bronson, and she left David and married Charles in 1968. In 1967, David married Katherine Carpenter and they have two children together, a son Peter and a daughter, Sophie. He and Katherine currently live in New York.

In NCIS since 2018, Ducky, played by McCallum, has appeared in fewer episodes. avid McCallum explained that appearing in fewer episodes will allow him to see more of his family, which includes his wife, children, six grandsons, and their cat, Nickie. According to IMDB he has chalked up an amazing 457 appearances in the show, morethan anyother character in the series.

[talkinfanfic]

Episode 306 - Talkin’ U2, Bono, and Bedge with Tory from the Retro Fanfic Retrospective Podcast!

Sara welcomes the great and wonderful Tory, best known for their reliably insightful analysis of fanfiction on the Retro Fanfic Retrospective podcast (found wherever you get your podcasts!) Tory shares their lifelong love affair with the legendary band U2, and their knowledge of the band’s history and music. Tory also digs into the amazing feat of how the band’s joyful, sublime chemistry seeps into the very music they produce, sustaining fruitful artistry for nearly fifty years. 

Other topics include: Irish history, and the Christianity of U2, along with comparisons with Oasis. We also talk Bedge and RPF! And we dig into a mini-RFR discussion of likeamadonna’s Bono/Edge fanfiction within a fanfiction, “Fictitious Characters”.

🎧 Find Talkin' Fanfic on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Or stream Episode 306 here!

Show notes below the cut 🧡

Contact and Credits:

Intro Theme: Kyle Laurin "Oasis Supersonic Theme" (Twitter: @cobrakylemusic)

Clip used - Noel Gallagher on The Late Late Show | RTÉ One 

Outro clip - “Beautiful Day” by U2, from the album ‘All That You Can't Leave Behind’ - pulled from Youtube licensed via UMG (on behalf of Universal-Island Records Ltd. ℗ An Island Records recording; ℗ 2000 Island Records Limited

Tumblr: talkinfanfic.tumblr.com 

Instagram: @talkinfanfic

Email: talkinfanfic@gmail.com 

Time caps:

00:00 - Introduction

06:03 - Start of episode

16:02 - Tory’s music background

24:25 - U2 in bloom right now!

35:06 - A little Irish history 

45:19 - The Troubles, a climate for the formation of U2

56:03 - U2’s Bigness, America, and ‘What is Bono??’ 

01:02:45 - Bono’s useful celebrity, vs individualism of Oasis. Or, “do-gooders” vs “do-badders”

01:08:22 - Bono the Energizer Bunny, and U2 in Vegas

01:13:07 - The other members of U2 (Larry, The Edge, and Adam)

01:20:35 - Christianity and U2

01:31:45 - Religion, U2 vs. Oasis

01:34:50 - Religious imagery in the Achtung Baby-era, and Bono’s ‘characters’

01:41:42 - U2 fanfiction and RPF fandom

01:51:20 - “Fictitious Characters”, by likeamadonna

02:02:26 - Fitting Ali into the Bono/Edge

02:07:20 - Start of Rapid Fire! (which lasts nearly an hour, lol)

02:12:27 - Tory’s Top 5 U2 Tracks

Episode References

U2 Fanfiction.com (Tory mentions they used to read fanfiction from this now defunct archive; link via Wayback Machine) 

The Retro Fanfic Retrospective podcast (Podbean, you can also search for it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts)

Link - Band bio, from threechordsandthetruth.net great U2 overview and biography

U2: The Origins Of The Biggest Band Of The Early 2000s a decent youtube documentary on U2

A live performance of ‘Until The End Of The World’ from ‘Achtung Baby’, filmed during the US leg of the Zoo TV tour in 1992. Kiss for the camera at 2m34s <3 

"One" - U2 Music Video (Anton Corbijn Version) feat. Bob Hewson, and U2 in drag! 

Bono interview with NPR Podcasts -  at 14m46 Bono starts speaking about the concept of ‘Surrender’. “Shut up and listen…is kinda where I’m at.”

Noel Gallagher on The Late Late Show | RTÉ One  - “Who puts the batteries in that guy??” 

Youtube Clip - Noel Gallagher, on U2 (for NME) 

 “Electrical Storm” - U2 Music Video directed by Anton Corbijn (starring Larry!)

Photo via Pinterest - Liam and Bono kissing. According to Bono, Liam had a guitar pick in his mouth and dared Bono to try and retrieve it in front of paparazzi. The photo was printed in a 2002 issue of Rolling Stone.  

Reprint of article - “When Oasis Hit the Road with U2” The Daily Telegraph, June 26, 1997

Bono’s ‘characters’ - Here is MacPhisto making a phone call to a taxi to take him home. This was in Syndey, Australia during the 1993 Zoo TV Tour.

Retro Fanfic Retrospective - Special Episode - Fanfiction Hypothesis The RFR crew discuss…what is and what is not fanfiction? (Spotify link) 

Fic discussion - "Fictitious Characters" by likeamadonna (Ao3 link)  

Bono and The Edge - NPR Tiny Desk Concert (2023) Bono asks Edge to “do an Edge thing!”  

Bono and The Edge - BBC Radio 2 Piano Room (2023) Bono and the Edge vibing together through a string-laden performance of classic U2 songs. Bono serenading the Edge during “Vertigo” around 7m30s, lots of fond looks. 

Fic mentioned - The Scientist or: How Edge Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bono by spacemonkey 

Tory’s Top 5 U2 Tracks (slightly deeper cuts, in no particular order): Red Hill Mining Town , Bad, Lemon, Every Breaking Wave, and Stay (Faraway, So Close!)  

“Ordinary Love” acoustic version, U2 on Jimmy Fallon (2014) with Roots. One of Sara’s favorite U2 live vids ever!! 

Tory is listening to - Leith Ross, an indie-rock Canadian singer-songwriter. Here’s a song from their Youtube channel.

Bandcamp - Her Dilemma the bass player that played for Leith Ross during the set Tory watched. “Mathy”, a bit like Slint!