#book three has like double the cast members

[smzeszikorova]

OC Crossover Art Compilation.

Thanks for doing this with me, everyone. This was so much fun, and infinitely better-constructed on my part than the last game. Excited to share these with you.

Here we go!

The First One: In which Winson, Levi, and @thatonecrowguy's OC Scott from Dog Days are stranded in the middle of nowhere together after Scott's van breaks down.

The Second One: In which Catherine and @aether-wasteland-s's OC Blake from A Time Travel Conundrum have a piney conversation about their loves.

The Third One: In which Victoria and @royal1asset-if's OC Serena from Royal Asset try to break into a locked safe.

And the Fourth One: In which @dogmomwrites's OC Jimmy from their currently untitled WIP takes a bug-eating joyride with fellow creepy crawly connoiseurs Eva and Rolyn.

All participants, thanks again! And thanks for your patience. I was planning on making some effortless scribbles, but your OCs were just too fun to draw. I couldn't resist putting in some time.

Hope it was worth the wait. :D

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

So ive diagnosed my blorbo as a knight of doom; how fucked is he?

Honestly, he's probably just fine! Though Doom is the aspect associated with death and suffering, and its players tend to be pessimists, that doesn't mean that they're slated for permanent, terrible fates.

aspect = base personality, class = character arc

So we don't have much on Doom players, but every Aspect exists as an equal-but-opposite reflection of another Aspect, so Doom can also be understood as being equal-and-opposite of Life. All three of our Life players are marked by a stubborn optimism - Feferi's main defining characteristic is outright stated to be her undeterrable optimism, and Jane stubbornly refuses to believe that Crockercorp is evil and that her friends are from a post-apocalyptic future. Meenah, too, stubbornly and wilfully refuses to listen to her friends telling her that trying to kill the invincible demon is an impossible task. If we then look at our Doom players through the lens that they ought to have opposite traits to our Life players, we see that this rings true - both Doom players are pessimists (at least, Mituna was before his injury, given his defining trait then was yammering on about a terrible fate that would befall his team if they didn't all stop being such assholes) who are marked by mutability. Mituna is noted as having this thing where he switches wildly between being highly offensive and then highly contrite, while Sollux's character introduction is literally a double bait-and-switch, where he initially refuses to be introduced, and then changes his mind. Life is also associated with the physical world and biology - the Condy giving herself the psionics of the other bloodlines through whacked out genetic experimentation - while Doom seems associated with artificial technological processes, like code.

I'm also personally convinced that being a dual dreamer is actually a Doom thing, and not a Captor/bifurcation thing, and here's my reasoning: Doom is associated with death and prophecies. Mituna was noted to still have prophetic visions even though he was an Heir, a class not associated with futuresight. Sleep/dreamselves in Homestuck are associated with prophecy - the clouds above Skaia and the whispers of the Horrorterrors - and having an extra dreamself means the player functionally has an extra "death" to spare. Moreover, having two dreamselves gave Sollux extra abilities in the dream bubbles (read: afterlife) - he was able to become "half-dead", which enabled him to leave the bubbles, something Aradia remarks he "shouldn't be able to do". Finally, there's another heavily bifurcated member of the cast, arguably much moreso than Mituna or Sollux (who are both shown to be dual dreamers) - Gamzee. Sollux and Mituna have a tendency to swing between two different emotional states, but Gamzee is confirmed by Hussie in the book commentary to literally have two halves of his personality (and after he snaps, he refers to himself as if he's two people - "THE MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS WERE ALWAYS ME (o: and me :o)"). It's not necessarily a split personality so much as the result of many years of masking his true self behind a persona, but it's still bifurcation AT LEAST comparable to Mituna, if not Sollux - but Gamzee is not a dual dreamer.

Plus, it just makes sense, right? Sleep and death are interlinked in Homestuck; the death one has to take to become God Tier is called "the Ultimate Nap", God Tier clothes are equated to pajamas, and becoming God Tier merges you with your dreamself. Thus I posit that Doom's domain is over pessimism, negative feelings, death, sleep, rest, prophecies, and endings. Its players are negative and pessimistic, but empathetic compared to Life's tendency towards callousness; they tend to be contradictory and standstill compared to Life's stubborn forward motion, and they're commiscerators, not healers. They are guides in stormy weather, reminders that sadness, grief, and pain are not bad things and not to be shunned; they aren't really super noticeable when things are going well, but when things turn to shit, they often become the team martyrs, willing to sacrifice themselves to course correct - but because they have a bit more death to spare, they're able to do so without losing themselves (Sollux, after all, ends the story alive).

Knights, meanwhile, have a character conflict centering around insecurity and façade. They're usually handed some great destiny - Dave to defeat LE, Karkat to unite all the bloodlines. However, they're struck by self-loathing and imposter syndrome, and to cope with those feelings, project a façade opposite of their Aspect. For example, Dave is consistently shown to be one of the most detail-oriented members of the team, who listens and absorbs all the bullshit Karkat says and picks up on "hints" that he's meant to kill LE, and he's constantly working to polish his "art" - these reflect Time's association with minutiae and its driven, goal-oriented nature. However, he has a crippling insecurity about Not Being Good Enough, and a fear of genuine sincerity, brought on by years of abuse at his brother's hands; this leads him to project a front of "disaffected cool kid who doesnt [sic] give a fuck". At its worst, this causes him to make the wild assertion that LE has never even done anything directly to him or his friends, so he refuses to fight the guy - even though he literally watched LE pop a bubble, and was haunted directly by LE in his youth via Lil' Cal.

Similarly, Karkat loves his friends and feels personally responsible both for their success and their failure, and when push comes to shove, and he's able to calm down and get serious, he's actually one of his team's most level-headed and reasonable members (his counselling of past!Kanaya comes to mind, where he talks her through her romantic woes and reassures her that she's doing just fine at frog breeding and will figure it out) - these are reflective of Blood and its focus on bonds, and its mature, responsible (if neurotically so) nature. However, he has intense self-loathing due to both his mutant status AND crippling insecurity about his status as the Second Coming of Troll Jesus (something he's confirmed to know about because he rants at Jade at one point about how his blood color makes him good only for an execution in the exact manner the Signless suffered); these lead him to try and project a façade of a Strong Leader Who Don't Need No Friendship, which ended up having disastrous knock-on effects for his team - he functionally sanctions the Tavros/Vriska situation, which dashed any hope of Tavros self-improving; he ignored Equius/Nepeta, which stifled Nepeta's ability to grow due to Equius's isolating overbearingness; he ignored the Terezi/Vriska dynamic, which ended in disaster; and he left Eridan all alone to fester and stew in loneliness and anxiety - all the worse because it's heavily implied/foreshadowed that Eridan and Karkat have a naturally pale dynamic, and confirmed that Karkat is basically the only person on the entire team who cares about Eridan and takes his problems seriously. His fixation on being an independent badass distanced him from his Aspect, and his team paid the price, and then, with half his friends dead, he had no way to complete his arc as a Blood player.

Finally, Latula is beset by crippling insecurity, especially over her role in the team and whether or not people like and respect her - she neurotically tells Meenah that she used to view Meenah as a competitor for the team's "badass cool girl," and worked herself into knots about it, before "rationalizing" it as being okay because Meenah could be the team Bad Girl, but Latula could be the team Rad Girl. This is her façade - she acts like a dumbass exaggerated Gamer Girl stereotype so that people will like her better, opposite Mind's associations with intellect, logic, and rationality. Porrim outright says that she's smarter than she lets on, and tells her to drop the act, which Latula agrees to do, confirming that it is, in fact, a façade. Latula also confirms for us that justice and karma are Mind things, stating that she "gets" how the Mindfang/Redglare situation turned out that way karmically, and that Porrim doesn't because she's not a Mind player. But, as a result of her dedication to her façade and pursuit of likability, Latula ends up being one of the team's ultimate bystanders. She's friendly towards Meenah and hostile towards Damara, even though, given she can sense how nasty Aranea is, she should've been able to easily identify how horrifically Damara was treated - the poor, rustblood immigrant being bullied by the rich fuchsia heiress? C'mon. All the worse because Latula IS anti-casteist, as this is one of the things Kankri likes about her. Moreover, she's dating Mituna... and I've gotten death threats for saying so before, but I stand by this; it's not a healthy relationship.

MITUNA DIGRESSION TIME. Asked by Meenah what she even likes about him, Latula can't come up with anything besides "idk, there's more to him than all the awful stupid shit he says" and "he will always need me". 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬 Like she literally can't resist insulting him when she's trying to come up with why she likes him, and the only specific thing she can name is that he's dependent on her... terrible! Terrible icky bad! Moreover, Mituna himself doesn't seem to... know... that he's dating Latula? He never comments on it, and in fact, when Meenah asks him to take off his shirt so she can see if he has God Tier wings, he ENTHUSIASTICALLY assumes that she's romantically/sexually interested in him and reciprocates. Cronus outright says that part of what he "likes" about Mituna is that he's too incoherent to understand anything Cronus says, which appears to be the common consensus. Look, I am not at all saying that neurodivergent people OVERALL can't consent. I am just saying that, given that Mituna literally forgets how to take his own shirt off, and seems confused and unhappy about Cronus's intimate shoulder-touching, but can't articulate it any more coherently than "why is your hand touching me, i don't want it to be touching me", I would personally feel uncomfortable doing anything romantic/sexual with someone drunk or high enough to be similarly impaired - especially because Mituna's condition is always framed as an injury and not who he is as a person. Not only that, but it's an injury he suffered at Kurloz's hands so Kurloz could use him as a hypnopuppet (the source of the "rumor" Cronus hears that Mituna can speak coherently around Kurloz)... basically, the injury is framed as a Very Bad Thing that happened to Mituna, which allows him to be taken advantage of and abused by the others on his team. And given that Latula's only stated reason for liking him is "he's dependent on me"? 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

Finally, the thing people always point to as "Latula cares about him awww" is that she yells at Damara not to touch him while he's sleeping, or else Latula will kill her. The thing is, though, Damara is the victim in her story, no matter how explosively she retaliated, and Latula - the smart Mind player who instinctively understands karma - would know this. Moreover, we know that Damara is perfectly kind and polite to people she has no beef with, because she's very sweet to the humans - and she's even still needlessly kind to Rufioh, offering him genuine romantic advice, just because he can actually speak her language. Before his injury, Mituna is characterized as constantly trying to warn his team to stop being shitty or else something bad will happen to them - AKA, the only person on the team who likely WASN'T a complicit bystander in the Meenah/Damara situation - meaning that it's more likely than not that Damara is friendly to Mituna. What does it ACTUALLY say, then, that Latula tries to keep her away from him? Just food for thought.

Anyway, Mituna digression over - point is, Latula dating him is her taking advantage of him (in fact, it probably passes her team's smell test because of the way it resembles culling - which, by all means, Latula is AGAINST), and thus, a nasty, unjust thing to do - but done because it assuages her insecurities and helps her push her façade as the Gamer Girl to have a Gamer Boy BF.

So an Knight of Doom takes shape - someone who's pessimistic and contradictory, who has prophetic abilities, but deeply insecure about some aspect of themselves. Given Doom's association with prophecy, the impact of the Knight's usual overhanging prophecy is probably magnified - the Knight of Doom is intended to accomplish some great feat, but their powers naturally cause them to see only poor endings. Thus, to cope with it, they adopt a persona that distances themselves from Doom - probably something relentlessly cheerful and positive, like a self-help guru. They also probably stay awake as often as possible, avoiding Doom's sleep and rest. Still, they're actually quite drawn to some aspect of their Aspect - like Dave to rap, Karkat to romance, the Knight of Doom probably has some great, earnest fondness for code, or lucid dreaming.

Their arc is one of internal struggle against insecurity, the façade against their true self. At their worst, the Knight of Doom's insistence on shallow, hollow optimism will lead them to ignore their prophetic visions, and all signs of brewing trouble - which the Knight, the party's direct leader, who wields their Aspect like a tool or weapon (and who can, in turn, wield others as such through their Aspect), is uniquely poised to intervene in. A Knight is the steering force of the party, for good or for ill, and a Knight of Doom who ignores all the warnings their Aspect provides will certainly charter a course for disaster.

However, Doom players are uniquely gifted in course correction, and having two dreamselves means they have an extra death to spare. Even if the Knight of Doom fails to steer the party away from trouble, once they're in trouble, the Doom player may just be able to pull them out at the cost of one of their own lives. In general, this ability to course-correct has great synergy with the Knight's role as a leader; if the Knight of Doom is able to overcome their insecurities, and come to terms with their pessimistic nature, they'll be uniquely poised to intervene in any situation before it gets too messy or passes the point of no return - but even if it does, the Knight still might be able to turn it all around. After all, death isn't really the end in Homestuck, and in the realm of the dead, nobody has more sway than the Doom player.

Doom as an Aspect isn't very glamorous, and its associations with pessimism, suffering, and death can even make it seem like the short end of the stick - which I'm sure Doom players would agree with, those negative nancies. But pain is the bricks that build the bridge of empathy, and one can't have joy without sadness. If you never live, you can't die; if you can never die, are you really alive? Finite things are more precious for their finiteness, and all things must eventually come to an end, one way or another; what a Knight of Doom does for the party is ensure that, when they reach that ending, it's a peaceful, satisfying, and restful one - one in which they can look back and go, "that was pretty great."

Also, being able to wield doom and death like a tool or weapon sounds Sick as Hell

[quill-of-thoth]

It's apparently Little Shop of Horrors day, so let me tell you all about the time I was house manager for the worst musical of, if not all time, the 20zeroes.

I was a theater kid in a school that did NOT do musicals. For crosstown rivalry reasons and a bunch of other stuff. The other high school did musicals so all you choir divas go try out over there. Also casting at my high school was highly correlated with seniority, AKA you were more likely to get speaking parts as an upperclassman, assuming you had been in any play before.

However, my junior year we got a new drama teacher, and therefore a budget, and therefore a spate of more musicals and small cast plays to perform. I got cast in zero things because my acting was pretty mid and my ability to sing is... not. However I was both one of the few non-graduating upperclassmen and The Responsible One and my presence building set / herding freshman / going off book early resulted in fewer stitches, so I got to be house manager. In high school theater, house manager shows up at call to help with things, then opens the ticket booth, answers questions on the walkie, and is the person fourteen year old ushers come to when somebody's mom needs to be sent to the special hell for people who talk on their cell phones in the theater. We did our very first school musical in like a decade, Little Shop of Horrors, in january.

If the Gifs have not clued you in, Little Shop of Horrors is the story of a florist's assistant who mistakes a man eating alien for a talking plant and decides to feed his crush's abusive boyfriend to it. This is not a weird plot for musicals, BUT it requires some prep work. 1) The Chorus tells a lot of the story, so in order to Give Everyone A Chance and to keep everyone's barely trained vocal chords in good shape, we double casted the chorus. Meaning that on nights where they weren't singing, they were supposed to usher, because we never had enough ushers and there were too many of them for all of them to fulfil their crew obligations building set.

2) There are three chorus leads. Some performances have them be the whole chorus but our director had ambitions, so we had three chorus leads and like ten background chorus members per chorus. Performing alternating nights. In the same set of matching RENTED costumes. (Background chorus wore their choir performance duds I think.) 3) Audrey 2, the "plant" is a puppet of some description, large enough to eat a successful dentist. Meaning that somebody has to be mic'd up to voice him, and somebody ELSE has to make him move. And you have to get him on and off stage, or configure the stage in such a way that he can be covered up. Ours rolled. I had only occasionally been on set crew for Little Shop, and most of the chorus hadn't been at all because of their choir schedules, so I rolled up opening night at half past call expecting an hour of running errands for people and an easy house opening. The Stage Manager handed me my walkie and said "I already hate this," which was just her personality regarding opening nights but which should have been a warning. I was quickly informed that The Chorus was being kept in the empty choir room upstairs of the stage because there were too many of them to stay in the dressing rooms, so there was going to be a LOT of walkie chatter about cues. We also had to shuffle in a dude from light crew to drop the show's only F-bomb, because the freshman voicing Audrey 2 hadn't known it existed when he tried out and was now in a tizzy because his Very Religious Grandma was coming. So I had to keep an aisle clear up in the nosebleeds so a crew guy could sneak in the dark from the spotlights to the sound booth to delightedly yell Fuck into the microphone. "We never get people in the nosebleeds anyway," I told Stage Manager, who shrugged unhappily. "Chorus of twenty. Choir kids. Musical."

Spotlight guy, passing by, said something like "I can handle it."

I did some emergency stitching on somebody's loose costume button, sorted out some props, ran around blocking off or opening doors, and then opened the house. With ONE usher because the Chorus Ushers were late. "Isn't their call time twenty to opening?" I asked the one reliable usher, who was build crew only, and he shrugged. I told him to put people as far to the front as he could, no exceptions, and not to use the stage left nosebleeds, and continued taking tickets and cash. We already had a crowd when the Chorus Ushers arrived - Late, not appropriately dressed, or telling me that they had to leave before the show was over because their parents did not want to pick them up any later than that time. I volunteered to tell their parents that having a kid in a show was a commitment that included days that they were not performing and that we had several reliable upperclassmen running carpool if they had emergencies. Only one of the ushers took me up on it, so I decided that we could close missing one usher since we had more than usual anyway, and signed them all in. I walkied the Director that we had all the ushers we were gonna get and that they were late but we had it under control, which was the last time ANYTHING was under control that night. The first obvious problem was that the Chorus Ushers didn't seat anyone, which was literally their one job. They just... walked in and out of the theater following people? I had to leave Reliable at the cash box and demonstrate, then move people out of the one row reserved for ushers and the closed off nosebleed area. Someone, probably Spotlight, had cordoned it off with duct tape so I don't know why they even tried. Then I had to explain that you cannot save a whole row so that tall people do not come and block your view. And then somebody wanted a half off ticket because they intended to leave at intermission. And somebody else wanted to pay by credit card even though they'd had weeks of warning that we were not set up to do that. Add in people jockeying for seats and ushers sneaking off to hang with friends or family and by the time the lights went down I was composing some strongly worded advice to our director about training ushers and making sure that showing up to usher one night wasn't the whole price of being in the cast. Then, in the middle of the second song, a phone rang. "Hi Mom. No, the play has started. Yes I have a ride home. No, dad decided he wouldn't - It's fine -" "Excuse me, Ma'am," I hissed to the rapidly confiscated phone, tugging the usher towards the back doors by the hoodie, "Your daughter is working and we do not allow cell phones in the theater." "But -" "All calls must be taken IN THE HALLWAY (which we had reached by then) and your ringer is expected to be off." "And who are you?" "The Stage Manager," I said, like I was an actual responsible party, and hung up. "When you are done sorting this out, I expect neither you, nor your phone, to make a single sound for the rest of this play. Any upperclassman with an available car seat will give you a ride home if you need it." That made one freshie with the fear of House Manager put into them properly, hopefully it meant she'd behave in general. And walkie hell immediately broke loose. In the next, possibly forty minutes, by virtue of being the person who had already left the auditorium and was wearing normal clothes, I learned the following:

someone needed to run a repair kit up to the chorus holding room

Because Second Night Choral Lead (on props duty) and Opening Night Choral lead had gotten into a slapfight about discovering that they shared the costume

consisting of shoving and shouting that one of them would ruin it for the other because she was "too fat" for a one size fits all wrap dress

And inevitably torn it

Stage Manager could not handle this

Because she'd gone up to Choral Holding Area to tell everybody else in the chorus to shut the fuck up because they could be heard ON STAGE

And the Choir Divas had decided to lock her in a closet

so somebody allowed to have building keys (director) had to come and let her out and put the fear of god into them

So someone ELSE who knew blocking had to move to cues position

Because The Dude in The Plant was relying on that

So I had to go help cover for whatever they should be doing that didn't involve knowing the script

And somebody else had to go whipstitch Opening Night Choral Lead back into her damn dress before their next cue

Also The Dude In The Plant was concerned because the rolling portion of the stage felt kinda wrong? The part he was on? Inside the plant puppet?

The director needed a List Of People Whose Parents Were Going To Be Called after the play because we do not lock people into storage closets

And don't think he won't ALSO tell on you to the choir director who will have you out of SO MANY performances for this behavior.

Audrey the Human just tripped over something that shouldn't be backstage because Choral Lead two is being read the riot act instead of doing props

WHOEVER IS RUBBING FABRIC ON THEIR MIC OVER THE WALKIES NEEDS TO TURN IT OFF

Sorry the micbox is right next to the dress tear

The Dude in Audrey the Plant just felt something move that should not

The Dude Voicing Audrey the Plant informs me that one of my ushers has left and also left the door to the auditorium wide open

Surprisingly it is not little miss phone call

Anyway he's trapped in the sound booth waiting for his cue and Reliable Usher doesn't have a walkie

Chorus is back on stage, the riot act is in intermission, Background Chorus Choir Divas have declared that if they are removed from the Chorus for being loud assholes and derailing the whole cast and crew they won't usher and then where will we be?

GREAT! I DON'T WANT THEM!

Choral Lead Two is crying in the boys dressing room instead of running props because nobody's currently using the boys dressing room

Because Choral Lead One will be standing around in a spare sheet in the girls' dressing room while we fix her dress during intermission.

Dude in the Plant says, very quietly, "fuck"

As the combined weight of chorus and cast and plant muppet and dude in the plant and choreography breaks one of the casters on the set

Which fortunately only falls like a quarter inch so everyone stumbles and nobody is hurt

"Should I help?" No, Dude Voicing The Plant, STAY WHERE YOU ARE YOU ARE THE ONLY THING ABOUT THIS THAT'S GOING WELL

Chorus and Crew and Everyone except me (because I'm hunting for a MIA usher) is trying to deal with that rolling bit of set under the cover of SON BE A DEEEEENTIST, YOU'LL BE A SUCCESS!

Congrats my missing usher has not been teen-napped. She saw me putting the fear of god and of me into her castmate about cell phones and has stepped outside the entire building to I Do Not Care What But This Conversation can Wait we LEGALLY have to know where you are

Hey who is the fastest / most invisible sewer we have? Because this dress is messed up worse than we thought. We need them for all of intermission

Me, possibly, except I am working intermission?

Can you come at call tomorrow and fix it? We have safety pins

Sure

Why are there no safety pins in the safety pins box

I dunno why don't you ask the kid who was literally making a safety pin necklace last time I was at set build

Who?

IDK they're new probably

Rolling stage has been fixed! Well. Assuming we don't want it to move.

"Am I safe to eat the guy?" Yes, Dude In The Plant, chow down on our dentist, the set will hold.

Intermission.

THANK FUCK

A twenty five minute intermission is totally normal, Sirs and Ma'ams. Please feel free to buy cold stale football field popcorn.

Phonecall usher "Uh. So My dad. Decided he wasn't going to come pick me up at intermission."

I gave her the name of the senior with a car that I thought would be feeling least murderous, because I am not a complete monster.

No, sir, you cannot show up for the second half of a play and expect a half priced ticket. It is five. Goddamn. Dollars. Anyway somehow the worst thing that happened on second night was Dude Voicing the Plant deciding that he was actually brave and secular enough to do the swears so we got TWO people saying fuck directly into the microphone. He still passed on Tough Titties though.

[mcalhenwrites]

A bit of a guide, since I have so many stories

Dragon Universe stories: The Will of the Whispering (TWOTW), The Hostile Credence (THC), The Dragons' Cosmos (TDC), Planetary Boundaries (PB), Cashmere, and Brackish TWOTW: Lester, Mildred, and a lot of kids THC: Seth, Niven, Ewan, Dunn, Flick, Tessa, etc. Lots of characters here, but they're more likely to be mentioned alongside the ones I've just named. TDC: Roscoe, Noah, Sylvester and their families. Bircha and Afensi are dragons in this story. PB: Huge cast, but there's Bianca, Brooklyn, Dorian, Florian, Trace, Lucinda, Andy, etc. Cashmere: Toryn, Hadeon, Riley (this is a retired story, however, and I reused Toryn and Hadeon in Geckos - they are Duncan's father and stepfather) Brackish: Basil (Christian), Cassidy, Wendy, Imogen, and Alison are the main characters outside of family members. (Imogen has a twin brother and Alison is her little sister, and ofc Basil and Cassidy's families are brought up frequently). Oh, and Sidony, the most important character. (A DRAGON) Pleasure Seekers series is my asexual incubus story and has four books planned. Characters include Xavier, Zachary, Clarissa, Eloise, Daphne, Bernardo, Fenton, Bethany... I can't keep up with this one, honestly, there are also a lot of characters here. ;) Name the Frogs: Irving's dad, Nestor, is a villain. Serrated Petals: Roland is a villainfucker, and that villain is Otto, and he has a side piece named Luther. Roland's little half-brother, Stanley, is dragged into this bullshit. Seasons: Vivian, Graham, and a ton of seasonal children. Easy to spot by all the mentions of weather and seasonal affinities! Stargazers' Hill universe: Stargazers' Hill (SGH), Before our Ghosts (BoG), and Rascal. I'm going to sum this up with "I have a lot of feelings about Ambrose and Thaddeus and Ferdinand/Hazel is my OTP, and Opal is my wife... okay, she's not, but she should be." Untitled story about automatons, featuring childhood enemies, Warren and Henry Maureen Maribel is the name of the story and the name of the character that the story focuses on. This is the child actress story. The Elephants Always Come Back: Mirza, Boris, Fredrick, Hana, Gustav, Moswen, etc. Love them. I name my Halloween spiders after these characters. Initials for story are TEACB, I call it TEACUP bc it's cuter. Geckos, Automata: Julian, Mortimer, Kieran, Rosalia, and Duncan. AND GECKOS AND AUTOMATA. This one is for sale, please buy it? Little Horrors: Hervey and Algernon, but they're not the only characters. Littlespace story with a side of horror/spooky vibes! Where the Lanterns Glow: Nolwen and Evander story. The witch story. Originally called Double Double Witch Boy in Trouble because it was supposed to just be sexy. Skin from the River: Three river dads have to go find their dangerous river son who used the bones and such from his waters to form a human body. This one is horror. I have a bunch of others and no time, but most are short stories or still in development. Stay tuned, I have over 1000 characters at this point <3

[votsalot]

what's ur tofu crumble recipe ⁉️ :3

My tofu crumble recipe is a modified version of what can be found in Jenny Rosenstrach's cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarian (full of so many hits - I recommend checking it out from the library to see if it's your thing if you don't have it already!) We always double this recipe, so these quantities are going to represent this -

INGREDIENTS:

2 blocks extra-firm tofu, drained

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil (vegetable oil works, too)

salt and pepper to taste (we use salt ground with bits of chipotle)

4 garlic cloves, minced (we use our garlic press)

1 whole chopped yellow onion (this recipe would not be hurt by more or less depending on your preference)

2 tbsp tomato paste

SPICE MIX: (We have a big spice library; edit as suits your needs)

2 tbsp chili powder (dark or light, your preference)

1 tbsp red pepper flakes

1 tbsp smoked paprika

1 tbsp chipotle powder

1 tsp adobo

1 tsp cayenne

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp cumin

2 tsps dried Mexican oregano

TO TOP:

1 12 oz (or more) package of queso fresco crumbling cheese

cotija or parmesan (the kind for spaghetti)

1 bunch green onions, chopped (white and light green parts only)

cilantro (fresh or dried; dried has a less "soapy" flavor if you're like me and have the soap gene. She's a good supporting cast member but I struggle when she's the star)

BASE:

2 cups uncooked basmati rice (yield: 4 cups cooked. you could add vegetarian tomato bullion or lime juice to this if you wanted, etc.)

DIRECTIONS:

Using your hands, squeeze the tofu like a sponge to expel as much liquid as you can and breaking it into crumbled as you do this. Place the pieces on a paper towel-lined plate as it breaks, then pat them dry with another paper towel (The more liquid you expel, the easier it will be to crisp up the tofu.) <- vots note: I don't really do this step as written in the book. I press my tofu wrapped in a kitchen towel and then I crumble it in my hands.

Heat the olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.

Add the tofu then season with salt and pepper and cook undisturbed until browned, about three minutes. Toss, scraping up anything sticking to the pan, and continue to cook until the crumbles are golden-brown and crisp around the edges, another 3-4 minutes.

Push the tofu to the side of the pan and add the garlic and onion, cooking until the onion starts to soften, another few minutes. <- vots note: We like our tofu super crispy; all together, we usually end up crisping it for 15 minutes before adding the onion/garlic. We toss/stir every 5 minutes. We leave the onion/garlic in place for 5 minutes before stirring into the tofu)

Decrease the heat to medium. Stir everything together, then add the [spice mix] and cook until the spices get deep in color, about 3 minutes.

Stir in the tomato paste, then add 1/2 cup water. Stir until the tomato paste is distributed and warmed through, about 2 minutes. <- vots note: The 1/2 c water is reflective of the doubled recipe.

You can serve this recipe over rice, as I've described above, or it makes an excellent burrito filling / salad protein (in this case, let cool, and then toss w/ black beans, avocado, fresh tomatoes, and a citrus vinaigrette). It also reheats like a champion.

This recipe makes six 3 cup Pyrex containers of food (tofu and rice together).

If you're into meal-prepping, a lot of the ingredients can be prepared (chopped) for a few days beforehand. I can't give exact time estimates because I am a slow loris at cooking recipes.

Enjoy at your leisure! :)

[maki-2206]

The Pearl

book one

The beginning

Act One - The Beginning Third person

Fifty - Six Years Earlier 

Essex , England The London Road 8th September 1761

Like all members go the German aristocracy , Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Sterlitz, was in possession of a great many names. Sophia for maternal Grandmother, Sophia Albertine of erbach-erbach, a countess by birth and duchess by marriage. Charlotte for her farther, Charles Louis Fredrick of Mechlenburg-strelitz,who was born second son and had died before he could assume the position of head of the family. Then there were the many and sundry double-barrelled lands and properties that made up her heritage.She enjoyed all of her names, and she was proud of every last one , but the one she liked best was Lottie.Lottie . It was the simplest of the bunch but that wasn't why she liked it, you had to know her to call her Lottie .Adolphus was the one who'd coined the pet name Lottie. And that was the true reason it was her favourite name. It had been bestowed upon her by her favourite brother.

pardon , her former favourite brother

" You give the appearance of a statue ." Adolphus said, smiling as if she had not spent the last three weeks begging him not to marry her off to a stranger. Charlotte wanted to ignore him. She'd have liked nothing better than to never utter a word in his direction for the remainder of both of their lives, but even she recognised the futility of such stubbornness. And besides, they where in a carriage in the southeast of England, and they had a long ride both ahead and behind them .she was bored and furious, never a good combination.

" Statues are works of art," she said icily. " Art is beautiful ."

this made her brother smile, damn his eyes. " Art can be beautiful to gaze upon," he said with some amusement. " You, on the other hand, are ridiculous to the eye."

" Is there a point? " Charlotte bit off.He shrugged . " You have not moved in an inch in six hours."Oh. Oh. He should have not gone there. Charlotte levelled her dark eyes on his with ferocity that ought to have terrified him.

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

Essex , England South-East London Greenwich Blackson House 8th September 1761

In one of the many room of the Blackson home sits a light brunette young women infant of a gold mirror as she is being smothered over by her lady maids all each to their own tasks.

" It ought to not be so bad my Lady " an older maiden speaks up with a motherly tone seeing the young Ladys frown. " why must I go?" she grumbles blankly in reply to the older women," it is out of respect from the Blackson family Mariah my dear" the older lady says softly with a hint of sternness that Mariah knows not to argue back against.

Four-teen years ago Mrs and Mr Blackson died in a carriage accident leaving their only daughter, Mariah age Five ,an orphan and to be brought up in the maids and staff hands to become the next leader of the Blackson house. It has been lonely on her own as she grew up with no one but staff members all around her, in result she slowly but surely built up these high walls guarding her soft, shattered beating heart that is slowly losing hope for her innocent broken soul.

Mariah stand infront of the golden floor length mirror looking back at her self not quite sure on who the person she is looking at. To others she looks beautiful,elagent with her white and baby blue dress with french trimming and white pearls a peal necklace and earrings  the hair in a low bun with some lose braids and curls with a pearl and gold tiara headband white gloves ,white and gold heels , white umbrella with laze gold trimming and the Blackson initials 

...but too her she doesn't recognise herself or the girl inside of her she's just lost or more like hiding.wever that will be only temporary or for good she will never know..snapped out of her thoughts by a hand on her shoulder , Mariah glances up to the older women with her eyes and gives a silently nod at the worried look casted her way.with one last glance to herself in the mirror she leaves the room heading down the hallways and grand stairs to the very carriage awaiting for her at the front door.

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

" I am wearing Lyonnaise silk. Encrusted with Indian sapphires. Withan overlay of two-hundred-year-old lace."

"And you look beautiful,"he said, he reached out to pat her knee, then hastily withdrew his hand when he caught her expression. Murderous

" Apparently too much movement could cause the sapphires to shred the lace." Charlotte growled. She literally growled." Do you want me to shred the lace? do you ?"she did not wait for him to answer. They both knew he was not meant to." If that were not enough," she continued, " the gown sits ontop a be-spoke underpinning made of whalebone."

" Whalebone ?"

" Yes, whalebone, brother. The bone of whales. Whales died so I could look like this."

At that, Adolphus laughed outright. " Lottie-"

" Don't ," Charlotte warned him " Don't you dare call me Lottie as if you care."

" Come, Liebchen, you know I care."

" Do I? Because it does not feel as if you care. It feels as if I have been trussed up like a prized sow and upon the alter as sacrafice."

" Charlotte-"

she bared her teeth." Shall u put an apple in my mouth?"

" Charlotte, stop. You were chosen by the King. This is a great honor."

" That." Charlotte spat. " that is why I am angry. The lies. You will not stop lying."she could not stand it, these endless lies. This was no honor, she wasn't sure what it was, but certainly not an honor.

King George III of Great Britain and Ireland had appeared out of no where( or rather, his people had; he had not deigned to make an appearance ) and inexplicably decided that she, Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Sterelitz, should be his next queen. Mecklenburg-Sterelitz.

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

Hello I hope you liked thus chapter.

Do not ask for updates or new chapters I will try and do it as much as i can.

do not be afraid to comment and leave your imput and what the name of the love intrest u want it to be wether its a OC or a character in Queen Charlotte but it will not be King George as he is my wife charlottes man no discussions. if u have seen any spelling mistakes or any ideas at all for plots and things u wanna see then go ahead and leave a comment.

1113 words 

[fy-yongsun]

[NEWS] Ok Joo-hyun-Solar Musical 'Matahari' Opens to Standing Ovation

The musical 'Mata Hari' opened at LG SIGNATURE Hall, LG Arts Center Seoul on December 5 and has successfully completed its run. Returning for its fourth season with Ok Joo-hyun and Solar, “Matahari” is a legendary performance that has been upgraded from previous seasons and is receiving rave reviews as the “definitive version” of everything a large-scale musical can show.

Ok Joo-hyun and Solar, who play Matahari, have captivated audiences with their irreplaceable charm. Ok Joo-hyun, who has played the role of Mata Hari in all of the previous productions, including the 2016 premiere, the 2017 revival, and the 2022 production, has become Mata Hari herself, impressing audiences with her delicate characterization and overwhelming vocal talent. Solar, who made her first musical debut in 2022 with “Matahari,” also received great acclaim for her more mature performance as she portrayed Matahari in a more solid manner.

In addition, Enoch, Kim Sung-shik, and Yoon So-ho as Armand, Choi Min-cheol and No-yoon as Colonel Radu, Choi Na-rae and Yoon Sa-bong as Anna, Kim Joo-ho and Hong Kyung-soo as Pervé, the French Minister of Defense, and Ahn Jin-young as Margareta, all proved to be a great cast as they perfectly embodied their characters and created an immersive stage.

Speaking about how she felt after the first performance, Ok Joo-hyun, who plays Matahari, said, “All the actors in the musical ‘Matahari’ will do their best so that there will be no regrets (after the performance). I hope that the beautiful message of the work will be kept in the hearts of the audience for a long time.” Solar added, ‘All the actors and staff involved in the musical ’Matahari' have been preparing from the bottom of their hearts since late summer to deliver a perfect performance. We hope that the audience will stay with us until the end, as we have carefully prepared all the intricate details.”

Frank Wildhorn, the composer of Matahari, said, “Ok Joo-hyun's grace and lyrical delivery inspired me to write Matahari. I would like to share this honor with everyone on this stage, and finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the audience for coming to see Matahari,” said Frank Wildhorn, composer of the musical.

The musical is based on the true story of the beautiful dancer Matahari (real name Margareta Gertrude Zeller), who was arrested and executed by the French authorities for being a double agent during World War I.

As EMK Musical Company's first original musical, “Matahari” was created by composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist Jack Murphy, along with executive producer Hong Hyun Eom, who led the musicals “Rebecca,” “The Laughing Man,” and “Beethoven; Beethoven Secret” to box office success, and has been loved by audiences every season since its premiere in 2016.

At the time of its premiere in 2016, the musical “Matahari” was recognized as a box office phenomenon with three consecutive months of No. 1 booking links, over 100,000 attendees within eight weeks of its opening, an average audience occupancy rate of 90%, and three awards for Musical of the Year, Stage Art, and Female Lead at the 5th Yegreen Music Awards, as well as two awards for Stage Art and Producer at the 1st Music Awards, and the Grand Prize at the 12th Golden Ticket Awards.

In the 2017 revival, it was the No. 1 booking link for two consecutive months and exceeded 200,000 cumulative audience members, and won the Best Revival Award and Best Actress Award at the 6th Yegreen Music Awards. After exporting the license to Japan in 2018, the show was also successfully performed in Japan, making it a perfect global musical.

Meanwhile, the fourth season of the musical “Matahari,” which has begun performing the upgraded legend with “Matahari's Complete Edition,” will be performed at LG Arts Center Seoul and LG SIGNATURE Hall until March 2, 2025.

[madraleen]

Bungo Stray Dogs - Kafka Asagiri/Sango Harukawa Vol. 18-19: Basically just praise for Harukawa-sensei in commentary format. (*anime spoilers and manga spoilers up to ch.114.5)

-BEAUTIFUL PRINCESS SIGMA ON THE COVER I LUFF HIM

-dazai, sigma, fyodor, why so pretty, guys?

-wait no, dazai can't have it right. sigma can't have learned of the Page from taneda since sigma WAS created with the page.

-fyodor looks so dreamy tho. if villain, why so pretty, man?

-fellas, is it gay to instantly create a code only you and your situationship can converse in, asking for dazai and fyod- errrr, asking for a friend. i kid, i kid, i don't ship them.

-CUT SIGMA SOME SLACK, TERUKO, HE'S ONLY THREE YEARS OLD :"(

-fyodor. my man. calm down with the pretty, you're distracting me

-always happy to see dazai unprepared for what he learns

-A PERSON WAS CREATED FROM NOTHING! BOOK-SAN'S CONSISTENCY MY ASS

-wait, "a piece of writing in the book" created sigma? so fukuchi or someone has access to the actual book, regardless of this one page? you speak in riddles, asagiri-sensei

-"can he even be called human?" dazai said, and immediately felt a connection to poor sigma

-SIGMA BABE, COME TO THE AGENCY (once we reinstate it)! WE WON'T HURT YOU! YOU CAN TRUST US! YES, THAT MEANIE DAZAI TOO, YOU CAN TRUST HIM!

-PROTECT SIGMA!

-i do like lucy

-gosh, it's all drawn so beautifully

-ooh nathaniel is still inside anne's room? oh cool, we'll see mitchell soon then. "soon." in the next... few... years...

-ango needs a long long vacation

-princess fyodor is so goddamn pretty. "i just sat here and prayed and those prayers were answered" - if this is a hint on how he communicates with the outside

-ah man. no one draws them like harukawa-sensei

-the way teruko slaps her knee when she laughs omg, what a cute detail. DAZAI DOES IT TOO, SO CUTE

-gosh i love tachihara. i say that about everyone, but have you met this cast

-every single character design is a gem, i can't

-SIGMA LIKES COOKIES, MY HEART

-THE CONTINUOUS DOUBLE PANEL OF JOUNO HALF-LIGHTER AND HALF-DARKER

-lmfao imaginary dazai is wearing his usual clothes in atsushi's vision and i was like "OMG YES HE DOESN'T LIVE IN THE WHITE FIT, I FORGORRR"

-the panel where gogol tells sigma they're going to kill dostoy and he holds his hat over sigma's head, chef's kiss, perfection, a masterpiece

-MUSHITAROU IS WITH POE OMG. POE IS AN HONORARY AGENCY MEMBER AT THIS POINT

-"why do people write? because inside that story you can see those you want to any time."

-ahaha the irony of ango disliking betrayal

-RANPO-SAN, YOUR CUTE LIL FACE, i missed you

-i love so much this line of thinking, that ranpo's saying 'no, i'm not asking you to believe we're pure and righteous, i'm asking you - wouldn't it be stupid if a master detective got caught like that?"

-ah man, yes, i've missed ranpo's lil face

-SOME OF THE AGENCY REUNITING, MY HEART <333. ATSUSHI LEAPING TO HUG KUNIKIDA, MY HEART! I MISS THEM! I MISS THEM ALL TOGETHER, I MISS THEM

-ranpo, i'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you only need "kenji and tanizaki" to be an agency again because technically dazai is with you since you're in contact with him. i will overlook the fact that he's not in any of all y'all's thoughts and i will not insult you by calling you a child of your own preposterous father figure and the lack of dazai in his thoughts. i will do that for you. this once. (i mean, technically they don't mention fukuzawa either, nor is he present in anne's room)

-the fukuchi panels hit differently with 20/20 hindsight.

-"fukuzawa's golden child" yes, fukuchi, that's our ranpo-san

-watching ranpo deduct who kamui is in real time with 20/20 hindsight is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

-THE PANEL COMPOSITION, THE COLORING, I LOVE IT. YOU HEAR THE PANELS EVEN WHEN NO ONE IS SPEAKING, i can't describe it otherwise, you just HEAR the panels.

-i was about to scream at atsushi so hard for not including dazai in his agency image, but it's fine it's fine, dazai gets his own panel as he deserves. good boy atsushi. i always knew i loved you for a reason. wait. is that a good thing or a bad thing foreshadowing-wise? ...no no, i'll go with "good boy, atsushi, you know dazai deserves a panel of his own 'cause he's that special in general, and that special specifically for you."

-WILL atsushi's head grow back if you cut it off? uh... i don't want to find out, it's... let's not.

-atsushi: "i'm scared that i am alone." aku-kun: "you called?"

-AKU-KUN, MY LOVE! look at him, no one draws 'em like harukawa-sensei.

-LMFAO, "why do i look so flashy!?" SIGMA ARE YOU SERIOUS

-YOUR TWO-TONE HAIR IS NOT WEIRD, YOU'RE PERFECT

-SIGMA THE BAND FRONTMAN

-A FYODOR-NIKOLAI-SIGMA BAND

[a1asta1r]

I GET TO TALK ABOUT HIM LETS GO!

I pretty much had to make a Soc OC for the production I’m in cuz I’m part of the Soc ensemble lol. I can’t draw so there’s no art of him so </33

Ps: if I talk about character dynamics, like Daniel with Paul or Dally, it’s entirely based off how the actors in my play interpret the characters & how we interact in the play! Not entirely based off the book or musical at anything

My boy Daniel <33, some people call him Danny but he really only lets Chuck (who’s also part of the Soc ensemble in my show, played by my best friend) call him that without putting up a fight.

Born & raised as a Soc in Tulsa, he is 17 years old & a senior at school. Both of his older brothers went to Ivy League schools. One is currently at Harvard for law, the other graduated from Cornell for engineering. He’s expected to also go to an Ivy League school, but he doesn’t really want too. Although he’s good at school, he doesn’t like at and doesn’t want to continue.

Because of his extreme anger issues, he was sent to the school counselor who suggested he get a journal to vent in. That journal is abandoned on his desk, the only thing written in it is how dumb the idea was.

He honestly doesn’t like Bob or Randy, he just hangs out with them because of Chuck, who’s his best friend, and Paul, who he’s not as close with but is still one of his closest friends. The three of them kind of have their own group within the bigger group. Daniel is indifferent on the others in the group.

Daniel is borderline jealous of the greasers and their relationships with each other, though he’d rather die than admit that to anyone (except for the one time he drunkenly admitted it to Chuck, but they haven’t mentioned it since) he doesn’t have the best relationship with his family and he only has two real friends, so seeing all the greasers have this found familt and everything, he can only wish to have something like that.

He fights because of insecurities. Part of it is the jealousy he feels talked about above, but also he feels the need to prove he can be just as intimidating as people like Bob or Paul. He is the shortest of the group, & with the fact he has a very androgynous look, he feels like he needs to prove he’s just as much of a man as the rest. (This is what happens when a trans guy plays a rich 60s dude </33)

Absolutely hates cutting his hair, he thinks he looks better with long hair but once every few months he cuts it because of both his insecurities and comments from other socs. While it’s long he usually puts it up anyways.

He’s gay and knows it, he just refuses to acknowledge it and hates himself for it. Paul was actually his gay awakening in his freshman year, but that went away quickly.

Actively has a crush on Dallas, but is trying to avoid it as much as he can. He works at the nightly double at the concession stand and one night Dally started bugging him. He was trying to get Daniel to sell him the snacks for free, and part of his plan to convince him was flirting. While he was annoyed at it, Daniel couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Dally after that.

Jealous of all the relationships Chuck has been in and gets annoyed when he brags about it, saying he’s been single his entire life b/c of the gay thing

Was one of the Socs that went to Dally in the hospital and taunted him about missing the rumble

Actually fought Dally a little during the rumble. He got Dally to run from him by Biting his ear. Daniel still doesn’t know entirely why he chose to do that, but Dally was choking him and he needed a way to get him off.

(Off topic but my productions rumble is SO COOL I’m gonna miss it when it’s over)

There’s probably more about Daniel I could talk about but I think I’ve tapped enough. I’m thinking of actually writing a little smth about him finding our Dally died but idk yet.

I could post a photo of my costume during the show and give you an idea of what Daniel should look like, but since all my photos have other cast members in it take a picrew instead lol

(His shirt is blue but that wasn’t an option on the picrew lol)

Starting a reblog game: RB w/ your own outsiders OC!

if enough folks do, I’ll draw them together or something lol, it’ll be fun!

So these are blatant self inserts for my sister and me

(Info & backstories under the cut because I’ve put waaaay too much thought into this)

and again, pls do reblog/tag me w/ your own Outsiders original/self insert characters! (Drawings and/or written descriptions!) Making OCs was one of my favorite things to do as a kid, so I figured it’d be fun to bring it back here lol

(And to reiterate- if enough of ya’ll do this I’ll draw ‘em all together like a greaser-sona gang! So don’t be shy ok??)

-got sent to Tulsa from Seattle in 1961 at ages 13 and 11 to live with their mildly neglectful uncle, due to their mother getting cancer and being unable to properly care for them. Their father was lost at sea when they were little, so they had no one else to go to.

-in Tulsa they go by their mother’s surname, Biondi, instead of their father’s, because interracial marriage isn’t legalized in Oklahoma until ‘67. They try to pass as just Italian. This works better for Naomi, who takes more after their mother than their father in looks.

-Naomi is good friends w/ Ponyboy- she relates to him a lot, from the dislike of fighting to the love for sunsets (legit Ponyboy reminds me of my sister so much irl) (She’s also low-key got a crush on him and Sodapop which is pretty funny)

-Jesse is closer to Two-Bit, Dally, Steve, and Soda. And he really likes fights. They’re exciting and make him feel tough. When he stops to think about it it does make him a little uneasy how much he’s grown to like them, but usually he just ignores that

-Naomi disapproves of crime. Jesse used to oppose it too, but the more time he spends without good role models and parental figures, the more his morels loosen. Tries hard to be a good example for Naomi though

-Jesse met the gang through Sodapop originally- they were thirteen and some Socs were jumping Soda, and Jesse jumped in and helped him out. Soda explained to him what the deal with Socs and greasers is, because there’s no greasers up North

-Naomi met the gang separately through being classmates with Ponyboy. They were working together on a school project, one with him writing and her drawing

-So Jess and Naomi spent a solid few months hanging out with different members of the same gang, completely unaware they had the same group. They eventually end up running into each other at the Curtis house, and both are totally shocked. Two-Bit, who knew the whole time, nearly died laughing

-Naomi is friends with both Socs and greasers, because she isn’t really either- she’s financially a greaser, but she has a crazy high GPA for someone who has ADHD and dyslexia in the 60s, and besides that, she just doesn’t like what she sees as pointless rivalry

-Jess loves pointless rivalry. At least until people start getting hurt. Then he starts to get angry.

[denimbex1986]

'The Oscar race got a shake-up this week, with Warner Bros. officially moving “Dune: Part Two” to 2024. It’s a game-changing move that could benefit the summer’s second-highest blockbuster “Oppenheimer.” The two seemed destined to dance in several artisan races at the upcoming Academy Awards.

I agree with the move by WB to move “Dune 2.” Why have its auteur director Denis Villeneuve, shockingly snubbed for the first entry, being forced to go toe-to-toe with several cinema masters? Sequels in franchises (i.e., 2002’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”) missed a directing nom before the third installment swept the next ceremony.

The first “Dune” walked away with six Oscars — production design, cinematography, film editing, sound, visual effects and original score. Based on the trailer and early buzz, the second installment would likely be competitive once again in those same races (perhaps even more). With “Oppenheimer,” Nolan assembles another dynamite team of talented artists, all competitive in those same races.

But why does it matter?

Well, if you’re Universal Pictures and you want to win best picture after coming up short with “1917” (2019) and “The Fabelmans” (2022), you are anxious to get your first best picture trophy since “Green Book” (2018). You’re also likely aware one of the best ways to craft the narrative “it’s Nolan’s time” is best achieved when multiple tech statuettes are bestowed upon a single film.

Throughout history, the most awarded movies at the Oscars have been period pieces or tech-driven features such as James Cameron’s “Titanic” (1997) and Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003). Since the expansion of the best picture lineup from five to 10 nominees in 2009, there have been others that dominated their respective ceremonies but came up short of the top prize, such as “Gravity” (2013), which despite winning seven statuettes lost out to “12 Years a Slave,” which netted only three in total.

Removing “Dune 2” allows “Oppenheimer” to plead its case among the tech branch members. When it comes to nominations, each of the categories is voted on by their respective branches. However, after noms, the entire membership (who are eligible) cast ballots, determining the winners.

Barring unforeseen shortcomings (which you can never count out in an Oscar season), “Oppenheimer” is currently projected to land in the realm of 12 Oscar noms — picture, director, actor (Cillian Murphy), supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.), supporting actress (Emily Blunt), adapted screenplay, production design, cinematography, costume design, film editing, sound and original score. With 12, Nolan’s atomic bomb origin tale would be on par with others such as “Ben Hur” (1959), “Dances with Wolves” (1990) and “Schindler’s List” (1993). It would be in a powerful, tentpole position if it could also find a way to muster in additional noms such as makeup and hairstyling, visual effects, or perhaps even a Matt Damon double dip in supporting actor.

Keep in mind it’s very early, with fall festivals nearing kickoff later this week with Venice and Telluride. Any number of films slated to come down the pike, such as Bradley Cooper’s partly monochrome “Maestro” or Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi period dramedy “Poor Things” could offer competition. In addition, we know Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” has more than enough juicy bits to whet the appetites of industry voters. Not to mention, Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” slated to become the highest-grossing film globally, could be the “pink” engine that could as the slog of awards season draws out.

With a $777 million global box office, critical acclaim, and a “Dune”-less year ahead, “Oppenheimer” stakes its claim as an early frontrunner.'

[audiofictionuk]

New Fiction Podcasts - 24th August

Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis D&D Actual Play New Audio RPG! Quests and Chaos plays through Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis in a 12 episode arc. This show features James Aaron oh as the Dungeon Master and players, Thomas Koch, Puja Tolton, Tasi Alabastro, Matthew Bridges, and Christy Bauer. https://spelljammer.captivate.fm RSS:https://feeds.captivate.fm/spelljammer/

Unholy Toledo New Audio Drama! Lou House and Tuffy LeMarr are a couple of runaway farm boys who ride the rails into Prohibition Era Toledo, Ohio, where they discover a world of gambling and bootlegging, ultimately going up against the infamous mobster, Yonnie Licavoli. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2161361 RSS:https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2161361.rss

Murder on Sex Island New Audio Book! When a cast member goes missing from the hit reality show Sex Island, producers ask the mysterious private detective Luella van Horn to go undercover as a contestant and solve the case. What the producers don’t know is that Luella van Horn is actually a woman named Marie Jones, a divorced ex-social worker attempting to lead a double life as a glamorous P.I. Unable to resist the opportunity to be a part of her favorite trashy reality show, Marie/Luella takes the case. But the more she learns about Sex Island’s dark underbelly, the harder it gets to make it out alive. She encounters shady producers, sleazy directors, and contestants willing to do whatever it takes to win the $100,000 grand prize. Will she find the killer? Will she find herself? Will she find...love? Find out now, in Sex Island's most dramatic season yet. https://rss.com/podcasts/murderonsexisland RSS:https://media.rss.com/murderonsexisland/feed.xml

Dice Company New Audio RPG! A real-play podcast about a group of friends who desperately try to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world. https://dicecompany.podbean.com RSS:https://feed.podbean.com/dicecompany/feed.xml

I plasmatori New Audio Book! Una storia travolgente dove finzione e realtà si fondono insieme. Tre persone di tre mondi paralleli: creatività, logica ed emozioni decidono di ritornare indietro nel tempo per plasmare il passato. https://www.spreaker.com/show/i-plasmatori RSS:https://www.spreaker.com/show/5936297/episodes/feed

SideChicks by Valorie M Taylor New Audio Book! News of a murdered Hollywood sex-worker fuels revenge in the heart of Lore, an L.A. Madame, who reluctantly learns murder is her only option. https://www.podserve.fm/series/website/sidechicks-by-valorie-m-taylor,7923/ RSS:https://www.podserve.fm/series/rss/7923/sidechicks-by-valorie-m-taylor.rss

Untrue Crime New Audio Drama! Love true crime but don't love the "true" bit? Maybe it's that you are unsettled by it being fact. Maybe you don't like the dramatization of traumas real people suffered. Untrue Crime is a perfect fit for you! We tell fictional stories in a variety of settings and times of murder, mystery, and intrigue. Whether you are looking for magical misdemeanors, sci-fi white collar crime, or something more realistic, we have stories to tell you. https://rss.com/podcasts/untruecrime RSS:https://media.rss.com/untruecrime/feed.xml

The Distant Silence Radio Hour New Audio Drama! A Lovecraftian anthology audio drama in the style of 1920's radio. Released annually, listen to an hour of three horror stories told to you by the eldritch narrator, The Host. Follow tales of madness, escape, and dread for an evening of spooky thrills and chilling twists. https://rss.com/podcasts/dsrh RSS:https://media.rss.com/dsrh/feed.xml

Flawless - YA fiction audiobook with score New Audio Book! Charlotte is a fairly normal teenager despite the family tragedy that still haunts her. Since her mother's accident Charlotte has had to learn to live in care and oblige her social workers by attending regular therapy appointments. Of course, she doesn't tell them everything. Lots of teenagers get bullied about the way they look and she's had enough pity from grown-ups. Everything begins to change however when a strange Fae visitor appears and reminds Charlotte of the natural world her mother loved and introduced to her, even though Charlotte had always thought she imagined the Fae. Her mother's favourite place, the wood, is being destroyed and Charlotte has been called to help save the Fae home. But, not everything goes to plan, and when Charlotte suffers a terrible accident and wakes up fifty years into the future, it's the technological world and legacy of her father that she will be called to. In this world she can not just be changed to look how she wants, but even given implants to make her one of the 'Flawless'. Amazed by the city and drawn in by the promise of being everything she always imagined, Charlotte finds herself torn between the present and the past. She must uncover the dark secrets and decide if being 'Flawless' is really as perfect as it seems. https://shows.acast.com/flawless-ya-fiction-audiobook-with-score-chapter1 RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/flawless-ya-fiction-audiobook-with-score-chapter1

Snatched From The Flames New Audio Book! What would you say to the people you loved if you knew The Secrets in your head could cost you all your lives? What do you do when you no longer remember your best friends name, the church you’d served at for seven years or the places you used to work? Where do you go when the memories in your mind are now clouded with shadows of things you’d carefully forgotten? Where once there used to be memories of soccer games and high school pranks, there are assassinations in hotel rooms with poisons and blades. Will she run from me when she knows what I’ve done? When she sees the man in the mirror is a shadow of the soul she once loved. Snatched From The Flames is a true story of Nathan Reynolds quest to discover answers to his mysterious double life. Born in between the world of the living and the land of the dead Nathan hunted for vengeance, hope, and healing. Until the day came when he made a decision that changed it all. He chose to tell the woman he loved the man she married was not what he seemed to be. For buried in the past of his other life were Secrets of bloodshed, torment, and murder. This book follows his family as they make their way out of the deadly Underworld where they will discover Hope hiding in the darkest of nights, a daughter who saves his life and a man on a desperate quest for redemption. https://www.spreaker.com/show/snatched-from-the-flames RSS:https://www.spreaker.com/show/5933844/episodes/feed

You only get one picture here - it's five different language versions of the same show.

The Sounds of Nightmares New Audio Drama! Noone, a timid young girl, is committed to The Counties Psychiatric Institute due to her ever-worsening nightmare disorder. She is placed under the care of The Counsellor who has dedicated his life to helping kids overcome their ailments, himself a product of childhood trauma. As Noone recounts her nightly torments during their sessions together, it becomes clear that her dreams unfold with a sinister life of their own. When The Counsellor realizes that her nightmares bear uncanny similarities to those of someone he loved dearly in his past, it unlocks a dangerous obsession inside him, and he grows desperate to find out what secrets hide inside Noone’s head. https://www.thesoundsofnightmares.com RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/the-sounds-of-nightmares

El Murmullo de las Pesadillas New Audio Drama! Nadie, una tímida jovencita, es ingresada en el centro psiquiátrico de Los Condados por los trastornos que le ocasionan unas pesadillas cada vez peores. Le asignan un doctor que ha dedicado toda su vida a ayudar a jóvenes a superar sus problemas y que también sufrió traumas en su infancia. Nadie le relata sus tormentos nocturnos en las sesiones que tienen juntos hasta que queda claro que sus siniestros sueños cobran vida propia. Una vez que el doctor se da cuenta de que las pesadillas son casi iguales a las de alguien a quien quiso mucho, una peligrosa obsesión despierta en su interior y decide descubrir qué secretos se esconden dentro de la mente de Nadie. https://www.thesoundsofnightmares.com RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/el-murmullo-de-las-pesadillas

Il Suono degli Incubi New Audio Drama! Nessi, una ragazzina schiva, è ricoverata nell'Istituto Psichiatrico delle Contee a causa di un disturbo del sonno in continuo peggioramento. Viene affidata alle cure del Dottore, il quale ha dedicato tutta la sua vita ad aiutare i bambini a superare i propri disturbi ed è egli stesso vittima di un trauma infantile. Man mano che Nessi racconta i propri tormenti notturni, risulta evidente quanto i suoi sogni si sviluppino come se avessero vita propria. Quando il Dottore capisce che questi incubi nascondono inquietanti similitudini con quelli di qualcuno che lui amava in passato, una pericolosa ossessione si scatena in lui, mentre cerca disperatamente di scoprire quali segreti si nascondono nella mente di Nessi. https://www.thesoundsofnightmares.com RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/il-suono-degli-incubi

Le Bruit des Cauchemars New Audio Drama! Modie, une jeune fille timide, est internée à l’Hôpital Psychiatrique des Districts en raison de l’aggravation de ses troubles du sommeil. Elle est confiée aux soins du Psychiatre, un homme ayant eu une enfance difficile et qui a consacré sa vie à aider les enfants à surmonter leurs traumatismes. Au fur et à mesure de leurs séances, Modie raconte ses terreurs nocturnes. Ses rêves prennent une tournure aussi réelle que sinistre intriguant le Psychiatre qui note des similitudes troublantes avec ceux d'une personne qui lui était chère par le passé. Se déclenche alors en lui une dangereuse obsession...il est maintenant prêt à tout pour découvrir ce qui se cache dans la tête de Modie. https://www.thesoundsofnightmares.com RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/le-bruit-des-cauchemars

Der Klang der Albträume New Audio Drama! Nima ist ein schüchternes junges Mädchen, das wegen ihrer immer schlimmer werdenden Albtraumstörung in das Psychiatrische Institut "Die Bezirke" eingewiesen wird. Sie wird in die Obhut des Betreuers gegeben, der der Aufgabe sein Leben gewidmet hat, Kindern zu helfen ihre Leiden zu überwinden, da er selbst als Kind ein Trauma erlitt. Während Nima in ihren gemeinsamen Sitzungen von ihren nächtlichen Torturen erzählt, wird klar, dass ihre Träume ein finsteres Eigenleben innehaben. Als Der Betreuer bemerkt, dass ihre Albträume unheimliche Gemeinsamkeiten mit jenen Albträumen eines geliebten Menschen aus seiner Vergangenheit aufweisen, entfesselt das eine gefährliche Obsession in ihm und er wird immer verzweifelter auf der Suche nach den Geheimnissen in Nimas Kopf. https://www.thesoundsofnightmares.com RSS:https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/der-klang-der-albtraume

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Toddler and tiara: Meghan Markle STILL throwing tantrums about royal family By Maureen Callahan August 29, 2022 

Lest anyone remain in doubt, Meghan Markle’s latest interview makes one thing clear: This woman has nothing to say. She has nothing to offer, no original thoughts or guiding philosophy, no earthly reason to be taking so much money from, and so much space in, the mainstream media she so clearly reviles.

You know, just as she reviles the British royal family, even as she clings to her title and accepts money from her father-in-law, the future king, who reportedly subsidized her and Harry’s $14.5 million mansion, purchased for their privacy.

Still, yet again, the Greta Garbo of Northern California sits for another major profile, this time for New York magazine. [not NY Magazine, A New York Magazine: The Cut.]

Forget the People’s Princess — now we’re saddled with the Petulant Princess, one whose preferred crown is perpetual victimhood. For the past three years she’s had a global platform, yet all she does with it is complain that she’s been censored, silenced, shut out. Meghan Markle has been a public downer longer than she was a working duchess. It’s long past time for a new talking point.

I must concede her lone accomplishment here: Just when you think Meghan Markle can’t get any more delusional, she outdoes herself. Her self-regard runs in direct opposition to her waning relevance. She clearly has no real friends left — or even decent publicists — because anyone with an iota of common sense would say, “You know, Meghan, it’s probably best not to compare yourself to Nelson Mandela.”

Reader, in this profile, Meghan Markle compares herself to Nelson Mandela. Settle in.

“I had just had Archie,” she says. “It was such a cruel chapter. I was scared to go out.” But go out she did — alas, there’s no keeping Meghan Markle down — to a performance of “The Lion King.” After, a South African cast member, she says, “looked at me, and he’s just like light. He said, ‘I just need you to know: When you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.’ ”

Oh, this piece is full of howlers. Enjoy it. Savor the details. Don’t read it with your mouth full.

Anyone who’s read Tom Bower’s recent book knows that Meghan is an inveterate liar. But here we have the duchess in her natural habitat — a soulless mansion, Meghan “backlit by the late-morning light in a scene that looks like a Nancy Meyers cinematic interior, Town & Country, Goop, and Architectural Digest had an orgy” — and this only frees her up to reveal her most authentically inauthentic self in all her resentful glory.

We begin with the “invisible” help [sounds more like black magic seance] lighting a scented candle from the members-only Soho House — the founder, Meghan says, a friend. Annual dues run a little over $4,000. But remember: even though she wants to be known as a humanitarian, a feminist and a renegade, what’s equally important are all the famous people she knows and the exclusive, rich-people-only places she has access to.

Meghan opens the interview with the most millennial of revelations: “Do you want to know a secret?” she asks. “I’m getting back . . . on Instagram.”

Stop the presses, indeed!

Or . . . not? Meghan doubles back on that bold announcement almost immediately: She’s not sure, she says. She might not. Lots to consider.

What those factors are, she cannot say.

Oh — and this moment: “At one point in our conversation,” writes Allison P. Davis, “instead of answering a question, she will suggest how I might transcribe the noises she’s making: ‘She’s making these guttural sounds, and I can’t quite articulate what it is she’s feeling in that moment because she has no word for it; she’s just moaning.’ ”

This might be the single most insane thing I’ve ever read in a celebrity profile. Truly, it’s Charlie Kaufman-esque: Meghan evincing such pain she’s non-verbal, yet verbalizing why she’s ostensibly non-verbal to her profiler, who Meghan says should tell us that Meghan doesn’t know what she’s feeling because Meghan told her, in Meghan’s own words, that there are no words for it.

It’s celebrity profile by way of Kafka, and it says something that the hundreds of reader comments on New York mag’s site — a self-selecting group of self-identified feminist social justice warriors — mostly proclaim her phony, delusional and vapid, if not an outright liar.

What will make Meghan happy? Hell if she knows. The only solace she finds from this existential torment, it seems, is sitting for fancy photo shoots and talking to friendly journalists.

“When the media has shaped the story around you,” Meghan whines, “it’s really nice to be able to tell your own story.”

Here’s something this self-styled brilliant mind seems to have missed: A little thing called social media has long allowed for unmediated, unfiltered communication between celebrities and the rest of us, the great unwashed who still, despite Meghan cawing and crying on Oprah, or among starving African children (“nobody asks if I’m OK”), or her new podcast (more on that later), still don’t get how hard it is to be Meghan Markle, unappreciated duchess in exile, transcendent representation of rare greatness.

Why won’t we all just adore her?

Gwyneth Paltrow, consider yourself dethroned. We have a new Queen of All Things Insufferable.

“One of the first things my husband saw when we walked around the house was those two palm trees,” she says, touring her grounds with our ink-stained wretch. “See how they’re connected at the bottom? He goes, ‘My love, it’s us.’ And now every day when Archie goes by [the trees], he says, ‘Hi Momma. Hi, Papa.’ ”

Archie is three.

A note about that podcast: A lot of people listened to it, I know. I also firmly believe those ratings are the audio equivalent of rubbernecking. If the first episode — ostensibly an interview with Serena Williams — is reflective of the rest, this is really a podcast about Meghan Markle.

She leads with her oft-reported origin story [🤣] of Feminist Meghan, standing up to corporate America as an 11-year-old (a story Tom Bower surgically took apart as false), then asks us to marvel at her longtime friendship with Williams and endure another tall tale in which the royals and their staff do not care that baby Archie almost burned to death in South Africa.

The conversation is everything one would expect, Meghan going on about her “lived experience” — is there any other kind? — her “dear, dear friend Serena,” and the “labels, boxes and archetypes” that women still suffer. “Women” being proxy for Meghan, “archetypes” such as: Spoiled brat. Ungrateful. Delusional. Hypocrite.

Now, I will also admit that I didn’t think Markle could surpass the moment when, as a working royal, she spontaneously wrote inspirational messages — “you are strong,” “you are loved” — for sex workers. On bananas.

But here, we see a totally spontaneous and sugary everyday school pick-up — “She scoops [Archie] [child actor] up in a big hug so full of genuine emotion that both close their eyes” — turn into a teachable moment about the homeless.

“At a stoplight, [Meghan] reaches into the trunk and produces a brand-new black backpack and hands it to her security detail to give to an unhoused man on the corner.” [Because she's so concerned about her "security" she couldn't keep the bag inside her vehicle or ask her security to keep the bags inside their vehicle. Nope MM had to (roll down her window) jump up out of the vehicle to be seen. Poor homeless person was probably a paid plant.]

Yes, young American royal-non-royal Archie: If you want to give some food to a starving homeless person — peanut-butter crackers and granola bars, no whole meals or cash or the like — have the help do it. No need to get near poverty and filth yourself.

And then back we go to the Montecito manse, where Meghan has another ready anecdote about the grand piano Tyler Perry gave her as a housewarming gift, instructing her to “write the soundtrack for your life,” she says. So relatable. [Of course she must learn to play piano better than Kate😉.]

Meghan winds down by returning to her other favorite subject, forgiveness. Even though she won’t forgive her father, whose main crime has been talking to the media, she wants the royal family to know that someday, maybe, she might forgive them. She, of course, has nothing to be forgiven for. Why would one even ask?

“I think forgiveness is really important,” Meghan says, adding that she has “a lot to say until I don’t. Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song.”

Meghan Markle, two very weary nations beg you: Please. Be that silent part.

[charliethomascoxuniverse]

Charlie Cox: Star turn

Charlie Cox is taking a break from Hollywood to bring Pinter to London's West End. And the experience has proved to be truly terrifying, he tells Charlotte Cripps.

Tuesday 29 January 2008 (X)

I'm watching a preview of the Harold Pinter double bill at the Comedy Theatre on the night before I meet Hollywood's newest star, Charlie Cox, when I encounter his fan club in the row behind me. The girls gasp collectively at how good-looking he is, especially at the end of The Collection, when he strips off to a pair of tight white boxer shorts.

The English public school-educated 25-year-old is not only converting teenagers to Pinter, however; he also holds his own with his more experienced co-stars, Timothy West, Richard Coyle and Gina McKee.

The young star has just played the lead in the blockbuster family film Stardust, alongside such Hollywood luminaries as Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert de Niro, Sienna Miller and Claire Danes. Cox's character was the earnest, genuine Tristan, who transforms from boy to man on his quest for true love. In real life, too, the actor is growing up fast as he finds himself, right at the beginning of his career, rubbing shoulders with the acting elite. Although he had picked up some good roles – performing opposite Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice and in Casanova alongside Heath Ledger – the actor was relatively unknown until a few months ago. Nowadays Cox, with his boyish, wide-eyed good looks, gets recognised wherever he goes.

When we meet the morning after the Pinter previews, the actor is cleaning his teeth in his dressing room at the Comedy Theatre. As he welcomes me inside, he takes off his porkpie hat to reveal a mass of bouncing, newly cut hair and clear brown eyes. His dressing room, which has the feel of a miniature flat, is nevertheless smaller than those of the other three members of the cast, because, he says as if he is still at boarding school, he is "the new boy".

His costumes for the character Bill – who in The Collection is accused by a husband (Coyle) of having a one-night stand with a married woman (McKee), despite being in a gay relationship with Harry (West) – are hanging tidily over a camp bed. There is a ‘Just For Today’ meditation book on the table – a 12-step recovery tool – because the actor no longer drinks. He has already begun pinning things neatly to the white walls, to create a collage that will document his four-month run in the play. So far it includes a line of fizzy vitamin C sachets, a Nurofen Cold & Flu packet, even three different Starbucks coffee cup sizes. He points out everything to me – "I will remember the bad cold I had at the beginning of the run" – but it is only day four. He is still warming up in his first proper job on a West End stage. "I am far out of my comfort zone. I am trying to keep up with actors who are consistently brilliant, not like me, this Disney kid Cox from Stardust."

Cox lives in World's End, Chelsea, above an art gallery, with his best friend, Ned, and dog, Ralph. He speaks with passion and maturity about his job, and has a calm presence as well as heaps of energy, which he uses both positively and negatively. "I am incredibly self-deprecating. It stems from self-doubt. With every job I watch, I can't find peace with what I've done. It's never good enough in my mind. I will never be happy if I'm in that mindset, unless I get a review that starts: 'once in a generation'," he says, laughing. "Fame terrifies me. I can say that with honesty. You're terrified that, when people know the real you, they won't like you."

The actor was born in 1982 and grew up in East Sussex with his publisher father, Andrew, his mother, Trisha, and his older brother, Toby. He also has three much older half-siblings, Ollie, Emma and Zoë, who were all leaving home by the time he was born. At the age of eight, he was sent to a local prep school and then to Sherborne School in Dorset. He won the school's Gerald Pitman Award for Drama twice, before leaving school for London at the age of 18.

He got a supporting role in the film Dot the I opposite Gael Garcia Bernal, before starting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at 19 years old. It was a miserable experience. "They start picking holes and I took it all too personally." Auditioning for roles was banned while pupils were still at the school, but after his first year he secretly auditioned for Pacino's The Merchant of Venice. "I remember feeling really panicked. I was meant to have learnt to play the recorder for the class nativity play when I got the call from my agent telling me I'd got the role. The next thing I knew I was hanging out in Luxembourg with one of my idols. Deep down I knew I'd never go back to Bristol. To slot back into my class after that would have been entirely weird."

He then played a warrior in an unwatchable Spanish film, Tirante el Blanco. "To call it a flop is an understatement. The film made no sense. It hadn't been translated properly. I wasn't even invited to the premiere." He returned to the UK to perform for no wages in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore to packed houses at Southwark Playhouse. The production, directed by Edward Dick, received rave reviews. "None of us got paid for it but it ended up being one of the shows to see in London."

This was the first time that the actor had a difficult decision to make, as he had already been offered a role in a big feature film when the Pinter play came up. "It really threw a spanner in the works because there is a pressure to continue to do films. If you disappear for a little while, they just lose interest. But if I want to be still acting when I'm older, the Pinter play is the kind of work I need to be attached to. The theatre is where I'm learning my trade," says Cox. "In Tim's [West] day he did years of rep theatre. Today we are in a manic rush to be rich and famous. None of us young stars has had time to learn our trade. There is a horrible misconception that you can either act or not. But experience is everything."

It is a challenge for Cox, playing a lead role in The Collection – one of the two rarely performed Pinter plays, the other being The Lover, which are being revived at the Comedy Theatre under the direction of Jamie Lloyd, who recently directed The Caretaker for Sheffield Theatres. "Harold [Pinter] has been involved in the production, but he hasn't told us whether my character Bill really did sleep with Stella or not. He is the only one who really knows. Gina [McKee] and I made a decision that we think helps us, but we are keeping that decision a secret." Bill is a million miles away from his Stardust role of Tristan, who wore his heart on his sleeve. "What is certain about my character Bill is that he lies all the time. Whether Bill did it or not, he still gives different versions of the story. He is a bit of a spoilt brat who doesn't think of what other people want. He just wants a bit of a drama. He craves power and manipulates people for his own amusement. He annoys Harry for no reason at all other than to entertain himself."

For Cox, who has been living out of a suitcase for so long, starring in the West End allows him something of a normal routine. He can walk his dog and hang out with the small group of friends whom he has known since childhood. Fame has not changed him, and he doubts it ever will. None of the older actors has ever sat him down for a pep talk either, but Pacino offered him some words of wisdom. "Al said, 'You're not an actor until you've got a leather jacket.' I took it very seriously and asked my parents to buy me this brown leather jacket for my 21st birthday. It's worn really well, hasn't it? Then Al rang me on the day to wish me happy birthday while I was in the middle of having a small party. Answering the phone to him was one of the most bizarre things that has ever happened to me."

Now Cox has another offer to star with Pacino, in Enclosure, a black comedy about a Jewish family. He has already finished filming Stone of Destiny, based on a true story, in which he plays Ian Hamilton, a committed Scottish nationalist who in the 1950s led a raid on Westminster Abbey to bring the Stone of Scone back to Scotland. The actor talks about his career with the excitement of somebody who is living his dream. In promotional TV interviews for Stardust he looked almost startled, but since he's been at home he seems to be more at ease. "It's so easy to become obsessed with the film industry and recognition that we can forget that we are not saving the world. We are just actors trying to entertain people. Doing this play, in front of a live audience, has reminded me of that."

~*~

[ausetkmt]

The New York Times: A Statue of Henrietta Lacks Will Replace a Monument to Robert E. Lee

A life-size bronze statue of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent and were used for research that ushered medical discoveries and treatments, will be erected in her hometown, Roanoke, Va., next year in a plaza previously named after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Roanoke Hidden Histories, an organization dedicated to acknowledging Black history in the community’s public spaces, raised more than $183,000 for the project.

In a news conference announcing plans for the statue on Monday, a local artist, Bryce Cobbs, presented a preliminary black-and-white drawing of Ms. Lacks wearing a blazer and a knee-length skirt with her arms folded. The sculptor, Larry Bechtel, will use the drawing as a reference to design the statue on a stone base.

Mr. Bechtel said he would first make a two-foot model based on the drawing and then make a second, six-foot model that will eventually be molded and cast into bronze. “Hopefully, if everything goes right, we will have an unveiling of this splendid sculpture next October,” Mr. Bechtel said.

Ron Lacks, Ms. Lacks’s grandson, said the effort to honor his grandmother had been a long time coming. “This means a lot to my family,” he said, adding that he was looking forward to seeing “the sculpture that will honor her forever in this beautiful city of Roanoke.”

The finished statue will stand downtown in Henrietta Lacks Plaza, where a Robert E. Lee monument once stood. That monument, erected in 1960, was scheduled to be removed after it was found damaged in July 2020. Plans to rename the plaza took shape after the monument was hauled away that summer. At least 230 Confederate symbols across the United States have been removed, relocated or renamed since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mr. Cobbs, the artist, said in an email on Tuesday that he aimed to capture Ms. Lacks in a way “that reflected her personality and also respected her legacy.”

He said that Ms. Lacks’s family had been in touch with Roanoke Hidden Histories throughout the process and offered to help capture her likeness in the final sculpt. “Which was very generous of them, seeing as how the amount of photographs of Henrietta Lacks are extremely low and limited,” he wrote.

Mr. Cobbs said he had been involved with the project for more than three years. “Being a part of history in this way, working with this group of people to bring this to life, is something that I’ll never forget,” he said.

Ms. Lacks, who was born in Roanoke and later moved to Baltimore with her husband during the 1940s, died from cervical cancer at 31 in 1951. She left behind five young children and an unrivaled medical legacy.

Just months before her death and without her knowledge, consent or compensation, doctors removed a sample of cells from a tumor in her cervix. The cells taken from Ms. Lacks behaved differently than other cancer cells, doubling in number within 24 hours and continuing to replicate.

The cell sample went to a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was trying to find cells that would survive indefinitely so researchers could experiment on them. The cells derived from that sample have since reproduced and multiplied billions of times, contributing to nearly 75,000 studies.

The cell line named after Ms. Lacks, HeLa, has played a vital role in developing treatments for influenza, leukemia and Parkinson’s disease, as well as advancing chemotherapy, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and more.

According to “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” a book about her life that was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, Ms. Lacks’s family members did not learn about the use of her cells until 1973, when scientists contacted them for blood samples so they could study their genes.

Last year, 70 years after her death, the World Health Organization honored Ms. Lacks for the contribution that she unknowingly made to science and medicine. A life-size bronze statue of Ms. Lacks was also erected last year at the University of Bristol in England.

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

Was The Wizard of Oz Cursed?

Despite its commercial success, The Wizard of Oz is seen by some as cursed. There were so many serious accidents on set that those Oscar-nominated special effects almost cost cast members their lives, from the two actors playing winged monkeys crashing to the ground when the wires that hoisted them up in the air broke, to the Wicked Witch of the West’s stunt double Betty Danko injuring her left leg when the broomstick exploded.

Buddy Ebsen was originally cast in the role of the Tin Woodman, a.k.a. the Tin Man, but he was essentially poisoned by the makeup, which was made of pure aluminum dust. Nine days after filming started he was hospitalized, sitting under an oxygen tent. When he was not getting better fast enough, the filmmakers hired Jack Haley to be the Tin Man instead. This time, instead of applying the aluminum powder, the makeup artists mixed it into a paste and painted it on him. He did develop an infection in his right eye that needed medical attention, but it ended up being treatable.

Margaret Hamilton — who played the Wicked Witch of the West and was the one tipped who Harmetz off to the turmoil on set more than three decades later for her 1977 book — got burns, and the makeup artists had to rush to remove her copper makeup so that it wouldn’t seep through her wounds and become toxic. Unlike Ebsen, she didn’t get fired because they could live without her on the set for several more weeks.

In a scene where Dorothy, the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and the Tin Man (Jack Haley) are skipping down the Yellow Brick Road, singing “we’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz,” some think the dark, moving figure hanging from a tree in the background is an actor who hanged himself on set. More likely, it’s one of the exotic birds that the filmmakers borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo in order to create a wilderness setting, according to the fact-checking website Snopes.com. The rumor has been circulating since around 1989, the time of the 50th anniversary of the film’s release.

An actor playing one of the Wicked Witch of the West’s soldiers accidentally jumped on top of Dorothy’s Toto, Carl Spitz, the dog trainer on set, told Harmetz. The dog (a female Cairn terrier named Terry) sprained its foot, and Spitz had to get a canine double. Terry did recover and returned to the set a few weeks later.

In a memoir by Judy Garland’s third husband, Sid Luft, published posthumously in 2017, he writes that, after bar-hopping in Culver City, the actors who played the munchkins “would make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress.”

Garland was only 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz, and her struggles with depression and disordered eating started at an early age and continued for the rest of her life. She claimed that the studio executives gave her uppers and sleeping pills so she could keep up with the demanding pace of show business. She struggled with a drug addiction and attempted suicide several times before she died of an accidental overdose on June 22, 1969, at just 47 years old.

[thephantomcasebook]

WILD New Leak Drop: Jace is gay? And Time Travel in the Hightower: Daeron meets Jon Snow and Sam Tarly?

Yo, I wasn't expecting this ...

Potential Spoilers for Season 2

Alright so ya boi Ser Hunt Reviews ... who has been a great source during "Game of Thrones" got slipped a little something and it's absolutely nuts.

just a summery if you don't want to watch the whole video.

1.) They're going to be shooting the "Battle of Rook Rest" first and it'll take three week in February. They're in need of 500 extras, 50 riding experts, and people with experience with pyrotechnics - Aka: People who know how to be set on fire.

2.) They are in need of two nude male body doubles for an explicit gay sex scene between two main male cast members. For months people have been postulating that perhaps Daeron would be gay. But it turns out that actually it's not Daeron at all, but Jace and Creggan Stark that might have a gay love affair.

Which, now, if you go back to "Fire and Blood" is kinda right there in plain sight - if true.

As GRRM said a thousand times ... there is no secret gay characters, If they're gay, he'll at least make it some what obvious.

3.) Kit Harrington and one other GOT alum have secret roles that are being kept hush-hush, perhaps a backdoor pilot of the "Jon Snow" show.

And this is where I take a bit of a rabbit trail with my own theory.

GRMM has said for years that the Hightowers are magic users and that the Battle Tower is one of the most magical places left in Westeros. We also know that GRRM has been dying - DYING - to tell a story in Oldtown, and as we know from the prologue of "A Feast of Crows" there is something hidden in the vaults of the Citadel that Marwin and Euron are trying to get their hands on.

My theory - and it's just a theory - that the Jon Snow show might deal with Time Travel of some sort and that Daeron's introduction will deal with whatever powerful artifact is in the magic vaults and perhaps will run into Jon Snow and Sam Tarly due to use or discovering of what is in the vault that the maesters are trying to hide.

We've already seen from the Pilot that there is a ton of ASoIaF spoilers in the show that haven't even made into the books yet - like Aegon's dream on the Valyrian Steel dagger when put to fire. And GRRM has said recently that Daeron is very important to the story which is why he insisted that he be included - even when Sapochnik didn't want him in the show.

Like I said, the time travel thing is just a theory ... but since time travel was such a big deal at the end "Game of Thrones" I would expect that it's still an interictal part of the narrative in Universe.

Perhaps Daeron will learn from someone or something about the fate of his family and will try to stop history from repeating itself.

But that's just a theory ...

A HOTD THEORY!