#general audience thoughts

[baddygab-bi]

My mom’s a general audience member in her sixties. Doesn’t read articles. Doesn’t watch interviews. Had NO spoilers. A very casual watcher. She once said “they’re not gay” when I told her about how “some gay people” (hi, yeah, me but she doesn’t know I ship nor that I’m bi) ship Buck and Eddie as buddie.

Here’s her thoughts:

Helicopter scene: “huh. Interesting.” Then about Tommy “who’s that guy? I remember him from last episode, but who is he?”

Sewer scene: “that’s funny. That’s cute.” About Buck watching Chris. She also was confused about Eddie suddenly having another car that’s not his truck. She thinks Ravi is adorable and funny.

Maddie and Buck at home: “so he’s jealous, what can you do?” “There’s nothing you can do.” “I don’t know why Buck is at Maddie’s house… I know they’re siblings.” “What’s the big deal, so what? Eddie has a new best friend, you can have many best friends.”

After pressing about Tommy: “He’s not gay, is he?” I said: You can’t just ask someone if they’re gay. “They’re getting really buddy-buddy”

Amazon prime scene: when Buck was doing the weights, she was mumbling something that looked like “no. Stupid. No” (we’re on FaceTime and only unmute on commercial breaks). She thought the Prime ad was funny. “Apparently the other guy (she means Eddie) isn’t interested.” “Buck is going to be lonely if he doesn’t find another friend to play, that’s all.” “I thought he was gonna kill himself with the bar weights.” “He’s not gonna come to your rescue, dude.” “He wanted his friend to spot him and look at him, not the other guy (Ravi).” “But Eddie’s busy with Tony.” (Yes she said Tony.)

She’s more invested in the mom shooting her son and Harry and Athena than I want her to be. I need her to be IN THESE BISEXUAL BUCK TRENCHES. Also is this my coming out moment lmao? I’m just gonna say I like his acting.

Basketball: “that was a killer move. He had so much anger and he wanted to really hurt him and he did.” “He’s jealous! And they were winning!” (Huh, they were winning.) “it’s all about the bonding, the guy things. He’s jealous, that’s all there is to it.” “And sooner or later, Eddie isn’t going to want to be around Buck, he’s gonna want to be around Tommy.” I asked her about the song that was playing, she didn’t hear it. Rewatched the scene to hear the song. Song thoughts: “oh there was music.” I bet she won’t understand the words. I was right, verbatim. She put on the captions. “Just because Eddie gets a broken ankle, I don’t want him to leave the show.” She thinks someone is gonna leave at the end or die, I kinda tricked her into thinking Tommy’s gonna die. She asked what a beard is. Told her. “Let me ask you something—no—wait—Eddie’s not gay. Neither is Chimney. So why would he be a beard?” I asked why she thought Eddie was gay. “Not Eddie. Buck! Buck’s not gay.” I told her nobody on the court is gay (not a lie technically). “Exactly. Nobody is gay.” Still listening to the song: she likes the song. She’s into this scene that I made her watch three times. “Ooohh he drove him.” “They’re not gonna be friends any more.”

Buck and Maddie at lunch: Liked Maddie going blonde and the Sarah story. Thinks Maddie was right he was acting like a kid, so jealous. “I want to be your friend too. Include me.”

The SCENE: she has no clue what’s about to happen. No idea. Is nodding when Buck said he was jealous. “Wow” about Buck wanting to get to know Tommy. “That was funny!” After they kissed. “Buck was trying to get his attention and he just kissed him.” “It’s nice. Good. It’s an interesting ending. So now those two will be friends.” I asked if she missed the end of that scene. “No! They’re going out on Saturday at 8am to learn to fly a helicopter.” I told her to rewind it. On the rewatch: “You can have more than one friend!” After Buck said he thinks Tommy is cool “He likes him… okay.” “Tommy went in for the kiss.” She smiling now. “They’re gonna get a beer.. and kiss.”

Promo for next week: she gasped when Buck said it was his first date with a guy. She thought it was just two guys going out for a drink. She didn’t realize they were romantically involved. “Who did Eddie bring to the restaurant?” I said it was his girlfriend “when did she get on the show?”

And on Buck being bi? “It’s nice.”

Was she expecting it? “I thought Buck was more interested in Eddie. Because of the jealousy. I thought Buck and Eddie would be kissing. And then Tommy comes along and he’s gonna kiss one of them.” “Tommy is cute, he’s gonna kiss somebody. Once they add another character it has to be someone to kiss Eddie or Buck.” “I was waiting for them to have a threesome.” “They’re just men having fun! All three of them!” “I thought Tommy and Eddie were gonna kiss. I forgot about the girlfriend.”

[clairenatural]

okay but you see sam has ALSO fallen for dean's act. sam also believes dean to be the macho, daddy's soldier, beer boobs cars guy he presents himself as. this is why sam makes fun of dean whenever he even lightly steps out of that mold and thinks it's harmless banter instead of attacking an insecurity. it's why he laughs when john talks down to dean in the early seasons and it's why he seems surprised when dean is more comfortable with himself in the later seasons. it's why he just scoffs but doesn't push it when dean puts up a front and refuses to talk about his emotions and just accepts whatever excuse he makes at face value. it's why he offers dean a strip club to make him feel better when cas dies. and this isn't his fault!! dean has spent a very long time perfecting this image in front of everyone and ESPECIALLY to sam because along with it comes safety and security and stability and the only person. who has consistently been able to see through it. is castiel

[cruelplatonic]

actually i think it's interesting that practically everyone's interpretation of valentino is that he has severe substance abuse issues & is high 50% of the time, when in the show he's shown disparagingly talking about addicts in a way that implies he doesn't see himself as one. and i'm not using "interesting" as a substitute for "oh boy do i fucking hate this" i just genuinely think it's fascinating. the juxtaposition of him looking down on addicts while refusing to acknowledge his own substance abuse problems is direly under explored and it's like, Right There. it's prime character study material

[generationlosscorkboard]

Gen Lossers!

I come with GREAT news!

Local Gen Losser ItsMaybeMadi on Twitter who (together with the genloss decoding server) solved the cypher and decoded the text!

Cipher:

(Just a couple notes for clarity: 'O' is actually just '--'. a line, and not and not like ō. Also the '|' is a space, so between words.)

Text:

Its not a one to one translation, but fortunately the letters remain within the word they belong to.

For example, "So I Did" in the original is "os I Idd"

But Congrats Madi and the Genloss Decoders!

And good job everyone who worked on it themselves, wether you managed to get the decoded message, just the cypher, or just plain did your best to try!

[doumekiss]

Lately I've seen a lot of complaining in the dungeon meshi tag about how now there is a lot more m/m works on ao3 than f/f but like farcille is still the most written pairing and by a lot :

And the reason why m/m is more popular is because there are more possible pairings like labru, kabumisu, chilshi, laishuro and others, while f/f ships with the main characters the only available options are farcille and marcille/izutsumi. And Kabru being the most shipped character with the male characters it's kinda cool because it is still rare to see characters with dark skin being shipped with the main character in anime fandoms (I literally can't think of any another example of a character with dark skin being part of the most popular slash ship in a anime fandom).

[steveyockey]

Some would rebut that “Oppenheimer,” being a Hollywood blockbuster with serious global reach (whether it will play Japanese theaters remains uncertain), will be many audiences’ only exposure to the events in question and thus might “create a limit on public consciousness and concern,” as the poet, writer and professor Brandon Shimoda told The Times. A corollary of this argument: The crimes committed against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so unspeakable, so outsized in their impact, that Oppenheimer’s perspective does and should dwindle into insignificance by comparison. For Nolan to focus so exclusively on an American physicist’s story, some insist, ultimately diminishes history and humanity, even as it reinforces the Hollywood hegemony of the great-man biopic and of white men’s narratives in general.

I get those complaints. I also think they betray an inherent disrespect for the audience’s intelligence and curiosity, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how movies operate. It’s telling that few of these criticisms of perspective were leveled at “American Prometheus” when it was published in 2005, that no one begrudged Bird and Sherwin for offering a meticulously researched, morally ambivalent portrait of their subject’s life and consigning the destruction of two Japanese cities to a few pages. That’s because books are books, the argument goes, and movies are movies — and this perceived difference, it must be said, reveals a pernicious double standard.

Because they seldom achieve the narrative penetration and richness of detail of, say, a 700-page biography, movies, especially those about history, often are hailed as achievements of breadth over depth, emotion over intellect. They are assumed to be fundamentally shallow experiences, distillations of real life rather than sharply angled explorations of it, propelled by broad brushstrokes and easy expository shortcuts, and beholden to the audience’s presumably voracious appetite for thrilling, traumatizing spectacle. And because movies offer a visual immediacy and narrative immersion that books don’t, they are expected to be sweeping if not omniscient in their narrative scope, to reach for a comprehensive, even definitive vantage.

Movies that attempt something different, that recognize that less can indeed be more, are thus easily taken to task. “It’s so subjective!” and “It omits a crucial P.O.V.!” are assumed to be substantive criticisms rather than essentially value-neutral statements. We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure. But because viewers of course cannot be trusted to know any history or muster any empathy on their own — and if anything unites those who criticize “Oppenheimer” on representational grounds, it’s their reflexive assumption of the audience’s stupidity — anything that isn’t explicitly shown onscreen is denigrated as a dodge or an oversight, rather than a carefully considered decision.

A film like “Oppenheimer” offers a welcome challenge to these assumptions. Like nearly all Nolan’s movies, from “Memento” to “Dunkirk,” it’s a crafty exercise in radical subjectivity and narrative misdirection, in which the most significant subjects — lost memories, lost time, lost loves — often are invisible and all the more powerful for it. We can certainly imagine a version of “Oppenheimer” that tossed in a few startling but desultory minutes of Japanese destruction footage. Such a version might have flirted with kitsch, but it might well have satisfied the representational completists in the audience. It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence.

That’s true even in one of the movie’s most powerful and contested sequences. Not long after news of Hiroshima’s destruction arrives, Oppenheimer gives a would-be-triumphant speech to a euphoric Los Alamos crowd, only for his words to turn to dust in his mouth. For a moment, Nolan abandons realism altogether — but not, crucially, Oppenheimer’s perspective — to embrace a hallucinatory horror-movie expressionism. A piercing scream erupts in the crowd; a woman’s face crumples and flutters, like a paper mask about to disintegrate. The crowd is there and then suddenly, with much sonic rumbling, image blurring and an obliterating flash of white light, it is not.

For “Oppenheimer’s” detractors, this sequence constitutes its most grievous act of erasure: Even in the movie’s one evocation of nuclear disaster, the true victims have been obscured and whitewashed. The absence of Japanese faces and bodies in these visions is indeed striking. It’s also consistent with Nolan’s strict representational parameters, and it produces a tension, even a contradiction, that the movie wants us to recognize and wrestle with. Is Oppenheimer trying (and failing) to imagine the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered by the weapon he devised? Or is he envisioning some hypothetical doomsday scenario still to come?

I think the answer is a blur of both, and also something more: In this moment, one of the movie’s most abstract, Nolan advances a longer view of his protagonist’s history and his future. Oppenheimer’s blindness to Japanese victims and survivors foreshadows his own stubborn inability to confront the consequences of his actions in years to come. He will speak out against nuclear weaponry, but he will never apologize for the atomic bombings of Japan — not even when he visits Tokyo and Osaka in 1960 and is questioned by a reporter about his perspective now. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he will respond. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.”

Talk about compartmentalization. That episode, by the way, doesn’t find its way into “Oppenheimer,” which knows better than to offer itself up as the last word on anything. To the end, Nolan trusts us to seek out and think about history for ourselves. If we elect not to, that’s on us.

[yes-man-wireplay]

the writers of yellowjackets want me to hate misty so bad but they could never make me hate you misty. youre a weird little freak and i love you misty

[caeslxys]

Zephrah actively postpones ruidusborn births. It is believed that the actual number of ruidusborn in exandrian history is much larger than has been officially recorded because the stigma of it was so intense that people lied about it. Alyxian, one of the few recorded ruidusborn heroes of the calamity who received direct blessings from three different prime deities (our very own Changebringer, the Archheart, and the Moonweaver) , has been all but forgotten (read: likely erased) by history.

The Archive of knowledge that revealed the truth of Predathos and Ruidus was never some forgotten thing—it was intentionally hidden by the elites in Vasselheim. And we have no idea how long they have been operating with that knowledge. We have no idea what they have been doing with that knowledge, what silent wars have been waging for years or decades or centuries. But we saw what they were willing to do, in Hearthdell. We saw the violence and suppression they were willing to commit. We saw the pettiness of the exandrian pantheon in the Dawnfather’s response to Deanna’s: “Are you worth saving?”. In the Changebringer’s manipulative change of course in her pleas to FCG. In the Wildmother’s rejection of Opal. In the knowledge we have that Imogen spent so much of her miserable time in Gelvaan begging the gods to aid her to no avail—just for Kord to reach out only to demand that she not let them down.

Liliana’s point that Vasselheim and the other faithful elite of the world will hunt ruidusborn down to negate even the potential of this happening again isn’t new, it isn’t something this solstice and the machinations surrounding it caused, and it isn’t some unsubstantiated, fearful claim—it has been happening.

The vanguard—and Liliana—are unequivocally wrong in their means. But can you really fault them in their desire? Can you really fault the conclusions they have drawn from the experiences they have lived? If you spend your entire life being rejected by the people and the pantheon of your world for means you could not possibly control, would you not seek out someone and somewhere that would accept you? And if you found it, if some being that has been connected with you your whole life welcomed you home and wrapped you in an embrace that felt like your mother’s and says that it is starving; well, aren’t you, too?

There is likely a holy war brewing. At the end of it all, is it truly the sole fault of the people and not the organizations and society that expelled them?

[bittersweet-mojo]

very much not a youtuber fanart person but the end of hermitcraft season 9 really got to me so here's ya boy grain.

[whileyoureinschoolidothisallday]

I know people like to make jokes that his coat would be gross, but on god if dabi ever saw you dressed in his jacket, he'd pass out from all the blood immediately rushing to his dick

[orbmanson7]

So I don't want to say I'm disappointed about this, but maybe I've just been spoiled by scorpy's amazing (and authentic) VHS skills, because the picture quality is way too high for a CRT, even using RCA-to-RCA, no additional conversion, the pixels are just too well defined to give an authentic VHS feel...

I eventually switched it over to the flatscreen tv using 720p, RCA-to-HDMI, and the picture is again very clear, even with the artificially added loss. However, the texture bleeding and tracking loss effect that's been added is definitely much better in this particular format. It feels more authentic and enhances the experience, and while it doesn't compare to the naturally bad quality expected of the CRT, it's still an improvement.

And then I switched the flatscreen tv to a 1080p display, and again, the loss texturing that was added certainly helps, but it just doesn't feel authentic to an actual VHS copy. There's definitely effort in this, but when playing the video in such a high resolution, it kind of gives the game away that it's all edited in. Maybe that's intentional, though? Don't look TOO closely, or you'll see the wires, you know?

I'll plug this into my laptop next to see if I can pull some additional display options out of it, but I think it's safe to say the best option for viewing The Founder's Cut VHS tape is using around 720p on a computer monitor or flatscreen tv, as it gives the closest to an authentic genloss'd experience you can get!

Even if it doesn't look all that great on the CRT, I am still quite happy with how this tape eventually came out overall. There's obvious effort here to show a degraded, lossed, altered video, and that really adds to the story of Generation Loss, especially the version of that story that the Founder seems to want people to know.

[hooked-on-elvis]

ꜱᴄᴇɴᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴘᴀʀɪꜱᴏɴ — ᴇʟᴠɪꜱ ꜱɪɴɢꜱ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴀᴛʀɪᴀʀᴄʜꜱ/ᴍᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ꜰɪɢᴜʀᴇꜱ

"Love Me Tender" (1956)

Scene from movie "Love Me Tender" (20th Century Fox)

"Can't Help Falling In Love (With You)" (1961)

Scene from movie "Blue Hawaii" (Paramount Pictures)

"We'll Be Together" (1962)

Scene from movie "Girls! Girls! Girls!" (Paramount Pictures)

[jorenilee]

made some stickers for an uni art market recently. enjoi

[mischiefbuckley]

see I did find it particularly interesting the chose to remind us yet again that not only Eddie was in the army, but he was specifically an army medic like again with the general audience they watch this show weekly unless they go out of their way to rewatch the show on their own time, but last time we would have had Eddie and his army medic background knowledge on our screens was season 5, so it had been a while and if season 8 is leaning in the direction of a huge storyline for Eddie and his character might as well start reintroducing him to the audience yet again by reminding us that yes he has a military background as an army medic and his family is from Texas where his son currently is away from his dad and his home they have built in LA like again it’s all the small details coming together

[markantonys]

the main difference between WOT and ROP fandoms is that if you tell WOT fans you're a show-only and don't know anything about the source material, they will go to extreme lengths to protect you from even the most inconsequential of spoilers such as a joke mat told on page 157 of book 1 which will never be relevant to the show in any capacity, whereas if you tell ROP fans you're a show-only and don't know anything about the source material, they will take the opportunity to give you a full-spoiler education on the history of middle earth whether you asked for it or not.

[fiapple]

i'm getting towards the end of the skypeia arc, & i'd like to say just how much i adore the way the female strawhats have been treated.

just... every aspect of how the way their characters have been previously contextualized influences the story-line is treated with a masterful amount of consideration. we're given so many layers to both of them that enrich not only their characters specifically, but the arc, and the one piece world as a whole. without nami & robin having their specific skills, and their specific values, without those being built upon, the story would have come to a halt.

you could not have skypeia without nami & robin being who they are as individuals. not just because they never would've gotten there without nami, but also because the way these women think is itself foundational to the machinations of the arc as a whole.

to be totally upfront, if you think any other strawhats were more central to the skypeia arc than nami & robin were you are full-on fucking lying to yourself.