#craig miller

[pinenutposts]

I am old enough to have watched Twin Peaks on tv in its original run (I was a child, mind you, but I did catch a few episodes of season 2 while my mom and stepdad were watching it.) I didn't see the entire series until it was re-aired on Bravo when I was in high school. I also read the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch (very eye opening for a relatively sheltered girl like me, and also crucial to understanding the show from Laura's perspective, before FWWM existed). I subscribed to the legendary fanzine Wrapped in Plastic by Craig Miller and John Thorne, through my local comic book store. I read alt.tv.twinpeaks. I read theories and news on websites like Glastonberry Grove and Mike Dunn's Lynchnet. I asked my dad to buy me the book of essays "Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks" from Wayne State University Press, and was introduced to things like Foucault, Critical Theory, and Feminist Theory, while my little teenage brain was just entering college and starting to work out what "critical thinking" even was. I obsessed over David Lynch and his art.

Why I mention all this, is that I think having been this type of fan for my entire adult life, and my formative teenage years, I'm able to hold several different and sometimes contradictory opinions about Twin Peaks and its creators, and more importantly, I'm able to enjoy wildly varied aspects of the show and fandom, all at the same time!

When I first saw The Return in 2017, it absolutely repulsed me. I hated it. Then last year I picked up "Ominous Woosh - A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks," by John Thorne, the only currently living editor of Wrapped in Plastic, and it opened my mind to understanding The Return in a way that I wasn't able to before. I'm not saying it's the definitive explanation (and he certainly does not claim that), but it helped me see it in a way that I just couldn't before, and even begin to enjoy it. There are still parts of it I deeply dislike, but that's okay. Twin Peaks is not a one size fits all. It can be approached from many different viewpoints and readings, and as David Lynch has said about all of his work, everyone will have a different experience of it based on their own experience and perspective. My views of Twin Peaks, including who I ship and don't ship, have certainly changed over the course of three decades!

I would like to encourage people who become frustrated and disappointed at the turns the show takes, and how the third season feels vastly different from what came before, to consider the history of the show. What happened with the network, the actors, Lynch's movie career, when it was made, why it ended when it did. And of course The Return doesn't look or feel like a show made in 1990! It's 25 years later! Lynch and Frost are old men now! Half the cast is dead! It would be absurd if it seamlessly picked up where season 2 (which was a jumbled, but still lovable mess, itself) left off. There's no way it could.

If season 3 had been allowed to be made as originally planned in the '90s, it would look vastly different than The Return. I will forever mourn what could have been, but that's the stuff of fanfiction now. Also, we may not have gotten the masterpiece that is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I consider to be the creative and emotional pinnacle of the series, and absolutely critical to having a full picture of what Twin Peaks is about, if the show had continued. Just food for thought.

I'm also an advocate of simply ignoring things if you really don't like them. There's no reason one has to accept The Return as part of your own personal headcanon. As the creators will say, there really is no definitive "canon" in the Twin Peaks universe!

I don't really know what the purpose of this ramble was, but I felt like going on about it because Twin Peaks has been my "favorite song" for years, and I'm always thinking about it in one way or another ^_^

- Pine Nut

[legends-expo]

Photos by Thor Parker / Bekah Marie Photo

We had such a great time with all of you a year ago today in Burbank, CA! We'll be back in the Los Angeles area in 2025 for another convention celebrating the Expanded Universe!

[calkestis]

We thought it was important to show that Joel missed her. That he’s mourning her. In his very simple way, just making a small cairn of rocks to say quietly ”I’m sorry, I blew it. I lost you”. It was important for us to show that he cared. (Craig Mazin)

HBO’s The Last of Us Podcast, Episode 3

[gay-mafia-stickball]

Can we spend a few minutes on the giraffe scene? Because right before this, ellie is completely checked out. She’s traumatized, she’s distant, and she’s so completely absent. But beneath all of this trauma, she’s still a kid, and now she’s a kid who just saw a weird, fucked up leopard camel llama thing, probably for the first time, and it’s eating out of her hand with a weird, fucked up blue tongue as long as her forearm. She may be traumatized out of her mind and living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but that childlike wonder is still there, and Joel hasn’t looked more proud in the entire series.

[toointojoelmiller]

Joel Miller...

guard doggin'

wrappin' a foot

computerin'

fixin' a boot

lettin' himself in

[earstwo]

“I think that letter underscores for him that no matter how hard he tries, and no matter how strong his instinct is to preserve and protect the people that he cares about, he can’t.” - Craig Mazin

[hbothelastofus]

"I remember Craig [Mazin] came over to us as a last prompt, and he turned to me and he goes, 'This is the most pain that you've ever been in in your entire life. This is the most excruciatingly painful thing that's ever happened to you.' And then he said the same thing to Pedro." —Nico Parker.

[azertyrobaz]

“Out of respect. It’s wonderful.”

[hnn3ydew]

Assortment of fallout drawings cause guess what I started getting into 🧐

[tlou-obsessed]

can you imagine the devastion he felt as they basically said they were gonna kill Ellie? He has been closed off for 20 years, basically surviving from day to day, unwilling to feel any emotion, locking it all away, staying away from children. We see that from the moment he meets Ellie his emotions are already bleeding out, he has a hard time controlling them, in his core he is made to be a father, to direct all his love to someone. Without Sarah there was no point anymore...

Now Ellie has made his way through all that devastion, she has poked his dad side, she makes him wanna be alive, he can finally direct all that love somewhere again, and now they dare take her away? again? over his dead body.

[chronicallyonlinewriter]

screaming into megaphone

GIVE US A TOMMY PHOTO, YOU COWARDS

[legends-expo]

Panel Announcement: Star Wars Memories Join Lucasfilm's original Director of Fan Relations Craig Miller for a discussion of his work and the early days of the Star Wars fandom in this Sunday, Sept. 9th panel at Legends Con in Burbank, CA! Buy tickets now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/legends-consortium-2023-tickets-541786186067

[wedgeantill]

LAYER CAKE (2004) dir. Matthew Vaughn

[probssomethingorother]

a man on a mission

source vids [x] & [x]

[toointojoelmiller]

things to look at here: Joel's face when they turn around, and how it changes when he realizes what he's looking at the way they're walking so close that Ellie's touching his shirt casually, comfortably, affectionately the way he becomes a human shield and covers her body with his ouch.❤️‍🩹

[thehotpilot]

i know the decision is supposed to be morally impossible to make but it’s almost laughable how easy it is to side with joel. the last of us has spent week after week crafting a narrative in which ellie is her own fully formed person, giving her agency and power and depth and dreams of the future she would never know she’d never see because the fireflies reduced her to a means to an unstable end that they can’t even guarantee exists.