#caribbean theater

[merelyafacade]

Honestly Arcane season 2 brought about the completion of my villain arc.

For years I've been getting more skeptical and more cynical about sequels of any kind. I've watched companies trash my beloved game franchises, beat tv show concepts to death with unnecessary seasons, and turn favorite movie franchises into utter mockery. The pursuit of quality for the sake of telling a good story is so very clearly no longer a priority. Stories are now only made to be quick cash grabs or made to further some other motive.

It sucks to be stuck in a media desert devoid of creativity or artistic/writing talent. It sucks to have every franchise that inspired you at some point be twisted into something off-putting at the best or unrecognizable at the worst. It sucks to be apathetic or even cynical at the mention of any new installment in a franchise.

I remember when I lived for a new game trailer. When I scoured the internet looking for release details of a new movie or game. I remember the hype and predictions that often followed the new announcement. It was awesome. I valued these medias as a source of inspiration and escapism.

Now there is no hype. No excitement. No creativity and nothing that provokes inspiration. I'm so fucking sick of it. Arcane was kind of my last hope. I had been let down by great games, enormous franchises, and tv shows that were at the top of their hype. I've watched brilliant projects and breath-taking stories corrupted by greed and people who don't give a shit about the writing or the characters. I had hoped that Arcane was going to be different.

Season 1 had been SO good and SO wonderful. S1E1 is a masterclass in how to introduce characters. The first season was brilliant in how it interwove its plots and characters, and so skillful in its dialog. For 3 years I had so much hope that season 2 was going to be good.

Season 2 was the last straw. The final betrayal. If the creative team can make something THAT GOOD and then turn around and fuck it up THAT BADLY in a single. season.... Then nothing is safe.

I've got no hope for sequels moving forward. Miss me with that shit.

[boltlightning]

curse of the black pearl + picspam

[whaleiumsharkspeare]

Every time I rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean I end up in this state for the next few days or so where all I want is to go have adventures on the high seas and say things like “belay that!”

[timmurleyart]

Mambo trio. 🎹🎻🥁🎺🪘(mixed media collage)🎵

[l0serr00]

Movie haul

I got all of these for $1 each at a thrift store :3 I’m so happy

[jgvfhl]

*cracks talons* lessgo

What a collection.... i love it.

Yo @worldseer @lucidz-dreamz @theultimatesandwich @toschestationed @thechaoticfanartist @23-bears maybe make a new post? If you want.

Rules: without naming them, post a gif of ten of your favorite films, then tag ten people to do the same

I was tagged by @shyravenns , thank you so much !!!

Tagging (but no pressure as always) : @on-a-lucky-tide @a-driftamongopenstars @adhdoomed @lialucis @jgvfhl @gomzdrawfr

@hexxedghost @cod-thoughts @crowbarrd

[megaflash]

New story!

Here it is, my contribution to the practice round for The Houses Competition. Only wrote a standard, but I ran right up to the word count, which is always a nice feeling.

It's loosely based off of Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a trilogy of movies I've seen multiple times, with directors commentary.

I aimed to make something interesting as the AU

Hopefully I succeeded.

[lupincentral]

TMS just dropped the release date, title, and preview for the first 2D animated Lupin III movie since 1996’s Dead or Alive!

The movie will be released in theaters in Japan on Friday, June 27th. No information is available (as of this moment) on an international release. It features a new rock song by the band B’z called "The IIIRD Eye."

LUPIN THE IIIRD THE MOVIE: IMMORTAL BLOODLINE — for the parts of it we see in this preview, anyway — seems to take place on an island somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. Now, in Mystery of Mamo, they went to an unmarked island in the Caribbean (where Mamo seemed to be headquartered with his cloning technology), which certainly could be the same island. Oddly, outside of Mystery of Mamo, the Bermuda Triangle has only been home to a single Lupin adventure: Part 2, Episode 95, “From the Ghost Ship With Love.”

Watch the trailer below!

[st-just]

Rhetorical self-owns online progressives seem bizarrely committed to walking into at every opportunity

using 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' as the canonical argument for why free speech isn't absolute ; literally a line from a SCOTUS judgement upholding the imprisonment of someone for agitating against the draft in WW1

calling economics 'the dismal science' ; term coined by Thomas Carlyle to insult the economists of the day that didn't support re-enslaving the Caribbean.

[youthereader]

Echoes in the Dark part 5.

PAIRING: joel miller (the last of us) x fem!reader

SUMMARY: 1.6k words. Every morning you wake up and remember two things. Firstly, that your son is dead, and secondly, that Joel Miller is your patient. A fix-it fic. Reader is Joel’s carer as he recovers from Abby’s attempt on his life.

RATING: E (no smut in this part). age gap (reader is in their 30s, Joel is in his 60s). heavy angst, grief and loss of a child, graphic violence.

A/N: Really angsty midweek update for you, besties. I'm not super proud of this part but it's necessary for the plot. Enjoy! 🖤

PART 4

You feel like you know him better, but he couldn't say the same about you. You’re still too scared to open up about your past, and rightly so. You have a nightmare for the first time in a while and wake up screaming, covered in sweat. You curl into a ball and wait until the sun rises, and only then are you brave enough to move. You scrub your face with cold water and examine the lines on your face, the dullness of your eyes. 

You’re quieter than usual and you know Joel knows, but it doesn’t come up. You can’t afford to start these conversations, and you refuse to, no matter what look he gives you when he thinks you can’t see him. 

-

His stitches are out and his leg is still covered in angry pink and shiny marks but he’s so much better. The doctor describes it as phenomenal, like it’s despite Joel’s old age, and Joel grips about it. The whole fucking-not-fucking an old guy thing isn’t something that comes up, either. Except when you reminisce, and you swear it’s not deliberate. He brings this out of you.

“You remember much?” he murmurs one time, while you flip through an old teen magazine you found in the mess hall. 

He’s busy eating a bowl of stew, while you were done some time ago. The way you eat, you still don’t behave like someone whose meals are regular, wolfing everything down as fast as possible just in case. 

“Why?”

You answer a lot of his questions with questions, it’s in your nature. He smirks. 

“I mean, how old were you when-?”

“How old was I when the world turned to shit?” you mutter and he nods. 

You close the magazine and push it aside. “Around seven or eight.”

You pause, the crackling of the fire filling the silence. Even though it doesn’t snow as often, the winter chill is lingering in Jackson. 

“I remember a lot, actually,” you admit. “Again, though - why?”

Joel shrugs. “Wanted to know something you missed, so when I get outta here I can maybe find it for you.”

His smuggler’s past comes up every so often. Your version of coffee is not to his standard, you’ve learned over the last couple months, and he yearns for the real stuff. Actual beans ground down, whereas you’re fine with the freeze dried crap. 

You can think of a lot of things that you miss, but the biggest one is the most painful and most obvious, but you know Joel’s not talking about anyone lost. You shrug. 

“It’s more an experience than a thing,” you murmur. 

He puts aside his bowl and sits back in his chair. “Like what?”

“Going to the movies,” you say, and he closes his eyes, nodding knowingly. “Going into an actual theater, eating popcorn. The stupid trailers that went on for thirty minutes before the fucking thing even started…”

You go on to explain that the last movie you remember seeing in the theater before the outbreak was Pirates of the Caribbean, though your mom didn’t want you to go initially. She thought it would be too violent. Your dad dismissed any concern and took you anyway. 

“And it was kinda scary,” you say, and Joel smirks. “But nothing compared to…”

You trail off. You both know, it’s nothing compared to the violence that came that following September. A lot of your memories from before the outbreak are blurry, a fantasy land. Some of them, you don’t know if they’re real or something made up. You know in your mind that you used to walk home from school in broad daylight, and there was a time before you could fire a gun. Then you jump forward nearly three decades and you’re here, with Joel.

“I miss the movies, too,” he says, pulling you back to the present. “I saw a lot of bad stuff, too. I’d give anything to…”

“Do it all again?” 

“Yeah,” he breathes.

Whatever good feelings you both had are long gone, and now you know you’re going to be stuck in this morose wasteland for a while. Your grief comes back over you like a fog and you slide further down your chair, sighing. 

“I’m sorry for bringing it up,” he says, and you shake your head vehemently. 

“Nah, it’s fine.”

To your surprise, you’re crying, but not real sobs. Tears spring from your eyes and you swipe them away, sniffling. You clear your throat and rise from your chair abruptly, snatching up both your empty bowls. You leave Joel there as you clean up. 

You sense him in the kitchen when you’re stacking clean dishes in the cupboard. You open your mouth to offer him help, but he speaks first.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other, before…”

You aren’t expecting this. You can see he’s thought about this a while, his words somewhat rehearsed. 

“It’s okay,” you interrupt. You want to put him out of his misery and move on. “I keep to myself, remember?”

“You’ve been here two years, Maria told me.”

The thought of you being a topic of conversation between other people makes your heart hammer. You resent the idea of anyone given the opportunity to speculate about you. 

“Yeah, well…” You don’t know what to say. “I didn’t think you’d want much to do with me anyway.”

“I’m supposed to say that,” he says, and you frown. “I’m the grumpy old guy. You’re a… beautiful young widow.”

It dawns on you that he thinks that’s all you’re hung up about and you let your breath go in a rush, your chest aching.

“Thanks,” you mutter. You turn your back but he keeps talking, to your dismay, and you almost drop a plate when he says:

“And if you wanted to have kids…”

Is he really talking about this with you? Reality is at the door, but you want to be back in the harmless stuff. And yet you know - you fucking know - that it was never harmless to begin with. Even when you were in the hospital and he woke up.

“I don’t want any more kids,” you snap. 

Your eyes slam shut, realizing your mistake. You put the plate down, easing yourself into showing your face again. He’s frozen, staring back at you with his hands on his wheels. 

“Any… more?”

You nod. It feels hard to swallow, eyes stinging. “I had a kid already, and I don’t want more.”

You never did when he was born, anyway. You couldn’t repeat a perfect baby, you said that to yourself. And people say that about their kids but he really was perfect, in the short time you had him on Earth. 

“I had a daughter,” he whispers, and you nod. 

You can’t remember when you found that out, but you did a long time ago. Someone at the bar told you maybe. A lot of months in Jackson are murky memories. You knew Joel was related to Tommy, and that he spent a lot of time with Ellie, but she wasn’t his biological kid. She was an orphan like you. Most people are orphans anyway, but Ellie being with Joel was a kindness that resonated with you. 

“I had a little boy,” you mumble. “But I can’t talk about…”

Because you can’t, or you’ll die a little more inside than you already have. And you don’t want Joel to see you this way. You hold up a hand, silently begging him.

“Okay.”

“It was a long time ago,” you lie. 

You don’t stay late like usual. You go home soon after you finish cleaning up. You don’t kiss him goodbye. You’re a coward and walk home with your head bent, sobbing when you reach your house. You remember Oliver and-

Oliver, who called you Ma, whose belly laughs cured everything. You crawl into bed and remember then that Joel never finished what he meant to say. Was he trying to tell you he wasn’t planning to be serious with you? Was he trying to break up with you?

You feel sick. 

-

The following morning, instead of going straight to Joel's, you go looking for Maria. She can't hide her surprise when you show up at her office. You don't greet her or ask her how she's doing, a first for you. 

“I need to know what you told Joel about me, before.” 

“Just that you don't have any family, that you live by yourself,” Maria replies. 

Her hands fold on her desk and you don't sit down, hovering by the closed doorway. 

“You swear?”

Maria looks taken aback, slowly nodding at you. She seems to be telling you the truth. You asks if you're okay when you don't say anything else. 

“I was hoping I could leave town, maybe do a patrol,” you say. “So I can help ease the load.” 

“You've already got Joel-” 

“He's becoming more independent every day,” you argue. “And I'm itching to leave, if I'm honest.”

It's only because you're afraid of Joel knowing too much. You wait, Maria considering this. 

“The last time you left, you didn't check in, you tried to run away,” Maria says. “You can't go alone.”

“Understood,” you murmur. 

Maria pushes off her desk and approaches you, gesturing to the door. She walks you out. 

“I'll talk to Ellie.” 

Your heart sinks a little. You were hoping for someone further away from you, a new resident that didn't know your name. 

“Joel mentioned she's climbing the walls,” Maria adds. 

You had no idea. Your little Joel bubble rarely includes Ellie or any of her angst. You feel a little excluded, though you know it's hypocritical. Sure, you can get to know his kid. 

What possible damage could that do? 

Man, it's not anywhere near as fun to write when it's not filth-ridden fun. But at least we finally know more about Reader's backstory! It gets worse!

taglist: @brianna-merlim @littledebbieinabigworld

[cleolinda]

The Scariest Movie I Ever Saw in a Theater: The Ring

I'll tell you up front that the story I'm going to tell you is about "The Ring (2002)," in the sense that it is about The Ring in the year 2002.

See, I don't know what The Scariest Movie Ever is. A quick google says that the consensus is The Exorcist (I haven't seen it, because I never felt like scheduling a day to freak myself the entire fuck out). But horror is specific, and not just to a person, but to a time and place, even. When I saw The Shining as a teenager in a well-lit living room with other people, I didn't even really flinch, but I bet it would play very differently to me now. I don’t think The Ring is at the top of anyone’s list, but twenty years ago, I had a personal interest in it—at the time, I was running a dinky little Geocities site devoted to movie news. Links curated and compiled from all the other, bigger sites I followed—basically, it was the linkspam format I have used on multiple platforms, including here on Sundays. And so, as someone who followed theatrical releases pretty closely for two or three years, I saw the trailer for The Ring, and I immediately knew it was going to be huge.

To locate you in time, this was just after three self-satirizing Scream movies and the Overcomplicated Serial Killer films of the '90s. The Ring was something completely different: chill aqua-blue color grading a good 5-6 years before Twilight; a mournful Hans Zimmer score; no jokes, no quips; and a slow, inexorable sense of doom. Grief, even, given that the movie begins with the death of the main character's niece. What immediately struck me about the first trailer was 1) the melancholy of it, and 2) how much it doesn't explain. Onscreen, you get the title cards,

THERE IS A VIDEOTAPE IF YOU WATCH IT SEVEN DAYS LATER YOU DIE

Concise! Understandable! A woman (Naomi Watts) is freaking out upon discovering that her young son has just watched it! Admirable job setting up the premise and the stakes of this entire movie in thirty seconds flat, without even any dialogue. That's all you need to know, and thus, the remaining minute of the trailer can do whatever it wants, and what it wants to do is be fucking weird. Echoing voices, TV static, a closeup of a horse's eye, ladders, a girl with dark hair, people reacting to things we don't see, drippy doorknobs, rain. Characters don't give us the whole plot in convenient soundbites of dialogue (like they do in a later trailer); we just hear lines, overlapping, murmured out of context—

did you see it in your head? she talks to you... leading you somewhere... showing you the horses... you saw it. did you see it in your head? she shows me things. Everyone suffers.

That you saw it has lived in my head ever since, and not once have I charged it rent. But the "best" part is Naomi Watts screaming at the end, because you don't hear her voice; you only hear this heartless telephonic beeeeeeep. It's 2002 and I'm watching this trailer, thinking, I have no idea what the fuck I just saw. This is going to be huge.

And it was, to the tune of $249 million on a $48M budget.

At risk of recapping what you might already know, Ringu, aka Ring, is a media franchise that spiraled out from a trio of Koji Suzuki novels into Hideo Nakata's film Ringu (1998), a landmark of Japanese horror, plus several other movies, some TV series, many comics, and even a couple of video games. The overarching story is about a murdered girl/vengeful ghost named Sadako Yamamura whose rage and pain have created a cursed video tape, you watch it and you die unless you pass the tape around like a virus, seven daaaaays, etc.

The "ring" in question is the rim of a well. Keep that well in mind.

The movie I saw is the U.S. remake, which itself had two sequels. (The iconic Sadako is now named Samara Morgan. Keep her in mind, too.) Director Gore Verbinski moved from The Ring to Pirates of the the Caribbean (!), and so Hideo Nakata himself would direct The Ring Two. I... honestly have only seen the first one. And I was right, it was huge, and it kicked off the American J-Horror Remake genre, for better or worse. But what gets forgotten about The Ring is its marketing campaign, which I followed pretty closely for my doofy little news site.

It was inspired.

The story of The Ring is partly the story of the sea change in the media landscape—how we watch movies. And the story of its marketing is a picture of the very last years before social media changed the wilderness of the internet into something that feels so big, like a billion people could see anything we say, and yet so small—only a tame handful of places to say it, owned by three or four companies, and corraled by algorithms.

Back around 1997-1998 or so, I worked at a video store (Movie Gallery, where the hits were there then, guaranteed) for about a year and a half. By the time I left, we had started adding DVDs to the VHS tapes on the shelves, but we hadn't replaced the entire stock. Video stores might have transitioned fully to DVD by 2002, I'm not sure, but people still commonly had both VCRs and DVD players in their homes. And I remember that The Ring was sold in both formats when it eventually hit home video. Which is to say—you know the analog horror genre today? Marble Hornets, Local 58, The Mandela Catalogue?

Analog horror is commonly characterized by low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings. This is done to match the setting, as analog horror works are typically set between the 1960s and 1990s. The name "analog horror" comes from the genre's aesthetic incorporation of elements related to analog electronics, such as analog television and VHS, the latter being an analog method of recording video.

Okay, but this is just what home media was like, and 2002 was at the very tail end of that—boxy black VHS tapes that degraded with time and reuse were just how we lived. At the same time, I'd been using CDs for music since about 1991, and all our software installs came on CD-ROM discs; a "mixtape" by that time had shifted to mean a rewriteable CD rather than a cassette tape. In college, I—well, I'll plead the Fifth as to whether I downloaded mp3s via Napster, but I was also taping Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS over the weekends. It was Every Format Everywhere, All At Once, and we kept half a dozen kinds of players around for them. Here in 2023, we stream and download everything invisibly, unless we choose to engage in format nostalgia. (I've already run into the problem of Apple Music deleting songs I really liked, due to this or that licensing issue, because I was really only renting them.) The year The Ring hit theaters was the edge of a last shimmering gasp of physical media where iTunes had only come into being the year before, and iridescent discs were still mostly what we used, but cassettes, both video and audio, were still viable. And so, people did not think it was terribly weird when they started finding unlabeled VHS tapes on their windshields.

Movieweb, quoting TikTok user astro_nina:

"Their marketing strategy was essentially 'let's get this tape viewed by as many people as possible without these people being aware of what this is, sort of raising intrigue," she says. One way they achieved this was by airing the tape, which allegedly marks its viewers for death within seven days, as a commercial with no context. The video would air between late-night programming "with no words, no mention of a movie, for like a month...so people would run into it and it would just go on to the next thing, and people would be like, 'what the f--k is this?'"

I remember seeing the Cursed Video as an unexplained ad at least twice, by the way. That TikTok also indicates that DreamWorks straight-up sent copies of the tape to Hot Topic stores, as well as planting them under actual movie theater seats. While running my movie site, I heard at least one story of someone finding a tape on the sink counter of a restroom at a club. Did the marketing department actually plant tapes in bathrooms—or did a freaked-out recipient leave it there, hoping to dodge the "curse"?

(I haven't embedded the Cursed Video here, by the way—but I could have. If you'd like to see the American take on it, you can watch both the full version and the shorter variant that appeared in the movie itself. A text description of what the fuck you're even looking at is here [content note for both: blood, insects, animal death, body horror, and suicide by falling]. The original version from the Japanese film is shorter, and it's eerie rather than gruesome.)

BUT WAIT, THERE WAS MORE: DreamWorks had something of an alternate-reality campaign going with a handful of in-character websites. This was only a year after Warner Bros. ran the groundbreaking "The Beast" ARG for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: "Ultimately, fifty websites with a total of about one thousand pages were created for the [A.I.] game." (I lurked in the Cloudmakers Yahoo group.) Marketing for The Ring did not go anywhere that in depth, nor did it need to; it was both a smaller film and a smaller story. I saw at least two “personal” websites (seemingly amateur and a little tacky, like my own), but the one I particularly remember was about someone who owned/trained horses? I'm not sure if it was meant to be the actual Anna Morgan character—Samara's mother—or maybe someone who had noticed that the Morgans' horses were disturbed? I'm not even sure anyone even remembers this but me. Reddit users dug up a few other archived websites, but they're about Sadako, the curse and/or videotape; they aren't as subtle or character-oriented as the site I remember. (Honestly, I wonder if weird shit like "What Scares Me" or "SEVEN DAYS TO LIVE" were made by fans rather than a marketing department, but who knows.)

[The “About” page from Seven Days to Live on the Internet Archive.]

[The entirety of An Open Letter on the Internet Archive. “UPDATE” is a now-blank pop-up. I would bet $5 that it was originally a pop-up of the cursed video.]

I need to point out here that Facebook did not exist in 2002. It would not exist for another two years, and Twitter wouldn't exist until 2006. Even MySpace was not a thing until the next year. I didn't start my Livejournal until October of 2003. What we had, for the most part, were independent forums and blogs. We also had Creepy Internet Fiction like "The Dionaea House" and "Ted the Caver"; their use of the blog format, of people out there seemingly living their lives until something fucked up went down, gave the stories the shape of reality. And it helped that these blogs had comment sections, sure—sometimes more story unfolded there—but for the most part, an author could "abandon" a blog, and you'd just find the story there via word of mouth. Like the Ring blogs I remember, it wouldn't seem strange if no one replied to you, whereas today, you'd have to hire a writer to sit on Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, and interact with people in character. Could you do something like The Ring's mysterious, weird-ass blogs today? Would anyone even notice?

So: It's 2002, my head is full of Alternate Reality and eerie images and you saw it, and I'm hype as hell to go out and see The Ring. I'm perfectly happy to go see movies by myself, so I went in the early afternoon (best time to get a good seat). The movie ended up being a sleeper hit, and the first weekend, the public was still sleeping on it, so there were only 7-8 other people in that theater, grouped in maybe two clusters. I was off in my own little pool of darkness in the upper right quadrant. Functionally, once the lights went down, I was alone.

Despite some middling reviews at the time, The Ring is something of a horror classic nowadays. If you want a scary movie this Spooky Season, check out The Ring. Or don't, because it nearly killed me.

We're at the last, I don't know, third of the movie? And Our Heroine has tracked down the origin of the Cursed Videotape to some creepy mountain motel or whatever. SPOILER, it turns out that it was built over the Cursed Well (everything in this movie is cursed) that Our Villain was thrown into—that's why Sadako/Samara is a vengeful wet murder ghost crawling out of TVs now. While investigating this decrepit hotel room, intrepid journalist Rachel and her, who is it, her ex-husband? her kid's dad, idk, discover the well under the creaky old floorboards. And then, wouldn't you know it,

NAOMI WATTS FALLS INTO THE WELL

NAOMI WATTS FALLS INTO THE FUCKING WELL

THAT'S WHERE SAMARA'S BODY IS

[The rather slapstick moment when Rachel falls into the well. Does not include what actually happens next.]

I go absolutely rigid in my seat. Naomi Watts is splashing around this dark-ass death swamp of a well and I know, with as much certainty as I have ever known anything in my life, that Samara is about to pop up in all her pasty, waterlogged glory. All the sad creepy dread, all the desperation to figure out what the fuck all that shit on the tape was and stop Samara from killing Rachel's son, all the horrible contorted victim faces, all the alternate reality I’ve been soaking in, it has all come to this. I have to leave the theater. I cannot be having with this. I have to be gone from this place. My legs do not work. I cannot feel them. I am frozen. I want nothing more in this life or any other to get up and leave this cavernous pitch-black room, and I cannot. I start praying for death. I want you to understand that I am not trying to be flippant or humorous. This is genuinely what went through my head. I was too scared to even think, "You know, you could just pray to pass out or for motion to return to your limbs or something." No, I sat there in The Ring thinking, Please for the love of all mercy just let me cease being.

You know that scene in Mulholland Drive (also starring Naomi Watts)? Winkie's diner and the EXCRUCIATING tension? It was a little like that, except I wasn't watching it, I was experiencing it, and Samara was my dirt monster out behind the diner.

Except that the jump scare didn't actually happen. I mean, yes, Rachel finds Samara's body down there, but—I don't remember exactly, please don't make me go watch it again to tell you what actually happens. It's played more sympathetically on Rachel's part, as I recall, and she and her ex get Samara's body out so that she (Samara) can have a proper burial.

And then it turns out that this is not the end of the movie. It turns out that Rachel has Fucked Up.

I think I was relatively okay through the rest of it, although the climax is Samara emerging from a TV in her full glitching swampy glory to scare [SPOILER] to death. I don't recall praying for death twice. There's a point when you're so exhausted from fear chemicals that you're like, yeah, this might as well happen. Bring it, Soggy. I did have a hard time prying myself out of that seat afterwards, though, and my mom says that when I got home, I had the classic thousand-yard stare. How was the movie?

"It was great," I said, and I meant it.

I've seen things that were objectively scarier (I watched much of The Haunting of Hill House from behind a pillow, to be honest), and it's not like I've never experienced fear in real life. But I respect when a movie that can make me feel so intensely, and there's something weirdly precious about the way horror is a safe roller coaster, as it's often been said. So I love telling the story about The Time The Ring Nearly Killed Me—a movie that actually made my body stop working—and I love thinking of how embedded in a specific time and place that movie was for me. The last gasp of VHS when the Cursed Videotape still seemed plausible; the way the internet was still wild and weird and free; where I was in my life, keeping up so avidly with all the movie news, and finding myself in such a little pool of darkness early one afternoon. It's the scariest movie I saw in a theater; that's the alchemy of circumstance.

[millportisntreal]

I haven’t Jeanneil posted in a while SOOO imagine Jean and Neil escaping the Nest and learning about pop culture and technology together. Neil gets them an iPod to share and downloads the top 40 songs on iTunes. They go to a movie theater and see Spider-Man and Pirates of the Caribbean (Neil prefers Spider-Man and Jean prefers Pirates). They both feel a weird sort of empathy with Britney Spears shaving her head (don’t they know about being exploited and feeling the need for one thing they can control?). Jean getting into Radiohead and Neil getting into Fall Out Boy. Both of them renting movies from Blockbuster to watch on a shitty tv together

[spookyserenades]

not trying to rush or anything! i was just wondering when we’ll get a taste of sanctity 👀

hehe! I'm working on the first chapter already, it's up to 4k words. I've made a banner (not a swanky one LOL my strengths are not with graphic design) but I'll copy paste my notes about the boys that I've come up with so far. And give you the banner 💕

Seokjin 

Born 1145 - Turned 1176 (Goryeo) 879 years old, physically 31

Manipulative type yandere 

Taeja (crown prince) of a monarch, third-born son; focused on studies, arts, humanities, and would assist in conversations surrounding war and foreign relations

Speaks Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic (most ancient languages as well)

Power: Compulsion, he can influence minds, wipe memories, make suggestions to control someone

Yoongi

Born 1476 - Turned 1507 (Renaissance Period) 548 years old, physically 31

Obsessive type yandere

Apprentice of Leonardo Da Vinci, created some of his art then went on to have his own famous career, patron of arts 

Speaks Latin, Greek, and all other Romance languages

Power: Paralysis, he can paralyze someone using his mind, rendering them unable to move

Hoseok

Born 1607 - Turned 1637 (Early Modern Period, Piracy’s Golden Age) 417 years old, physically 30

Possessive type yandere

Buccaneer, captain of a ship that would sail around the Caribbean. Plundered and burned cities, owns many fine things, well-traveled

Speaks all Romance languages, Dutch, Haitian Creole

Power: Tracking, he can find anyone with his senses without fail, can predict target’s moves in advance

Namjoon

Born 1630 - Turned 1659 (Joseon) 394 years old, physically 29

Sadistic type yandere

Ruthless military general that led men during the Qing invasion of Joseon. Later became an assassin (sword for hire, essentially) 

Speaks Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, and most other Asian languages

Power: Pain Illusion, when focused on target he can create the illusion that the target is being burned alive

Jimin

Born 1796 - Turned 1824 (Regency Era, 20 years post America’s Independence) 228 years old, physically 28

Clingy type yandere

Famous playwright of romantic tragedies, owner of a theater in England that was extremely popular

Speaks all Romance languages

Power: Hypnosis, he can convince targets that they’re in love with him/can’t live without him

Taehyung

Born 1841 - Turned 1869 (Victorian Era, 20ish years before Industrial revolution) 183 years old, physically 28

Stalker type yandere

Basically Vanderbilt vibes. The coven lives in the Breakers mansion, Taehyung built it. Owned railroads, reclusive business tycoon

Speaks English and French

Power: Glamoring, he can disguise his appearance and his presence itself

Jeongguk

Born 1900 - Turned 1926 (Roaring 20’s, Prohibition Act, Al Capone mafia) 124 years old, physically 26

Overprotective type yandere

Ran with Al Capone crime family, mostly as a booze smuggler and bodyguard. Was turned when the North Siders targeted Capone at the Hawthorne inn

Speaks English

Power: Telepathy, can read minds

[artemiseamoon]

🤎 Melanin May 🤎

Status: Complete

As I warm back up to writing, after an unplanned break, I’m doing this little drabble challenge. Hopefully I’ll be inspired to revisit wips soonish. I do not write reader inserts, minus rare exceptions, like this. I am not taking requests.

ALL my f! Readers in this challenge are intended to be over 30 and woc (Black, Caribbean, Bipoc, Poc etc). And all the Moodboards will have representation for us brown gals. Anyone can read, and read the RCs as OCs if they like.

Challenge includes the specific readers mentioned above and Ocs. Again, I am not taking requests.

Fandoms: multi

Read on A03 📚

Prompts from this list

Moodboards

Day 1: Strawberries | Tumblr teaser (Max Phillips)

Day 2: Adventure | Tumblr teaser (Marcus Pike)

Day 3: Golden hour | Tumblr teaser (Benny Miller)

Day 4: Lake house | Tumblr teaser (Will Miller)

Day 5: Picnic | Tumblr teaser (Nico)

Day 6: Mayflower | Tumblr teaser (Ezra)*

Day 7: Nostalgia | Tumblr teaser (Poe Dameron)

Day 8: Homecoming | Tumblr teaser (Mando)

Day 9: Juice Box | Tumblr teaser (Frankie)

Day 10. Farmer’s Market | Tumblr teaser (Javi G)

Day 11: Morning light | Tumblr teaser (Will Miller)

Day 12. Birdsong | Tumblr teaser (Steven Grant)

Day 13: Drive-in theater | Tumblr teaser (Santi, Benny)

Day 14: Island | Tumblr teaser (Lucien Flores)

Day 14: Photographs | Tumblr teaser (Marcus Moreno)

Day 15: Riptide | Tumblr Preview (Billy)

Days 16 - 19: Multi prompts | Tumblr teaser (TF multiH

Days 20-22: Multi prompts | Tumblr teaser (Ezra)

Days 23-25: Multi prompts | Tumblr teaser (Rick Flag, TF)

Day 26: Milkshake | Tumblr teaser (Max P)

Day 27: Orchid | Tumblr teaser (Tf, Yovanna)

Day 28. Field | Tumblr teaser (Willian Tell, omc +)

Day 29. Petrichor | Tumblr teaser (Poe Dameron)

Day 30. Sketching | Tumblr teaser (tba)

Day 31. Memory Lane | Tumblr teaser (tba)

🤎🤎🤎

My A03

Masterlist

💫💫💫 No promises, but if this goes over into June, I would use these prompts: June prompts

⬇️

Next: Black, Brown & Beautiful June

A03 link

Tumblr info post

[jane-lynndrake-t]

The portrait in higher quality.

Transcript:

New Earth Observer

GOTHAM GLOBE (jane-lynndrake-t)

ISSUE 621 | 12/18/2020 | Morning News | Weather: Bad | AI DNI

Drake Socialite Murdered!

Deborah Donovan B.A.

Janet ’Jane’ Lynn Drake (neé Crowne), a beloved mother and wife passed away on June 21, 2020 at the age of 43.

Born in Gotham, NJ, on January 10 1981, Janet was the daughter of the late Mr. Marvin Noel Crowne and Ms. Patricia Lynn.

She is additionally predeceased by her half brother, James “JT” Thomas Crowne.

She is survived by her husband, Johnson “Jack” Drake, and her 14 year old son, Timothy Jackson Drake.

At the time of her death, she and her husband were kidnapped and ransomed while traveling to assess and provide relief work to the impoverished within the Caribbean islands. During rescue, she was poisoned and declared dead on the scene. Her husband, Mr. Drake is currently recovering.

From a young age, she loved history, the arts, and traveling. Many enjoyed discussions with her about artists, writers, and theater.

An associate of her late half brother recalled conversations between the two as fast paced, varied, and excessively thought provoking.

As a teenager, she was remembered tenderly for her beauty and self confidence. She had a smile despite any challenge she faced.

This bright attitude drew people to her. An old friend from her graduating class described her as a brave woman who was a delight to be around.

After her marriage to Mr. Drake, she became the CFO of Drake Industries. She was known by her associates as a diligent business woman with sharp wit and a sharper eye for character. She is credited for Drake Industries’ upstanding and honest reputation world wide.

Her employees remember her fondly for her unwavering direction and her equal dedication to her son and the company. Many recall the common sight of a 4 year old Timothy Drake carried protectively on her hip as she attended and led meetings.

Photo caption:

Mrs. Drake, May 15 2020, Wayne Charity Auction.

Jewelry Pictured: Auctioned For 4 Million Dollars And Donated To Ace Children’s Hospital (peepdraws)

She will be remembered by Gotham as a charming, noble, and innovative woman.

Her service will be held on December 24 at 4 pm at Pinkney C. Funeral Home.

In lieu of flowers, her Last Will and Testament requests donations to different charities listed on page 10.