#i do have an imdb account maybe i could go in and change it

[deanpinterester]

ok out of curiosity i searched up a show i worked on on imdb just to see if i have an imdb page and i do!! but in the credits section it lists a bunch of shows i've never even heard of, let alone worked on. hello?? my generic ass name strikes again

[gusgus373]

Forever My Girl

"Sometimes you have to let yourself go, take a walk on the wild side, trust that everything will work out".

Spanish title: Hasta que te encontré.

Year: 2018

Length: 1h 48min

Score (IMDb): 6.6/10

Synopsis:

Country music superstar, Liam Page returns to his hometown to attend the funeral of his high school best friend, Mason Belmont and runs into his ex-girlfriend Josie, who has a daughter, named Billy Ann, after Liam's mother. Liam didn't know he had a daughter as he got nervous on his wedding day, causing him to leave Josie before the wedding took place.

"She's the one"

Opinion:

Although I don't like it I am a die hard romantic, and that I loved this romcom is proof, the movie is based on a book which I haven't read, but after watching it made me want to read it.

There are a couple of things I didn't like a lot, the first one is that for a 7 year old girl she seems very intelligent, she seems to know more than adults, which is weird in my opinion and she also shouts a lot, most of her dialogues are shouting.

The other bad thing I see is that they could have added in that 12 minutes for the 2 hours that people relate more, like for example a scene of Mason and Liam being friends, so we would see that he really cared enough to leave everything behind and go back to his town or why he was so shocked by the news of the death of someone he hasn't seen for 8 years.

Or a scene of Liam recounting the trauma of his mother's death and reliving it with Billy.

Or when Liam's dad went to find him to tell him about his daughter.

Or a deep conversation on the date Josie and Liam had.

Or how fame swept through young Liam to turn him into the person at the beginning of the film.

Or a conversation with his sober father, maybe talking about the trauma he has.

Notes:

I love that the film starts with the first song we hear of Liam saying many times "Don't throw my whisky" as showing how he is at that moment, frivolous, disinterested, in my opinion with some absurd lyrics (almost reaching the absurdity of many currently popular songs) and ends with a song that talks about coming home, that the song tells you, no, rather it conveys a nice feeling like that, coming home.

Another thing I notice that also has to do with the songs is that the second song that Liam plays right after the one I named in the first point, shows us the real Liam, that is inside him or the shadow of what he was, a man in love, who has a wound that he can't heal.

Something nice also is that there are two occasions in which Liam does not show up to concerts, the first is when without caring about anything he goes back to his friend's funeral, but he is disinterested in leaving his fans behind and does not seem to measure the consequences of his actions, and the second is when he abandons everything back but to return to his family, and we see how he did the first to run away from his responsibilities and the second to run to them, which makes us realise how he evolved.

One question I have that I hope is resolved in the book is how Liam changed in such a short time to be unrecognizable to his father, it's like one day he was one way and a week later he becomes someone totally different, although later I remember that my fantasies as a child (15 years old) were something like that too, going away, not talking to anyone, not even my friends, and coming back years later changed, and taking into account that they are 27, at that time and subtracting Liam's 8 years outside they were going to get married at 18/19 which means that Liam fulfilled my teenage fantasy.

A nice thing is that while Billy somehow teaches Liam to be responsible and careful, he teaches her to let go, they teach each other opposite concepts.

I think who would make Jake look like an antagonist, when he makes the rant to Liam, because from our point of view that we saw Liam's memory, we know that he didn't stand by and do nothing because he didn't care, but because he was reliving his mother's death, but for Jake, who was practically a father to Billy, he saw the man who abandoned his sister at the altar standing next to him watching his daughter drown with a poker face, He doesn't know why he stayed like that, but he doesn't care either, and his resentment may be justified, because you can forgive what was done to you (Josie) but it's harder to forgive someone who hurt a person you love (Jake) because you were there when he cried, when he maybe blamed himself and through the whole grieving process and you don't want it to happen again.

[a-shakespearean-in-paris]

Why Cullen?

Today I bring you a post I’ve been in the process of mentally drafting for a while, a post that essentially analyzes the age old question in the Dragon Age fandom: Why is there always something with Cullen?

To do this, I am going to go through different “phases” of Cullen discourse. My thesis and answering the titular question: It’s complicated, and I don’t think I can answer “Why Cullen,” but “there’s sometimes recycled discourses made about his character through the years, maybe there’s a pattern.” When it comes to Cullen’s detractors, I understand the fact that it might be frustrating to see much content for someone so “boring” when there’s more “interesting” and “well done” characters (though interest is of course relevant) so it leads to a lot of vitriol from both new and old fans who think the man had too much screen time already. Furthermore, he is highly complicated man dressed as a Disney prince, and the “Disney-esque” feel of his romance creates a dissonance between coming to terms with his problematic past and reveling in the romanticism. We can have a happy medium everyone,  but because of what I can only describe as “tik tok thought” it’s become looked down upon to have problematic favorites, which leads to guilt in liking something problematic, or outright revisionism.

But liking things with problematic elements doesn’t make you a bad person.

Alright, let’s begin: 

The first phase truly began of course with DAO with Cullen’s crush on the female Circle Mage Warden. Some were endeared, others not so much. I cannot speak to this phase too much as I was around 15-16 and pretty preoccupied with my high school drama instead of fandom, though I played both DAO and DA2 upon it’s release and followed updates for DA2 before it came out. Despite not being an active fandom member I was what they would call, a lurker. I knew some people liked Cullen and thought he was cute, wishing for more screen time after the game and hoping he’d be in DAI through IMDB message boards (remember those?) and YoutTube comments. When news broke he’d be an advisor in DAI and a romance option, I remember seeing a lot of people in those same spaces rejoice. I’m sure there were also people who weren’t so pleased, but from what I saw, people were happy. When Inquisition did release, I actually did quite a bit more lurking on tumblr despite the fact I didn’t have a blog, because I played the romance route, really gravitated toward it, and wanted to see fanart and such. People liked the romance, liked his arc and how Bioware handled his struggles with lyrium; and found it realistic. Even in my lurking days I did see some blowback on Cullen from detractors, those who didn’t think he should have been the military advisor (which canonically it makes total sense to me why he’s where he’s at, but I won’t get into it here however.) But likely because I wasn’t fully “in fandom,” my surface level understanding of how tumblr felt about Cullen was relatively positive and there was only standard fare discourse.

Phase 2: I can speak about this phase better because I established this blog in 2017. Two years after DAI was released, you still had a lot of fans who loved his romance and character, but you also saw a lot of those fans really dive into his flaws, insisting even that just focusing on the Disney Prince aspects of him reduced his character. There were also more internal debates. Would realistically Cullen be a good father was one. One thing however was for sure, there was a strange them and us line between detractors and fans, and to many fans, myself included, oftentimes the Cullen blowback would extend beyond the valid, “hey I don’t think his characterization was handled well” or “his redemption arc isn’t that great” to outright vitriolic hate that blatantly ignored his PTSD and lyrium addiction, and even sometimes “you just like Cullen because he’s white.” As a POC fan it was a fantastic thing to be accused of. I used to be more involved with discord during this period and I remember a few discussions about this as well. Even those indifferent to Cullen didn’t get it.

Overall, I have to say the air was one where people in Cullen fandom enjoyed all aspects of him, from delving into this troubled past to indulging in the Disney prince aspects of him. It was a happy medium I think, even if occasionally I would see a Cullen fan feel bad for liking him, and feel like they needed to justify it. Heck I even did and still do feel that way sometimes, like I need to justify what I like. But we all come into fandom for different reasons. I come into fandom some days for different things. Sometimes I want smut with my favorite character, other times I want more intense thought pieces and challenging fics. Great thing about fandom is that it’s a bakery that has cherry tarts, cinnamon rolls, or all kinds of pie depending on your mood. Craving a different sweet treat, you can make your own. Or you can commission an artist or writer for something you fancy.

*(sexual assault mentions here late in the paragraph****)And now I’ve been warped back into Cullen/DA fandom through what I am calling phase three, where the general air on Cullen reads as….very different. After having one foot outside DA fandom for a while coming back and reading the air has been different. There was the bizarre nuggetgate and other things with Cullen. Now, instead of accepting his flaws and exploring him there seems to be a lot of revisionism going on, as if his past never happened or we’re supposed to ignore he was a templar. A sexually active Cullen is looked down upon but in a different way from before. Instead of smut works with him “reducing his complicated character.” it’s distasteful to write smut with him where he’s sexually dominant or even just a lot of smut because he was sexually assaulted. (***Now, it is implied that he was, if you are a female Circle mage in DAO, with “sifting through my thoughts, tempting me with the one thing I always wanted but could never have” but this is an implication. I will be honest, it is what I have implied. However, it’s not there if you’re not a female Mage. He was however canonically sexually harassed in the Winter Palace, something I will always argue, even if canon treats it like a joke, even if Leliana tells him to “just look pretty.” Just because he is a man doesn’t make it funny that someone grabbed his bottom, and if you take Cole he flat out says “Cullen is afraid.”***)

So here I am, wondering what changed and what’s going on. Here’s what I believe: Cullen is a complicated character and his flaws and his past make him interesting to me, and they are interesting to explore. However there is nothing wrong with wanting to just explore a romantic, sexual Cullen. He’s a character with many facets. He’s romantic, determined, nostalgic, stubborn, unrelenting, loyal, driven, all things that made him seem so real. Here we get to my theory: in today’s media “criticisms” I see people—particularly younger people—beat themselves up for liking something problematic. It’s like every time you engage with media that’s potentially problematic you have to write essays to yourself why it is so and hold yourself accountable. I see this on tik-tok a lot and why I refer to it as “tik tok thought.” Look at the way some young Hamilton fans talk about the musical, or heck even here, and you may see what I mean. It’s like if you don’t acknowledge the problematic aspects of the historical figures behind their fictional portrayals in the show you’re a bad person. Same thing with nostalgic Disney fans my age in younger, if you don’t clown on Ariel for “choosing a man over anything” (SHE LIKED THE SURFACE WORLD BEFORE SHE MET ERIC) you don’t get your brownie points.

I want to make it clear: being critical of media is good. I am glad I see young people and people my age think about the messages we are given in media, but somehow this is turned into ANALYZE EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. Ya’ll I’m a grad student. I’m critical most of the time, when I come to my tumblr blog’s lawn I’m here mostly to have some fun, and hey sometimes my fun is being critical. But sometimes it isn’t. You do not have to always be critical. You do not have to beat yourself up for liking something that’s problematic or write an essay about why it is as if that’s your due diligence in stanning a fictional character. I’m going to be honest I used to kind of think I had to justify my likes once, especially because of the Cullen vitriol on tumblr. I worked overtime in my early fanfic efforts to try to prove to the world I knew Cullen was problematic for fear I’d be perceived as just an idiot horny fangirl. Well, let me tell you: I largely don’t think that way anymore. If I want to just enjoy writing some smut or reading some smut with him, I am. But I think there is a second part of this in Cullen fandom currently, a revisionism of his problematic elements. Now, if you have to do mental gymnastics with a character in an effort to ignore problematic elements, perhaps you don’t like the character that much. That’s totally okay. DA has many awesome characters to write about and stan.

So, why Cullen? For so many reasons a bit of a shit show has always followed this character. There’s a divide between fans and his detractors and sometimes there’s a divide within the Cullen fandom. What I can extrapolate for now is the need to keep him squeaky clean and safe and away from anything “problematic” because his of past, his templar roots, or the fact that he’s white when there are POC characters with less content. It reads as a guilt associated with liking him. But please, do not be guilty. He’s not real. Templars aren’t real, mages aren’t real, Cullen isn’t real. Here’s my advice, something I learned while in my directing class in college. What my teacher always said was direct what turns you on, direct a story that gets you thinking, gets you excited. What gets you thinking and excited in a fictional world may be tons of conflict and dramatics, or it may be peace and love. Sometimes it can be both or more. Don’t shame others for coming to a bakery and wanting blueberry when you want cherry, and the baker has both, especially if the baker labels each pie, especially if the recipe for the pie has some salt in it and people like the salt. We can have it all and enjoy it all. What we want in our fiction doesn’t always align with something we may want real life. Lots of people write Modern girl in Thedas stories. Ya’ll if that actually happened to one of us it would probably suck. I’d probably get killed and not even get to meet Cullen and pose around the desk to get things going, so I’d rather it not happen. However, it is fun to read about.

Again, don’t be guilty for liking Cullen, please. But if you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to like Cullen, maybe you don’t like him at all. To that I say, there are many other amazing characters, or perhaps you could write your own.

[cowboyjimkirk]

talk to her again. This went on for longer than you might think: I first met her in I think mid-to-late 2009 or so, and I stopped talking to her almost entirely in April or so 2012. In a lot of ways, this dynamic defined my high school experience, I guess. In 2015 or so, we started talking again--I'm not entirely sure why--and things went surprisingly well. We weren't fighting, and she was extremely calm about everything. And then abruptly, for no reason, she stopped talking to me (2/x)

This period lasted for about a month. Then she came back, spoke to me for a few minutes, and then asked me how long it'd been since we last spoke. I told her about a month. She said, "Then no wonder I missed you; I've been in the hospital for a month." I don't know whether or not she was lying about this, but something about it seemed...off. It's just that it was the kind of thing her "friends" would have said to me to get me to talk to her again in 2011 or so, I guess. (3/x)

That's when it clicked: what if those friends she had talk to me back when I was in high school were just her alt accounts? What if she'd been catfishing me in order to manipulate me? So I go off and find those old Facebook accounts. Sure enough, most of them had apparently gone unused since 2011 or 2012. The most recent one had been used in I think early 2013 or something. There were other things there, too. (4/x)

Most of them had names based on a video game series. I didn't pick up on that at the time because I'm not really into video games, but I'd had friends who were into this series since then so I recognised the names then. It also made sense, given that this game was one of her favourites back then. The other thing was that when a lot of these accounts made statuses, it was only ever about her, which was weird when you consider some of these people were supposed to hate her guts (5/x)

They all had the same writing style, too--particular words they'd consistently misspell, a few clear emoticon preferences. Profile pictures from animes she liked but very few of themselves. It all fit with these accounts being catfish accounts, and I have no idea why I didn't pick up on it earlier. It should have been so obvious to me. I hate that I was so oblivious--not just hate, I fucking despise myself for it (6/x)

Maybe I just got a little too caught up in the moment when it was happening. Maybe I was caught up in the emotions of it all--because trust me, if there was one thing this person could do more than anything else, it was make me feel. But I can learn, even if it takes me a while. And I learned then; it all clicked. The funny thing is that I'm not even entirely sure why it clicked in late 2015 but not in those few years when we weren't talking at all (7/x)

After that, I just stopped talking to her entirely. I've never spoken to her again. I guess I could have confronted her about it, but what would have been the point, you know? It wouldn't have changed how I felt about it, and I sorta know enough about her background to make an educated guess as to why she did it to begin with. I won't ever know if she was telling the truth about the hospital thing; just that it seemed really off (8/x)

I'm not even really sure why I'm telling you this. Maybe I shouldn't; it's all a bit much I guess. I guess I just wanted someone to know, and for there to be at least some anonymity about it because I'm still really embarrassed by it, even after all these years. I just wish I'd picked up on it a bit earlier than I did (9/9)

sorry, i know i read your first message, but i must have deleted it because i can't find it.

i really don't think you have any reason to feel embarrassed. everyone who was online in the early days of the internet, and especially everyone who was a kid, is entitled to at least one toxic online friendship. you were a teenager! when i was that age, i was wasting my time getting into arguments on IMDb message boards.

and of course we'd all been warned about stranger danger online, but the concept of catfishing wasn't solidified into popular culture yet (the movie came out in 2010 and the term would have entered the lexicon some time after that). you had no reason to suspect that she had an elaborate plan to trick you, and her duplicity is not your fault.

never feel bad for being lied to or deceived---never feel bad for trusting someone. it was kind of you to keep giving her a chance and you should feel good about that. don't blame yourself for something she did.

[6rookie-writer0110]

One dance don't feel low

Kaylee Bryant x Male Reader

Request- Kaylee and Male reader work together on the show Legacies. They developed feelings for each other.

Kaylee had to do a scene with you. It was a kissing scene and she wasn't sure why she felt nervous about it. She felt a spark when she kissed you. She starts to wonder if you felt the spark.

“What’s on your mind?” Danielle asked.

“What do you know about the new guy,” Kaylee said.

“Just Google his profile on IMDb, that's what I did,” Danielle said.

She had to do a costume change and Kaylee looked up your profile on IMDb. She starts to read that you appeared on

Arrow, Chicago PD, Gringo, The Adams family (2019), the good dinosaur, and Onward.

She is impressed by the work you did. She did look up your Instagram account, she pressed followed and liked a few pictures. She puts her phone away and she looked at you.

On the show, you will be Josie's new boyfriend. Your scenes are with Kaylee and Jenny. Your character doesn't get along with Hope and Landon. Hope and Landon won't support the relationship but Lizzie supports the relationship. You would be a vampire on the show.

You and Kaylee starting to get to know each other. She makes you smile and laugh, her smile makes you weak. When you were alone, you noticed Kaylee followed you on Instagram. You can't stop smiling and you did like a few pictures of her.

---

You are sitting down in a chair and Kaylee walked towards you. She bought coffee for you and her.

“Y/N, I got this for you,” Kaylee said.

You grabbed the coffee and you smiled.

“Thanks. You didn't had to buy me coffee” You said.

“You did buy me lunch last week. So umm... Y/n any plans for Valentine's Day?” Kaylee said.

“Nope. I'm not dating anyone, I guess I will just stay home and do something. What about you?” You said.

Kaylee asked because she wanted to know if you're single. She did see some pictures with girls on your Instagram account.

“I was dating but we broke up six months ago,” Kaylee said.

You developed feelings for Kaylee. Talking to her is never boring and her smile you love it. Kaylee teaches you the basic words in Japanese. She giggles when you say it wrong and your struggle to say it properly.

“If you go to Japan you will love it,” Kaylee said.

“Can't wait to go. Maybe you can be my trout guide and translator” You said.

She smiled “could happen... Will see”

You and Kaylee smiled at each other.

✯ ✫ ✬ ✫

You and Kaylee always have to shoot scenes together. Your feelings for her became stronger and you wonder if she feels the same. You like doing the kissing and her lips are soft.

You and Kaylee started to do interviews for the show. Before the interview started Kaylee noticed your collar is uneven.

“Wait, y/n let me fix it,” Kaylee said.

She is standing very close to you. You felt your heart in your throat and Kaylee is feeling nervous too. She stares into your eyes and she fixed your collar.

“Much better” Kaylee said.

“Thank you,” You said.

You and Kaylee started to interview with puppies. You couldn't focus on the questions because you kept with the puppies. Kaylee would answer the questions for you then you jump in and say something. Kaylee would play with the puppies and one of them licked her face.

----

You and Kaylee are on set filming 3x01. Kaylee is covered in mud and you are laughing at her. You noticed that she is getting closer to you and you kept moving away.

“Y/N, give me a hug,” Kaylee said.

“Maybe later,” You said.

“Just give me a hug,” Kaylee said.

She didn't stop walking towards you. You keep moving away then you felt her arms go around you. The mud got all over your clothes and she kissed your cheek but it was close to your lips.

“I got my hug” Kaylee smiled and kissed your cheek again.

She starts to giggle and she has a strong grip around you.

“You ruined my clothes” You laughed.

She lets go of you.

“You moved too slow” Kaylee laughed.

She smacked your ass before you went to change clothes.

“Naughty” You laughed.

✯ ✫ ✬ ✫

The more you worked with Kaylee your feelings got stronger. Again you and Kaylee have to do another interview together. You don't mind it's with her but you had to wake up very early.

“I got this for you,” You said.

“You remember my order?” Kaylee asked.

“I never forgot. I did get it right?” You said.

You went to Starbucks before you met up with Kaylee.

“Yes, you got it right. But you forgot the whipped cream” Kaylee said and kissed your cheek.

Later, you and Kaylee did start to answer questions about the show. The next couple of questions are about the characters.

“How does it feel working with y/n?” The host asked.

“I like working with him. He is very funny, sweet and sometimes he brings me food. He is a talented actor and handsome” Kaylee said and smiled.

You did blush and she just smiled.

“ I don't like working with Kaylee. She is diva” You joked.

She playfully smacked your arm “Y/N”

You laughed.

“I’m kidding. Kaylee is an amazing actress, beautiful, very sweet and she always makes me laugh. I love working with her all the time” You said.

“Do you want to go out tonight on a date?” Kaylee asked.

Your eyes opened wide and you looked at the host.

“Of course!” You said.

You and Kaylee smiled at each other. What happened everyone is talking about it on the internet.

-----

You and Kaylee have some time off from work. It was her idea to go to Japan, you or Kaylee never to been to Japan. But she does know Japanese on the plane she did teach you how to speak Japanese. You did struggle to learn but she found it cute how you mess up the words. You and Kaylee would spend Valentine's day in Japan.

[myimmortalisimmortal]

Why Chapter 39 of My Immortal was due to an actual hacker

After considering some findings, I’m confident in this theory. And thus, I’m confident anyone who claims to be Tara Gilesbie while claiming the hacked chapter was faked is not being honest. Below I will explain why I believe so and how I came across this information in the first place.

All this was from a long chain of breadcrumbs. Let’s go back... all to the mid 2000s in the LiveJournal days when Tara Gilesbie had a dedicated fan club.

The Tara Gilesbie Fan Club

One thing that particularly stuck out was members mentioning finding Tara through IMDb. Yes, you heard right.

[ID: Two comments on the Tara Gilesbie Fan Club LiveJournal.

The first is from ‘golden_helikaon’ on 2008-01-19 writing, “I found it on the Order of the Phoenix IMDb board. There were several long threads dedicated to ripping her apart with every new chapter.”

The second comment is from ‘heartdreamerz’ on 2008-01-20 writing, “It was almost 2 years ago and I've told this story many times. I knew Tara a month before My Immortal was published. It was on IMDb's board for My Chemical Romance. When the story came out I knew about it but didn't pay attention because I wasn't into HP at the moment. Then, like icarus_malfoy wrote, there were the threads about her and that's when my interest started. There were also another troll on the His Dark Materials...” (Image cuts off.) End ID.]

According to this, Tara Gilesbie was already tyrannizing the internet before she posted My Immortal. This actually is very consistent with the fact “Tara Gliesbie is totlly Gottik” was a petition that existed in November 2005. (My Immortal was posted in March 2006.)

This IMDb profile seemed very intriguing. It hasn’t been mentioned much, and isn’t considered to be official by most people. Was it a legitimate account? If so, was there gothicness we were deprived of all along? I searched to try find out more about it, hoping screen captures or something would turn up. Luckily, one of the same members copied and pasted Tara’s bio in another comment.

[ID: A comment on the Tara Gilesbie Fan Club LiveJournal by ‘heartdreamerz’ on 2007-05-05 writing, “All her posts are deleted now. I can still visit her profile because she's on my friend list. Her bio:

‘hi im tara. im a goth (n prode!). i have died blak hair n blu eyez. i wer eyeliner a lot of da time. i hav a bf. his naym is justin. he rox! i liv in Dubia.

likz: eyliner, goffik makep, beng goffik, GOOD CHRALOTTE, death, sleting my rists, drak colorz, hot topik _

dizliks: beng alive, bo, pop music, brite colors, pink, brabie, hiraly doof da music i lik: linen prak, GOOD CHRELOTE, evinezenz, simpl plan, akon, arvil levine, blink-183, panik! at da disko, foll oot boi, mcr. HIRALY DOOF IS A PSR!

fav moviez: when a stranger kallz, da grudge, da grudge 2, korps bird, da nitemare b4 krismas, da ring 2, da ring, shrak attak, undreworld 2, da texas chonsow massakre da bogenning

ps 2 all da prepz nd pozers tryin 2 diz me u r jus jeloz!!!! so yolsentik nd hartdremer u kan go fok ur momz 4 al i ker ok U SUK!!!111′

I feel so special to be personally insulted by her on her profile.” End ID.]

People like to copy & paste things stupid things to laugh at all the time (no offense Tara), so I thought: why not Google some of the bio? Maybe whoever did that posted additional stuff.

And it worked! (I found more content from Tara’s supposed IMDb, but more on that for a different post.)

When searching the bio, a Reddit thread about Rose Christo popped up.

During Rose Christo’s brief reign, a user said Rose’s claims seemed to check out. This user actually happens to be the same commenter, Heartdreamerz, in the LiveJournal thread. (Which makes sense, considering she’s the one who originally had the bio I was searching.) 

If you don’t feel like clicking the Reddit link, basically she confirmed Rose’s claim that two Filipino users from the forums hacked the account.

Because of Heartdreamerz’ long involvement in My Immortal and the fact she never claimed to be Tara or Raven, I take a lot of trust in her word.

Heartdreamerz linked the FF.net profile of the original hacker: Coruscate Corruption.

Looking up “Coruscate Corruption” had me come across this from the LiveJournal fan club, which implies that there were two hackers.

[ID: post on the Tara Gilesbie Fan Club Livejournal by 'nicespice' on Dec. 28th, 2006, writing, “Just a little thing I drabbled down. Hope it's not too horrible. What do you think?

There is an evil on FF.net and All who encounters it feels their Respiratory system give out And become too scared to scream. Gruesome, it is. The anti-christ fanfiction, My Immortal, written by a total idiot. Does she Leave you to cry tears of blood, because I have before. EarnestInBerlin and Coruscate Corruption, the hackers, Sought to bring My Immortal redemption. Too Bad the real Tara had to come back so soon to ruin the fun. I wish she had at least continued her story, I look at her fic Everytime I go online, wishing she'd just update so I could laugh at... Tara Gilesbie." End ID.]

While searching “Coruscate Corruption”, a few posts popped up from a forum for The Bartimaeus Sequence called Bartiforums.

[ID: Two images showing 3 forum posts by Mwamba.

The first post was a reply to, "Mwamba, how did you crack both passys? Just guessing or what?"

On December 8th 2006, Mwamba replied, "Tara's was just pure luck. It didn't take long to get. The password was tara. *snorts* Post's was just guessing too, but I remembered when his passy was cracked on here, so I tried out the same password. It worked. Oh yeah, and I wrote a fanfic for Post, it's a rip off of Tara's story, but meh.”

The last two posts were made on January 14th, 2007. The second post wrote, "It was me. I had complete control for two days. And then EarnestInBerlin had to hack in too and change the password. But then she told what it was and then the real Tara had to come back and rechange her passy so nobody could get in. But that's old news. That account is most certainly not mine. I could not continue that fic for 39 chapters, I'd get bored after the first fifteen.”

The third post wrote, “*Shrug* It doesn't matter. Call me whatever. Though if I have to pick, I suppose you can call me by my FF.net name, Coruscate Corruption. What book category are you writing this fic in? Just curious.” End ID.]

Chapter 39 was posted late November 2006, so that first post was only a few weeks after it happened.

The password was “tara”... does that ring a bell at all?

[ID: A screencap from Rose Christo’s now-deleted blog. It says, “And My Immortal? You can come to your own conclusions. This was really never about the fic; it was the marketing team at SMP that decided to make My Immortal the main part of the story. Our email address was gofikchick@hotmail.com and our password was tara.” End ID.]

-- Rose Christo’s claim before deleting

 You may be asking, “Rose Christo? The woman who lied about her family, being Native American, and writing My Immortal to sell a book?” Yes, that Rose Christo. Yes, she was a fraud and a scammer, but she peppered in some little-known true details to make her claim seem more legit. For instance, she talked about a Voldemort rper in the reviews, and that ended up being true. You can actually find this Voldemort reviewer in the web archives of Raven’s stories. (Apparently, that Voldemort even came out and said “hey, that’s me!” Cannot find it unfortunately.)

Keep in mind the only way I found any of this was because Rose Christo made that claim. Without it, Heartdreamerz wouldn’t have made that post that led to Coruscate Corruption and those posts on Bartiforums. It’s possible Rose somehow came across the same information I did, but it’s more likely she was there. Rose Christo may not be the author of My Immortal, but it was likely she was a spectator as it all went down. (As I was a spectator for Rose’s ordeal when it all went down.)

 Since it was said the hackers posted on the fanfiction forums, I sought to find it by searching “Tara”, “My Immortal”, etc. on FFnet’s search. The posts are unfortunately long gone, but there is a surviving forum called “My Immortal Forum Tara Gilesbie is a genius!”

[ID: A screencap of “My Immortal Forum Tara Gilesbie is a genius!” from Fanfiction net. Someone named Ebony Dark’ness wrote, “I have personally logged on to Tara’s account when her password was revealed after she got hacked.” End ID.]

TL;DR: Multiple, separate people made consistent claims over the span of years. Because of this, I personally believe Tara’s account was legitimately hacked.

(Sources/links will be added in a reblog.)

[infinitecrime]

Spoiler-free TFATWS Ep. 1 review:

A strong and promising set-up episode to reintroduce us to these characters and where they’re at now, with plenty of (sometimes a little clunky...) world building, beautiful cinematography and action sequences, and some really likable new characters. Grounded in reality but it still felt big and like everything could kick off at any time. I have some reservations about Sam’s writing so far but got everything I wanted from Bucky’s. 8/10

Spoiler-heavy review:

Plot/Writing:

No big issues with the plot; it was a set up episode so I wasn’t expecting any huge revelations. Everything was very well done.

Sam’s scenes were meant to show the mundane and realistic aspects of being a superhero and the struggles of post-blip life, but at times they felt a little too mundane and repetitive, particularly the bank stuff. I feel like something more substantial could have been done with Sarah to make that plotline more tense and add real stakes - her car getting towed, an eviction notice, a bailiff coming round, for example? We hear that they’re struggling, but we don’t really see it.

There were a couple of moments of exposition that were so clunky and forced that it really made them stand out, because the rest of the script was so smooth and natural. Particularly Torres explaining who the flag smashers were to Sam, Yori suddenly being reminded of his son, and then some of the lines in the loan scene.

The audience isn’t dumb; we can figure these things out for ourselves. For example, the line from Yori about his son could have been cut entirely because it was already obvious. Bucky seeing the photo in the shrine at the end should have been the reveal for anyone who hadn’t figured it out.

In prior movies we’ve had plenty of backstory for Bucky, but no personality, and plenty of personality for Sam, but no backstory. They needed to fill in those gaps in a way that didn’t have us drowning in constant angst with Bucky, or drowning in constant exposition with Sam. I think we were successful with Bucky because he had some light moments, but Sam’s scenes were just a bit too exposition heavy to feel quite natural. I’m forgiving them because it’s a set up episode, but they need to balance this better in the future.

Sam:

Loved Sam’s action scenes, his relationship with Torres, his interactions with members of the public, all the stuff at the Smithsonian with Rhodey, and his banter with his family. Anthony killed the Smithsonian speech scene and his chemistry with Sarah and Torres is great. But most of the reservations I have about this series after the first episode are about Sam’s scenes, even though I liked them overall.

His writing started very strong but then kind of... fizzled out up until the last 2 minutes? Despite Sam being arguably the most charismatic and likeable and emphatic characters in the MCU, his characterisation just didn’t really come across in the latter half, because he seemed a little too out of touch with what Sarah was going through. Having so many scenes of people hero-worshipping him in one short episode definitely didn’t help with this - we put him in a down to earth, everyman setting but didn’t really see him being that everyman that we know he is, especially when we compare him to Bucky who’s living largely incognito. If I had been a first time MCU viewer I would not have been endeared to him or really gotten what his character was about because it seemed a bit all over the place.

I think this could have been fixed by having a darker scene with his family that would have humbled him to the audience and given Anthony an opportunity to flex his range. Like visiting his parents graves, or being unable to connect with his nephew’s because he’s been gone so long they don’t recognise him, or assuring Sarah that everything’s going to be fine with money then looking at an empty bank account and panicking when she was out of the room. Without that scene it just felt like he was brushing Sarah’s reality and struggles off with an “eh, it’ll be fine!” attitude. We got some range from his character at the Smithsonian, but even that felt like it was more about the shield and the symbol than about Sam and Steve, because we weren’t told whether Steve is alive or dead or still in Sam’s life, so we don’t really know what Sam is feeling.

I’m hoping now that the character set up is done and the fight for the shield gets going, this will get better.

Also, while Sam's opening sequence was awesome and really showed the capabilities of the wings and Red Wing and Sam himself, it felt ever so slightly too OP on the tech front. Unless Redwing has semi-sentient AI like Jarvis the way it works is just too unbelievable, and the wings also seemed to be semi-sentient or controlled by his brain somehow? I think they need to figure out exactly how his tech works because right now we’re leaning into ‘magic wings’ territory. 

Bucky:

I love that Sam has been trying to reach out to him as mentioned by the therapist. I wish Sam and Rhodey had paused at his exhibit in the Smithsonian or mentioned him to tie the two storylines together more tightly. 

This Bucky is my exact Bucky. This is the absolutely perfect characterisation for me. Snarky, funny, smart, kind of a dork, morally grey, riddled by guilt, trying to do the right thing, depths of sadness and rage and loss, barely holding it together, regaining his old sass and personality and memories but forever a changed man. He wasn’t a totally broken damsel in distress, he wasn’t a completely lawful good hero, he was an independent but traumatised man trying his best to heal.

I’m happy that they mentioned his family and the ‘man out of time’ thing was dealt with very well. He’s wasn’t totally lost, just bemused but adapting well. I was worried they were going to sweep it all under the rug because they felt all ground had been covered with Steve, but they didn’t.

It’s also great that they showed he was capable with technology. The Winter Soldier would absolutely have used all kinds of tech, Bucky was always a science nerd, and he lived in high-tech Wakanda for a few years. He’s likely fine with technology, it’s the people and culture he doesn’t understand.

I love him trying to date and being flirty. I will continue to fight the people who say he shouldn’t be dating because he has PTSD - it’s fucking ableist and patronising. Also, he’s been free from HYDRA for almost 5 years (10 if you count the blip). When is he allowed to start dating if not after 5 whole years?! 

Sam has previously been the funny one but I think Bucky had better one liners here. I can’t wait until we see both of them together, their chemistry is unmatched.

Seb does all these conflicting emotions and micro-expressions and feelings hidden in the eyes so, so well. You feel it all - the guilt and shame, the desperation to make amends, but also the rage and need for revenge and killer instinct bubbling under the surface that he’s constantly having to fight down. This is a character with a dark side, and no matter how fandom may characterise him, he always has been. Seb really bought the comedy here too. 

Bucky having P.W. Hauser in his book was hilarious. 

New Characters:

All the new characters felt very real and likeable. Loved the girl in the restaurant (did they actually say her name? I think from the credits she must be Leah), Sarah Wilson, the no-shit taking therapist, Yori, and particularly Torres, who I have a feeling will die but I really love.

I see from the IMDB that Leah is listed as appearing in all 6 episodes, so maybe there will be an actual relationship between her and Bucky? Or she’s a secret super hero or not who she seems?  We didn’t actually see Batroc die, meaning he will likely come back too. He’s listed as only having 1 ep on IMDB but so is the therapist and we know she comes back from the promos - maybe IMDB is just wrong, idk.

Other:

The cinematography was really great, some beautiful shots here, especially around Louisiana and the Tunisia stuff. 

It’s such a minor thing but I like when people actually get to speak the languages they would speak in that situation, instead of a room full of French people speaking English for the audiences benefit. It feels so much more real.

Even the end credits were beautiful!

[imanativeofswlondondahling]

Hiding in Plain Sight (1)- Tom Holland X Reader

Word Count-1792

A/N: This was inspired by this wonderful post by @starsholland. Without it this would not be happening. This will be a multi part fic, but I don’t know how many chapters or when it will be posted so if you’d like to be tagged let me know:)  Welcome to Tom being undercover on Tumblr. Quick notes- Y/T/B = Your Tumblr Blog, Y/A is your age :)

“You’re not going to make me go undercover on Tumblr are you?” Tom asks as they hook up the mike to his white t-shirt. “I’ve heard dangerous things about that site.”

“No, no. We’re sticking to Reddit, Twitter, Youtube. Maybe some Quora and IMDB.” The redheaded assistant sitting across from him states as she places the GQ laptop across from him. Tom sees Harrison’s shoulders silently moving up and down, laughing at the idea of him having to go undercover on the site that he had been telling horror stories of for weeks leading up to this interview. “If any of these don’t sound good to you, we can skip them.”

“No, those sound fine.” Tom says. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

“Camera A ready?” She asks the camera man sitting diagonally from where she is. In response she gets a nod. “Tom when you’re ready say something like I’m Tom Holland and I’m going undercover on the internet to answer your questions. It’s actually me. Something like that.”

From across the room Harrison watches as Tom flows through the questions easily, hoping from site to site with better technical luck than he normally has. He can guess that some of the answers will be giffed and blasted around social media within minutes of this interview going live. It would shock him if it didn’t.

“Check it out mate.” On his screen flashes Tom saying I drink tea darling over and over again. “Your fans love it. Which is good, seeing how upset a lot of them are over the Disney/Sony thing.”

“Where is this?”

“Your favorite site.”

“Instagram?”

“Tumblr.” Tom rolls his eyes and falls back into the couch.

“Why are you even on there?”

“Why aren’t you? So many fangirls, so little time.” Tom shoots a dirty look at Harrison. “But in all seriousness, there’s a lot of great reactions and gifs that you can only find on Tumblr. You should check it out.” Tom reaches for Harrison’s computer but he pulls away. “Make your own account. It costs nothing.”

“Ugh, fine.” Pulling his phone out of his pocket, downloads the app and creates an account. Expecting one of the fangirls to have already have taken his common username, he’s surprised to be able to fill out the form with tomholland2013 as his username. Will that seem too much like him? Who knows. It’s not like he’s planning to actually use this site. He just using it to see what Harrison wants him to see. “What do I look up?”

“Just search the hashtag Tom Holland and look under recent for the most recent stuff. Most of it is your undercover interview. Or you can look under the Tom Holland top posts and see what your fans are obsessed with.” Tom is on the main page and sees a suggestion of blogs. A lot of them have his name intertwined in them with his picture as the profile picture. Guess it wouldn’t hurt to follow some blogs while he’s on here? 

The first one he follows is @starsholland who seems to write fanfictions about him but also shares a lot of marvel pictures. By clicking follow it brings up a lot of suggested blogs to follow. He clicks on @tonguetiedholland and sees another fanfiction writer but also a lot of posts between them and other bloggers. “Is this site just fanfiction?”

“No, there’s pictures and edits and stuff too. Why? You only interested in the fanfiction?”

“I only seem to find fanfictions.” Tom replies as he clicks on a blog called @tomhollandsstan, finding a mix of fanfictions, pictures and conversations. However his eyes scroll through one of the fics and find something much more raunchy than he anticipated finding. “Holy hell. What are they writing all of this about?”

“Reading something steamy Tommy?” Harrison teases. Tom feels his face flush with the embarrassment of knowing that there are girls and guys out there picturing stuff like this with him as the main feature. 

“I’m getting off this site. It’s bloody porn.”

“No wait, you’ve just stumbled down the wrong path. Let me send you some blogs to look at.” Harrison pulls up some of the ones that are mostly pictures and reactions. “What’s your tumblr handle? I’ll send them to you?”

“Tomholland2013.”

“Really? It wasn’t taken?”

“Nope.”

“See how long it stays secretive.”

“I don’t plan on using it.” Tom says as he hits follow on some of the other blogs that Harrison sent him, including one that was @Y/T/B. He found himself scrolling through it a little more in depth than he had with any of the other pages he had been on. The posts and your reactions were more what he expected of tumblr. Glee filled, but not thirsty. Hitting follow was a no brainer.

Across the country, your phone lights up as you get a notification from Tumblr. You’re about to swipe it away, since your day is currently going down hill as the recipes you’re in the middle of trying out are turning into pinterest fails. Also you should have checked before you started baking a cake that you had powdered sugar to make frosting, so you’ll have to do another pinterest deep dive for a frosting recipe since you can’t use your tried and true recipe.

However, the name on the notification catches your eye- Tomholland2013 has followed you. Wow someone finally snatched the name. There had been jokes around the fandom for months that someone should snag the name so Tom could have it whenever or if-ever he decided to join tumblr. But it seems someone has decided to be Tom. Whoever it is though seems to enjoy your posts because they’re liking your posts in succession. While your stand mixer whirls, you open to their blog and see there’s nothing there. Not even a banner or an icon photo. They must be a super new blog. You back out of their blog and almost back out of the app when you see a message from this Tom Holland wanna be.

From: Tomholland2013

I really like all your edits of Tom. Can I use one as my profile pic? X

You pause for a second before replying. This person wasn’t the first to ask to use one of your edits as a profile picture. Why does this feel different though? It has to just be because of the name. You click to reply to the ask.

I’m so surprised someone finally took the name. Me and @imanativeofswlondondahling had a bet going on for how long it was going to stay open in case Tom wanted it. Anyway, feel free to use my edits, or if you have a favorite picture of Tom, send it my way and I’ll make an edit for you.

You hit send on the ask before you can change your mind and then you turn back to your cake- which has probably been overwhipped now.

“Do I have a favorite picture of Tom?” Tom mumbles to himself as he reads over your reply. He’d love to see something that was made for him, but that means finding a picture of himself that he wants edited. “Harrison, com’ere mate. Take a selfie with me.”

“What’s this for?” Harrison asks before posing. @Y/T/B wouldn’t know this was just a selfie. You’d probably think he just did a Google deep dive.

“Need a profile picture. For my blog.” Tom teases, before clicking back to his messages on tumblr. There has to be a way to send a direct message instead of an ask like he did before. He had been planning to use an edit you had done of him saying I drink tea darling, but he wasn’t going to toss up having a custom made icon. After fiddling around on the app for a few minutes Tom finally figures out how to send a message and sends the picture he had snapped with Harrison a few minutes earlier. He tacks on a quick message asking her to do whatever she wants with the picture and to take as long as she wants and or needs. After hitting send, he clicks back to your blog's main page, trying to learn more about you.

At the top of your page, simply stated, it reads Y/N, Y/A, Tom Holland Fan. Well that does tell him you’re around his age, so that makes him feel less like a creeper. He wants to know everything he can about you, but all he can find through scrolling is mainly, well him. He can’t explain why, but there’s a sort of pull towards you from what he can find in your messages to other people and responding to anon messages, you seem like someone he’d want to be friends with. You have a great sense of humor and make jokes as often as you can in your messages. 

“Haz, can I turn on notifications for, like a certain blog?” Tom calls across the living room.

“Thought you weren’t going to use it.”

“There’s a couple blogs I like.”

“Sure, let me show you.” Tom passes his phone over and watches as Harrison turns on notifications for your blog. “Oh she’s great. Her reactions when news is posted is great.” A notification pops up on your screen. “Apparently she just posted.”

A cake maker I am not destined to be. Gordon Ramsay will make an idiot sandwich out of me.

A picture of a very sad looking cake appears under her text. “Maybe she should stick to making edits.” Harrison jokes. 

“Mate, that’s rude.”

“But it’s not wrong. Plus it’s not like yours would look much better.”

“Mine would be worse.” Taking his phone back, he clicks on the comment bubble and types out: looks better than anything I would make X His inbox dings a couple moments later. 

How have I never seen this photo of Harrison and Tom? Did it get posted while I was attempting to bake?

I think it’s an old photo. Found it on my phone. X And technically that’s not a lie.

Well I’ll hop on that edit. Any colors you prefer?

Blue or Red would be good I guess. X

I’ll get right on that. What’s with all the x’s?

Oh it’s a European thing. It’s just how we sign off texts and messagesX

If it’s annoying I can try and not do it?X

It’s fine. Just didn’t know why it was there. 

Do you think Tom does it?

Oh most definitely. What kind of Brit would he be if he didn’t?X

Well I’ll go get on the edit, hopefully I’ll have it done in the next day or so

No hurryX

Thanks againX

[jo2uke-himboshikata]

Okay so, I don't have a prime account. I am never going to use an alexa or whatever vocal recognition BS anyone releases. I don't order anything on amazon, I use ebay or etsy for everything instead. I use duckduckgo instead of google search. I deleted my facebook and don't even use messenger anymore.

But I still look things up on IMDB. I have an instagram. I use google apps and youtube. Call me a hypocrite if you want, but it is absolutely impossible to boycott every single thing these companies own. AWS is integrated into the very fabric of the internet at this point. If I had to go through every service and stop using anything that used AWS there would be nothing left. I don't even know where to start to figure that out. You can't get away from it. Even part of the taxes I pay end up in bezos's pocket.

All these companies already have a full profile on me. All these companies know who I am and based on the data they have on their servers they could show up at my door and tell me exactly what my daily schedule is, all about my personality and hobbies, my medical history, and who all of my friends are. They have more data on me than any living person I know. They have a record of where I am at all times, and if they wanted they could keep a record of everywhere I've been since I got a smartphone and had GPS enabled.

Does that mean it's hopeless and I should just give up and use amazon prime's same day shipping? Should I just go ahead and use all these tiny conveniences that save me maybe minutes of time? No. I refuse.

I will deprive them of every single dollar and every piece of information I possibly can, even if it's only 5% of the money they're making off me. I will be one less user account they count for their total "engagement" of everyone in the world. I will set an example and put the thought in the heads of everyone around me.

This isn't about virtue signaling. I don't care what people think of me and I don't judge anyone for not doing the same. This isn't an easy thing to think about, a lot of it isn't easy to understand. But I want to let people know that there is at least one person doing this. I want to have the real-life conversation with people and let them know exactly how much these companies make on you and what they do with the money. How much information they gather and what they do with it.

I know it will not make a dent in their profit. But I hope that it can change the public sentiment towards them. I hope that people who are in positions to make decisions will get the memo and decide not to use AWS. I hope they'll vote not to let amazon build that factory in their town. I hope at least one other person hears what I say and decides to stop paying for amazon prime. I want to create one less box for amazon's workers to have to push through the second I click "buy". One less stop the delivery driver needs to make over the course of a year.

And I know there are other people out there like me. Some of them put in the effort to go even further. Guys like julian assange have to in order to survive. I have a choice, and I want to be one of those people. Both for myself and for everyone else in the world.

[that-thing-that-feeling]

1- I don’t think it’s necessarily that he doesn’t like press. I mean I’m sure he doesn’t love doing it– most celebs don’t– but most times he seems like he doesn’t mind, as long as he isn’t being ignored or being asked too-personal questions. And it’s kind of his job to do press- that’s part of how you stay relevant. Natalia always looks miserable doing press, unless she’s with Charlie or a friend, but she still does it when needed. I think in the past, Charlie wasn’t involved with a lot of ST press because he didn’t live in America like everyone else. Plus he doesn’t have the best luck with premieres. He obviously couldn’t really do press when S2 came out, and his nana passed away just a few days before S3 premiered, so he must’ve opted out of doing additional press to spend time with his fam.

Obviously, press goes both ways: you need a celebrity’s publicist to accept interview/photoshoot/ etc requests, but you also need those requests to be, well, requested, in the first place. NF is a small indie that screened exactly once, has less than 15 reviews, has no public distributor or release date, and has directors/producers/cast who seem reluctant to promote the film, outside of one interview and one Deadline article. Catherine is the biggest name involved with the movie, and she still has yet to mention it, she didn’t even go to the premiere (I think she was filming something else at the time, but then again so was Charlie). I think NF missed out on a lot of opportunities, whether that be because the market is too competitive rn, or because the film’s agents fell behind, or something else. It could be very possible that because of this lack of marketing, there weren’t many opportunities extended to Charlie to do anyway. So I wouldn’t blame Charlie or his team for this, it should not be his responsibility to promote this movie by himself. As for Soulmates, who knows what happened there. Malin did do lots of press, but she also had many other projects coming out around that time, so most of her interviews were not actually about the show. Bill Skarsgård didn’t do any press, and all Sarah Snook did was the Television Critics panel.

2-Also, Charlie as we all know is not very ‘social media savvy’. Most celebrities today are pretty involved on social media and would be able to easily make posts about their projects without any prompting from their publicist. But Charlie is not like that, his Instagram is basically just a work account. It’s the publicist’s job to maintain their client’s profile and keep them relevant, which does include social media, so ultimately it would be his publicist’s responsibility to make sure he posts about what he needs to post about, and uses his base to promote himself and his projects efficiently.

I think it’s maybe some combo of his team not being good and him not taking the initiative. He used to do a lot more things (events in uk and us), and posting projects and shoots, so feel like he knows how to do it! And yes NF also didn’t use their own IG to post the premiere which is p ridiculous, and I really don’t get NF not doing basic things that could help it get distribution esp in such a tough market (why not do some smaller fests too?). But imo his team needs to do more to promote him and help him get cast in things but idk hopefully he realizes all those things are impt for his career. Like hopefully he’d actively try to get a uk agent, for instance? He prob doesn’t notice he’s left out of blurbs for NYFF, or who knows if he notices his IMDb foto lol, but hopefully he communicates with his team? Also like if your team isn’t doing something for you, maybe it’s a good idea to change part of it.

[slasher-party]

Leslie Vernon’s Secret 2021 Short Film: Wait For It

J: Calling all Leslie Vernonites! This info is MUST KNOW for all fans of the Glen Echo slasher! So even if you already know about this project, please consider reading & sharing so more fans can get excited about this!  (This is a post I’ve been REALLY excited to make for a while, so I really hope you enjoy and spread the news!) Lace your boots up, kiddies; this is gonna be a looong post. I’m putting every step of my discovery path in here. That way you have access to all my sources:

We begin our journey on YouTube back in July. I was fooling around, watching some Leslie content, and was recommended  Joebizz34's 1/6 Behind The Mask Leslie Vernon custom figure video (tip: bold words from this point forward are most likely links). I thought it was super cool! And it had about 1k views. A small plug! But I scrolled down into the comments... and spotted a familiar face.

‘Nathan?!’ I thought to myself. Was this his actual YouTube account? That singular like is my own, by the way. So odds are, Joebizz34 himself hasn’t even seen this comment (or doesn’t realize who this is). Step One: Investigating Nathan’s Channel A natural skeptic, I assumed this was a fan account and set out to prove myself wrong. (Here’s the link: Nathan Baesel) At the beginning of all of this, this was the main task I was attempting to accomplish.

Pulling up his page, there isn’t much to look at. Just a clip from an old movie and a short video of someone who clearly isn’t Nathan Baesel. He also only has a handful of followers, but that didn’t deter me and I decided to look deeper. 

Popping over to his own subscriptions, another familiar face jumped out at me:

Ben Pace! Who you might recognize as the man who played Doug in Behind the Mask!

Double-checking this page as well, this is definitely his channel. 

And Leslie/Nathan fangirls will find a particular little treat in this pinned video of his, Hello Jogger:

Absolutely fantastic, the both of them. 

So this is a good sign, but Ben doesn’t follow him back, and I couldn’t find any interaction between them with this account. So this isn’t definitive proof.  Step Two: the 197 MPH Promo Going back to his channel, I checked out the first video he had up... with only 15 views on it. 

Now, this guy I didn’t recognize. So I jumped in to see if I could figure out who it was, and low-and-behold, you’re looking at David J. Stieve, the writer of Behind the Mask. And that man in the back? In the stripes? Well, check out the video yourself and you’ll see:

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. Keep in mind - I was just trying to figure out whether or not this was Nathan’s actual YouTube channel for fun. Now I’m going nuts cause there’s apparently some short-film set in the Behind the Mask universe that I haven’t heard about?! At this point, I can’t say for sure this is Nathan’s actual YouTube account, but I can definitely confirm that that is Nathan in the video, and this main guy is David Stieve, the writer of Behind the Mask. (Also, can I just say, I live for Nathan’s sass? He’s just the best, guys.) But my goal had changed. Now I needed to find out what this Wait for It project was all about. Step Three: Discovering Wait for It I jumped on over to IMDB and there it is: Wait for It (2021)

Check out that unnamed boy. That’s right, folks.  You’re looking at a secret Behind the Mask project. (That little bit of trivia that says they’re linked was actually added by me. Sorry for the bad wording - I tried to fix it but IMDB wouldn’t let me, so, what can I do.) Now, talk about being hard to find! Without my addition, there’s nothing that points to this having anything to do with Leslie. Even with Nathan & David’s involvement. I checked Twitter today, and there are only a few tweets (with the #WaitForIt tag) that refer to this project and not Hamilton. David hasn’t said anything about it, Nathan hasn’t said anything about it. That I saw. I did an advanced search but if I accidentally misspelled something and they have mentioned it, please let me know. From this tweet:

I was able to find the IndieGogo for the project:

Which was closed a long time ago, with only 36 backers, where B4TM got roughly 300. One can only assume it was an exposure issue, but it doesn’t seem like they really advertised it. However, I wasn’t a Vernonite back in 2017, so I can’t really say that for sure. The last update was from 2018, which stated that things were in motion for the project: 

But then again, the last update on the B4TM Indiegogo is outdated, stating issue #6 is in production when I have it sitting on my desk right now. So who knows where this project lies. It could be even further along than the update suggests, and after all, the IMDB does say 2021. One last update I found poking around the official B4TM Facebook page: 

Now, this is a little strange. You have the Behind the Mask crew here, and given the title of the page this is posted on, one would assume this “screening” is for Behind the Mask. But looking at the date, and the now-familiar-to-us posters on the table, that might not be the case.

So, does that mean this short film is finished and unreleased? Does that mean we see Taylor and crew in the film? Or are they there to support the creators? I’m leaning toward the latter. A streaming party was also an incentive for backing the Wait for It fundraiser. I’m lead to believe they premiered a rough-cut of the short film, and that’s what we’re looking at in this photo. That may also be where the technical data on IMDB is pulled from, but that rough cut isn’t available to us, and the finished project isn’t either. If it is I can’t find it, otherwise it’d be part of this post.  I also did check the collector’s edition Blu-ray (which I’ve yet to get myself but I do want it for the incentive of extended/deleted scenes, the interviews, and the movie commentary), but Wait for It was not listed as part of the bonus features.  Now, this interview has the most information about the project’s details out of everything out there I’ve seen so far. It’s an audio-only over the phone interview a horror channel did with David Stieve back in 2017.

For details on what Wait for It is about, and how it fits into the Leslie universe, it would be better to listen to this interview than for me to write it all out.

Step Four: What now?

Well, I realized that I might have found something that maybe a lot of people don’t know about, but they should. So, I’m putting this together! While we can’t back the project monetarily anymore, we can support it, the creator, and the Leslie Universe by spreading as much awareness about it as possible.  With that said, this is all the information I’ve found, with the links included. Poke around and see if you turn up anything else! And if this project is available somewhere, even as a rough cut (but so long as it’s posted legally), please do share! I love Leslie, I love Taylor, and I love what the Behind the Mask universe stands for. I love David Stieve’s mindset, and if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would immediately call him up and tell him any Leslie projects he had planned were now completely funded. I’m really just that passionate about this franchise. 

Thank you so much for reading this!  I hope you found out something new, or you at least now have a post with all the information about Wait for It gathered in one place. Like I mentioned at the beginning, please consider sharing so all the Vernonites know about it! As always, much love to all of you, and the Slasher community!  XOXO, Mod Jess

[disappointingyet]

Mank

Director David Fincher Stars Gary Oldman, Lily Collins, Amanda Seyfried, Sam Troughton USA 2020 Language English, a tiny bit of German, some Latin sayings 2hrs 11mins Black & white

Lovely-to-look at but essentially pointless delve into ancient and very dull Hollywood gossip

The selling point for this film is, apparently, its contribution to the debate over who wrote Citizen Kane. Really? Really? After almost 80 years, is it vital to figure out exactly how much Herman Mankiewicz contributed to the script versus how much (if anything) Orson Welles put in? What about John Houseman, Roger Q Denny and Mollie Kent, all of whom the IMDB suggests made uncredited contributions to the screenplay but whose possible input is not acknowledged in this movie? (Other than Houseman supplying the stationery and surroundings for Mankiewicz to do the work.) 

This all seems remarkably small beer – it’s not as if Mankiewicz was like one of the blacklisted writers whose names didn’t appear on the work they wrote. His name was in the movie, he did get the Oscar. He’s one of the reasons Kane is a terrific film, but then so were Joseph Cotton and Agnes Morehead (actors) and Gregg Toland (cinematographer) and Robert Wise (editor) and Bernard Hermann (composer) and everyone else who worked on the picture.

Likewise, are there really people out there desperate to revisit the accident gossip about William Randolph Hearst, especially as this film takes a fairly unexciting take on him? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe this is all the stuff of urgent debate. Maybe you’ve been smarting since 1999’s RKO 281told the same story, only from Welles’ side. 

One thing the two films have in common is that they are littered with limeys. In RKO 281, we had David Suchet as Louis B Mayer and Fiona Shaw and Brenda Blethyn and as gossip column rivals Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and even Roger Allam as Walt Disney! In Mank, meanwhile, we’ve got Gary Oldman as the lead character, plus Tuppence Middleton as his wife Sara, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving  Thalberg, Charles Dance as Hearst and Tom Burke as Welles. It’s ridiculous. The only fully* British character is played by the less British-than-you-might-think Lily Collins, who indeed struggles with the accent. 

New Cross’ Gary Oldman is 62 years old. Herman J Mankiewicz was only 55 when he died in 1953. The film doesn’t fudge this: Oldman’s Mankiewicz actually says. ‘I’m 43,’ presumably to the bafflement of the audience. And that’s during the 1940 segment of the movie – there are plenty of flashbacks to the 1930s when Mank was in his thirties. There’s no obvious attempt to de-age Oldman – I think we’re meant to accept that Mankiewicz’ alcoholism had taken a brutal toll. 

So the plot is this: Mankiewicz, who has been injured in a car crash, is parked by Welles and Houseman on a ranch in the desert to write a script, tended to by a German nurse (Monika Gossmann) and a British typist (Collins). While working on the script, he flashes back to how he first met Hearst and Hearst’s mistress, actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), his friendship with them and troubled working relationship with MGM bosses Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg. 

There’s something admirable perverse/ambitious about a glossy 2020 production that invites its audience to join with Mank in sneering at people who don’t know the difference between Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis.** Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for the governorship of California indirectly triggers the crisis in the friendship between Mank and Hearst, which ultimately leads (in this telling of the story) to Kane. This section of the movie is both protracted yet incomplete and unconvincing. 

Mankiewicz was by all accounts a big character. Unsurprisingly, then, directors chose grand hams to play him: John Malkovich in RKO 281 and Oldman here. For me, there’s no getting past how ridiculously old Oldman is for the role. The drinking and his reliance on a young secretary also reminded me of Oldman’s portrayal of Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour, one of the most despicable and disgraceful films of recent times. But as Oldman performances go, this is one of the more likeable. Just not one that should ever have happened. 

The best thing about the film by a very long way is the luscious black & white photography. The film plays around a bit – at times it hints a full pastiche of old movies, including the use of rear projection when the characters are in a car and having cue marks, the little circles on the top right of the screen to tell the projectionist to change the reel. At other times, though, it’s quite clearly using all the tricks and tools of 2020. It’s great work from cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt, whose previous director of photography stints have mostly been on TV.

The feeling I was mostly left with by this film is: why? What’s it for? To give a juicy role to an overindulged and miscast actor? To recreate the glory of lost Hollywood, just because we can? There have been far better recent excursions into the movie industry’s past: the Coen’s Hail, Caesar!, Trumbo or the TV show Feud, for instance. And, to be fair, there have been worse: this probably has the edge on Rules Don’t Apply. But I feel that if someone like me – who goes into this knowing who Thalberg and Houseman and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and so on were – doesn’t really care, why would anyone else?

 *Houseman was half-British and very much English educated. He’s played by Sam Troughton, who you could probably correctly guess is Patrick Troughton’s grandson. **I’m happy to admit this is something I’ve always struggled with, having never read a word either wrote. 

[danzinora-switch]

IMDb Day

Hey guys, so I got off a 10 hour shift happily checking to see if we made a difference in the IMDb rating and was confounded to see that it was still at a 5.2.

So I did some digging.

And, well, we certainly showed up and did a head count! But upon some more digging, I think this U-shape is actually what’s hurting us. 5.2/10 is IMDB’s Weighted Average Rating. What is that? Well according to them:

“Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie”

They probably deal with this kind of stuff all the time. Fandoms are powerful, as we know.

So, even though they do not list what kind of filters/algorithms they use, I got to thinking: if I were an internet movie database trying to ward off this kind of behavior, what would I look for? And, conversely, what could we do differently because of it?

The following are just my sheer thoughts and speculations:

1. Don’t just pick 10 stars

As much as it may pain us, we need more 9′s, 8′s, and 7′s, heck, maybe even a handful of 6′s and 5′s thrown in. That U-shaped curve is probably giving the impression that “oh, either people love or hate this show, so for YOU, new user, it’s a 50/50 shot. 5.2″ IMDB says they’re looking for honesty, and while 10 stars may be honest, 1000 10 stars starts to look suspect. An air of general positivity will probably go further.

2. Timeline

Were I an algorithm or filter guarding against vote stuffing and spam, I’d probably look out for a sudden spike of ratings and reviews. This will need to be the opposite of what we do on Twitter: this is something that needs to simmer. Space out the ratings. A few here, a few there, 10′s through 7′s all mixed in, and those are much more likely to be counted as real, honest, thoughts instead of a coordinated strike.

Instead of a day, maybe a week of 9 star ratings? Last names A-M? Then next week, 8 star ratings? Last names N-Z? Or some other form of rotation?

3. New User Activity

I made an IMDB account only a month or two ago, and yes, it was to give Rise 10 stars. But that’s all I’ve done with it. How many of us have also just created accounts to review this show? A filter might think we’re bots at best. If you have an account, be active. Rate and review other shows and movies. Prove you are not a robot, nor a lip-service protester who just made an account to contribute to changing one rating and then moved on with life. I’m not 100% sure if algorithms will treat some ratings/reviews as more ‘real’ than others, but this certainly couldn’t hurt.

4. Going Forward

I’m sure other review sites have similar guards. If we try something similar with Rotten Tomatoes, for example, we’ll probably have to be just as careful.

I’m not sure what changing current ratings will do in regards to affecting that weighted average, and I wouldn’t put it past a smart enough algorithm to note the changes and suspect that we’re on to its tricks with more tricks, thus discounting the ratings even more (wow, this feels Machiavellian). Or we could simply create new accounts (again, following the considerations above).

Idk if any of this is on point or not, but it makes sense to me and might explain why that pesky 5.2 still remains.

[arecomicsevengood]

More Movies I Watched. Should I Just Join Letterboxd?

Is Letterboxd fun? Not really sure if anyone gets anything out of these posts being located here, but also not sure I have any desire to join a website I’m not sure anyone I’m friends with is on, don’t necessarily feel a yearning to be around more people with too many opinions, who are maybe trying to parlay their “expertise” into writing jobs.

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2020) dir. Celine Sciamma

I’m going to consider this a 2020 movie as that’s when its wide release was in the States; also, this movie’s great and if considered a 2020 movie is easily the frontrunner for best of the year. Well-shot enough I felt I was in good hands from the very first minutes, which feel vaguely reminiscent of The Piano (which I don’t remember super-well), this movie ends up also have a very intense relationship with music as well. This is a lesbian love story between a woman betrothed to be married to a man she’s never met and the painter who is making her portrait for the approval of said man. The painter is initially working on the portrait secretly, the film’s attention is tuned to the two leads’ furtive glances and studies of one another, the gaze intensely felt, but returned and mutual. Lots of great stuff, real delight taken in faces, the ability to change another’s expression by making them laugh. the power of music, the incommunicable aspects of subjective experience. I watched this director’s other movie, Girlhood, but don’t remember it, and this is a lot better. This is also a lot better than Blue Is The Warmest Color, where the only thing I remember is the long and graphic sex scene. This movie has no such scene. One of these actresses led the walkout when the French film industry gave Roman Polanski an award.

Summer Hours (2008) dir. Oliver Assayas

Just did an IMDB search and found out Assays cowrote a movie with Polanski a few years ago? That sucks. This one’s about an artist’s estate being sold off after a widow dies, as the kids need money. Plenty of nice bits about the subjective value of art and nostalgia. Assayas is not my favorite filmmaker by any means but he’s consistent enough. I guess Personal Shopper is my favorite of his?

Two Friends (1986) dir. Jane Campion

TV movie about two teenagers, told somewhat in reverse order for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Not great.

The Day Shall Come (2020) dir. Chris Morris

Beginning with like a series of “establishing shots” of Miami that eventually get to college kids partying is such a terrible way to begin a movie, really signals a degree of indifference to the language of film in favor of a a product of constant churn of content that “television” once served as shorthand for. Chris Morris comes from TV, of course, so I should know what I’m in for, and British comedy of a subversively-intentioned sort puts it in the wheelhouse of things I pay attention to anyway. That’s not to say I laughed at this thing, but I sort of observed it and its intentions — it never really wants you to be comfortable enough to laugh, and while the posture it takes to its black leads is sympathetic there’s still a feeling of anthropological indifference as part of its satirical thrust. Film comedies are meant to work in a theater because of the contagious properties of laughter, and when you lose that you end up with a thing that, even if I don’t want to subject it to “Hm, this seems kinda racist” thinkpieces that are the worst-case scenario, everything about the movie seems like the best case scenario is a reaction of “I see what you did there.”

Midnight Special (2016) dir. Jeff Nichols

Fits into the tradition of not-a-superhero-movie-but-basically tradition of Scanners and The Fury, but while those are basically the X-Men, this kid, kept from the sunlight because his dad think it will hurt him but really it’s good for him, is basically The Ray, of the 1990s Christopher Priest series I didn’t read consistently but liked a few issues of. The first half of this movie, spent speeding down streets at night, while some weird things happen, involving government agencies and a cult, is considerably better than the payoff, which is the child (a kid from Room and later, Good Boys) is an angel and is going to ascend to heaven. Part of it is so low-key and tense (but in a way where it feels like if it were on mute nothing would appear to be happening) and then the other part of it has these special effects that are fairly corny? So while the whole “indie guy makes a more mainstream movie” thing generates some interest, the idea of what constitutes a mainstream movie at this point in time (while also being a throwback in some ways to eighties Spielberg, or riding an It Follows/Stranger Things wave) means being forgettable.

Atlantic City (1980) dir. Louis Malle

This was a rewatch, which normally I avoid doing, but it turns out I had forgotten basically everything about this movie, besides vague memories of shots of stairwells, the sprawl of its plot, the roaming camera. That, still, is sort of the main thing to take away, because I love how the plot sort of swirls around this apartment building, and the streets of the city, the casino where Susan Sarandon works. She plays a woman whose husband left her for her sister, and they have rolled into the city with a large amount of cocaine. Burt Lancaster plays Sarandon’s neighbor, who lusts after her, but watches after another neighbor in the apartment, an old gangster’s ex-lover. Maybe I would suggest this as a good first Louis Malle movie to watch? Then you could watch Au Revoir Les Enfants, Murmur Of The Heart, Elevator To The Gallows, and My Dinner With Andre, and some of those are maybe better movies but this is arguably the most “accessible” in terms of its relationship to gangster/crime stuff while nonetheless feeling expansive and deeper than that. It relates to Burt Lancaster’s larger career but also has such a depth of feeling it’s not just a film history thing. Wallace Shawn has a cameo as a waiter also, it’s nice to see him.

Cat People (1982) dir. Paul Schrader

This movie’s a rewatch but I remember it being “watchable” but not really good, at least not nearly as good as the original. If memory serves, this has pretty much nothing in common with the original, but there’s a scene in the original that’s very memorable that’s reprised here. There’s a lot of gratuitous nudity in this one, and it even ends with a scene that seems perverse enough it should be memorable- Where Nastassja Kinski’s limbs are tied to a bed in a bit of bondage before she has sex and gets turned into a panther, so she can safely be put into zoo custody, but I didn’t remember at all on account of it feeling more perfunctory than indelible. Also I thought there was a scene where you see a naked man climb out of a cage at the zoo but maybe that’s in another movie too. Remember when Paul Schrader made a facebook post asking whose were the best tits in the history of art?

Affliction (1997) dir. Paul Schrader

When there was a little featurette documentary on Criterion Channel where Alex Ross Perry interviewed Schrader, Schrader cited Affliction as one of his best movies. Takes place in a snowy landscape reminiscent of Fargo and A Simple Plan, the vision of small-town life feels slightly familiar from Twin Peaks too — all of these things feel “nineties” in a way. About the cycle of domestic violence being passed on from fathers to sons. Stars Nick Nolte, with Willem Dafoe as his younger brother, who narrates intermittently. Mary Beth Hurt plays Nolte’s ex-wife, Sissy Spacek plays his current lover. James Coburn plays the abusive father but I kept thinking it was Rip Torn.

Rancho Notorious (1952) dir. Fritz Lang

Another solid Fritz Lang movie, that I believe was a favorite of the French new wave filmmakers? (Who didn’t like his German stuff for some bullshit reason.) This one’s a western. A man’s fiancee gets murdered, and he tries t to track down the guy who did it, in search of revenge. There’s a recurring bit of a song narrating his desire for revenge that’s pretty bad. It turns out there’s a large ranch, run by Marlene Dietrich, where criminals can hide out if they don’t ask questions of one another and give her a share of their haul. He forms alliances, does some crimes, gets his revenge, there’s some great technicolor shots of landscapes, it’s unclear how real his feelings are for Marlene Dietrich or if they’re partly put on to win her affections, I don’t think Dietrich is that appealing personally. The thing that makes this movie cool or interesting (and maybe makes it feel particularly American, but seen from an outsider’s perspective) is this sense of bonhomie that is maybe just a total front for long-standing resentment, with love as a conditional thing.

Slightly French (1949) dir. Douglas Sirk

I found this one pretty watchable. A rough-around-the-edges fairground actress is recruited to play a French ingenue in the press as part of a long play for a director to get his job back with a studio he was fired from after alienating the original lead actress and everyone above him. The director basically only cares about making movies, and is sort of a psychopath, but she falls in love with him. The director’s sister, who warns that she also has no feelings, ends up being paired off with the producer who competes for the star’s affection for a while. Written by a woman, and feels very psychologically insightful and unjudgmental about women’s tendency or willingness to fall in love with people who treat them poorly, and to allow for the movie/genre expectations to respect that choice as the right one.

A Scandal In Paris (1946) dir. Douglas Sirk

Apparently Sirk considered this his best movie. It’s before his melodrama period, and is based on a memoir, so there’s a bit of a biopic quality to it, though it does try to be fairly concise and well-structured. About a criminal who solves a crime he committed in order to become chief of police, ostensibly to become an even bigger criminal who pulls off a huge robbery, who then goes straight instead. The criminal is also a casanova type, who seduces a series of women and makes them fall in love with him and forgive him his crimes. I would probably have liked this movie more if it was a stylized seventies thing and/or liked the actors better.

Story Of A Cheat (1936) dir. Sacha Guitry

This movie’s wild! One of the best credit sequences I’ve ever seen, establishing a pattern that the whole thing will be told mostly via narration, and this narration goes on to tell so much of the story that the visual storytelling almost seems redundant, or illustrative of the text, in a way I’d never seen in a movie. It’s structured as a man writing his memoirs, and is more literal about that structure than we normally see. But then there are parts where his writing gets interrupted and these scenes use dialogue and employ elision to discreetly set up punchlines… Really cool. Criterion’s website says this was an influence on Orson Welles, and maybe they mean F For Fake?

The Immortal Story (1968) dir. Orson Welles

I hadn’t seen this one, despite being an Orson Welles fanatic, I guess because most people would not consider it a feature film, as it’s under an hour long, and made for French television. It’s not great, kind of feels like a long short film. Welles plays an old rich man who hates the existence of fiction so much he tries to make a story that’s basically a Penthouse letter become true, casting Jeanne Moreau in the role of the woman and a much younger man as the dude who has sex with her. Based on a story by Isak Dinesen, which I’m just learning now was the pen name of a woman.

If You Could Only Cook (1935) dir. William Selter

So I kept on watching Jean Arthur movies, binging them before they left Criterion Channel at the end of June. You would expect them to blend together, and maybe they will in time but having just watched this one it’s great. Totally absurd premise becomes legit funny. The master chef from History Is Made At Night here plays an Italian gangster. The two movies would be a pretty solid double feature, as both feature pretty involved, absurd plots, based around love stories, but also featuring this weird comedic element. This one features Jean Arthur as a down-on-her-luck woman who strikes up a conversation with a guy on a park bench, convincing him they should get a job together working as a butler and cook team. He is secretly rich, and gets lessons in being a butler from his butler, and falls in love with her, a week before he is scheduled to get married to a rich woman he doesn’t actually care about. This movie is just over seventy minutes long. I am pretty unfamiliar with the screwball comedy genre and really wonder how they play with a different lead actress.

The More The Merrier (1943) dir. George Stevens

This one’s great too. Super comedic, with sort of intricately choreographed visual gags, but then the romance culminates in a scene that’s wildly horny, bordering on the pornographic despite the absence of any nudity. That’s a seduction shot in close up, where a sort of oblivious and distracted conversation occurs absentmindedly as kisses move from hand to neck. Jean Arthur rents a room to a domineering older dude (Charles Coburn, the guy from The Devil And Miss Jones, who’s funnier here) who then rents half of his room to a man he thinks would be a good for her. Feels like a big part of the comedy in these is people being absolute nightmares who force other people into going along with things they absolutely hate, and as much as I hate the idea of being someone who can’t handle an old comedy because of my modern cultural mores, such scenes are pretty nerve-wracking to me. Still, there’s something to the storytelling in this, how the initial gags build on themselves when it’s just the two of them, then the introduction of the second man sort of continues the sort of jokes that were already being made, how the comedy sort of snowballs but then takes the shape of this very real romance.

The Impatient Years (1944) dir. Irving Cummings

This was originally conceived as a quasi-sequel to The More The Merrier. It is a weird one, with a vaguely comedic premise it takes a pretty emotionally intense first act to set up. The first half hour has these long dialogues filled with tension of people not really being able to communicate. It’s written by a woman and you can really tell, holy shit, it’s closely observed. But the whole premise is fucked! Begins with a court hearing for a divorce. Jean Arthur has been hit by her husband, and her father (Charles Coburn again) who witnessed it says he can’t recommend a divorce, because then the judge would have to give a divorce to all the couples who got married too quick before the man shipped off to war. A flashback structure shows him, freshly home, smoking cigarettes above the crib of the child he’s never seen before and pretty irritable. The father argues the issue is the married couple has forgotten while they’ve fallen in love. Coburn basically sucks too- he’s in all these movies as this railroading paternalistic figure, and apparently was in his real life a white supremacist? And while The Devil And Miss Jones shows him learning to not be a piece of shit, this movie basically takes his side and argues for him being right. The judge agrees with this plan that they should spend four days retracing the steps of when they first met, before he shipped off to work. And it works, they fall back in love in the movie’s second half. But basically Jean Arthur’s whole behavior at the beginning of the movie is predicated on her having the responsibilities of a mother? And the movie just sort of argues that she’s got to learn to be a wife too, and she agrees, pitching it as this sort of romantic thing, but the actual central cause of tension is never resolved. So this movie is flawed and kinda nonsensical, but it’s interesting, partly because the beginning is like Bergman-level brutal before the contortions of a plot push it into this unnatural light comedy shape.

Arizona (1940) dir. Wesley Ruggles

This one has Jean Arthur as the female lead, opposite William Holden, but is more notable for its scope as a Western. A pretty good example of the genre being about society in microcosm, being forged from this conflict between the wild and domestic spheres. Jean Arthur both brings this semi-feminist sense of freedom to all of her roles, and she also built up a body of work of populist politics and class consciousness. This one has her as a rugged individualist frontierswoman, who runs a series of businesses as a way to make more money and accrue wealth, which ends up being a good vehicle, from a storytelling perspective, to increase the scale of action consistently. The villain runs a series of scams/conspiracies to win a profit via dishonest means. This culminates with a wedding where the man leaves his bride immediately afterwards to murder the person who’s been trying to take over her property. Probably the best western I’ve seen where the threat of Native American violence is a major plot point. It does lack the sense of atmosphere and landscape I value in a western, favoring a more storytelling more focused on plot and characters. Ends with a scene where a dude gets married and then immediately leaves to go kill someone waiting in a bar for him. (I should try to track down the George Stevens western Shane, that also features Jean Arthur.)

Whirlpool (1934) dir. Roy William Neill

This isn’t as top shelf as the other Jean Arthur movies but it’s pretty good. A man goes to prison, fakes his own death for the sake of his wife so she’ll move on. Jean Arthur plays the daughter, who meets him once he gets out, but needs to keep him a secret from her mother, who has remarried but would probably wreck her life for the other man’s sake. This is a pretty weird movie, both structurally, and because the father-daughter relationship feels quasi-incestuous: She abandons dates with her fiancee to spend time with her father, etc. The movie handles it semi-innocently, but I guess I had just been hearing about how when things like this happen in real life, and adult children meet their parents for the first time as adults, there often is an irresistible desire between them. So the movie kind of feels like it’s basically about something super-fucked-up but is trying to depict it as innocent, but also just the raw emotion Jean Arthur displays as she cries when they meet for the first time is really intense! She doesn’t even show up until like 1/3 of the way through the movie but she gives it such emotional weight.

Party Wire (1935) dir. Erle Kenton

This movie’s charming and watchable but yeah not one of the better ones. It’s about a pretty interesting thing- In small towns in this era basically cheaper for there to be a telephone line everyone can listen in on. This ends up being a movie about small town gossip and resentment, where the villains are old women with too much time on their hands. It’s also about Jean Arthur being a wildly charming “real” person who wins the heart of a rich man who every woman is after, so while she’s good in the part there’s an element of formula executed better elsewhere. Here she has a father who’s drunk all the time, his alcoholism is a big running gag that gets a little exhausted. Also apparently there’s an app now that’s basically a party wire?

The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) dir. John Ford

Felt pretty ambivalent about this one too, which is more of an Edward G Robinson vehicle. This is meant to be a comedy, but I don’t really think the jokes come off that well, and the sense of reversals feels a little pat. Realized my best friend from high school looks sorta like Edward G Robinson now and worked out a way to remake it starring him. The Robinson version is about a guy who works as a clerk in an office, writes on the side, but learns he is the doppelganger of a killer gangster who just escaped from prison, who’s played by Robinson as well. This leads to his worldly coworker he has a crush on developing an interest in him, but also a lot of cases of mistaken identity with the police, who give him a note saying that while he looks like the person they’re trying to arrest, they’re not the same guy. The gangster then reads about this in the news and breaks into his apartment to get this “passport” from him. The remake I envision plays off of the fact that people are no longer famous for doing crimes enough to attract the attentions of a savvy young woman. But what if it was some dumb Youtube prankster, who is constantly committing crimes, that has the police after him? And then it’s basically the same movie.

Public Hero No. 1 (1935) dir. J. Walter Rubin

More of a heavy-duty crime thing, about the head of a gang busting out of prison, reuniting with his gang to do crimes, not knowing the cellmate he broke out of prison with is an undercover cop. Jean Arthur ends up caught in the middle, falling in love with the cop (not knowing he’s a cop) while being the sister of the criminal she hopes goes straight. She enlivens the movie quite a bit but it’s a  familiar enough plot to still come up a little bit short. Would maybe benefit from more atmosphere in the crime bits and less comedy bits about an alcoholic doctor slowing it down.

You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) dir. Frank Capra

Watched these for Jean Arthur, though they are classics for being Frank Capra movies, Jimmy Stewart movies, and sort of archetypal in their depiction of sincerity and the opposition of the rich and powerful. So that is to say that while my favorite movies I’ve watched recently have felt genre-less, or like they participate in every genre, these feel far more like you know where they’re going pretty much from the start: In the case of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington that’s partly because of things like there being an episode of The Simpsons that parodies/reuses it.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936) dir. Frank Capra

Also has Jean Arthur as the female lead, here playing opposite Gary Cooper. When they remade this as an Adam Sandler vehicle, Winona Ryder took the Jean Arthur role. Gary Cooper inherits money, comes to the big city, everyone wants the money, Jean Arthur writes news articles mocking him as a rube while slowly falling in love with his sincerity. In the end his decision to give the money to the poor outrages everyone in power and they try to argue he’s not mentally fit. All these Frank Capra movies are longer than the other Jean Arthur movies, (two hours, as opposed to an hour and a half) and also are not really focused on her, though she’s the best part of them.

Ball Of Fire (1941) dir. Howard Hawks

Billy Wilder cowrites this, and it’s maybe his best comedic script? Lot of good jokes in this, feel like this would’ve blown people away in 1941. Gary Cooper plays a naive nerd grammarian who in the course of realizing he needs cover modern slang for his encyclopedia runs into Barbara Stanwyck, as a gangster’s moll, hilarity ensues, they fall in love, both leads are great, supporting cast is big and funny, Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds plays a somewhat naive hayseed, the character here is similarly out of his element but it’s because he’s a big nerd, which is a lot funnier. Stanwyck’s world-weariness giving way to affection for a bunch of old people while continuing to use language they don’t understand and sort of run all over them as they fall over here is a great bit. Really well-written, there’s a Billy Wilder movie starring Jean Arthur (A Foreign Affair, from 1948) I haven’t seen but would like to track down. Sort of fascinating preoccupation with gangsters in these movies, but also positing innocence as a virtue, but in a way that runs counter to “virgin/whore” reductionism. I guess a lot of this comes about because it precedes the post-war mass migration of white people to the suburbs? Organized crime was a big part of people’s lives. I hadn’t seen any Howard Hawks movies until recently I think? Unless I saw one of his westerns or screwball comedies in college. He’s good!

The Sniper (1952) dir. Edward Dmytrk

This one’s interesting in terms of feeling very ahead of its time but also like it would never be made now. About a dude whose misogyny causes him to shoot women with a sniper rifle, the same rifle that apparently any ex-soldier would carry. Probably a pretty tough and upsetting watch, as it’s just about a dude being insane, hoping the police arrest him, and him having interactions with women where he very quickly becomes upset when they realize he’s weird, so he follows them with a gun. Director was blacklisted, the only real overt political sentiment is “get perverts and people who assault women serious mental health care after their first offense.”

[streamworthytv]

Pictured: My Venmo address (@StreamworthyTV, for any donations to keep the channel going), as well as some pics of me, both after and before before I got ill with physical disabilities (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, MCAS, POTS/dysautonomia) & psych issues (like depression, anxiety, & agoraphobia, after I was pushed from my job...shortly after I first showed up in my chair - despite having the highest performance rating possible).

WHAT IS @StreamworthyTV ALL ABOUT?

#StreamworthyTV is meant to be a free, quick resource, for all major streaming platforms. We cover #Netflix, #Hulu, #PrimeVideo, #DisneyPlus, & even #AppleTV. (Other platforms, like #Starz, & #HBO, may also be added, based on demand!)

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I see myself as a sort of #TVGuide for the most popular, relevant streaming platforms. I’ll let you know about #arrivals & #departures to each platform, while also providing other news/info, such as #renewals, #cancellations, & #recommendations. If I haven’t seen a show or movie, I do my best due diligence, researching IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, & box office numbers, to help factor in recommendations.

All news & updates are COLOR-CODED for your convenience, to help you quickly find what’s related to each platform. These colors were set as those most associated with the platform...so Netflix updates are outlined in red, Hulu in light green, PrimeVideo in blue, Disney+ in gold/yellow (since blue was already taken!), & AppleTV is in white or black, based on the image.

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Starting off with the platform means that you don’t read all about a show you don’t have access to, & keeping the genre at the top also helps you find programming you’ll be interested in. The separation of “Quick Info” vs “The Deets” lets YOU decide just how much you want to read about a program, and if you want more detailed information, or not. And any links are conveniently found at the bottom of a post, just above any hashtags.

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I will also have other curated lists (you’ll have to wait on those...#TopSecret!!). Plus, I’ll soon have some of these lists up on #YouTube, along with some reaction videos, some review videos on #hiddengems and #oddities that I’ve found, & some comedy clips on movies/shows I’ve found that were flat out #CRINGE AF!!

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WHO IS BEHIND StreamworthyTV??

My name is Kelly, & I became disabled, physically and psychologically, over the past few years...the pic on the left is of me now, while the pic on the right was just a few short years ago, when I was capable of working and commuting long hours, and doing 10ks, & even a half-marathon! I’m a hard worker, but my conditions - #EhlersDanlosSyndrome, #MastCellActivationSyndrome, #POTSsyndrome/#dysautonomia, now require me to use a #powerchair.

Once I showed up to my last job in my chair, despite having a pristine record, and the highest rating possible - I was soon pushed out, via refusal to grant me #accessibility (after previously enduring #bullying & #discrimination for years, once it was known that I had health issues).

Because of the #trauma that I faced in how I was treated by my job, I was soon caught in a deep #depression, facing #anxiety, panic attacks, & #agoraphobia. These issues worsened my physical conditions, causing many flareups. My job found a way to make me lose 6/8 months of free insurance coverage I was to get from my union, after I tried to file a lawsuit. My health, not surprisingly, further spiraled out of control. I was too ill too work, and was in fact #bedbound for over 2 full years.

In working towards “making a comeback at life” I wanted to find - or CREATE - a job that fit within the parameters of what I could still do...watch TV, research things online, be a wiz at organization, make great art, & write well (all channel art & write-ups, unless stated otherwise, are my own!). Also, I have a hell of a sense of humor, that I can’t WAIT to share on #YouTube!! I have materials ready to set up, & several treatments (scripts) nearly or partially finished.

Plus, I love to help people, and to make things easier for them. I’m a proud #Aspie, & I know that this channel will be the most efficient way of finding all you need, about ALL THINGS STREAMING!! I just need a bit more time to finish setting up some templates and get into a groove, and after that, I’ll always have you on the cutting edge!

I’m eventually hoping that this is a success, that I can maybe even get a Patreon for!! But until then, you can decide if you’d like to help me continue to release content - which will ALWAYS be free - on my new Venmo account, @StreamworthyTV. This channel is a lot more work than some may realize, and all money donated will go towards things like my #healthinsurance, my #medications, durable medical equipment (like the upkeep of my powerchair), & towards funding professional training lessons for my #servicedogintraining, @TheWorkingWigglebutt.

Mikka has been owner-trained for the most part, to this point...& has an amazing sense of smell, with many natural alerting/medical response instincts. However, my agoraphobia & other health issues, as well as costs of training being too high, contributed to her not getting enough socialization. She already does several tasks for me at home, but could really use the training to learn more, & also to learn how to behave as a proper SD in public, so that she doesn’t need to remain as only an “at home” service dog. (I may post a video of her doing a fantastic medical response revival for me, when I’d only had her 4 months - in the future.) Mikka definitely has service dog potential, & at not quite 16 months, she still has time to make the changes that I need from her, in order for her to help me in public (and perhaps to make me feel safe enough to break me of my agoraphobia!)

In any case, thanks so much to anyone that has taken the time to read!! I look forward to helping you find what to watch, whether you can contribute financially, or just with like, follows, comments, & shares!! (And don’t worry, I won’t repeatedly bother you for 💰!) As always, happy streaming!!

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YouTube is coming as soon as I finish filming some clips!!!

#StreamworthyTV #streamworthy #whattowatch #disabledblogger

[serendair]

The last 12 hours were a wild ride of emotions yet again in the Banana Fish fandom. And it wasn’t the first time in this story that we went through all 5 stages of grief within a few hours just to repeat the cycle shortly after.

The whole thing came down with the last episode airing or more like coming to the dreaded inevitable end that some of us (me included) hoped until the last second they averted somehow and do the biggest plottwist in plottwist history. Obviously it didn’t happen and Mappa stayed true to their word when they said they will stay faithful to the manga. 

So last night we all went through “stage 1 - denial and isolation” where we all (at least those I talked to and read posts of) sat there crying our hearts out over the loss of a fictional character. (Please don’t get me wrong here especially since I’m totally on board with all of you. It took me 10 minutes to stop the sobbing and even longer to stop the tears. So I by no means try to belittle the reactions to this tragic end of a beloved character. I’m just in disbelieve over myself mostly that I can get so attached that I feel such strong and deep feelings over - and let’s face it - fiction! That as such is a huge proof of how capable Yoshida Akimi is when she can create a story that evokes such a big resonance even on emotional levels. That requires quite some skill. And Mappa translated this to animation in an extraordinary way. I’m drifting off though so back to topic.)

The same night shortly after we already moved on to “stage 2 - anger” seeing all those posts on social media expressing (for the most part) their disapproval for the ending which to my distaste peaked in insults and threats towards the creator and the animation studio. I’m willing to think that this is only a momentary feeling lead by anger because I want to believe that I’m dealing with reasonable people that know to behave and express themselves better than that usually. (Again, this isn’t the point of this post either.)

“Stage 3 - bargaining” already was scratched at some point (and extended while I was sleeping lol) because there were already discussions about how and why Garden of Light didn’t make it into the animation. There were voices of approval and of disapproval from all sides and while I must say that I do like GoL as it does give us closure of some sort, I’m almost happy or relieved that they didn’t animate it (yet). Yes, I think the animation made it a little more obvious  compared to the manga that Ash actually died instead of just slept in the library but it still isn’t as ultimate as watching/reading GoL and be certain that this was indeed death. After all the manga as well as the anime without GoL does leave room for interpretation (even though a small one and I might be talking in denial here, but it is there). At least you can bend it enough to give fanmade sequels that include Ash without having it to be an AU some space to develop. Heck it even leaves a lose end to pick up for Mappa or any other animation studio buying the rights and continue close this story one way or another.

So not animating GoL might have been a deliberate decision by the animation studio Mappa for several reasons. Of course they knew what they were getting themselves into when they picked up this project as the end was not only already written but very well known to those who read the manga somewhere during the last 40ish years. Therefore the reactions regarding the story and it’s strongly discussed ending were known. They knew what was coming and yet stood strong to their word translating the manga to animation as is and did an amazing job at it (I’m not happy about the ending of that story at all but you have to admit that the show was a great piece of work. After all without the anime I would have never gotten to know the manga or the story in general and I’m sure I’m not the only one and I’m really grateful for that). And we have to keep in mind at this point that it’s not Mappa who decided on the ending but the creator Yoshida Akimi did 40 years ago. This is her story and we don’t know about contracts and copyrights and who has to say what about how the story may or may not be adjusted. Yes it is possible that Mappa might have had the chance to change the ending but didn’t, we don’t know that, but rumour has it that the staff wasn’t pleased having to produce the story with this outcome. (Apparently there was an interview of some sort where someone of Mappa stated this but I don’t have access to the source so I can’t say anything for certain. If I do get my hands on it will certainly edit it to this. That being said, if someone reading this has the link to first hand information I’d be so grateful if you could share it with me/us!) So taking this assumption into account I can imagine them deciding against GoL for just the fact that it leaves a small but existing open end that can be picked up not only by fans but professionals once the copyright is gone (Yes this would mean after Yoshida Akimi passed away and it wasn’t fixed otherwise in a contract somewhere. Not wishing her anything bad this means we most likely won’t see it anytime soon but from manga to anime was a 40 years gap so we can wait another 40 years, right? Bargaining right there...) 

Anyways. Where I’m trying to go with this post is basically “stage 3 - bargaining” because what else might it be that I’m about to say? Maybe I’m still stuck in denial but please hear me out (if you haven’t left after this wall of text already lol)

With episode 24 the story should be over. Right? Maybe there’s room to adapt the prequels “Angel Eyes” and “Private Opinion” or the sequel “Garden of Light” but from all we know so far the anime was planned to conclude within 24 episodes and those were delivered. Topic’s over. Or is it? Well... part of the bargaining that started yesterday were the following screenshots of streaming platforms (thank you @cyberiin​ and @buy-goldbye​ for providing me with the screenshots as I have no access to those platforms):

Clearly if the show is over the timers should have stopped and it most definitely should not say “to be continued”. I pushed that thought aside last night when I went to bed thinking that this is just an automated thing of these platforms and it will be gone once they update the information. So I went to bed with my broken heart thinking that this is the last image we get on the character relationship chart:

Only to wake up to an updated one:

Different character picture. No longer greyed out as all the other dead characters still are (including Lao). Ash as stubborn looking as always refusing to obey anything or anyone (including his own death?). Name still greyed out but that changed while I was writing to a white name:

So needless to say that this is getting my hopes up but I don’t want to hope too much. At this point this can mean anything or nothing. Maybe this is just Mappa’s way of coping with the fact that they didn’t like the ending either but had to follow contracts (as assumed by rumoured statements talked about before) trying to solidarize with fans and giving them at least an open end. That of course only applies if what is rumoured actually is true. It might mean something entirely different of course but this only leads to speculations I have no basis for besides my hope that they will still turn this thing on us. Why I’m still hoping although the story is over? Well not only the character relationship chart changed within a few hours after Ash’s “death” but noone cared to stop timers either. Quite the contrary even IMDb is in denial with us and the fact that official media sites like these don’t update the information but leave it open says a lot in my humble opinion:

I don’t know what to do with the information. Nothing is confirmed at the time I’m writing this and this 

being published while I’m still typing isn’t helpful either. All of the above leads my naive mind and bleeding heart to the conclusion that there is a happy ending coming somehow but honestly all you can take from this is that apparently the show isn’t over yet and they still have something up their sleeve for us. 

I’m sorry everyone that I don’t have anything profound to say or give you more insight than you already have. In the end this is just me rambling and ranting on about the current status quo and shouting out into the void in hopes my wish for a happy end will be granted. 

How do you all feel about this? Come talk and share your thoughts. Am I delusional for believing in it still or are you with me? I’m curious! Let me know :)