#it goes beyond still living in a religious household and going to a religious school and all

[jewishcissiekj]

yom kippur is my least favorite Jewish thing ever by principle. not eating is not becoming purer. ignoring bodily needs for a day doesn't get me any closer to god. if anything it's just distracting. why are we trying to become more like angels on the most sacred day. ugh

[themagnuswriters]

Writing a Muslim Character

The Mods of the Magnus Writers discord server and community are putting together a variety of resources for Magnus Archives fan creators; these have been collated from articles on the topics, our own experiences, and the experiences of the members of the Magnus Writers discord. These are definitely not comprehensive or the only viewpoints out there, and are by no means meant as a way to police fanworks, but as a way to support and inspire fan creators in creating thoughtful and diverse works. Please note that external links will be added in a reblog to outsmart tumblr’s terrible tagging system, so make sure to check those out as well!

This resource in particular was put together by Mod Jasmine: hi, all! 

While there are no canonically Muslim characters in TMA, Muslim headcanons are common in fanworks—particularly for Basira, and sometimes Jon (which I love to see!). I have cobbled together this post from my own experiences to help support and inform fans in these areas, and as part of my diabolical plan to get more Muslim!Basira and Muslim!Jon fics to shove into my brain.

First, two gigantic caveats:

I was raised Sunni Muslim in Egypt, which is a majority Sunni Muslim country, and still live there. This means my experience will be very different from someone raised in a majority Christian country like the UK, and different again if they are not Sunni and not Arab.

I am currently ex-Muslim. This does not mean I bear any ill will towards Islam or Muslims, just that it wasn’t for me, and I felt it was important to be upfront about that. I’ll be linking to resources by practicing Muslims in the reblog to this post, whether to add to my opinions and experiences or provide you with a different opinion. I am not here to put my voice over that of Muslims, just to do some of the work so they don’t have to. Obviously, if any Muslims have any additions or suggestions for this post, I’m happy to accommodate them.

Alright. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started with the basics of writing a Muslim character.

(Warning: this is absurdly, absurdly long)

Basics:

Muslims follow two main sources of religious instruction: Quran and Hadith. 

The Quran is the holy book, considered to be dictated by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammed, who then relayed what he was told to his followers. It is composed of surahs, or chapters, which have individual ayat, or verses. There are no varying versions of the Quran, later additions, or anything considered lost in translation. Any Arabic Quran is considered to be the same text that the Prophet Mohammed relayed, unchanged. As a result, while Muslims can debate interpretations of the Quran (although that’s often still left to the scholars), none debate the actual words of the text.

Hadith, meanwhile, are the sayings or teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Their validity can be disputed, as they were written by his followers after his death, and mainly depend on having several witnesses for a specific saying or situation. The more witnesses there were, the more valid the hadith is considered to be.

When in doubt or should there be any contradiction between the Quran and Hadith, Muslims will always refer to the Quran first and foremost.

Denominations:

The bigggest (but not only!) divisions of Islam are Sunni and Shia, and both of those have separate madhabs, which are the separate thoughts and stances of specific Imams. When writing a Muslim character, a good first step would be to decide where your character’s family might have come from, as that could help inform which denomination your character might belong to. This will in turn inform things like the beliefs they grew up with, how they pray, their holy holidays, and so on. Obviously, all denominations fall under the bigger umbrella of Muslim, but can vary in practice.

Background:

The intersection of culture and religion affects a character beyond which denomination they likely belong to, such as whether they call prayer salah or namaz, the foods they might associate with Ramadan or Eid, and their community’s stance on things like hijab and alcohol.

One thing to keep in mind is that being Muslim is not synonymous with being Arab and vice versa. Not all Arabs are Muslim, not all Muslims are Arab or even Middle Eastern. In fact, the largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia. That said, depending on your character’s race and backround, there is the potential they may have faced Arab elitism or other strands of racism within Muslim circles. Please see the reblog of this post for an article about  one Black British Muslim woman’s experience with racism.

And, of course, your character and their family do not need to have been immigrants at all. They or their family may have been converts instead. According to most Muslim schools of thought, all that’s required for a person to be Muslim is stating the shahada in Arabic, honestly and with intent. It goes, “Ashhadu an la ilah illa Allah, wa an Mohammadan rasul Allah,” which translates as “I bear witness that there is no god but God, and that Mohammed is His prophet.” Shia Muslims, I believe, have an additional section, but otherwise that’s it. Recite that in front of witnesses with sincere belief and that’s all you need to be Muslim.

Pillars of Islam:

These are the duties or cornerstones of a Muslim’s faith and considered to be acts every Muslim should strive for. What the pillars are can, I think, differ between denominations, with Shia Muslims having additional ancillaries as well (any Shia readers, please feel free to correct me!) but both denominations agree that the following are important:

Salah—prayer

Sawm—fasting during Ramadan

Zakat—giving a certain percentage of income to charity or the community

Hajj—pilgrimage to Mecca

In all cases, these are considered mandatory only for those who are able. A person who cannot perform hajj, whether due to not being physically able to or lacking the funds to travel, is under no obligation.

Prayer:

Prayer is performed five times a day while facing the Qibla, which is the direction of Mecca. Prayer is formed of units, called rak’at, which consists of a set of actions done in a specific order. The “How to Pray Salah, Step by Step” article linked in the reblog of this post provides fairly good prayer instructions for beginners, so check it out for details!  These include bowing, prostrating, and reciting some surahs. 

Each of the five daily prayers has a different number of rak’at, as well as its own name and allotted time of day, as follows:

Fajr, which means Dawn and can be performed at any point until the sun rises (two rak’at). 

Dhuhr, which means Noon (four rak’at)

Asr, performed in the afternoon (four rak’at)

Maghreb, which means sunset and can be performed at any point until it’s dark (three rak’at)

Isha, performed at night and can be done at any point until dawn (four rak’at)

The specific time of prayer will differ day to day and place to place, according to the sun, but those are the rough timeframes for each. It’s generally preferred that a Muslim does their prayer on time, but in practice some Muslims find it difficult to wake up for Fajr, for instance, and just try to make sure they get a morning prayer in before noon.

On Friday, there is a congregational Friday prayer at Dhuhr in a mosque called the Jumu’a prayer (which, fun fact, literally means gathering and is also the Arabic name for Friday!). Only men are required to take part in the congregation, however.  

In Muslim majority countries, the time for prayer is announced by the adhaan, the call to prayer, from mosques and in media. This won’t be the case in the UK, and the character will likely have to rely on an adhaan app or looking up what time prayer should be. 

There are various requirements for a prayer to be correct, chief of which is facing the Qibla and purity. Before performing prayer, a Muslim must purify themself by performing wudu, or ablutions, which basically involves washing the hands, arms, nostrils, face, head, and feet a specific number of times using clean water. The way I was taught these must be performed in a certain order, and the person shouldn’t speak during or after until their prayer is finished. This may be different for others.

Wudu is considered valid until nullified by bodily functions such as urinating, defecating, vomiting, flatulence, or any sexual activity. For Sunni Muslims, it’s also invalidated by going to sleep. If none of these have happened, a Muslim can perform more than one prayer using the same wudu.

Notably, a Muslim cannot pray if they’re on their period, as they’re considered in a state of impurity. 

Another important requirement is that a Muslim be dressed modestly for prayer. The general guideline is that Muslim men should cover the area between their navel and knees with loose, non-revealing clothing, and that during prayer it’s preferred that they cover their chests as well  Muslim women should cover everything except their face, hands, and feet. This means that a woman who isn’t hijabi would still wrap a hijab for prayer. For nonbinary Muslims, I don’t think there are specific guidelines yet, although please feel free to correct me. 

If praying at home, a family may choose to pray together. In this case, the male head of the household usually stands at the front and acts as Imam, leading the prayer. Other men will tend to be in front of or beside women, as generally women should not pray in front of a man. This is the case even, especially, if he is not praying.

Children aren’t required to pray, as they’re considered innocent and have no obligations, but may want to take part early on or may be encouraged to practice.

Praying is one area you’ll find denominational differences. For example, while Sunnis fold their arms in prayer, Shia keep their arms to their side, and while Shia Muslims make sure their foreheads touch a piece of clay or earth when they prostrate, Sunnis do not. If you write your character praying, keep these details in mind.

Fasting:

During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast from Fajr (dawn) until Maghreb (sunset) every day. This means they abstain from consuming anything—yes, even water, cigarettes, and medicine. They should also abstain from sexual activities and cursing. Most importantly, they must have the intention to be fasting. This means that not eating and drinking because they were asleep for that entire period of time or just lost track and forgot does not count as fasting.

Generally, the idea is more to try to be more pious and avoid sin throughout the month. It’s thought that the shaytan (or devil) is chained up during Ramadan, so any temptation or sinning is a person’s own doing. The way I was raised, I was taught that sawm/fasting is invalidated by sexual thoughts  and raising your voice as well. Many people also try to dress more modestly during Ramadan, with some women opting for looser clothing or a headscarf. Many Muslims will try to read the whole Quran during Ramadan. 

After Maghreb, Muslims break their fast with Iftar (which means breakfast, hah) and have a late night meal called Suhour. Since the Muslim calendar is a lunar calendar, Ramadan is 11 days earlier every year. Depending on when Ramadan falls in the year, there can be barely any time between iftar and suhour in certain parts of the world, as the sun is up for so much of the day. 

Given the length of time and difficulty involved, there are exceptions and allowances for fasting. A person is not required to fast if they are:

A child (up to puberty)

Ill or has a medical condition such as diabetes

Pregnant

Travelling

On their period

In fact, if they are on their period it will not be counted, even if they do fast. That said, sometimes people choose to fast while travelling anyway, as travel is less strenuous now than it used to be. If they’re crossing time zones they will have to consider which time zone they’re breaking their fast to. As far as I remember, it’s based on the time zone of the place they just left or started their fast in. 

If an obstacle to fasting is temporary, such as their period, they’re expected to make those days up with additional fasting before next Ramadan. Otherwise, they are allowed to make up for the lost fast in another way, such as by donating money or feeding fasting people. Whether due to societal pressure (which is formidable in Muslim-majority countries) or out of consideration for others who are fasting, those who are not fasting for whatever reason may often choose to hide this and only eat in secret.

If a person forgets they were fasting or accidentally consumes something, it does not invalidate the fast , and as soon as they remember or realise the mistake they can have the intention to fast again and continue with their day. 

While children are exempt, many families will start them off by fasting for half a day so they can build up to a full day when they hit puberty.

Ramadan traditions vary wildly from country to country and culture to culture, but generally it’s a time for family gathering and celebration. Often there are special Ramadan-specific food, drink, and decorations, and it ends with Eid ul-Fitr which has its own specific foods and celebrations. Basically, imagine if Christmas lasted a month. That’s how big a deal Ramadan is. 

In my experience, the first few days are usually the hardest. Water is what I tended to miss the most, even if I managed to stay up long enough or set an alarm to wake up to drink just before fajr, followed closely by swearing. Anyone who drinks caffeine or smokes cigarettes will likely find abstaining from those more difficult than water. By the end of the month, though, it gets much easier and I often got to the point where I barely noticed. I will say, however, that the longest I’ve had to fast has been maybe 16 hours. A summer Ramadan in the UK would be more difficult due to the much later sunsets.

Halal and Haram:

Halal means “permissible,” while haram means “forbidden.”  You might have heard these words in passing before, such as halal food, but they are used for many areas of life.  

Things that are considered haram include:

Consuming, serving, or trading in intoxicants, such as alcohol

Consuming improperly slaughtered meat or meat from forbidden animals, such as pork

Extramarital sex

Tattoos

Gambling

Men wearing silk or gold

A Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man (although it’s fine for a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman)

Being immodest

Modesty is expected of all genders, including men. If you’ll recall from the section on prayer, the general guideline for male modesty is that they should cover the area between their navel and knees with loose, non-revealing clothing. Note that for women, modesty does not necessarily involve wearing a hijab.  There is actually a ton of controversy as to whether the hijab is a fard (requirement) or not, as described in the following section.

The Hijab:

To be hijabi takes more than just throwing on a headscarf. As a word, hijab means “barrier” or “veil,” and a hijabi person would be expected to cover everything except their face and the palms of their hands, and to ensure that their clothes are loose and non-revealing.  It all comes from an interpretation of two verses in the Quran that many scholars nowadays agree to mean the hijab is required, and that some say actually call for a face covering as well, which is called a niqab. 

This wasn’t always the case, however, and these days there is still the occasional controversial scholar (I remember a few kerfuffles coming out of Egypt’s Al-Azhar mosque recently) saying it isn’t and has never been required at all. At least in the Arab world, this is largely due to the wave of Wahhabism (which is a specifically fundamentalist interpretation of Islam) that’s taken over the region in the past half a century. Before that, the idea of a hijab being a religious requirement was less widespread.

I’m not here to argue who’s right or wrong, just to make you aware that the hijab as we know it today hasn’t always been considered a requirement for a Muslim woman. Most of the women of my family never wore any form of head covering, but more and more they are an exception rather than the norm.

The choice of whether to wear a hijab can mean very different things, depending on the surrounding culture. For instance, my grandmother, the strictest woman I have ever known, got married in a very cute sleeveless dress that went just under the knees, and when she grew older she wore a head-covering more as a cultural indication of age rather than any religious reason. In my generation, in a country with a Muslim majority, lack of visible signs of devoutness have become almost a class marker, with some upper-class women using their lack of head-covering as a sign that they are “more Westernized” or “modern.” And again, I want to emphasize that this is the case for my country only. 

This will be completely different for Muslim minorities, where the hijab can become a symbol of pride and unity.

I will say that it’s very rare for women to be forced into getting veiled, whether in Muslim minority or majority countries. I’m not saying it never happens, just that it’s not the “oppressive tool of the patriarchy” outsiders sometimes think it is. Women may face some societal pressure, but by and large it is considered a choice and often an empowering one. In fact, I have friends whose families discouraged them from wearing a hijab too young and emphasized only taking the decision when they were sure they wanted to. If writing a Muslim character when you’re non-Muslim, I strongly suggest not trying to tackle the story of someone forced into a hijab, as there’s a lot of nuance there and it’s very easy to fall into harmful stereotypes. The hijabi woman who gets “liberated” and takes off her hijab is also overdone and harmful. Please don’t.

Everyday Life:

Muslims are not a monolithic entity, and some will be more devout or religious than others. There are those who will pray their five a day and others who only pray during Ramadan or Eid, some who don’t drink and some who do, hijabis who dress only in loose clothing and those who wear tight trousers or show some of their hair, some who have tattoos, and some who may date or even have sex before marriage. However, this isn’t a carte-blanche not to do research when writing a Muslim character, because even if they break a rule of Islam, they will be conscious of it, may be concerned about their community’s response to it, and in any case will be affected by it.

For instance, I know many Muslims who drink alcohol. Some interpret the text differently, saying that since the sin is getting drunk then they won’t drink enough to get drunk, just buzzed. Some only do it on special occasions or on vacation, saying they know it’s a sin but it’s fine on occasion and they’ll repent later. All of them would probably dive under a table if they thought their family was nearby.

For more opinions on Muslims and dealing with alcohol, take a look at the “Islam and Alcohol” article linked in the reblog of this post.

Here are things that a character who is a practicing Muslim might do or be concerned about in their day to day life:

Checking ingredients to make sure they’re all halal. This goes for things like food, drink, medicine, anything consumable. Things like gelatine capsules are only halal if the source of the gelatine is itself halal, for instance.

Keeping up with their prayers. With five prayers a day, some will inevitably happen while they’re out of the house. Some Muslims prefer to just group their prayers when they get home, but since it’s preferable to do prayers on time, others may try to pray while out and about This means considering the following:

Finding a bathroom for wudu. Part of wudu involves washing feet and the head, which isn’t feasible in a public location or if the person is hijabi and doesn’t want to unwrap and rewrap their hijab. In that case, they can generally wipe a wet hand over their socks and top of their head covering. 

They may carry a prayer carpet or have one stashed in a convenient location, but it’s not a must.

Finding a clean and secluded place to pray. Generally, it’s not done to pray in a place where someone will pass in front of you, and a woman must also take care to pray away from men’s eyes. 

Figuring out where the Qibla is. Luckily, there are apps for that.

If a woman is not hijabi, she would have to carry a veil and, depending on her clothes, something to cover up so she can pray.

If they’re hijabi, they’ll probably have to adjust or re-wrap their hijab throughout the day, depending on the material and their activities. This would typically happen in bathrooms or any other space that doesn’t include men, as they can’t reveal themselves to any men who aren’t of their immediate family. For more on the hijab, and the day to day realities of wearing and wrapping one, take a look at the links provided in the reblog of this post.  

A Muslim woman may choose not to accept handshakes from men who aren’t family.  She has probably considered how to deal with that potential awkwardness.

If they’re fasting, they might carry some dates or biscuits or something in case they need to break their fast while on the go.

If making plans, they might say, “Insha’allah” which means “God willing.” I was always admonished to do so to acknowledge the future is entirely within God’s hands.

If asked how they are, they might reply with “Alhamdullilah” which means “Thanks be to God.”

When starting to eat, they may say, “Bismillah,” which means “In the name of God” and when done eating may say “Alhamdullilah.” These can also be invoked silently.

As you might have noticed, Allah’s name is invoked pretty often. While it’s not preferable to swear using God’s name just to make a point (“Wallahi”), there’s nothing against it, really.

Fundamentally, an important thing to remember is that Islam is a religion of ease and not hardship. This is an actual Quranic quote. What this means is, it may seem like there are a lot of rules to keep in mind, but there are also a ton of allowances for when those rules aren’t feasible, just like the case for fasting above. Other allowances include how an elderly or disabled person who may not be able to perform the motions of prayer can pray while sitting in a chair or even lying in bed. If there isn’t any clean water to purify before prayer or if using the water would mean lack of drinking water, a Muslim can use dust or sand to purify, and if no dust or sand is available then they don’t need to purify at all and can simply pray. 

This means that, say, if your Muslim Jon wants to pray while kidnapped by the circus, he can, even without being able to perform wudu, even without knowing where the Qibla is, even without being able to move or say anything at all.

For more day-to-day tidbits, check out the “More on writing Muslim characters” link in the reblog of this post. 

LGBTQ Muslims:

Needless to say, Queer Muslims absolutely do exist, and their being Muslim doesn’t cancel out their queerness or vice versa. While there are Quranic verses that have been interpreted as condemning homosexuality, there are also other interpretations, and queerness has existed in Muslim societies for ages. There was a ton of homoerotic imagery among Abbasid poets during the Golden Age of Islam, for example. 

However, modern-day attitudes can be difficult to get around, and queer Muslims may have difficulty finding their place in both Muslim spaces and queer spaces, the latter which often expect them to reject religiosity.

Although I am queer myself, I don’t feel it’s my place to speak for queer Muslims and their relationships with their communities beyond this, so I’ll let some queer practicing Muslims speak for themselves.  Please see the reblog of this post for valuable contributions from queer Muslims about their experiences.  

Miscellaneous:

This is mostly for all the random tidbits I thought up while writing this that didn’t fit anywhere else and also because I don’t know when to quit apparently, SO!

Allah is just Arabic for God. Muslims can and do use these terms interchangeably, such as saying “God willing,” instead of “Inshallah,” even in an Arabic-speaking country. 

Also, God has 99 names! Just a fun fact for you there. 

The Devil in Islam is pretty different from his Christian counterpart. Referred to as Iblis or Shaytan, among other names, he is not a fallen angel and there is no great revolt story, nor is he considered a root of all evil. Instead, he is a djinn made of smokeless flame who refused to bow down to Adam, as he felt he was made of superior stuff and not about to bow to a creature made of mud. His disdain for humanity is what has caused him and other shayateen/demons to try and tempt humans.

A person’s right hand is considered purer than their left, so it’s encouraged to always eat with your right hand. Unfortunately, this does mean left-handed people face something of a stigma—or at least that’s the case here in Egypt. My cousins, both lefties, both eat with their right hand, though they  do everything else with their left.

Similarly, it is considered better to enter spaces with your right foot, though only the most devout are likely to think of this all the time. This is especially considered for entering a mosque or new home.

A Muslim might say or write “Peace be Upon Him” whenever the Prophet Mohammed is mentioned, written as (PBUH), and “Subhanuh wa Taala” when mentioning Allah, written as (SWT).

The Evil Eye is mentioned in the Quran as “hasad,” and considered to be a very real thing. This jealous or envious energy is considered able to ruin good things in your life, even if the jealous person didn’t intend to. There are some surahs that are considered good to ward against it, as well as incense, the colour blue, the number five, and the symbols of the nazar (which is a round, blue-ringed eye) and the khamsa (an open five-fingered palm, also known as the Hand of Fatima). The nazar, khamsa, and belief in the evil eye aren’t unique to Islam at all. What is unique to Islam is that a Muslim might preface a compliment with “Masha’allah” which means “As God wills it,” to ward off their own evil eye. 

Much of the Quran in Arabic rhymes and is very poetic, which can make surahs easy to memorise by rhythm. It can also make recitations by a skilled reader very lovely.

[svankmajerbaby]

my very long winded thoughts on episode two of chucky season 2

summary: better than the first episode but still leaves me cold when comparing it to season 1. funnier moments interesting developments and new characters dont fully compensate for the weird pacing and things being mostly setup.

the biggest issue for me so far is definitely that the first season was such a solid 8, and this one is kind of like a weak 6

i thought we would have more of the new characters, at least to establish them better and have a feel of their personalities. but sister ruth (freddie lounds!!!!!!!) made me miss ms fairchild big time, and the detective looking for nica and his interactions with tiffany made me somehow miss gladys from season 1 (the funny "high as a kite" lady, the woman who chucky gave the razor apple to on halloween night and who later was the realtor who sold tiffany the old ray house). i think even the tied-up guy back at the hotel had more of an attitude than these new faces. i dunno if thats a casting thing or a writing thing tbh. the previous episode had ended with an interesting note regarding that boy trevor, but he was absolutely nothing in his only scene here. lexy keeps saying hes evil hes awful but we dont get anything specific (”life a living hell” this and that, i need details), so it feels even more like just talking and no real outcome

nadine is a sweetheart though. i really like her and how she is so drastically different to the other three main kids, even though putting a kid in a catholic boarding school for kleptomania (what a letdown of a backstory tbh) when theres others who were sent there for blowing up a kid with a homemade bomb feels.... a bit weird. but whatever, what do i know. i just hope she gets something to do besides hang around the main three, bc otherwise the feeling that she will only be around to be killed by chucky for some quick emotional impact is not going to go away.

i!! actually loved!!!! that one scene in class with the teacher talking about hieronymus bosch, along with that projection it gave me big hannibal in florence vibes and i loved seeing jake talking about art, even if it was just a quick thing. im really curious about the religious aspect of the season, beyond the aesthetics, which so far seem to be the only way it really impacts the story. i think it was a missed opportunity to not make any of the three kids catholic/religious, especially either jake or devon (not even super religious, just a mention of being baptized or having been raised in a christian household), since that would intersect very well with issues of guilt which feels like its going to be a running theme for jake in particular. having him feel guilty for everything that happened so far (which makes perfect sense and his two little breakdowns were very well done i think) and not really have anything to do with the religious environment feels like such a waste.... especially with how interesting it could be to acknowledge fully how devon sawa is once again portraying a sort of paternal authority figure, continuing with his authority role as logan and lucas. maybe its just too subtle for my thick skull, maybe its something they will build towards as the season goes on, who knows

i really really really hope devon gets more to do in the rest of the season. jake has his guilt, lexy has her drug addiction, and devon... he feels so lightweight compared to the other two. i love him so much, hes a sweetheart (and i think he would accomplish what i think?? nadines role is meant to fulfill) but having him just be the emotional rock for jake in this season is not enough, nor is it to keep the previous seasons tug of war with jake regarding their relationship and whether theyre good for one another. i was all episode hoping hed come up with some interesting info on the school and with charles lee rays childhood in it or something..... devon is a smart one, he made the important research and came up with the trap in season 1, and i wish the series remembered that, like it remembered that jake is an artist at heart

really dumb thought but im kinda glad that in the scene with nica and chucky talking inside her head we didnt get like a gollum/smeagol, david-hasselhoff-as-jekyll-and-hyde-the-musical thing (not that fiona dourif wouldnt be able to pull it off); i liked that it showed them as two separate entities even in her own body. probably not the intention but i always like to see nica in some way in control of herself and it makes absolute sense that in that discussion with him she would conceptualize him as a being apart from her. i do think we will eventually get a pretty hammy “shifting” scene and it will be probably a little bit cringe even if its fiona’s wonderful acting

i liked seeing nica trying to manipulate tiffany to leave her alone with her chiding her for wasting money, it was believable but also just clumsy enough of an effort to show shes really getting desperate and that tiffany is still smart enough to realize when shes trying to get her to do something. tiffany as a whole has been feeling just a little too.... dumb? in some way? especially with how little care she put into even properly lying to that detective. like i know its meant to be funny.... but i dont want the comedy to come from tiffany being clueless or dumb. shes ditzy and a bit naive but never dumb

and also i really didnt like the opening credits with the portraits. what the heck was that. i know its a detail and im petty but that was so lazy why didnt we get like crucifixes or sth else, even if it didn’t fit super well it made more sense than those silly production images of the doll and of fiona floating around...........

most of all i feel like stuff IS happening in each episode (here theres the interesting thing with the doll doing recon and taking those pictures?? for some reason???? and now chucky and nica working together to break free and get revenge) but its nowhere as tightly structured and well built up to as in the first season. im thinking of how every scene added a little more to the characters and the environment and the dynamics and how it juggled a whole bunch of plotlines masterfully, while here i think we might have. three. if we count devon and jake, and lexy and nadine as separates. and theres still this feeling of waiting for something else to happen, of building up to something, instead of a constant succession of impactful events. i hoped first episode was all setup even if it wasnt super well conveyed, and this episode too felt most of all like catching up and setting up possible threads. it got better after the halfway point but it still feels like a slow climb. thinking it will eventually get better isnt much of a comfort to me when i can easily remember how much better season one was

[gvbejvmesmichaels]

Task 14: Genderbent

Legal Name: Gabriella Antonia James-Michaels Usually Goes By: Ella Michaels Why: She only kept the James-Michaels because she didn’t want the James name to end with her. She’s never felt as though she was a James or a Conrad. Michaels is the only last name that’s ever felt like hers. Former Names: Gabriella Antonia James (maiden), Gabriella Antonia Conrad (first marriage) Nicknames: Ella (everyone), Briella (Jocelyn) Relationship Status: Married to Jocelyn James-Michaels Past Relationships: Nathan Conrad (ex-husband) Children: Andrew Conrad, Constance Conrad, Arabella James-Michaels (by adoption) Occupation: Professional Tattoo Artist and amateur sculptor. She co-owns a tattoo shop called The Collective with Kaia Johnson where they specialize in Skin Artistry. Higher Education: B.A. in Art History from California State University Los Angeles (prisoner education program), the required certifications to become a professional tattoo artist Tattoos: She honestly doesn’t know how many tattoos she has. She can tell you that all of her tattoos have been done by herself, by Kaia, or by one of the apprentices at The Collective. Her two prized tattoos are 1) her first tattoo she ever did: a crude rendering of her brother’s name on her inner left arm done by stick and poke, 2) the tattoo on her ring finger she talked Joss into giving her. Her wife had been uncomfortable with the idea, and she definitely went too deep in places, but Ella is beyond proud of the shaky Joss printed on her finger. Quirks: Growing up Ella wasn’t allowed to wear pants, which of course means that now she lives in pants and shorts. Ella refuses to wear dresses or skirts. She even wore a fitted pantsuit to her wedding.

Ella James was born and raised in Roswell, New Mexico to extremely conservative parents. Her father was incredibly religious and forced his religious beliefs on his family. He had very strict rules about how Ella was to dress and behave. Her mother was one of those women that wanted nothing more than to be a homemaker. She was more than happy to go along with all her husband’s strict rules because she liked the idea of rules and structure. That was also probably why Ella’s parents only had two children: Ella and her younger brother, George. On the outside, the family appeared to be the American ideal: Husband, wife, and a pair of kids. On the inside, it was hell.

Life in the James household for Ella meant that she was supposed to dress modestly, speak only when spoken to, and only engage in activities that were becoming of women. If her father had it his way, Ella wouldn’t have even gone to school. The only places she was able to go to were school, the family antique shop, and church. So, she took advantage of every opportunity to get out of the house. She signed up for extra art classes, extra home economic classes, and even multiple bible study classes -- anything to get out of the house. Her only saving grace was her little brother, George.

George and Ella were attached at the hip. While Ella’s world outside of the house was art, her brother’s world was aliens. He lived in his own extraterrestrial world, which often brought bullies his way. The worst of the bullies was a boy in Ella’s grade: Nathan Conrad. As much as Nathan harassed George, all it took was a smile from Ella for Nathan to completely forget any bad feelings towards George. It didn’t take long for Ella to figure out that if she dated Nathan, George wouldn’t get picked on any more. As an added perk, her father loved Nathan, which meant Ella was allowed out of the house if she was out on a date with Nathan. So she went with it.

For as long as she could remember, she knew she was a lesbian. She has a very distinct memory of watching Smokey and the Bandit, seeing Sally Fields changing out of her wedding dress in the car and being very jealous of Burt Reynolds. She knew right then and there that she liked girls. The problem was that her family would never accept her sexuality, and she knew it. She’d sat through enough bible study classes to know that her parents believed homosexuality was a sin. So, she knew she needed to play straight until George was out of high school, and they could get out of town. Of course, life had different plans. 

When Ella got pregnant her senior year of high school, she knew she was screwed. Lesbian or not, she knew the only option that didn’t end with her losing custody of her child to her parents would be to marry Nathan. Having a kid at 18 and marrying her high school sweetheart, wasn’t the life she wanted for herself, but it was the life she’d been given. Nathan was very similar to her father so she knew what was expected of her. She was supposed to stay at home and raise their son. It was a miserable life, but it gave her the opportunity to build sculptures as much as she wanted. Besides, as soon as she realized that she was pregnant, she knew there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her son. She’d never loved anyone as much as she loved George, until she gave birth to Drew. 

As much as she hated being a housewife, she absolutely adored being Drew’s mom. She took to motherhood like a duck to water. Being a mom was the only thing that made life worth living. So when she gave birth to her daughter, Connie, her whole life revolved around her kids. Motherhood gave her purpose, but there was still something missing in her life. So, she started going to parties that the women in the neighborhood used to host: Tupperware, Mary Kay, Avon - housewife parties. Or at least, that was the cover. In reality, they were hook-ups for women needing more attention than what they were getting from their husbands. They would mess around with each other, and go back home to their husbands like nothing happened.

Ella’s life went on like that until 2002. It was just any other normal Thursday. She’d been at a party, and wound up falling asleep. It was two in the morning by the time she stumbled home to a horror show. Her ten year old son, Drew, was sitting in the corner, covered in blood. She followed the trail outside where her brother, George, lay in a pool of his own blood. Immediately, she dropped to her knees and checked for a pulse, but he was long gone. By the time she looked around to see what had happened, it was too late. Nathan had called the police, and Ella was sitting there covered in her brother’s blood. No matter what she said, the police refused to believe her, and she was arrested for her brother’s murder.

The truth was that George was helping her get enough money together to leave Nathan. Her husband was just as terrible as her father had been. All Ella wanted was to escape with her children and start over somewhere she could be herself: like San Francisco or New York. Somehow Nathan had found out, and well… staged George’s murder to frame Ella for a crime she didn’t commit. He could have given a shit about the kids; it was controlling Ella’s life that he wanted, and he got his way and then some.

Her trial ended just as quickly as it started. All the evidence pointed to her, and no matter what she said or what her public defender tried to sell, the jury was primarily made up of men -- and all they saw when they looked at her was a killer. She never had a chance.

Once she was in prison, life got worse -- Nathan filed for divorce and full custody of the kids. As soon as it hit her that she was never going to see her kids again, she sort of gave up. She let herself slip away in prison. She took classes to get a degree in art history, and did tattoos on the girls for cigarettes and juicy romance novels. Ella didn’t exactly take life seriously. As far as she was concerned, she was a lost cause that had nothing to live for once she got out of prison. So, she fucked around where she could and lived in her own world.

Then her stupid cousin, Annie, had to get involved. Annie didn’t believe for one second that Ella would have killed her brother. So she did what she did best: she meddled and needled until 1) Ella was transferred from New Mexico to a prison in Los Angeles County closer to Annie, and 2) she found a lawyer who was willing to reopen Ella’s case -- and that was how Ella met Jocelyn Michaels.

Meeting Jocelyn was the last thing Ella had wanted to do, but hell, was she glad that she’d taken the meeting. Jocelyn was hot as hell, the smartest person she’d ever met, and stubborn as all fuck. Once she heard Ella’s story, she was invested and Ella found herself invested in Joss.

Somewhere between working on the case, they fell in love. If Ella was honest with herself, she never stood a chance with Joss; she’d fallen for her that first time they met. Ella was handling her feelings well enough. It wasn’t like she was acting on her feelings towards the other woman. She’d never actually been in love with anyone before; it was all new for her. And then… she managed to piss someone off in prison. She wasn’t sure what she did, but she’d always been real good at running her mouth, especially back then. One minute she was fine, and the next minute, there was a sharpened spoon sticking out of her side.

There’s not much she remembers about getting stabbed, but when she woke up in the hospital, Jocelyn was there. She knew right then and there that she was going to marry that woman one day. In fact, she must have said that part out loud because then Joss was kissing her, and not even two weeks later, they were married. 

The new trial was probably the most terrifying month of Ella’s life. If they lost the trial, if she lost Joss… She didn’t know what she’d do with herself. But by some miracle, Jocelyn was able to win the case and after serving 8 years for a crime she didn’t commit, she was found innocent, and for the first time in her life, she was free. 

Once she was out of prison, there were still a lot of things that needed to be handled and taken care of. As far as she was concerned, the most important thing was getting back custody of her kids. Drew was 18 by the time she was out of prison, but he was a senior in high school -- it didn’t make sense to have him leave New Mexico when he was so close to graduating. And Connie… She was 14 and wanted nothing to do with her mother. Even if Ella had tried for custody, Connie wouldn’t have gone with her. So, she gave both her kids her number and moved to New York with her wife.

Life in New York took getting used to. It was the first time that Ella had the freedom to figure out who she was, and what she wanted to do with her life. The first thing she knew for sure was that she didn’t want to be a housewife again -- that had been awful. So, while her wife settled back into New York like she had never left, Ella took it upon herself to figure out what she wanted to do. At first she was so overwhelmed that everything seemed like it was too much. So, she started taking long walks around Central Park, just enjoying naturing and exploring. That was how she met Zak. 

Zak was going to Central Park for the same reasons as Ella - he was trying to figure out his life. The difference between them, however, was that Zak had recently transitioned from having HIV to AIDS. He was dying, and he was trying to figure out a way to ensure his partner, Kaia, wouldn’t lose their self in his death. Throughout their short friendship, they figured out a solution. Kaia was a tattoo artist who loved creating pieces of artwork that took over their client’s backs. With Ella’s self-taught tattoo skills from prison, it made sense for the two of them to open a tattoo shop together. Sure, Ella still needed certification and training in styles other than stick and poke, but it gave both herself and Kaia a purpose and something to focus on.

Once Ella and Kaia officially opened the Collective, it was like the second half of her life had begun. For the first time, Ella was making friends she wasn’t related to or sharing a cell with. It had taken her a long time, but she’d found herself. She had a career, she had her wife, and she had multiple dogs. Her life was finally coming together, but there was something missing -- something that had been missing from the beginning: her kids.

When he was twenty, Drew moved to New York. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in terms of school, but he wanted to be near his mom. Ella was, of course, thrilled. Jocelyn was a little standoffish about the whole thing, but having Drew staying in the guestroom made Ella happy so Joss warmed up to the idea of having at least one of Ella’s kids around. Or so she thought. 

It was around 2013 when Ella’s biological clock started ticking out of control. She wanted a baby, and more importantly, she wanted to have a baby with Joss. If they wanted to have kids with their DNA (in Ella’s head she wanted Drew’s sperm and Joss’s egg), they needed to have a baby now. As much as she begged, and begged, Joss was in the middle of running for DA so it wasn’t a good time to add a baby to their life, but they were 39 so… after many discussions, they froze Ella’s eggs at least. It helped soothe Ella’s ticking clock, but the desire never fully went away.

Instead of a baby, Ella put all her effort into her career and her marriage, but Joss’s career had taken off and her wife typically was swamped with work. Her wife must have realized how unhappy Ella was becoming because when Ella brought up having a baby again in 2017, her wife said they could make an appointment to potentially begin the process of surrogacy. Except… the meeting never happened; not really. Sure, they went, but Joss was so busy with work that nothing ever came of the appointment. So, Ella stewed and flashed back to her first marriage and then, after a particularly bad fight about Joss never being home, Ella left her wife and moved in with Kaia.

As much as she still loved her wife, she’d been unhappy, and if she was honest, she’d jumped from one marriage right into the next, so she did some soul searching. It was during their separation, that Ella refound her first love: clay. There had been a time where she thought she was going to be a world famous artist instead of a tattoo artist that people booked appointments for 6 months in advance. And she’d loved working with clay. So, now that she had free time, she found a local studio and began sculpting again.

After filing for divorce in 2018, Ella got a surprise. Her daughter, Connie, had been living in New York for about a year and had been convicted on a distribution charge. As her daughter’s closest relative and blood relation, she was given custody of her granddaughter, Arabella. Once Bella was put in her arms, Ella knew she was meant to raise Bella -- this was the baby she’d been yearning for. Much like the first time, she took quickly to motherhood, even though it had been decades between children. Unlike the first time, she was a single parent, which was a totally different experience.

By late 2019/early 2020, Ella more or less had her life together. She knew who she was, the shop was flourishing, she had an insane amount of YouTube followers who liked to watch her sculpt, and she finally had the single (grand)mom thing down. It was then that she realized that the one thing that was missing from her life was her ex-wife. The problem was that it looked like Joss had moved on, and yet, Ella still found herself trying to reconnect with her ex-wife. 

Falling back into a relationship with the other woman had almost been too easy. It was like going home again. Working on their relationship and getting back together had been great and fine until they were quarantined together with a two year old, and Ella found out they were still technically married. Joss had never filed the signed petition for divorce. If there was anything that could have fouled up their reunion - it was that. But somehow (and with the help of an annoying marriage counselor via Zoom), they were able to reclaim their marriage.

October 13, 2021 will mark one year of being remarried (okay, vow renewal). Ella has no idea where the time has gone, but she knows two things for absolute certain: one - she’s the person she was always meant to be, and two - she’s married to the  absolute love of her life. Things in her life may have been rough, but those things led her to where she was meant to be, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. She hadn’t suffered through the bad, she never would have been able to appreciate the good.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

153 Questions for Americans

Listen, as far as I am concerned, America is a place where movies are set. I know you’re all real but you don’t feel quite real, you know. Somebody actually grew up in New York? Impossible - that only exists on TV. I have questions. And somewhere out there, there is an American bored enough to answer them. Or at least some of them. 

I feel I should clarify that none of these are loaded questions. I’m asking these with no agenda other than burning curiosity. There’s no judgement or meanness behind them. I’m sorry that I sound incredibly stupid. 

1) Do you think of yourselves as American, or does your state come first? 

2) Where does the generic American accent come from? The one most people in movies have? Is it Californian, cos that’s where movies tend to be made? That’s my current working theory. 

3) Is it true that you don’t have egg cups? 

4) Is it normal to live in one state all your life and never go to another, even for a visit, or would that be weird? 

5) Are all school buses really yellow, like in movies? 5b) Why? Are they all owned by the same company or do different groups keep identical yellow buses for this one purpose? 

6) Do you have semi-detached houses in America? They’re never in movies. 

^^ These houses! Where two houses are mirror images of each other and share a joining wall. Do you have those? 

7) Turkey is your classic Thanksgiving meat, I think? So what’s your classic Christmas meat? 

8) There must be an insane number of colleges/universities in a country that size. How do you narrow down your choices? Do most people stay in their home state? 

9) Are school sports really as big of a deal as movies make them out to be?

10) How do you decide if your school is an obsessed-with-basketball school or an obsessed-with-football school? Is it regional? Have movies exaggerated this binary too much and I’ve got the wrong idea? 

11) Are there any girls’ sports teams at schools or is it basically just cheerleading? 

12) What is a pep rally and also why is a pep rally? Who goes to them? 

13) Do cheerleaders wear their uniforms around school casually like they do on TV? Wouldn’t a sports uniform need to be taken off post-training for cleanliness reasons? Do they only wear it before training to save the trouble of getting changed? 

14) Does the average American family own a gun or are they not as widespread as it is made to seem? Is that regional too? 

15) How similar is the culture between, say, Montana and New Mexico? Do they feel like the same country? 

16) Do you get sheriffs in cities or is it only out in the middle of nowhere? What’s the difference between a sheriff and a police captain? 

17) Is prom as big of a deal in real life as it is in movies? 

18) Are prom queens a real thing and, if so, how do they work? Are there duties involved or is it just wearing a tiara for a night? Can anyone be voted in or is there a pre-prom shortlist? Do you have to apply? 

19) What is stereotypically American, from the perspective of an American? I know what the stereotypes are over here, but how do you stereotype yourselves? 

20) Why does Alabama have a reputation for incest? Is there a historical basis or do people just not like Alabama very much? 

21) Is it true that you don’t have roundabouts, or do you just not have as many / don’t have them everywhere? (You might call them something else - the little islands in a crossroads that you have to circle round) 

22) If you were asked to name European cities, what would be the first ones you would name? 

Clarification: If somebody asked me to name American cities, my brain would immediately go: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. By the time it had thought of those, it would already be saying: Las Vegas, Washington DC, New Orleans, San Francisco. Then, Detroit, Miami, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore. After that, I would have to actively stop and think of another one. So, if somebody just says ‘European cities - go!’ what does your brain immediately leap to? 

23) Are those gigantic supermarkets (superstores???) standard across the country? What do the big brands (Walmart?? Target?????) look like in cities? Are they still that huge? 

24) Do the big grocery brands have specific personalities/reputations? What are they? Which one do middle class people look down on, for example? 

25) Is deep-frying everything something you really do or is it more of a regional delicacy / special occasion type deal? 

26) Do the states that are more “famous” (California, and the like) feel more or less American because of it? Are you a cultural beacon, or are you an independent entity shackled down to the rest of them? 

27) Do the states that often get ignored (Montana?? Iowa?????) feel more or less American because of it? Does your isolation make you separate, or are you bound together into a greater whole? 

28) I get that different states have different laws. So say one state said you could get a driving license without having to take a test, but the next state insisted on standardised testing. Would a license issued by the first state still be valid in the second state? Could you cross the border to the state with easier specifications just to get a license?

29) Which universities / colleges are really the ones with good reputations? Obviously, places like Harvard and Yale are world-famous but I don’t really know any others unless a character in a movie is aspiring to one. Which are the names that command respect amongst real people?  

30) Is the average American’s knowledge of geography or history beyond the US as poor as it is commonly described? Or is that more of a joke and the average person is perfectly well-informed, with a few outliers?

31)  Are those red cups in party scenes a convenient movie prop, because they’ve become the stereotype of “oh, that cup has alcohol in it” or something, or are they actually used that universally? 31b) If they are that ubiquitous, what happens when red is the colour of the enemy sports team? That seems like something people would care about.

32) Do you really recite the pledge of allegiance at school every day? If yes, is it done sincerely or just because it’s tradition? 

33) Are flags as popular a décor choice as popular media seems to suggest?

34)  Which state has the reputation for having the most attractive / sexiest people from it, or the people you would most want to date? Why? (I’m assuming this won’t be fully universal, but there are definite stereotypes of ‘guys from this region aren’t the romantic sort’ and ‘girls from this region are easy’ in other countries so you must have something) 

35)  What kind of cheeses do you have? This probably sounds insane, or possibly a little patronising, but whenever you see cheese in an American context, it tends to be those little plastic squares that look like linoleum flooring. Yet Americans are really into putting cheese in everything, so there must be other types. But I couldn’t name a single type of cheese off the top of my head as being a known American cheese. So what are the standard cheeses of an American household? 

36) Is that “biscuits and gravy” thing that people sometimes post pictures of when talking about the difference in biscuits across the Atlantic actually a thing people eat? On what occasion? And if that’s gravy, what do you call the stuff you pour on meat and potatoes? Are they both gravy? 

37) Do young people really hang around at shopping malls all weekend, or is that a movie thing? 

38) Do Americans eat custard? I’ve never heard an American mention custard.

39) If you had to pick an area of the country that is “where rich city folk go to pretend to get back to nature despite being afraid of dirt” where would it be? Or does every state have their own bit where people from their own cities go to buy big old houses and complain about phone reception? 

40) Why do Americans still talk about themselves as being, for example, “a quarter Welsh, a sixth Irish, a bit Swedish, but mostly German”? I don’t mean the people whose parents moved there, but the people who have been there for generations. Do you really feel connected to the cultures/countries your ancestors were from? Is “American” more of a circumstance than an identity?

41) Is Easter a widespread secular event in America or purely religious-based? What would a typical Easter celebration involve? Do you have the fruit cake and funny hats, like we do? 

42) If you had to pick one song already in existence to be your new national anthem, what would it be and why?

43) I know that it is possible to be made to repeat a grade, possibly several times, if you don’t get the required exam results. How common is that? Does it happen a lot, or is it more of a threat to hold over kids? 

44) Are there limits on how early you can legally drop out of school, or could a child stop attending at any age? For example, where I grew up it would be illegal to leave school before the age of sixteen but movies seem to imply you can drop-out earlier in the US.

45) What is homecoming? Who is coming home, and where from? 

46) What is a more important social event: prom, or homecoming? 

47) Can anybody attend homecoming, even the freshmen? I have this vague idea sports has something to do with it and it would seem logical that some freshmen play sports but how does that work logistically? 

48) Does homecoming also have a queen? Do she and the prom queen compete in some way? Which one outranks the other? 

49) Are there buses in America? Other than the school bus or the occasional long-distance coach, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bus in American media. Does a standard public-transport bus system exist? Is it only in some places? 

50) Why are trains not a more popular mode of long-distance travel in America? Or are they but it doesn’t make for as dramatic a movie scene as a desperate non-stop road trip? 

51) Are freshmen and sophomores really called that? Is it colloquial, or would you see it on official paperwork? 

52) Do teenagers get to choose which subjects they study to exam level at high school, or does everybody have to take a final exam in everything?

 53) Are places like Puerto Rico, or American Samoa, thought of as extensions of the country? Do they seem American to mainland Americans? 

54) Does Alaska ever feel left out, being up there on its own? 

56) Teen novels seem to suggest there’s an endless succession of school dances in high schools. Spring dances, winter balls, proms, homecoming, ladies’ choice dances… Is that true? If so, do people really care about them or is non-attendance no big deal? 

57) Is Halloween as big an event as movies suggest, or was Hocus Pocus not representative? 

58) Sometimes from the outside, it seems that we know more about what’s going on with American foreign policy than Americans do. Does it seem that way, as Americans, about other countries? That you’re getting information that is not being shared with their citizens? 

59) Do Americans really like British accents that much, or is that just a small but vocal handful on the internet? Do different foreign accents go in and out of fashion? 

60) What is the whole deal with white shoes and Labour Day? Or was that just a line in Legally Blonde? 

61) Do American teenagers really have sex in cars a lot or is that a movie thing?

62) Do American teenagers really sneak out of the house at night a lot, especially via the window, or is that also a movie thing? 

63) Are people as blasé about tornados as they seem or is that bravado? Are tornados really that common that people can just shrug about them and carry on with their day?

64) What age are the majority of people when they are learning to drive? Not what age can they legally learn; what age do most people actually learn. 

65) How many of the things you might call an American stereotype really only apply to one specific region? 

66) Are taxicabs yellow everywhere or is that just a New York thing? 

67) Are Sweet Sixteen celebrations a real thing? What happens at one? Is it just a particularly impressive birthday party or are there specific traditions? 

68)  Are sororities and fraternities as common or as important to college life as movies make them out to be? 

69)  Why would somebody join a sorority or a fraternity? What’s the point? (I know the phrasing of that sounds critical but I really don’t mean it like that. I just do not have the cultural context to understand what they’re actually for.) 

70) So, I know that the price you have on price labels isn’t the price you pay because of tax being a secret. I see you talk about this a lot. Does this mean the amount you’re asked for at the end is always a surprise, or are you all really good at mental arithmetic? Is calculating tax something you learn at school?

71) Do Americans generally have a good opinion of their fellow Americans?

72) Is New York the only place theatre really gets a chance to go big? That can’t possibly be true, it’s a massive continent, there must be incredible actors and writers and stuff hanging out somewhere in South Dakota or something. Is this why the people in Glee were so fixated on living in New York? 

73) The garbage-eating drains you have in kitchen sinks…where do they lead to? Can you put anything down them? 

74)  Which parts of America are the parts other Americans go on vacation? Is it different to where foreigners want to visit?

75) Do any American schools have school houses or is that absolutely not a thing at all? 

76) Do American schools have a system of merits or house points or some other way of giving a positive score for good behaviour that adds up to something eventually? Or is good behaviour expected and therefore not given special recognition? 

77) What actually is a hall monitor, and is it a position people respect or aspire to? 

78)  Is it as common for people to drive themselves and their friends to school as movies make out? How is there parking space for that many students with their own cars? 

79)  How did the town in Footloose have the power to ban dancing? Do individual towns have that much control over their laws and citizens? Does every town council get to make decisions that huge? 

80) Are big house parties the most common place for teenagers to get drunk and hook up? It seems like that in movies but surely that would be inefficient? You’d have to keep waiting for somebody’s parents to leave town. 

81)  What is the deal with Americans hating France? Is that a real thing or was it just a throwaway joke in enough media for me to think it’s a real thing?

82) Why do people not live in national parks?

83)  Which states actually count as “The South” and which ones are officially “The North”? Because it doesn’t seem like the line is just drawn across the middle. 

84) Whenever you see Americans talking about candy on the internet, it’s always the same six or seven items. Are those just the big favourites and there are lots of other candy types around the place that don’t get a place on personality quizzes, or are there really only a handful of familiar items that are widespread? Do different states have different candy?

85) Which sport is most central to American identity? I’d assume it was one of the three (baseball, basketball, American football) but is one of them more important than the others?

86)  Are all your prisons out in the middle of the desert or something? 

87) There’s this sort of mythology around an American idea of just getting a plot of land and building your home on it and making it your own, with an implication that you can grab anywhere and do whatever you like with it. Are planning laws that relaxed, or is that more something you could do in the 1800s that has taken up a place in cultural mythology? 

88) When kids are hanging out in someone’s yard or an empty lot on a summer day, what game or sport would they be most likely to be playing? It feels like American football, for example, wouldn’t be very good for that, and it’s hard to improvise a net for basketball. 

89) Is it strange to live in a large city that nevertheless is virtually unknown nationwide because all the attention goes to the enormous cities? Or are these places known nationwide and it’s just internationally that they get forgotten?

90) How far from somewhere would you have to be to consider yourself in the middle of nowhere? 

91) How localised are things like local news or local tv? Is it every state? Every county? Every major town and its surroundings? 

92) Does national television have to take place at different times regionally because of time zones? 

93)  Is there a reason why American recipes measure everything in cups, even the things that it doesn’t make sense to put in a cup e.g. solid items that don’t fill the space so could vary in cup-filling volume? A cup full of butter is a different thing if the butter is in blocks to if it is poured in, as it were, to fill to the edges completely. Is there a trick to it?

94) Is marching band the only kind of band you have at schools? Is there no orchestra? Swing band? Concert ensemble? 

95) Why do you have marching bands at schools? Where are they marching to? Do you have a lot of parades? 

96) If you had to choose one (non-reality) TV show that best represents what life is actually like in America, what would you pick? 

97) What is spirit week? Is it important? Do people take it seriously? I think it might be something that happens at schools but beyond that, I have no idea.

98) How big is a school locker? Apparently big enough to fit a person in but are they standing comfortably or curled into a tiny ball? If it were person-height, wouldn’t it have shelves in it? Does the victim go on a shelf? 

99) When you dress up for Halloween, can you be anything? I mean, could a kid going trick or treating conceivably wear any costume at all? It doesn’t have to be spooky? 

100) On a similar note, in movies there are always wild packs of children roving around on Halloween, filling the streets with their trick-or-treating. It’s crowded. Kids are running everywhere. There’s a gang knocking on every door. Is that movie magic or is Halloween really like an unofficial street party? 

101) Do you have half-term holidays? I assume you wouldn’t call them that. Mid-semester break, maybe? You know. The week off in the middle. 

102) Do you have days when you don’t have to go to work or school that aren’t for a special celebration? Just…days when the country stops working? Or, at least, most of it because cafés would always be open on that sort of day. 

103) Which is the bigger deal: Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July? 

104) How diverse is the landscape in any given state? If you take, say, Ohio, does it all look like roughly the same place all the way through or are there lots of different landscapes going on? I feel like there should be, but there’s still this very typical image of what Ohio is.

105) Do people care about what clothes they wear to school or does the fact that everybody sees everybody every day mean that it all stops mattering? 

106) What makes something a diner rather than a café, a restaurant, or whatever else? What defines a diner?

107) What is the one, singular, most significant place in the USA? (I realise this could be controversial)

108)  What would you, as an American, say was the best thing America has ever done, or the most important contribution it has made to the world? There’s no need to be coy here, I’m not asking for a fully-analysed unbiased dissertation on the subject, I just want to know what people are thinking. A person, an invention, an action…whatever takes your fancy. 

109) How does a state fair work? Is it really a fair for the whole state? Wouldn’t it have to be the size of a city for that? Does all of that get taken down at the end of the week and packed away, or do bits stay standing? 

110)  Are music festivals an upper class thing? Coachella seems to be an upper class thing but, then, I don’t really know what Coachella is, only that celebrities are there. Are there other music festivals of significance? 

111) When Americans say things like “We drove from New York to California last weekend, didn’t even stop to sleep, no big deal”, is there an element of bravado to that or is it completely genuine? I get that you drive long distances very casually but is there a point where those distances do become a big deal and a serious trip, you just pretend they don’t to mess with non-Americans? 

112) Is summer camp a normal thing for people to do, or is it something the minority of people send their kids to but it makes for a convenient movie setting so we see it a disproportionate amount? 

113)  Is a maths summer camp a thing or was that a joke in one book I read once? What would you even do at a maths summer camp? 

114) Is standing just inside the entrance of a shop and yelling a greeting at anyone who walks in a real job or is that a movie joke I don’t have the context to understand? If it is a job, is that the whole job or are you expected to do other things at the same time? 

115) Okay, the thing about the gap between the door and the wall in a bathroom stall. Is that as widespread as people say? I mean, is it everywhere? If so, there simply has to be a reason for it, it’s too weird otherwise, so does anybody out there know what’s going on with that? 

116) What actually is Kool-Aid? Is it true that you can drink it and use it as hair dye? 

117) What is an American Girl Doll? It seems to be a big deal but I can’t really figure it out. Is it just a brand of doll or is there more to it? 

118) Are the indicator lights on your cars officially called blinkers or is that more of a colloquial thing? Or not a thing at all? Would they be called that on your driving test? In a car manual? 

119) What actually is a GPA? What is it based on? And what counts as a good one? 

120) Is pancakes for breakfast a normal thing or a special occasion thing? 

121) What are cooties? I feel like I ought to know this, it comes up so often in various bits of media, but I’ve never actually figured out what it means. 

122) Is going to a pumpkin patch and just hanging out a real thing? Do you take pumpkins home with you? How about when you go apple picking? Are all these cutesy autumn activities a normal thing to do or is it just in romantic comedies?

123) How do school qualifications work? Are the exams you take at the end of high school, when you’re eighteen or whatever, the only ones that count if you’re looking to get a job? Or are there, sort of, mid-high-school exams that could also count towards something? Is it just “high school” then “degree” or are there other levels, is what I’m trying to ask. 

124) What is making out? By which I mean, what makes something “making out” rather than just kissing? Where’s that line drawn?

125) I understand that school newspapers are a thing. But do people pay to buy them? Other students? What kind of things do you write about in a school paper?

126) How does seeing the doctor work? Do you book an appointment with a local practitioner? Are there clinics? Does everybody wait until it’s an emergency? They don’t see doctors on TV unless they’re dying.

127) In Glee, they had slushie machines in the school. Which were used as weapons of bullying. Is that real? Are you allowed slushie machines? 

128)  Why is the president addressed as “Mr President”? Is there some historic reason? It seems odd to me, like calling somebody Mr Shopkeeper or Mr Insurance-Salesman. Is it because it is so clearly not a peerage title and that was important when America began? That’s my working theory based on no history whatsoever.

129) I understand that tipping servers at a restaurant and so on is very, very important but does that extend to other jobs? Do you tip postmen, for example, when they deliver your mail? Or shop assistants for bagging up groceries for you? 

130) Is a school mascot a) a real thing and b) a position of prestige? 

131) How do Girl Scout cookies work? Do the Girl Scouts make them themselves from secret recipes? Is it just a cookie company they happen to have a good relationship with for bake sales? It seems important but I can’t unravel the mystery. 

132)  What’s Delaware like? No stories ever seem to be set there. Nobody ever really mentions it. What goes on in Delaware? 

133) Somebody mentioned something called “color guard” once, which I think is something that happens at schools, but I don’t know what it was or whether they were messing with me. I’ve never knowingly seen it in a teen movie. Tell me about color guards. It sounds so fake. What are they guarding? 

134) I know that legal drinking age is twenty-one, but what age would you say the average person started drinking? I don’t mean “had a glass of wine at a family dinner” but I also don’t mean “drank to black-out”. Just…drank socially with the aim of getting at least tipsy. 

135) I can already tell that this is a silly question but what is under the bleachers? People seem to have clandestine meetings there a lot, but I thought bleachers were just benches. How do you get under them, and what is there once you do? Is hooking up there something people do in real life?

136) How small is a small town? Is it based on population or more on facilities e.g. if it has a certain number of basic shops, it becomes a normal-sized town?

137) Movies seem to think that being involved in music or theatre at school is deeply uncool. This is so contrary to my own experience at school, that I have to ask whether it is true or not? If so, is there a reason why or is it just one of those adolescent mysteries? 

138) Does everybody have those netting screens over their windows or is that only in regions prone to, say, mosquitos? 

139) Do small towns tend to have their own little tiny high schools or do the students have a long commute every morning to a bigger high school elsewhere? How far is considered acceptable/normal to travel to get to school?

140) When it comes to prom, is it considered really important to get a date or do lots of people turn up alone / with friends? If you do have to have a one-on-one date, is it usually romantic or is it acceptable just to pair up with a friend? Movies are very intense about this and I’m not sure the portrayal is accurate.

141) Do most schools have big theatre auditoriums with fully-functional stages and raked seating, or is that just High School Musical? 

142) Is sex ed really as poor as people joke about it being, on average? Is abstinence education the norm, or is it rarer but we hear about it a lot because it’s so controversial? 

143) Are chastity clubs at schools a real thing? If so, why, when almost all students must be underage? I mean, I know people are having underage sex but why make a club about obeying the law? I don’t mean for this to sound all judgemental, I’m just really lacking the cultural background to make sense of this. 

144)  Which is the most popular state, the one the fewest number of people hate? Is there even one that is universally well-liked? 

145) Would you normally refer to your country as “America” or “the US” or “the USA” or, I don’t know, some other variation? It seems pretty interchangeable but is there a preference? 

146) Is the “no outside food in the movie theatre” rule as rigorously enforced everywhere as general media would suggest? TV shows make it seem pretty militant but they might be exaggerating for comic effect. 

147) Is kindergarten a part of the compulsory school system or is it more of an optional pre-elementary-school step that only some people attend? What do you do in a kindergarten?

148) What makes somebody a redneck? Is it just a catch-all for the rural poor or is there something more specific behind it? 

149) Why is spring break supposedly this wild party time? What makes that a more suitable time for crazy shenanigans than, say, the autumn? Or July?

150) What is the difference between college and community college?

151) If you could pick one place to add as a new state, where would you choose? 

152) If you had to get rid of one state, which one would you kick out of the union? 

153) What is a letterman jacket for and why is it called a letterman jacket?

154) Washington DC. How does it work? I understand that it’s not a state, but if it’s not a state in a federal system, who governs it? Who runs the schools? And if the big elections are held by every state collecting their votes, figuring out the majority, then passing that on or whatever, how does Washington DC vote? Do they have people in the electoral college, whatever that turns out to be? What is going on there? Do real people actually live in DC or is it just politicians / people who serve politicians? 

If you’ve actually read this far and have even the slightest intention of answering any of these questions, you are a true angel and I love you. I’m sorry they’re not divided up into thematic groups or anything like that. I’ve been collecting this list for a few years now and I thought I might as well just ask at this point. 

[drshebloggo]

Ask box: JUSTICE FOR LANE KIM, a breakdown.

Anonymous asked: Do you know why Lane disappeared from the show as Rory's best friend over time? She appeared every now and then, yeah, but it has always bothered me that she slowly faded from being Rory's best friend to nobody... am I remembering things wrong?

I do not know! The Palladinos make decisions that sometimes are simply beyond my comprehension.

It’s been awhile since I watched Gilmore Girls in its entirety (and I kind of selectively ignore a lot in the last two, three seasons) but I don’t think you’re remembering things wrong. I will say, though, that the show faced a challenge with all of the Stars Hollow supporting ensemble when Rory went off to college. It’s these kind of problem-making focus shifts that I find really interesting, and they are UBIQUITOUS across teen/high school shows when a character or ensemble graduates.

Most of them that I can think of are done poorly, maybe with the exception of Friday Night Lights. But in defense of these shows, it’s HARD. How do you embrace a fundamental shift in the entire premise of your show? How do you deal with the new geographies of this shift, and the way they ripple into beloved character dynamics? How do you evolve a character through an engaging and meaningful arc without abandoning the foundation on which they were built? And how do you still capture your audience’s attention when there’s a risk that you’re leaving behind the magic that captivated them in the first place? IT’S HARD.

So in the case of Gilmore Girls, Rory at Yale is the shift that moves the show into a new paradigm, and it’s a big one. She’s separated from Stars Hollow and slowly beginning her emancipation from Lorelai, which is, on principle, painful for the audience because it’s directly against the show’s premise. (It’s no coincidence that the Palladinos starts seriously building the Luke-and-Lorelai-of-it-all once Rory’s away at college. Give that empty-nester some new story!)

Of course, Lane is right behind Lorelai in the list of People in Stars Hollow that Rory is Leaving Behind. How is Lane supposed to stay a part of Rory’s story when Rory is in a new context, and Lane is not? But, truth be told, Lane was ALREADY in this role. In seasons 1-3, LANE, not Lorelai, was #1 on the list of People in Stars Hollow that Rory is Leaving Behind. Ultimately Gilmore Girls is a story of two worlds, and Rory going to Chilton begins her passage across the into the New (Old, with Baggage) World. Lane is already being left behind, to some degree, and in seasons 1-3, there’s still room in the show’s universe to address those issues and give Lane some good storylines of her own, especially in conjunction with Rory.

So it’s possible that the issue is not necessarily one of screentime or setting. Whenever I hear the rebel cry of JUSTICE FOR LANE KIM resound in my heart chambers, I mostly think of the kinds of storylines that befell her in the later seasons, not simply in their detachment from Rory. Heeding her mom’s insistence that she attend Seventh Day Adventist college. Fracturing her relationship with her mom in order to pursue her dreams. Getting kicked out of her home. Living with her two boy bandmates who are very stupid and very messy. Never really getting the band off the ground. Her first sexual experience being terrible. Her first sexual experience being terrible AND yielding a pregnancy with TWINS. Why do the Palladinos hate Lane Kim!!! The only thing I wholeheartedly love about Lane’s later storylines is Luke hiring her to work at the diner and then being completely overwhelmed by her sheer competence.

It’s probably important to note that the mere construction of Lane Kim’s character is a bit tragic. The Palladinos are VERY good at building conflict and tension into what seems like simple character descriptions. Here’s this girl that loves rock music to an obsessive, encyclopedic level, wants to play drums in a band, and she’s from a strict religious household where she can’t express any of that. The description itself inherently means that things are going to blow up for Lane at some point. That’s okay, to some degree - that’s conflict, that’s drama, that’s good story.

So if we look at Lane’s arc pre-blow-up, and post-blow-up, the satisfying thing would be for Lane to experience some kind of happiness or success living unstifled in her dreams, to offset the trauma that her family relationships are ruined (at least for the time being). But the Palladinos don’t even do that! It’s encapsulated in the incident that tears apart Lane’s relationship with her mom: she goes to play at CBGB, her mom finds out and kicks her out, and the band doesn’t even get to go on!! The Palladinos love PAIN.

And okay, fine, there’s still some defense that that is well-designed drama and story. (And Lane and her mom do reconcile eventually, and it was at least very affecting, from my memory.) I guess you could argue that Lane IS happy with how things turned out after the lifelong lie she’s lived completely unravels and she’s able to just exist, unguarded. But also... the Palladinos wrote her that way??? And regardless, for me, the issues arise more down the line with Lane essentially staying in Stars Hollow. Wouldn’t unshackling herself from the yoke of her mother mean that she’s free to pursue her dreams? And wouldn’t pursuing her dreams necessitate her to ALSO leave Stars Hollow, like Rory herself? Would she not try to scrape together money to move with the band to New York City and hit the big time? (Bear in mind, I have no idea how the music industry works.)

Ultimately, Lane’s story in the later seasons puts the writers in a Catch-22. If she leaves Stars Hollow and goes somewhere else to pursue her dreams, she’s almost certainly written off the show. She’s a supporting character, and they can’t open up a new world beyond Stars Hollow and New Haven, just for her. On the other hand, if she stays in Stars Hollow, in keeping with the geographies of the universe, she stays on the show, and just... gets really disappointing storylines. I’d be inclined to keep giving Keiko Agena a paycheck. 

(Now, the fact that WB threw money at a backdoor pilot for Jess Mariano to go to California and open up a new world for a weakly-premised spin-off, and did no such thing for Lane Kim, is some bullshit. Literally “moving to the big city to live a dream” is SUCH a well-worn trope that all the storylines are essentially handed to them, and it’s almost inherently refreshed because Lane is a Korean-American woman and not a brooding white guy or a quirky white lady. You FOOLS, you could’ve made that show with your EYES CLOSED.)

Anyways.

I’m going to meander my way further off the main point for a moment to kick up some dust on JUSTICE FOR RORY GILMORE as well. When you write ten paragraphs lamenting Lane Kim’s eternal relegation to supporting role, it’s hard not to be cranky about affording world-opening and story-building for a main character instead. (Spin-off Jess very much deserves the crank, though.) But, frankly, the unyielding walls that the Palladinos built to construct their very effective Two-World Universe don’t do a lot of favors for Rory Gilmore either, in the end.

Basically, this construct of Stars Hollow ensemble and New Haven future means that Rory is the only one who will “get out” of Stars Hollow, because she is structurally decreed to do so. It’s the massive conflict that the Palladinos smartly built into their little generational premise: Lorelai fled her parents’ world, and Rory will slowly be lured back into it. Pain ensues. This is good drama. This is good story. This is story that will last seven seasons and six-hour revival.

But it also inadvertently makes Rory the Chosen One, in a story that doesn’t need one. This is not Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I’d like to believe that even Paris and Rory wouldn’t want it to be, much as they love the Power of Myth. Lorelai divests her entire life into Rory’s success; the town of Stars Hollow wants Rory to spirit out of their small town and Be Great; Rory’s grandparents expect her to follow in Richard’s footsteps and also carry out their orphaned dreams for Lorelai. And then the Palladinos choose little things that further this: Lane doesn’t ever leave Stars Hollow; Paris doesn’t get into Harvard but Rory does; Luke interrogates any boy that comes near Rory because no one is good enough. (I confess, I’m charmed into forgiving the last one.)

It’s much too much to put onto one character and leave unaddressed!!! It’s also why some audience members just really hate Rory, in a really unfortunate knife-twist on an otherwise-winsome main character. They hate the unwillingness of the narrative to acknowledge this very obvious dark and specific underside to Rory’s specialness, and the unwillingness of people within the narrative to name this very obvious dark and specific underside about Rory. But to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit: she’s just DRAWN THAT WAY!

Rory’s storylines never really confront the idea that she has had FAR too many unrealistic expectations put on her by literally everyone that’s ever existed in her life, and what it might mean if she doesn’t live up to them. What does it mean if she’s not Christiane Amanpour? What does it mean if she’s scared of disappointing people? What does it mean if she’s trying to live up to other people’s standards rather than examining what she really wants?

The Palladinos completely ignore this, and simultaneously give Rory multiple meltdowns (cheating with Dean, being cowed by Mitchum Huntzberger, stealing a boat, quitting Yale, an aimless/struggling career) and they never QUITE dig into the complete dark and specific issue at the core of Rory��s character construction... which just exacerbates the Rory hate. Rory has no self-awareness; the writers give her no self-awareness; we go in circles, and every few years there’s a slew of thinkpieces about how selfish and awful Rory is.

What makes it worse is that those questions outlined above are essentially applicable for two other women on the show: Lane Kim, and Lorelai Gilmore II, herself. Lane, like Rory, doesn’t quite bust through and answer them wholly. Lorelai, however, comes into the show having already answered them, years before, when she was a headstrong and tenacious teenager. The idea that neither Rory, her actual daughter, nor Lane, her spiritual inheritor of Parental Disapproval, are ever able to grapple with those concepts in a real way, and blossom into self-defined adulthood the way that Lorelai did is maybe the bottom line on where Gilmore Girls went “wrong.” Lorelai’s legacy is not that she’s hyperverbal, loves junk food, and got pregnant young. It’s that she rejected the expectations of her forebearers and carved out a place in the world for herself by her own definition, for better or for worse. It’s why Lorelai comes out of the narrative like a Super Mom, when in fact she’s still just as deeply flawed as Emily or Rory, and why Stars Hollow is overall magical and cherished despite it serving as a small-town hometown for Rory to leave behind. And it’s why A Year in the Life was SO satisfying for Emily Gilmore, because she proved it’s never too late to answer those questions and break through to the other side. Perhaps we’ll get enough revivals to see the same happen for Rory, and for Lane.

But enough dust about Rory. I think, after all this nitpicking, there were two options for the best way to have handled Lane Kim after Rory went off to college:

1. Give her a backdoor pilot and spinoff to Band Dreams NYC. Which, of course, was not in the Palladinos’ control, so, y’know, fine.

2. Keep Lane in Stars Hollow and give her a chance to answer those questions about self-definition and live out a few years of Lorelai-like hard-but-happy independence (and better sex) before saddling her with Zach and two babies (if you MUST). Bonus points if she moves in with Lorelai and they bond over being fundamentally disappointing to your parents and also missing Rory. A very good obvious choice.

Secret option 3. Just let Lane move to New Haven and live with Rory and Paris off-campus, and give me the goddamn roommate comedy of my dreams. Honestly this is what they should’ve done. Forget everything I said. This is my answer.

Tiny footnote: I cannot BELIEVE, that after twenty years, I am just now realizing how on-the-nose it is that Lorelai escaped from the clutches of New Haven and started a new life for herself at a place called INDEPENDENCE INN. Truly, it was right there in front of me and I didn’t even notice. This oversight might weaken the integrity of the thousand-paragraph essay I rattled off above...

[clownhara]

I've been following you for a while but I dont know all that much about your OCs so how about a big resume of them all?? :DDD

I haven't really posted much about them on this account until recently so that doesn't really suprise me 😅 but yeah I absolutely can! Warning though this is going to be unbelievably long

I guess I should start off with Zensuke because he is THE gay purple cat. I named this blog after this guy. I made him when I was probably like 12-13 or around there so he had all the things you'd expect a repressed edgy kid's of to have. He was basically a demon who managed to get out of thier world's equivalent of hell and instead of doing anything evil he just made cake and got married to the guard who was supposed to kill him. I don't really do much with him anymore but I still love him very much.

Corbinian is probably the character I talk most about and he's the one I edit to fit into different worlds the most. He was a normal doctor but he got his memory wiped by robots and ended up working as an executioner for the robotic mafia, but eventually got caught and had to hide out in Lobotomy (he was originally a Lobotomy Corp oc) where he discovered he can extract abnormality dna and with some altering the dna can be injected into humans causing a variety of different mutations and effects. He's usually very heartless and manipulative, but does have a soft spot, usually for anxious, soft spoken people, who subconsciously remind him of his brother (who is a friends if so I can't really get into him). He also was given a variety of nicknames by the higher ups, like Corb, Corn chip, Corb on the Orb, or just Corn. Je

Corble is the result of Corb trying out human cloning. He has the same general appearance as Corbinian, but with purple hair (hence the name, because he's porble corb) that's styled differently. Since the experiment was technically a failure Corb was going to kill him, but Corble was really sweet and innocent and Corb basically went "well great guess I adopted my clone then". Corb stopped messing with cloning but adores Corble.

Might as well get all of my Lobotomy ocs out of the way. Oliver is the first Lobotomy oc I ever made, which is funny because I may or may not constantly forget that he exists. Oliver is basically a five year old kid in an adults body, and I mean that literally, because his parents basically locked him in a room and ignored him so his mental age is basically that of a kids. He's very mischievous and loves pulling pranks on people, most of which are harmless. Unless it's Corb, whom Oliver gates with a passion. Then it's thinly veiled murder attempts disgusted as pranks. He loves Fairy tales, and only works with fairy tale abnormalities because he panics with any other kind. Only one person in the entire facility can even put up with him, and that's Mabel.

Mabel is trans lesbian who can find the good in almost anyone. She's optimistic, bubbly, and has a great sense of humor. She tends to get really flustered around women though. Is it obvious I kinda projected onto her a bit? Because I did. If she wasn't in Lobotomy she'd definitely be a streamer. I'm just now realizing I basically made snapcube before I knew who that was. Whoops.

Up next is Adam! Adam is quiet, nervous, and honestly just prefers to not be noticed. Their ability to almost seamlessly blend into thier surroundings is astounding. Most people (me included) tend to just forget they exist. Which honestly is funny because they end up dating the loudest, most cocky person in the entire facility. Adam loves horror movies and spicy food.

Kieth is the loudest, most cocky person in the entire facility. He's the adopted son of a sephirah and the leader of the Rabbit team so that much is unavoidable. He's quick to anger, blunt, and tends to underestimate other people. However, he's also loyal to a fault, and willing to back his friends up no matter what. He feels like his mom's are expecting him to live up to expectations that he can't (and that they don't have but he doesn't realize that), so he's constantly throwing himself in harm's way to desperately try to prove to them that they made a good investment by adopting him or die trying. His two passions in life are collecting weapons and tending to rabbits, two of which he managed to train to sit on his shoulders and attack people. Despite being total opposites he loves Adam very much and will endure any horror movie with them, even if he's a huge scaredy cat.

Damien doesn't gave that much development, unfortunately. He came from a very religious household, moved out, and frequently gets possessed by an abnormality who makes him act like a cryptid. Totally normal stuff. He also went to law school.

Zephyr is a very, very serious individual. They've got a completely monotone color palette, speak either in short, blunt sentences or long, fanciful paragraphs with no in between, and tend to come off as cold and stiff. They're completely devoted to work, which is how they managed to become a captain. Despite this, they're very kind and caring, but unfortunately rarely get to show that side of themselves unless it's with Jamison, thier partner, both in crime and in the romantic sense. They also have a love/hate relationship with Owen, basically openly hating his guts but also enjoys thier banter and would hate if anything genuinely awful happened to them or his family.

Jamison is the complete opposite of Zephyr. He's an open book, very colorful, and tends to slack of when Zephyr isn't looking. Not on purpose, he just tends to get distracted most of the time. He's quite popular because he's very cheerful, which is rare in the higher ranks of Lobotomy. He'd absolutely die for Zephyr, and us usually the one who patches thier wounds. He really doesn't like Owen and thinks thier a pain in the ass, but keeps that to himself most of the time.

Owen is..... Interesting. I kinda went buck wild with him not gonna lie. He's one of the oldest son's of the God of Nightmares and Fire, an absolute agent of choas, and a campy fashion nightmare. But... I love them. They're both unbelievably obnoxious and also very caring. He's the kind of character you'd love but also hate at the same time. He also ended up becoming the God of Death in one timeline. If he wasn't God they'd probably run makeup guru/cursed amsr YouTube channel. Honestly he'd still run those as a God though. Also gender is a toy store and Owen is a kid who broke in after dark and is running along pushing all of the assorted genders into a cart while laughing maniacally (they use any pronouns but I stuck to just he/him they/them for this little snippet)

Alright, Lobotomy ocs done. Up next is.... Ugh... Octavious. He's originally a Danganronpa oc, the shsl gossip, and he was made to be a villian and by God does it show. He's the most fake, back stabbing, two faced character I've ever made. He's also the most one dimensional, which was actually intensional. He has no personality beyond being a petty, lying bitch, so when he runs out of lies and rumors to spread he goes into an existential crisis about how he has virtually no identity until he makes some new lie up about some random person. He's also abusive towards his younger sibling Aspyn, whom he has both physically and emotionally scarred. And, the icing on the "fuck this guy" cake, he's incredibly obsessive over his "wife" Melissa, who wants nothing to do with him and never even dated him, let alone married him. Basically he's a horrible, lying, abusive stalker. He also dresses exclusively in eye burn pink since the most poisonous bugs are usually brightly colored. Fuck Octavious, all my homies hate Octavious.

Next is Melissa, who honestly wasn't much better before her arc. She was raised to believe that in order to truely succeed in life, you have to ensure others fail. She, unfortunately, took that advice to heart. Get arc consisted of learning that we all can succeed together and that actively fucking other people over just made her an awful person, so she changed her behavior and tried to help people from then on out. She's incredibly meticulous, organized, and really smart. She still has issues trusting, but she's getting better. She has a crush on Octavious's younger sibling, but absolutely despises Octavious.

Aspyn is a quiet, caring individual who has no confidence both due to Octavious and just how they were raised. They are an incredibly skilled doctor, however, managing to perform amazingly in several different fields. They are, however, very defensive about thier passions, quick to insult anyone who questions them, mainly due to Octavious. They have a huge crush Melissa, but is to afraid to ask her out. Also they wear an eye patch because Octavious messed up one of thier eyes.

Hooo boy where to start with Edward. He's really inconsistent between universes, but the main constants are his power (he can trade bodies with people), him and Max getting together, him being a huge bookworm, and somehow he usually ends up being my self inserts dad???? Hos other aspects tend to change. Sometimes he's a power hungry megalomaniac who's trying to take over the world and will crush anyone and everyone who gets in his way or isn't useful to him, using his power evily to stay young forever by trading bodies with his kids and killing them when they're in his body. Other times, he's a fairly calm, if not a little cold, man whos biggest crime is the occasional tax evasion, who's power is more of a curse, causing him to stay alive forever through a series of unfortunate coincidences. Either way he's fun to write

Max is one of my favorite characters. He loves baking, his friends and family, he isn't too bright but no one holds that against him. Unfortunately, no matter which side of Edward it is, he's hopelessly in love with him, which can lead to his downfall. He's very protective of his cousin Heron, and tries to protect the innocent, which he usually doesn't end up doing thanks to evil Edwards manipulation. I also somehow failed to mention he's a plant man and flowers sprout wherever he walks and he can control plants but I couldn't find a good way to fit that in naturally.

Heron is half a plant man, in the worst possible way. He has rose vines instead of blood, which feels exactly how you think it would. Magic keeps his alive luckily, but it's unbelievably painful. Most of him and Max's family died when they were young, and unlike Mac who ended up on the streets, Heron ended up in an orphanage, where he learned at a young age that he shouldn't get close to anyone because if he does, they'd die. He genuinely believes that, and the only person he thinks is immune, is his cousin Max, who he even still expects to drop dead. Heron mainly fights by breaking his skin so his vines will grow rapidly and trap and kill his attacker, which looking back is uh. Kinda symbolic. I didn't do that on purpose but it fits

Eden is an angel, who was outcasted from heaven after being framed for a crime they didn't commit. They don't understand how humans work, but is trying thier best to fit in. He's one of the few beings Heron trusts, and even still Heron doesn't trust them much because of Eden's ability, being able to control holy flames. Eden is stoic and aloof, with an odd sense of humor. He insists that him baking using his holy flames is a form of training. Despite them claiming to be above human emotions, they very much are not above them and he is actually quite emotional.

Avocado is one of Herons old friends, who fell victim to Herons "luck" (aka they died). They are a drider (basically spider centaur) who came from a large family of drider thieves. They are very quiet and kind, which they use to thier advantage, since one would thing they'd steal small objects from people's houses or pickpocket them, which Avocado very much does. While they're fairly weak in combat thier thieving skills are not to be underestimated.

Grape is Avocados older sibling, and they are very serious and quite rude. Grape wants to kill Heron to avenge thier sibling, but ends up getting caught robbing the wrong person and ends up having to join the person's kids adventuring party.

Apple is the oldest drider sibling, and ends up taking a motherly role for all of the younger kids. They had to grow up incredibly fast, and has to make all of the hard decisions in place of thier dying father. Desperately needs a break.

There's more spider siblings but there isn't much info on them

Both Sherry and Theodore Poser are mainly just there because I have them really fun designs and don't really have a personality. Sherry's kinda hard to draw though

[artycloudpop]

1hey are u bored at home, wanna chill and netflix....... but just can’t find some thing nice to watch? here’s a list of movies for u watch

A Ghost Story (2017)

Director David Lowery (Pete's Dragon) conceived this dazzling, dreamy meditation on the afterlife during the off-hours on a Disney blockbuster, making the revelations within even more awe-inspiring. After a fatal accident, a musician (Casey Affleck) finds himself as a sheet-draped spirit, wandering the halls of his former home, haunting/longing for his widowed wife (Rooney Mara). With stylistic quirks, enough winks to resist pretension (a scene where Mara devours a pie in one five-minute, uncut take is both tragic and cheeky), and a soundscape culled from the space-time continuum, A Ghost Story connects the dots between romantic love, the places we call home, and time -- a ghost's worst enemy.

Airplane! (1980)

This is one of the funniest movie of all time. Devised by the jokesters behind The Naked Gun, this disaster movie spoof stuffs every second of runtime with a physical gag (The nun slapping a hysterical woman!), dimwitted wordplay ("Don't call me, Shirley"), an uncomfortable moment of odd behavior ("Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), or some other asinine bit. The rare comedy that demands repeat viewings, just to catch every micro-sized joke and memorize every line.

A24

American Honey (2016)

Writer/director Andrea Arnold lets you sit shotgun for the travels of a group of wayward youth in American Honey, a seductive drama about a "mag crew" selling subscriptions and falling in and out of love with each other on the road. Seen through the eyes of Star, played by Sasha Lane, life on the Midwest highway proves to be directionless, filled with a stream of partying and steamy hookups in the backs of cars and on the side of the road, especially when she starts to develop feelings for Shia LaBeouf’s rebellious Jake. It’s an honest look at a group of disenfranchised young people who are often cast aside, and it’s blazing with energy. You’ll buy what they're selling.

Anna Karenina (2012)

Adapted by renowned playwright Tom Stoppard, this take on Leo Tolstoy's classic Russian novel is anything but stuffy, historical drama. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander are all overflowing with passion and desire, heating up the chilly backdrop of St. Petersburg. But it's director Joe Wright's unique staging -- full of dance, lush costuming, fourth-wall-breaking antics, and other theatrical touches -- that reinvent the story for more daring audiences.

NETFLIX

Apostle (2018)

For his follow-up to his two action epics, The Raid and The Raid 2, director Gareth Evans dials back the hand-to-hand combat but still keeps a few buckets of blood handy in this grisly supernatural horror tale. Dan Stevens stars as Thomas Richardson, an early 20th century opium addict traveling to a cloudy island controlled by a secretive cult that's fallen on hard times. The religious group is led by a bearded scold named Father Malcolm (Michael Sheen) who may or may not be leading his people astray. Beyond a few bursts of kinetic violence and some crank-filled torture sequences, Evans plays this story relatively down-the-middle, allowing the performances, the lofty themes, and the windswept vistas to do the talking. It's a cult movie that earns your devotion slowly, then all at once.

Back to the Future (1985)

Buckle into Doc's DeLorean and head to the 1950s by way of 1985 with the seminal time-travel series that made Michael J. Fox a household name. It's always a joy watching Marty McFly's race against the clock way-back-when to ensure history runs its course and he can get back to the present. Netflix also has follow-up Parts II and III, which all add up to a perfect rainy afternoon marathon.

NETFLIX

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

The Coen brothers gave some big-name-director cred to Netflix by releasing their six-part Western anthology on the streaming service, and while it's not necessarily their best work, Buster Scruggs is clearly a cut above most Netflix originals. Featuring star turns from Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, and more, the film takes advantage of Netflix's willingness to experiment by composing a sort of death fugue that unfolds across the harsh realities of life in Manifest Destiny America. Not only does it revel in the massive, sweeping landscapes of the American West, but it's a thoughtful meditation on death that will reveal layer after layer long after you finish.

Barbershop (2002)

If you've been sleeping on the merits of the Barbershop movies, the good news is it's never too late to get caught up. Revisit the 2002 installment that started Ice Cube's smack-talking franchise so you can bask in Cedric the Entertainer's hilarious wisdom, enjoy Eve's acting debut, and admire this joyful ode to community.

NETFLIX

Barry (2016)

In 1981, Barack Obama touched down in New York City to begin work at Columbia University. As Barry imagines, just days after settling into his civics class, a white classmate confronts the Barry with an argument one will find in the future president's Twitter @-mentions: "Why does everything always got to be about slavery?" Exaltation is cinematic danger, especially when bringing the life of a then-sitting president to screen. Barry avoids hagiography by staying in the moment, weighing race issues of a modern age and quieting down for the audience to draw its own conclusions. Devon Terrell is key, steadying his character as smooth-operating, socially active, contemplative fellow stuck in an interracial divide. Barry could be any half-black, half-white kid from the '80s. But in this case, he's haunted by past, present, and future.

Being John Malkovich (1999)

You can't doubt the audacity of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Anomalisa), whose first produced screenplay hinged on attracting the title actor to a script that has office drones discovering a portal into his mind. John Cusack, Catherine Keener, and Cameron Diaz combine to create an atmosphere of desperate, egomaniacal darkness, and by the end you'll feel confused and maybe a little slimy about the times you've participated in celebrity gawking.

A24

The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017)

Two young women are left behind at school during break... and all sorts of hell breaks loose. This cool, stylish thriller goes off in some strange directions (and even offers a seemingly unrelated subplot about a mysterious hitchhiker) but it all pays off in the end, thanks in large part to the three leads -- Emma Roberts, Lucy Boynton, and Kiernan Shipka -- and director Oz Perkins' artful approach to what could have been just another occult-based gore-fest.

Bloodsport (1988)

Jean-Claude Van Damme made a career out of good-not-great fluff. Universal Soldier is serviceable spectacle, Hard Target is a living cartoon, Lionheart is his half-baked take on On the Waterfront. Bloodsport, which owes everything to the legacy of Bruce Lee, edges out his Die Hard riff Sudden Death for his best effort, thanks to muscles-on-top-of-muscles-on-top-of-muscles fighting and Stan Bush's "Fight to Survive." Magic Mike has nothing on Van Damme's chiseled backside in Bloodsport, which flexes its way through a slow-motion karate-chop gauntlet. In his final face-off, Van Damme, blinded by arena dust, rage-screams his way to victory. The amount of adrenaline bursting out of Bloodsport demands a splash zone.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Before he went punk with 2016's siege thriller Green Room, director Jeremy Saulnier delivered this low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir. When Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) discovers that the man who killed his parents is being released from prison, he returns home to Virginia to claims his revenge and things quickly spin out of control. Like the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, this wise-ass morality tale will make you squirm.

WELL GO USA ENTERTAINMEN

Burning (2018)

Some mysteries simmer; this one smolders. In his adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, writer and director Lee Chang-dong includes many elements of the acclaimed author's slyly mischievous style -- cats, jazz, cooking, and an alienated male writer protagonist all pop up -- but he also invests the material with his own dark humor, stray references to contemporary news, and an unyielding sense of curiosity. We follow aimless aspiring novelist Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) as he reconnects with Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), a young woman he grew up with, but the movie never lets you get too comfortable in one scene or setting. When Steven Yeun's Ben, a handsome rich guy with a beautiful apartment and a passion for burning down greenhouses, appears, the film shifts to an even more tremulous register. Can Ben be trusted? Yeun's performance is perfectly calibrated to entice and confuse, like he's a suave, pyromaniac version of Tyler Durden. Each frame keeps you guessing.

Cam (2018)

Unlike the Unfriended films or this summer's indie hit Searching, this web thriller from director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei isn't locked into the visual confines of a computer screen. Though there's plenty of online screen time, allowing for subtle bits of commentary and satire, the looser style allows the filmmakers to really explore the life and work conditions of their protagonist, rising cam girl Alice (Madeline Brewer). We meet her friends, her family, and her customers. That type of immersion in the granular details makes the scarier bits -- like an unnerving confrontation in the finale between Alice and her evil doppelganger -- pop even more.

THE ORCHARD

Creep (2014)

Patrick Brice's found-footage movie is a no-budget answer to a certain brand of horror, but saying more would give away its sinister turns. Just know that the man behind the camera answered a Craigslist ad to create a "day in the life" video diary for Josef (Mark Duplass), who really loves life. Creep proves that found footage, the indie world's no-budget genre solution, still has life, as long as you have a performer like Duplass willing to go all the way.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Armando Iannucci, the brilliant Veep creator, set his sights on Russia with this savage political satire. Based on a graphic novel, the film dramatizes the madcap, maniacal plots of the men jostling for power after their leader, Joseph Stalin, keels over. From there, backstabbing, furious insults, and general chaos unfolds. Anchored by performances from Shakespearean great Simon Russell Beale and American icon Steve Buscemi, it's a pleasure to see what the rest of the cast -- from Star Trek: Discovery's Jason Isaacs to Homeland's Rupert Friend -- do with Iannucci's eloquently brittle text.

Den of Thieves (2018)

If there's one thing you've probably heard about this often ridiculous bank robbery epic, it's that it steals shamelessly from Michael Mann's crime saga Heat. The broad plot elements are similar: There's a team of highly-efficient criminals led by a former Marine (Pablo Schreiber) and they must contend with a obsessive, possibly unhinged cop (Gerard Butler) over the movie's lengthy 140 minute runtime.  A screenwriter helming a feature for the first time, director Christian Gudegast is not in the same league as Mann as a filmmaker and Butler, sporting unflattering tattoos and a barrel-like gut, is hardly Al Pacino. But everyone is really going for it here, attempting to squeeze every ounce of Muscle Milk from the bottle.

NETFLIX

Divines (2016)

Thrillers don't come much more propulsive or elegant than Houda Benyamina's Divines, a heartwarming French drama about female friendship that spirals into a pulse-pounding crime saga. Rambunctious teenager Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and her best friend Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) begin the film as low-level shoplifters and thieves, but once they fall into the orbit of a slightly older, seasoned drug dealer named Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), they're on a Goodfellas-like trajectory. Benyamina offsets the violent, gritty genre elements with lyrical passages where Dounia watches her ballet-dancer crush rehearse his routines from afar, and kinetic scenes of the young girls goofing off on social media. It's a cautionary tale told with joy, empathy, and an eye for beauty.

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Eddie Murphy has been waiting years to get this movie about comedian and blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore made, and you can feel his joy in finally getting to play this role every second he's on screen. The film, directed by Hustle & Flow's Craig Brewer, charts how Moore rose from record store employee, to successful underground comedian, to making his now-cult classic feature Dolemite by sheer force of passion. It's thrilling (and hilarious) to watch Murphy adopt Moore's Dolemite persona, a swaggering pimp, but it's just as satisfying to see the former SNL star capture his character at his lowest points. He's surrounded by an ensemble that matches his infectious energy.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

As romanticized as adolescence can be, it’s hard being young. Following the high school experience of troubled, overdramatic Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), The Edge of Seventeen portrays the woes of adolescence with a tender, yet appropriately cheeky tone. As if junior year isn’t hellish enough, the universe essentially bursts into flames when Nadine finds out her best friend is dating her brother; their friendship begins to dissolve, and she finds the only return on young love is embarrassment and pain. That may all sound like a miserable premise for a young-adult movie, except it’s all painfully accurate, making it endearingly hilarious -- and there’s so much to love about Steinfeld’s self-aware performance.

FOCUS FEATURES

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Romance and love are nothing without the potential for loss and pain, but most of us would probably still consider cutting away all the worst memories of the latter. Given the option to eradicate memories of their busted relationship, Jim Carrey's Joel and Kate Winslet's Clementine go through with the procedure, only to find themselves unable to totally let go. Science fiction naturally lends itself to clockwork mechanisms, but director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman never lose the human touch as they toy with the kaleidoscope of their characters' hearts and minds.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Before Bruce Campbell's Ash was wielding his chainsaw-arm in Army of Darkness and on Starz's Ash Vs. Evil Dead, he was just a good looking guy hoping to spend a nice, quiet vacation in a cabin with some friends. Unfortunately, the book of the dead had other plans for him. With this low-budget horror classic, director Sam Raimi brings a surprising degree of technical ingenuity to bear on the splatter-film, sending his camera zooming around the woods with wonder and glee. While the sequels double-downed on laughs, the original Evil Dead still knows how to scare.

The Firm (1993)

The '90s were a golden era of sleek, movie-star-packed legal thrillers, and they don't get much better than director Sydney Pollack's The Firm. This John Grisham adaptation has a little bit of everything -- tax paperwork, sneering mobsters, and Garey Busey, for starters -- but there's one reason to watch this movie: the weirdness of Tom Cruise. He does a backflip in this movie. What else do you need to know?

A24

The Florida Project (2017)

Sean Baker's The Florida Project nuzzles into the swirling, sunny, strapped-for-cash populace of a mauve motel just within orbit of Walt Disney World. His eyes are Moonee, a 6-year-old who adventures through abandoned condos, along strip mall-encrusted highway, and across verdant fields of overgrown brush like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. But as gorgeous as the everything appears -- and The Florida Project looks stunning -- the world around here is falling apart, beginning with her mother, an ex-stripper turning to prostitution. The juxtaposition, and down-to-earth style, reconsiders modern America in the most electrifying way imaginable.

Frances Ha (2012)

Before winning hearts and Oscar nominations with her coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig starred in the perfect companion film, about an aimless 27-year-old who hops from New York City to her hometown of Sacramento to Paris to Poughkeepsie and eventually back to New York in hopes of stumbling into the perfect job, the perfect relationship, and the perfect life. Directed by Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories), and co-written by both, Frances Ha is a measured look at adult-ish life captured the kind of intoxicating black and white world we dream of living in.

NETFLIX

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)

Everyone's favorite disaster of a festival received not one, but two streaming documentaries in the same week. Netflix's version has rightly faced some criticism over its willingness to let marketing company Fuck Jerry off the hook (Jerry Media produced the doc), but that doesn't take away from the overall picture it portrays of the festival's haphazard planning and the addiction to grift from which Fyre's founder, Billy McFarland, apparently suffers. It's schadenfreude at its best.

Gerald's Game (2017)

Like his previous low-budget Netflix-released horror release, Hush, a captivity thriller about a deaf woman fighting off a masked intruder, Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation of Gerald's Game wrings big scares from a small location. Sticking close to the grisly plot details of King's seemingly "unfilmable" novel, the movie chronicles the painstaking struggles of Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino) after she finds herself handcuffed to a bed in an isolated vacation home when her husband, the titular Gerald, dies from a heart attack while enacting his kinky sexual fantasies. She's trapped -- and that's it. The premise is clearly challenging to sustain for a whole movie, but Flanagan and Gugino turn the potentially one-note set-up into a forceful, thoughtful meditation on trauma, memory, and resilience in the face of near-certain doom.

A24

Good Time (2017)

In this greasy, cruel thriller from Uncut Gems directors the Safdie brothers, Robert Pattinson stars as Connie, a bank robber who races through Queens to find enough money to bail out his mentally disabled brother, who's locked up for their last botched job. Each suffocating second of Good Time, blistered by the neon backgrounds of Queens, New York and propelled by warped heartbeat of Oneothrix Point Never's synth score, finds Connie evading authorities by tripping into an even stickier situation.

Green Room (2015)

Green Room is a throaty, thrashing, spit-slinging punk tune belted through an invasion-movie microphone at max volume. It's nasty -- and near-perfect. As a band of 20-something rockstars recklessly defend against a neo-Nazi battalion equipped with machetes, shotguns, and snarling guard dogs, the movie blossoms into a savage coming-of-age tale, an Almost Famous for John Carpenter nuts. Anyone looking for similar mayhem should check out director Jeremy Saulnier's previous movie, the low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir, Blue Ruin, also streaming on Netflix.

The Guest (2014)

After writer-director Adam Wingard notched a semi-sleeper horror hit with 2011's You're Next, he'd earned a certain degree of goodwill among genre faithful and, apparently, with studio brass. How else to explain distribution for his atypical thriller The Guest through Time Warner subsidiary Picturehouse? Headlined by soon-to-be megastar Dan Stevens and kindred flick It Follows' lead scream queen Maika Monroe, The Guest introduces itself as a subtextual impostor drama, abruptly spins through a blender of '80s teen tropes, and ultimately reveals its true identity as an expertly self-conscious straight-to-video shoot 'em up, before finally circling back on itself with a well-earned wink. To say anymore about the hell that Stevens' "David" unleashes on a small New Mexico town would not only spoil the fun, but possibly get you killed.

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The Hateful Eight (2015)

Quentin Tarantino has something to say about race, violence, and American life, and it's going to ruffle feathers. Like Django Unchained, the writer-director reflects modern times on the Old West, but with more scalpel-sliced dialogue, profane poetry, and gore. Stewed from bits of Agatha Christie, David Mamet, and Sam Peckinpah, The Hateful Eight traps a cast of blowhards (including Samuel L. Jackson as a Civil War veteran, Kurt Russell as a bounty hunter known as "The Hangman," and Jennifer Jason Leigh as a psychopathic gang member) in a blizzard-enveloped supply station. Tarantino ups the tension by shooting his suffocating space in "glorious 70mm." Treachery and moral compromise never looked so good.

High Flying Bird (2019)

High Flying Bird is a basketball film that has little to do with the sport itself, instead focusing on the behind-the-scenes power dynamics that play out during an NBA lockout. At the center of the Steven Soderbergh movie -- shot on an iPhone, because that's what he does now -- is André Holland's Ray Burke, a sports agent trying to protect his client's interests while also disrupting a corrupt system. It's not an easy tightrope to walk, and, as you might expect, the conditions of the labor stoppage constantly change the playing field. With his iPhone mirroring the NBA's social media-heavy culture, and appearances from actual NBA stars lending the narrative heft, Soderbergh experiments with Netflix's carte blanche and produces a unique film that adds to the streaming service's growing list of original critical hits.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsese hit pause on mob violence and Rolling Stones singles to deliver one of the greatest kid-centric films in eons. Following Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as he traces his own origin story through cryptic automaton clues and early 20th-century movie history, the grand vision wowed in 3-D and still packs a punch at home.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

A meditative horror flick that's more unsettling than outright frightening, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House follows the demise of Lily, a live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) who's caring for an ailing horror author. As Lily discovers the truth about the writer's fiction and home, the lines between the physical realm and the afterlife blur. The movie's slow pacing and muted escalation might frustrate viewers craving showy jump-scares, but writer-director Oz Perkins is worth keeping tabs on. He brings a beautiful eeriness to every scene, and his story will captivate patient streamers. Fans should be sure to check out his directorial debut, The Blackcoat's Daughter.

NETFLIX

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

In this maniacal mystery, Ruth (Melanie Lynskey), a nurse, and her rattail-sporting, weapon-obsessed neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood) hunt down a local burglar. Part Cormac McCarthy thriller, part wacky, Will Ferrell-esque comedy, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a cathartic neo-noir about everyday troubles. Director Macon Blair's not the first person to find existential enlightenment at the end of an amateur detective tale, but he might be the first to piece one together from cussing octogenarians, ninja stars, Google montages, gallons of Big Red soda, upper-deckers, friendly raccoons, exploding body parts, and the idiocy of humanity.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

With a bullwhip, a leather jacket, and an "only Harrison Ford can pull this off" fedora, director Steven Spielberg invented the modern Hollywood action film by doing what he does best: looking backward. As obsessed as his movie-brat pal and collaborator George Lucas with the action movie serials of their youth, the director mined James Bond, Humphrey Bogart, Westerns, and his hatred of Nazis to create an adventure classic. To watch Raiders of the Lost Ark now is to marvel at the ingenuity of specific sequences (the boulder! The truck scene! The face-melting!) and simply groove to the self-deprecating comic tone (snakes! Karen Allen! That swordsman Indy shoots!). The past has never felt so alive.

Inside Man (2006)

Denzel Washington is at his wily, sharp, and sharply dressed best as he teams up once again with Spike Lee for this wildly entertaining heist thriller. He's an NYPD hostage negotiator who discovers a whole bunch of drama when a crew of robbers (led by Clive Owen) takes a bank hostage during a 24-hour period. Jodie Foster also appears as an interested party with uncertain motivations. You'll have to figure out what's going on several times over before the truth outs.

DRAFTHOUSE FILMS

The Invitation (2015)

This slow-burn horror-thriller preys on your social anxiety. The film's first half-hour, which finds Quarry's Logan Marshall-Green arriving at his ex-wife's house to meet her new husband, plays like a Sundance dramedy about 30-something yuppies and their relationship woes. As the minutes go by, director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer's Body) burrows deeper into the awkward dinner party, finding tension in unwelcome glances, miscommunication, and the possibility that Marshall-Green's character might be misreading a bizarre situation as a dangerous one. We won't spoil what happens, but let's just say this is a party you'll be telling your friends about.

Ip Man (2008)

There aren't many biopics that also pass for decent action movies. Somehow, Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen and director Wilson Yip made Ip Man (and three sequels!) based on the life of Chinese martial arts master Yip Kai-man, who famously trained Bruce Lee. What's their trick to keeping this series fresh? Play fast and loose with the facts, up the melodrama with each film, and, when in doubt, cast Mike Tyson as an evil property developer. The fights are incredible, and Yen's portrayal of the aging master still has the power to draw a few tears from even the most grizzled tough guy.

NETFLIX

The Irishman (2019)

Opening with a tracking shot through the halls of a drab nursing home, where we meet a feeble old man telling tall tales from his wheelchair, The Irishman delights in undercutting its own grandiosity. All the pageantry a $150 million check from Netflix can buy -- the digital de-aging effects, the massive crowd scenes, the shiny rings passed between men -- is on full display. Everything looks tremendous. But, like with 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street, the characters can't escape the fundamental spiritual emptiness of their pursuits. In telling the story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and truck driver turned mob enforcer and friend to labor leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian construct an underworld-set counter-narrative of late 20th century American life. Even with a 209 minute runtime, every second counts.

It Comes at Night (2017)

In this post-apocalyptic nightmare-and-a-half, the horrors of humanity, the strain of chaotic emotions pent up in the name of survival, bleed out through wary eyes and weathered hands. The setup is blockbuster-sized -- reverts mankind to the days of the American frontier, every sole survivor fights to protect their families and themselves -- but the drama is mano-a-mano. Barricaded in a haunted-house-worthy cabin in the woods, Paul (Edgerton) takes in Will (Abbott) and his family, knowing full well they could threaten his family's existence. All the while, Paul's son, Trevor, battles bloody visions of (or induced by?) the contagion. Shults directs the hell out of every slow-push frame of this psychological thriller, and the less we know, the more confusion feels like a noose around our necks, the scarier his observations become.

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Ascending is one of those "bad" movies that might genuinely be quite good. Yes, Channing Tatum is a man-wolf and Mila Kunis is the princess of space and bees don't sting space royalty and Eddie Redmayne hollers his little head off about "harvesting" people -- but what makes this movie great is how all of those things make total, absolute sense in the context of the story. The world the Wachowskis (yes, the Wachowskis!) created is so vibrant and strange and exciting, you almost can't help but get drawn in, even when Redmayne vamps so hard you're afraid he's about to pull a muscle. (And if you're a ballet fan, we have some good news for you.)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Perhaps the only movie that ever truly deserved a conversion to a theme-park ride, Steven Spielberg's thrilling adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel brought long-extinct creatures back to life in more ways than one. Benevolent Netflix gives us more than just the franchise starter, too: The Lost World and JP3 sequels are also available, so you can make a marathon of it.

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Killing Them Softly (2012)

Brad Pitt doesn't make conventional blockbusters anymore -- even World War Z had epidemic-movie ambitions -- so it's not surprising that this crime thriller is a little out there. Set during the financial crisis and presidential election of 2008, the film follows Pitt's hitman character as he makes sense of a poker heist gone wrong, leaving a trail of bodies and one-liners along the way. Mixed in with the carnage, you get lots of musings about the economy and American exceptionalism. It's not subtle -- there's a scene where Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn do heroin while the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" plays -- but, like a blunt object to the head, it gets the job done.

Lady Bird (2017)

The dizzying, frustrating, exhilarating rite of passage that is senior year of high school is the focus of actress Greta Gerwig's first directorial effort, the story of girl named Lady Bird (her given name, in that "it’s given to me, by me") who rebels against everyday Sacramento, California life to obtain whatever it is "freedom" turns out to be. Laurie Metcalf is an understated powerhouse as Lady Bird's mother, a constant source of contention who doggedly pushes her daughter to be successful in the face of the family's dwindling economic resources. It's a tragic note in total complement to Gerwig's hysterical love letter to home, high school, and the history of ourselves.

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The Lobster (2016)

Greek style master Yorgos Lanthimos' dystopian allegory against romance sees Colin Farrell forced to choose a partner in 45 days or he'll be turned into an animal of his choice, which is a lobster. Stuck in a group home with similarly unlucky singles, Farrell's David decides to bust out and join other renegades in a kind of anti-love terror cell that lives in the woods. It's part comedy of manners, part futuristic thriller, and it looks absolutely beautiful -- Lanthimos handles the bizarre premise with grace and a naturalistic eye that reminds the viewer that humans remain one of the most interesting animals to exist on this planet.

Mad Max (1979)

Before Tom Hardy was grunting his way through the desert and crushing tiny two-headed reptiles as Max Rockatansky, there was Mel Gibson. George Miller's 1979 original introduces the iconic character and paints the maximum force of his dystopian mythology in a somewhat more grounded light -- Australian police factions, communities, and glimmers of hope still in existence. Badass homemade vehicles and chase scenes abound in this taut, 88-minute romp. It's aged just fine.

Magic Mike (2012)

Steven Soderbergh's story of a Tampa exotic dancer with a heart of gold (Channing Tatum) has body-rolled its way to Netflix. Sexy dance routines aside, Mike's story is just gritty enough to be subversive. Did we mention Matthew McConaughey shows up in a pair of ass-less chaps?

The Master (2012)

Loosely inspired by the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard -- Dianetics buffs, we strongly recommend Alex Gibney's Going Clear documentary as a companion piece -- The Master boasts one of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest performances, as the enigmatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd. Joaquin Phoenix burns just as brightly as his emotionally stunted, loose-cannon protege Freddie Quell, who has a taste for homemade liquor. Paul Thomas Anderson’s cerebral epic lends itself to many different readings; it’s a cult story, it's a love story, it's a story about post-war disillusionment and the American dream, it's a story of individualism and the desire to belong. But the auteur's popping visuals and heady thematic currents will still sweep you away, even if you’re not quite sure where the tide is taking you.

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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

When Danny (Adam Sandler), Matthew (Ben Stiller) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), three half-siblings from three different mothers, gather at their family brownstone in New York to tend to their ailing father (Dustin Hoffman), a lifetime of familial politics explode out of every minute of conversation. Their narcissistic sculptor dad didn't have time for Danny. Matthew was the golden child. Jean was weird… or maybe disturbed by memories no one ever knew. Expertly sketched by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) this memoir-like portrait of lives half-lived is the kind of bittersweet, dimensional character comedy we're now used to seeing told in three seasons of prestige television. Baumbach gives us the whole package in two hours.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The legendary British comedy troupe took the legend of King Arthur and offered a characteristically irreverent take on it in their second feature film. It's rare for comedy to hold up this well, but the timelessness of lines like, "I fart in your general direction!" "It's just a flesh wound," and "Run away!" makes this a movie worth watching again and again.

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Moonlight (2016)

Chronicling the boyhood years, teenage stretch, and muted adult life of Chiron, a black gay man making it in Miami, this triptych altarpiece is at once hyper-specific and cosmically universal. Director Barry Jenkins roots each moment in the last; Chiron's desire for a lost lover can't burn in a diner booth over a bottle of wine without his beachside identity crisis years prior, blurred and violent, or encounters from deeper in his past, when glimpses of his mother's drug addiction, or the mentoring acts of her crack supplier, felt like secrets delivered in code. Panging colors, sounds, and the delicate movements of its perfect cast like the notes of a symphony, Moonlight is the real deal, a movie that will only grow and complicate as you wrestle with it.

Mudbound (2017)

The South's post-slavery existence is, for Hollywood, mostly uncharted territory. Rees rectifies the overlooked stretch of history with this novelistic drama about two Mississippi families working a rain-drenched farm in 1941. The white McAllans settle on a muddy patch of land to realize their dreams. The Jacksons, a family of black sharecroppers working the land, have their own hopes, which their neighbors manage to nurture and curtail. To capture a multitude of perspectives, Mudbound weaves together specific scenes of daily life, vivid and memory-like, with family member reflections, recorded in whispered voice-over. The epic patchwork stretches from the Jackson family dinner table, where the youngest daughter dreams of becoming a stenographer, to the vistas of Mississippi, where incoming storms threaten an essential batch of crops, to the battlefields of World War II Germany, a harrowing scene that will affect both families. Confronting race, class, war, and the possibility of unity, Mudbound spellbinding drama reckons with the past to understand the present.

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My Happy Family (2017)

At 52, Manana (Ia Shughliashvili) packs a bag and walks out on her husband, son, daughter, daughter's live-in boyfriend, and elderly mother and father, all of whom live together in a single apartment. The family is cantankerous and blustery, asking everything of Manana, who spends her days teaching better-behaved teenagers about literature. But as Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß's striking character study unfolds, the motivation behind Manana's departure is a deeper strain of frustration, despite what her brother, aunts, uncles, and anyone else who can cram themselves into the situation would like us to think. Anchored by Ia Shughliashvili's stunningly internal performance, and punctured by a dark sense of humor akin to Darren Aronofsky's mother! (which would have been the perfect alternate title), My Happy Family is both delicate and brutal in its portrayal of independence, and should get under the skin of anyone with their own family drama.

The Naked Gun (1988)

The short-lived Dragnet TV spoof Police Squad! found a second life as The Naked Gun action-comedy movie franchise, and the first installment goes all in on Airplane! co-star Leslie Nielsen's brand of straight-laced dementia. Trying to explain The Naked Gun only makes the stupid sound stupider, but keen viewers will find jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes. It's the kind of movie that can crack "nice beaver," then pass a stuffed beaver through the frame and actually get away with it. Nielsen has everything to do with it; his Frank Drebin continues the grand Inspector Clouseau tradition in oh-so-'80s style.

The Notebook (2004)

"If you’re a bird, I’m a bird." It's a simple statement and a declaration of devotion that captures the staying power of this Nicholas Sparks classic. The film made Ryan Gosling a certified heartthrob, charting his working class character Noah's lovelorn romance with Rachel McAdam's wealthy character Allie. The star-crossed lovers narrative is enough to make even the most cynical among us swoon, but given that their story is told through an elderly man reading (you guessed it!) a notebook to a woman with dementia, it hits all of the tragic romance benchmarks to make you melt. Noah's commitment to following his heart -- and that passionate kiss in the rain -- make this a love story for the ages.

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Okja (2017)

This wild ride, part action heist, part Miyazaki-like travelogue, and part scathing satire, is fueled by fairy tale whimsy -- but the Grimm kind, where there are smiles and spilled blood. Ahn Seo-hyun plays Mija, the young keeper of a "super-pig," bred by a food manufacturer to be the next step in human-consumption evolution. When the corporate overlords come for her roly-poly pal, Mija hightails it from the farm to the big city to break him out, crossing environmental terrorists, a zany Steve Irwin-type (Gyllenhaal), and the icy psychos at the top of the food chain (including Swinton's childlike CEO) along the way. Okja won't pluck your heartstrings like E.T., but there's grandeur in its frenzy, and the film's cross-species friendship will strike up every other emotion with its empathetic, eco-friendly, and eccentric observations.

On Body and Soul (2017)

This Hungarian film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, and it's easy to see why. The sparse love story begins when two slaughterhouse employees discover they have the same dream at night, in which they're both deer searching the winter forest for food. Endre, a longtime executive at the slaughterhouse, has a physically damaged arm, whereas Maria is a temporary replacement who seems to be on the autism spectrum. If the setup sounds a bit on-the-nose, the moving performances and the unflinching direction save On Body and Soul from turning into a Thomas Aquinas 101 class, resulting in the kind of bleak beauty you can find in a dead winter forest.

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The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Don't go into Orson Welles' final film expecting it to be an easy watch. The Other Side of the Wind, which follows fictional veteran Hollywood director Jake Hannaford (tooootally not modeled after Welles himself) and his protegé (also tooootally not a surrogate for Welles' own friend and mentee Peter Bogdanovich, who also plays the character) as they attend a party in celebration of Hannaford's latest film and are beset on all sides by Hannaford's friends, enemies, and everyone in between. The film, which Welles hoped would be his big comeback to Hollywood, was left famously unfinished for decades after his death in 1985. Thanks to Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall, it was finally completed in 2018, and the result is a vibrant and bizarre throwback to Welles' own experimental 1970s style, made even more resonant if you know how intertwined the movie is with its own backstory. If you want to dive even deeper, Netflix also released a documentary about the restoration and completion of the film, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which delves into Welles' own complicated and tragic relationship with Hollywood and the craft of moviemaking.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro’s dark odyssey Pan’s Labyrinth takes a fantasy setting to mirror the horrible political realities of the human realm. Set in 1940s Falangist Spain, the film documents the hero’s journey of a young girl and stepdaughter of a ruthless Spanish army officer as she seeks an escape from her war-occupied world. When a fairy informs her that her true destiny may be as the princess of the underworld, she seizes her chance. Like Alice in Wonderland if Alice had gone to Hell instead of down the rabbit hole, the Academy Award-winning film is a wondrous, frightening fairy tale where that depicts how perilous the human-created monster of war can be.

Paranormal Activity (2007)

This documentary-style film budgeted at a mere $15,000 made millions at the box office and went on to inspire a number of sequels, all because of how well its scrappiness lent to capturing what feels like a terrifying haunted reality. Centered on a young couple who is convinced an evil spirit is lurking in their home, the two attempt to capture its activity on camera, which, obviously, only makes their supernatural matters worse. It leans on found footage horror tropes made popular by The Blair Witch Project and as it tessellates between showing the viewer what’s captured on their camcorders and the characters’ perspectives, it’s easy to get lost in this disorienting supernatural thriller.

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Poltergeist (1982)

If you saw Poltergeist growing up, chances are you’re probably equally as haunted by Heather O’Rourke as she is in the film, playing a little girl tormented by ghosts in her family home. This Steven Spielberg-penned, Tobe Hooper-directed (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) paranormal flick is a certified cult classic and one of the best horror films of all time, coming from a simple premise about a couple whose home is infested with spirits obsessed with reclaiming the space and kidnapping their daughter. Poltergeist made rearranged furniture freaky, and you may remember a particularly iconic scene with a fuzzed out vintage television set. It’s may be nearly 40 years old, but the creepiness holds up.

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Taking Jane Austen's literary classic and tricking it out with gorgeous long takes, director Joe Wright turns this tale of manners into a visceral, luminescent portrait of passion and desire. While Succession's Matthew MacFadyen might not make you forget Colin Firth from 1995's BBC adaptation, Keira Knightley is a revelation as the tough, nervy Lizzie Bennett. With fun supporting turns from Donald Sutherland, Rosamund Pike, and Judi Dench, it's a sumptuous period romance that transports you from the couch to the ballroom of your dreams -- without changing out of sweatpants.

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Private Life (2018)

Over a decade since the release of her last dark comedy, The Savages, writer and director Tamara Jenkins returned with a sprawling movie in the same vein: more hyper-verbal jerks you can't help but love. Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) are a Manhattan-dwelling couple who have spent the last few years attempting to have a baby with little success. When we meet them, they're already in the grips of fertility mania, willing to try almost anything to secure the offspring they think they desire. With all the details about injections, side effects, and pricey medical procedures, the movie functions as a taxonomy of modern pregnancy anxieties, and Hahn brings each part of the process to glorious life.

The Ritual (2018)

The Ritual, a horror film where a group of middle-aged men embark on a hiking trip in honor of a dead friend, understands the tension between natural beauty of the outdoors and the unsettling panic of the unknown. The group's de facto leader Luke (an understated Rafe Spall) attempts to keep the adventure from spiralling out of control, but the forest has other plans. (Maybe brush up on your Scandinavian mythology before viewing.) Like a backpacking variation on Neil Marshall's 2005 cave spelunking classic The Descent, The Ritual deftly explores inter-personal dynamics while delivering jolts of other-worldly terror. It'll have you rethinking that weekend getaway on your calendar.

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Roma (2018)

All those billions Netflix spent paid off in the form of several Oscar nominations for Roma, including one for Best Picture and a win for Best Director. Whether experienced in the hushed reverence of a theater, watched on the glowing screen of a laptop, or, as Netflix executive Ted Sarandos has suggested, binged on the perilous surface of a phone, Alfonso Cuarón's black-and-white passion project seeks to stun. A technical craftsman of the highest order, the Children of Men and Gravity director has an aesthetic that aims to overwhelm -- with the amount of extras, the sense of despair, and the constant whir of exhilaration -- and this autobiographical portrait of kind-hearted maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) caring for a family in the early 1970s has been staged on a staggering, mind-boggling scale.

Schindler's List (1993)

A passion project for Steven Spielberg, who shot it back-to-back with another masterpiece, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who reportedly saved over 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Frank, honest, and stark in its depiction of Nazi violence, the three-hour historical drama is a haunting reminder of the world's past, every frame a relic, every lost voice channeled through Itzhak Perlman's mourning violin.

A Serious Man (2009)

This dramedy from the Coen brothers stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics professor who just can't catch a break, whether it's with his wife, his boss, or his rabbi. (Seriously, if you're having a bad day, this airy flick gives you ample time to brood and then come to the realization that your life isn't as shitty as you think.) Meditating on the spiritual and the temporal, Gopnik's improbable run of bad luck is a smart modern retelling of the Book of Job, with more irony and fewer plagues and pestilences. But not much fewer.

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Shadow (2019)

In Shadow, the visually stunning action epic from Hero and House of Flying Daggers wuxia master Zhang Yimou, parasols are more than helpful sun-blockers: They can be turned into deadly weapons, shooting boomerang-like blades of steel at oncoming attackers and transforming into protective sleds for traveling through the slick streets. These devices are one of many imaginative leaps made in telling this Shakespearean saga of palace intrigue, vengeance, and secret doppelgangers set in China's Three Kingdoms period. This is a martial arts epic where the dense plotting is as tricky as the often balletic fight scenes. If the battles in Game of Thrones left you frustrated, Shadow provides a thrilling alternative.

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

Before checking out Spike Lee's Netflix original series of the same name, be sure to catch up with where it all began. Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns) juggles three men during her sexual pinnacle, and it's all working out until they discover one another. She's Gotta Have It takes some dark turns, but each revelation speaks volumes about what real romantic independence is all about.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The late director Jonathan Demme's 1991 film is the touchstone for virtually every serial killer film and television show that came after. The iconic closeup shots of an icy, confident Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as he and FBI newbie Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) engage in their "quid pro quo" interrogation sessions create almost unbearable tension as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) remains on the loose, killing more victims. Hopkins delivers the more memorable lines, and Buffalo Bill's dance is the stuff of nerve-wracking anxiety nightmares, but it's Foster's nuanced performance as a scared, determined, smart-yet-hesitant agent that sets Silence of the Lambs apart from the rest of the serial killer pack.

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Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and David O. Russell’s first collaboration -- and the film that turned J-Law into a bona fide golden girl -- is a romantic comedy/dramedy/dance-flick that bounces across its tonal shifts. A love story between Pat (Cooper), a man struggling with bipolar disease and a history of violent outbursts, and Tiffany (Lawrence), a widow grappling with depression, who come together while rehearsing for an amateur dance competition, Silver Linings balances an emotionally realistic depiction of mental illness with some of the best twirls and dips this side of Step Up. Even if you're allergic to rom-coms, Lawrence and Cooper’s winning chemistry will win you over, as will this sweet little gem of a film: a feel-good, affecting love story that doesn’t feel contrived or treacly.

Sin City (2005)

Frank Miller enlisted Robert Rodriguez as co-director to translate the former's wildly popular series of the same name to the big screen, and with some added directorial work from Quentin Tarantino, the result became a watershed moment in the visual history of film. The signature black-and-white palette with splashes of color provided a grim backdrop to the sensational violence of the miniaturized plotlines -- this is perhaps the movie that feels more like a comic than any other movie you'll ever see.

Sinister (2012)

Horror-movie lesson #32: If you move into a creepy new house, do not read the dusty book, listen to the decaying cassette tapes, or watch the Super 8 reels you find in the attic -- they will inevitably lead to your demise. In Sinister, a true-crime author (played by Ethan Hawke) makes the final mistake, losing his mind to home movies haunted by the "Bughuul."

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Small Crimes (2017)

It's always a little discombobulating to see your favorite Game of Thrones actors in movies that don't call on them to fight dragons, swing swords, or at least wear some armor. But that shouldn't stop you from checking out Small Crimes, a carefully paced thriller starring the Kingslayer Jaime Lannister himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. As Joe Denton, a crooked cop turned ex-con, Coster-Waldau plays yet another character with a twisted moral compass, but here he's not part of some mythical narrative. He's just another conniving, scheming dirtbag in director E.L. Katz's Coen brothers-like moral universe. While some of the plot details are confusing -- Katz and co-writer Macon Blair skimp on the exposition so much that some of the dialogue can feel incomprehensible -- the mood of Midwestern dread and Coster-Waldau's patient, lived-in performance make this one worth checking out. Despite the lack of dragons.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Did people go overboard in praising Snowpiercer when it came out? Maybe. But it's important to remember that the movie arrived in the sweaty dog days of summer, hitting critics and sci-fi lovers like a welcome blast of icy water from a hose. The film's simple, almost video game-like plot -- get to the front of the train, or die trying -- allowed visionary South Korean director Bong Joon-ho to fill the screen with excitement, absurdity, and radical politics. Chris Evans never looked more alive, Tilda Swinton never stole more scenes, and mainstream blockbuster filmmaking never felt so tepid in comparison. Come on, ride the train!

The Social Network (2010)

After making films like Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac, director David Fincher left behind the world of scumbags and crime for a fantastical, historical epic in 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Social Network was another swerve, but yielded his greatest film. There's no murder on screen, but Fincher treats Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg like a dorky, socially awkward mob boss operating on an operatic scale. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire, screwball-like dialogue burns with a moral indignation that Fincher's watchful, steady-handed camera chills with an icy distance. It's the rare biopic that's not begging you to smash the "like" button.

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

In this shrewd twist on the superhero genre, the audience's familiarity with the origin story of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger -- the character has already starred in three different blockbuster franchises, in addition to countless comics and cartoon TV adaptations -- is used as an asset instead of a liability. The relatively straight-forward coming-of-age tale of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager who takes on the powers and responsibilities of Spider-Man following the death of Peter Parker, gets a remix built around an increasingly absurd parallel dimension plotline that introduces a cast of other Spider-Heroes like Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glen), and, most ridiculously, Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), a talking pig in a Spider-Suit. The convoluted set-up is mostly an excuse to cram the movie with rapid-fire jokes, comic book allusions, and dream-like imagery that puts the rubbery CGI of most contemporary animated films to shame.

Spotlight (2015)

Tom McCarthy stretches the drama taut as he renders Boston Globe's 2000 Catholic Church sex scandal investigation into a Hollywood vehicle. McCarthy's notable cast members crank like gears as they uncover evidence and reflect on a horrifying discovery of which they shoulder partial blame. Spotlight was the cardigan of 2015's Oscar nominees, but even cardigans look sharp when Mark Ruffalo is involved.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

No movie captures the prolonged pain of divorce quite like Noah Baumbach's brutal Brooklyn-based comedy The Squid and the Whale. While the performances from Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as bitter writers going through a separation are top-notch, the film truly belongs to the kids, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, who you watch struggle in the face of their parents' mounting immaturity and pettiness. That Baumbach is able to wring big, cathartic laughs from such emotionally raw material is a testament to his gifts as a writer -- and an observer of human cruelty.

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Starship Troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven is undoubtedly the master of the sly sci-fi satire. With RoboCop, he laid waste to the police state with wicked, trigger-happy glee. He took on evil corporations with Total Recall. And with Starship Troopers, a bouncy, bloody war picture, he skewered the chest-thumping theatrics of pro-military propaganda, offering up a pitch-perfect parody of the post-9/11 Bush presidency years before troops set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan. Come for the exploding alien guts, but stay for the winking comedy -- or stay for both! Bug guts have their charms, too.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

You might think a movie that opens with a suicidal man riding a farting corpse like a Jet Ski wears thin after the fourth or fifth flatulence gag. You would be wrong. Brimming with imagination and expression, the directorial debut of Adult Swim auteurs "The Daniels" wields sophomoric humor to speak to friendship. As Radcliffe's dead body springs back to life -- through karate-chopping, water-vomiting, and wind-breaking -- he becomes the id to Dano's struggling everyman, who is also lost in the woods. If your childhood backyard adventures took the shape of The Revenant, it would look something like Swiss Army Man, and be pure bliss.

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Tallulah (2016)

From Orange Is the New Black writer Sian Heder, Tallulah follows the title character (played by Ellen Page) after she inadvertently "kidnaps" a toddler from an alcoholic rich woman and passes the child off as her own to appeal to her run-out boyfriend's mother (Allison Janney). A messy knot of familial woes and wayward instincts, Heder's directorial debut achieves the same kind of balancing act as her hit Netflix series -- frank social drama with just the right amount of humorous hijinks. As Tallulah grows into a mother figure, her on-the-lam parenting course only makes her more and more of a criminal in the eyes of... just about everyone. You want to root for her, but that would be too easy.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Travis Bickle (a young Bobby De Niro) comes back from the Vietnam War and, having some trouble acclimating to daily life, slowly unravels while fending off brutal insomnia by picking up work as a... taxi driver... in New York City. Eventually he snaps, shaves his hair into a mohawk and goes on a murderous rampage while still managing to squeeze in one of the most New York lines ever captured on film ("You talkin' to me?"). It's not exactly a heartwarmer -- Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old prostitute -- but Martin Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver is a movie in the cinematic canon that you'd be legitimately missing out on if you didn't watch it.

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The Theory of Everything (2014)

In his Oscar-winning performance, Eddie Redmayne portrays famed physicist Stephen Hawking -- though The Theory of Everything is less of a biopic than it is a beautiful, sweet film about his lifelong relationship with his wife, Jane (Felicity Jones). Covering his days as a young cosmology student ahead of his diagnosis of ALS at 21, through his struggle with the illness and rise as a theoretical scientist, this film illustrates the trying romance through it all. While it may be written in the cosmos, this James Marsh-directed film that weaves in and out of love will have you experience everything there is to feel.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson found modern American greed in the pages of Upton Sinclair's depression-era novel, Oil!. Daniel Day-Lewis found the role of a lifetime behind the bushy mustache of Daniel Plainview, thunderous entrepreneur. Paul Dano found his milkshake drunk up. Their discoveries are our reward -- There Will Be Blood is a stark vision of tycoon terror.

Time to Hunt (2020)

Unrelenting in its pursuit of scenarios where guys point big guns at each other in sparsely lit empty hallways, the South Korean thriller Time to Hunt knows exactly what stylistic register it's playing in. A group of four friends, including Parasite and Train to Busan break-out Choi Woo-shik, knock over a gambling house, stealing a hefty bag of money and a set of even more valuable hard-drives, and then find themselves targeted by a ruthless contract killer (Park Hae-soo) who moves like the T-1000 and shoots like a henchmen in a Michael Mann movie. There are dystopian elements to the world -- protests play out in the streets, the police wage a tech-savvy war on citizens, automatic rifles are readily available to all potential buyers -- but they all serve the simmering tension and elevate the pounding set-pieces instead of feeling like unnecessary allegorical padding. Even with its long runtime, this movie moves.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

If a season of 24 took place in the smoky, well-tailored underground of British intelligence crica 1973, it might look a little like this precision-made John le Carré adaptation from Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson. Even if you can't follow terse and tightly-woven mystery, the search for Soviet mole led by retired operative George Smiley (Gary Oldman), the ice-cold frames and stellar cast will suck you into the intrigue. It's very possible Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch are reading pages of the British phone book, but egad, it's absorbing. A movie that rewards your full concentration.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)

Of all the entries in the rom-com revival, this one is heavier on the rom than the com. But even though it won't make your sides hurt, it will make your heart flutter. The plot is ripe with high school movie hijinks that arise when the love letters of Lara Jean Covey (the wonderful Lana Condor) accidentally get mailed to her crushes, namely the contractual faux relationship she starts with heartthrob Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo). Like its heroine, it's big-hearted but skeptical in all the right places.

Total Recall (1990)

Skip the completely forgettable Colin Farrell remake from 2012. This Arnold Schwarzenegger-powered, action-filled sci-fi movie is the one to go with. Working from a short story by writer Philip K. Dick, director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) uses a brain-teasing premise -- you can buy "fake" vacation memories from a mysterious company called Rekall -- to stage one of his hyper-violent, winkingly absurd cartoons. The bizarre images of life on Mars and silly one-liners from Arnold fly so fast that you'll begin to think the whole movie was designed to be implanted in your mind.

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Tramps (2017)

There are heists pulled off by slick gentlemen in suits, then there are heists pulled off by two wayward 20-somethings rambling along on a steamy, summer day in New York City. This dog-day crime-romance stages the latter, pairing a lanky Russian kid (Callum Tanner) who ditches his fast-food register job for a one-off thieving gig, with his driver, an aloof strip club waitress (Grace Van Patten) looking for the cash to restart her life. When a briefcase handoff goes awry, the pair head upstate to track down the missing package, where train rides and curbside walks force them to open up. With a laid-back, '70s soul, Tramps is the rare doe-eyed relationship movie where playing third-wheel is a joy.

Uncut Gems (2019)

In Uncut Gems, the immersive crime film from sibling director duo Josh and Benny Safdie, gambling is a matter of faith. Whether he's placing a bet on the Boston Celtics, attempting to rig an auction, or outrunning debt-collecting goons at his daughter's high school play, the movie's jeweler protagonist Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) believes in his ability to beat the odds. Does that mean he always succeeds? No, that would be absurd, undercutting the character's Job-like status, which Sandler imbues with an endearing weariness that holds the story together. But every financial setback, emotional humbling, and spiritual humiliation he suffers gets interpreted by Howard as a sign that his circumstances might be turning around. After all, a big score could be right around the corner.

Velvet Buzzsaw (2018)

Nightcrawler filmmaker Dan Gilroy teams up with Jake Gyllenhaal again to create another piece of cinematic art, this time a satirical horror film about the exclusive, over-the-top LA art scene. The movie centers around a greedy group of art buyers who come into the possession of stolen paintings that, unbeknownst to them, turn out to be haunted, making their luxurious lives of wheeling and dealing overpriced paintings a living hell. Also featuring the likes of John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Billy Magnussen, and others, Velvet Buzzsaw looks like Netflix’s next great original.

COLUMBIA PICTURES

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Oscar-baiting, musician biopics became so cookie-cutter by the mid-'00s that it was easy for John C. Reilly, Judd Apatow, and writer-director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) to knot them all together for the ultimate spoof. Dewey Cox is part Johnny Cash, part Bob Dylan, part Ray Charles, part John Lennon, part anyone-you-can-think-of, rising with hit singles, rubbing shoulders with greats of many eras, stumbling with eight-too-many drug addictions, then rising once again. When it comes to relentless wisecracking, Walk Hard is like a Greatest Hits compilation -- every second is gold.

The Witch (2015)

The Witch delivers everything we don't see in horror today. The backdrop, a farm in 17th-century New England, is pure misty, macabre mood. The circumstance, a Puritanical family making it on the fringe of society because they're too religious, bubbles with terror. And the question, whether devil-worshipping is hocus pocus or true black magic, keeps each character on their toes, and begging God for answers. The Witch tests its audience with its (nearly impenetrable) old English dialogue and the (anxiety-inducing) trials of early American life, but the payoff will keep your mind racing, and your face hiding under the covers, for days.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Before taking us to space with Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón steamed up screens with this provocative, comedic drama about two teenage boys (Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal) road-trippin' it with an older woman. Like a sunbaked Jules and Jim, the movie makes nimble use of its central love triangle, setting up conflicts between the characters as they move through the complicated political and social realities of Mexican life. It's a confident, relaxed film that's got an equal amount of brains and sex appeal. Watch this one with a friend -- or two.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher's period drama is for obsessives. In telling the story of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who captured the public imagination by sending letters and puzzles to the Bay Area press, the famously meticulous director zeroes in on the cops, journalists, and amateur code-breakers who made identifying the criminal their life's work. With Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-turned-gumshoe Robert Graysmith at the center, and Robert Downey Jr.'s barfly reporter Paul Avery stumbling around the margins, the film stretches across time and space, becoming a rich study of how people search for meaning in life. Zodiac is a procedural thriller that makes digging through old manilla folders feel like a cosmic quest.

13th (2016)

Selma director Ava DuVernay snuck away from the Hollywood spotlight to direct this sweeping documentary on the state of race in America. DuVernay's focus is the country's growing incarceration rates and an imbalance in the way black men and women are sentenced based on their crimes. Throughout the exploration, 13th dives into post-Emancipation migration, systemic racism that built in the early 20th century, and moments of modern political history that continue to spin a broken gear in our well-oiled national machine. You'll be blown away by what DuVernay uncovers in her interview-heavy research.

20th Century Women (2016)

If there's such thing as an epistolary movie, 20th Century Women is it. Touring 1970s Santa Barbara through a living flipbook, Mike Mills's semi-autobiographical film transcends documentation with a cast of wayward souls and Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), an impressionable young teenager. Annette Bening plays his mother, and the matriarch of a ragtag family, who gather together for safety, dance to music when the moment strikes, and teach Jamie the important lesson of What Women Want, which ranges from feminist theory to love-making techniques. The kid soaks it up like a sponge. Through Mills's caring direction, and characters we feel extending infinitely through past and present, so do we.

for more cool stuff life this, follow my page an send me a message for suggestions and queries

[horrorhousereview]

Carrie Franchise

Carrie, the heart warming tale of a high school girl who sets the world on fire with her mind. I knew little else about the original film, nor that it had a sequel and been remade twice. While the original movie proved to be better than I'd have imagined, attempts to recapture the essence of the 1976 version have sadly fallen flat.

1. Carrie (1976)

When I sat down to the original Carrie, my expectations were moderate. I knew that the movie was famous, and that the protagonist could set things on fire with her mind, but really nothing else. It sounded interesting but not earth shattering. I had no idea the wild ride the movie was about to take me on.

The opening scene, in classic seventies style, was a soft core porn in a high school girls locker room as they showered. The porn gave me whiplash when Carrie suddenly got her first period, and instead of handling it like a normal person screamed for help and grasped onto her teammates with bloody hands in a panic. The girls teased her in a sequence that can only make sense in movies, not real life, shouting for her to "plug it up" and pelting her with tampons and pads as she screamed and cried in a corner. Apparently, Carrie had literally never heard about how periods work before. This is attributed to her crazy, fundamentalist mother, but I would also like to raise questions about the state of sex ed. in schools in the seventies. I wasn't expecting much, but did they really not even go over reproductive organs for five minutes? Incredible.

The bulk of the movie is a slow burn wherein we follow Carrie, a girl who is relentlessly bullied by her peers. Not only that, but she is actually a little weird, due to her fundamentalist Christian mother who abuses her at home. Her mother says such gems as that Carrie wouldn't have gotten her period if she hadn't had sex, and that it was God's punishment. She then proceeded to lock her in a closet for several hours, telling Carrie to pray. Carrie's mother makes all of their clothes, and doesn't allow electric lights in the household, just to give the very briefest depiction of how weird it is there.

Through the movie we see that the gym teacher, and then a few others actually try to do right by Carrie. A boy asks her to the prom. They try to turn Carrie's sad life around.

Meanwhile, the head bitch of the school plots revenge on Carrie, whom she blames for her own teenaged angst. She's a terrible person.

Right in the last stretch of movie, Carrie wins the title of prom queen. Her dreams are coming true. Then the head bitch douses her in pigs blood, and a few people laugh, and Carrie totally snaps and kills everyone with her mind, including those who had tried to do right. She goes home, and her mother who believed she was possessed by the devil tries to kill her, but Carrie in turn kills her mother. The sole survivor of the night continues to have nightmares of Carrie attacking her from the grave, and it isn't clear to me whether that's delusion caused by trauma or whether Carrie continued to haunt even her from the beyond.

What a wild ride. I didn't see the ending coming at all, and the shock and chaos of it very much reminded me of Friday the 13th, and The Birds. To add to that, I'm still not certain who the true villain of the movie is. Carrie? Her mother? Her terrible classmates? All of them? None? And did Carrie's mother create her through the abuse, or was Carrie truly possessed by the devil the entire time? Her retribution, after all, was more than a bit excessive.

I enjoyed Carrie far more than I had expected to.

Final rating? 8/10

2. The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

When I started Carrie 2, I was curious how they'd go about a sequel. Carrie had died at the end of the first film. Would this be a sort of prequel to her life? Would she be a ghost? Would they find a way to resurrect her, as they did Jason Voorhees so many times? In fact, it was none of these. The story follows Rachel, Carrie's half sister. Apparently their father has a telekinesis gene that was passed on to both of them, because that makes sense.

We start the movie when Rachel is a little girl. She has a religious nutter mother, just like Carrie, who is trying to banish the devil from her, because she can move things with her mind. The mother gets taken away to a psych ward and is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Is she schizophrenic? Or justified? Perhaps both.

Rachel lives with terrible foster parents, and like Carrie is unpopular. Unlike in Carrie, however, the school atmosphere is completely unrealistic. There's absolute chaos, someone running around with a supersoaker, another guy filming girls' boobs. The cheerleaders are practicing on the school lawn before school starts. I'm always astounded by how unrealistic high school is depicted in some movies and shows, considering that the writers probably attended one.

Also unlike Carrie, Rachel isn't the single social pariah of the entire school. She's just one of many unpopular students, and even has an unpopular best friend. The friend sleeps with a jock (the eldest son from Home Improvement, weirdly), and then when he casts her aside she kills herself by jumping off the roof. This, I guess, is the catalyst for Rachel's telekinesis to start spiraling out of control.

One of the teachers at the school is the sole survivor from the Carrie incident twenty years ago. She wants to help Rachel before it's too late, but that never gains any traction. She also wants to sue Home Improvement boy for statutory rape, and while he and his friends are thoroughly disgusting that felt like a bit of a stretch to me. As a result, the jocks rally against Rachel, all except for Good Jock. Rachel and Good Jock start dating, and Good Jock temporarily friend-divorces the other jocks.

The story culminates in Rachel thinking that Good Jock used her due to the influence of his friends, and she has her Carrie moment where she tries to set everyone and everything on fire. Until this point the echoes of Carrie in Carrie 2 were stupid but boring. The carbon copy ending pushed the film into the realm of terrible.

In addition to the same end scene, they even had the original Carrie mother's voice repeating "they're all going to laugh at you" in the background of Rachel's mind, just as from the original Carrie ending. Why? How? What was it supposed to imply? As if that didn't ruin the scene enough, there was a hilariously bad performance of violent acts -- such as mentally flung CDs acting as shurikens. And Rachel's heart tattoo began to beat, and the barbed wire of it spread to mark her entire body. Again, why? How?

I finished this movie wondering why they'd bothered to make it at all, and also wondering how they failed so spectacularly in capturing whatever magic it was that had made Carrie so fantastic, while simultaneously copying as much from the original movie as possible.

Final rating: 3/10

3. Carrie (2002 made for TV film)

Like all good movies, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would do a remake of Carrie. I was skeptical of the 2002 made for TV movie, but I wanted so much for it to offer something unique. Some remakes actually do have artistic vision behind them. Unfortunately, it was as terrible as one might expect.

The main point to the remake, so far as I can tell, was to update Carrie to take place in a more modern setting. But what exactly was unrelatable about the 1976 film? The lack of sex education is the only real flaw so far as I could tell, and to be fair, the 2002 film does address it. Carrie opts out of sex ed. with a religious exemption. But she also lives in the world of the internet, and uses the web to research her secret powers instead of the library. Yet even with apparently websites helping her to learn them, no one else knows about telekinesis or believes what happened in the end. The modern setting, in my opinion, only built more plot holes rather than filling them in.

In Carrie 2002, the method of story telling is also different. We start off at a police station, after the main events of the film, as detectives interview students and teachers and try to piece together what had happened. I'm not sure what the point of the investigative narrative is, and in fact it threw me. In my experience, the point of having such a perspective is so that each time we're actually inside of the movie, the events we see are only told from the limited point of view of whoever is being interviewed. But that isn't so in Carrie 2002, because we frequently have perspectives from Carrie, who isn't interviewed at all, nor is she seen from the perspective of any of the interviewees.  As such, the investigative angle is a weakness, not a strength.

Like Carrie 2, Carrie 2002 features a somewhat unbelievable vision of high school. Every detail, to me at least, is not quite sold. In fact, "not quite" is the theme of the movie, as every key aspect of the original film seems diminished.

Carrie's mother is abusive, but not very. She's religious, but not nearly as much so. The girls at Carrie's school are mean to her, but only to a point. The head orchestrator of Carrie's torments is almost shy in comparison to her original counterpart, and has to be goaded on by the advice of her sociopathic boyfriend. It's quite the departure from the sociopathic girl of the original movie with the whipped boyfriend following in tow.

The gym teacher does care, but she doesn't care nearly as much. The kind boy who takes Carrie to prom seems nice enough, but mostly seems to take Carrie because of his girlfriend's wishes. In the original, there was at least some foreshadowing of his kindness when he spoke up for her slightly in class.

Even the final scene of the movie felt lesser. At points it almost felt goofy, and like Carrie 2, Carrie 2002's final scene felt over the top. She kept going well after the school was destroyed, and proclaimed not to have remembered what happened when she reached home. While Original Carrie seemed to be in shock, Remake Carrie seemed to instead be purely evil, all nuance lost. Rather than the knife battle with the mother, the mother tried to drown her, and Carrie's over-the-top powers manifested again in an ability to visualize and control the mother's heartbeat in her chest.

The coup de grace as far as terrible decisions in the remake is that Carrie actually lived in the end. Sue, the girl who'd gone out of her way to help Carrie get a date to prom, showed up for some reason at Carrie's house after the massacre, and found her drowned but resuscitated her. She helped Carrie escape to a new life in Florida and didn't tell the truth to the cops. Why? I have no earthly idea. I suppose that she felt sorry for Carrie, but with the luke-warm mother and the brick-to-the-face storytelling, this film failed to manifest any of the conflicting feelings in me as the original. A final shot of Carrie shows that she's still haunted by visions of her mother and of the head mean girl, but they seem to be PTSD with no possibility of a haunting. It's a sad, pale shadow of the Carrie-haunting of Sue at the end of the original.

In the end, I'm not really sure why they felt a need to remake Carrie in 2002. Or if they really felt they must, then I fail to see the artistic vision. In any good remake, there should be some element offered that is uniquely its own. In this case, the writers failed to deliver.

Final rating? 3/10

4. Carrie (2013)

Once again, they decided to remake Carrie. Would it be as creative as the original? Unfortunately not. Instead, they made many of the same mistakes that they had in 2002.

Like the 2002 movie, Carrie 2013 is set in modern times. They give the students the internet and cell phones to make things seem more current, then randomly put Carrie in pool volley ball because somehow that's more relatable than the volleyball of the original movie. Throughout this adventure I've wondered why they've felt the need to change the sport, and am always curious to see which one it will be next. First volley ball, then softball, now the pool.

The first major misstep of this film, right off the bat, is that Carrie is incredibly conventionally attractive. No one can beat the sort of awkward and strange look of the original actress, although the casting in 2002 wasn't too bad. But in 2013, for some reason we get a completely normal, or even above average looking girl who can have no makeover on prom night, as she already looks amazing. Not only is the aesthetic off, but she fails to deliver the awkward mannerisms that go hand in hand with the character of Carrie.

Next, we come to the iconic opening scene, which as in the 2002 remake remained mostly intact. However, in Carrie 2002 the only truly redeemable thing was that Carrie's lack of sexual education had been explained by a religious exemption. For some reason, in 2013, we no longer have any excuse or idea how she has no idea what a period is. In the modern day setting, this is all the more difficult to swallow.

The writers seemed to want to correct a few of the 2002 mistakes: the head bad girl was more cacklingly evil, the good jock was once again good in his own right and had a little foreshadowing. But they kept some of the mistakes as well -- the bad girl's boyfriend being a criminal, and most notably Carrie's overpowered telekinesis. In 2013, it's probably more overt than ever before, as Carrie deliberately practices floating books around her, though perhaps it's not as spectacular as the random meteorites striking inexplicably in either Carrie 2 or 2002, I can't remember which.

Much like in its 2002 predecessor, Carrie 2013's mother has been reduced. She's not nearly so abusive as the original 1976 mother, instead turning much of her abuse inward, as she's seen slapping herself, and banging her head against a wall. She's also not as extreme in her rejection of electricity as in 1976. All of this -- the more pathetic mother, the stronger Carrie, serve to lose all the nuance of the original film. I'm not left thinking that everyone -- the school bullies, Carrie, and her mother -- are terrible. Instead, it read a bit like a '90s slasher film in the end scene, as Carrie spread her arms into the air like a caricature of a witch while she mentally flung things to and fro. Gone was the echo of the mother's voice in her head, and instead it was a rather boring scene, with none of the detached horror that I've come to associate with Carrie.

In fact, when Carrie arrived home after the devastation, she was visibly upset, bursting into tears and calling for her mother. That's a far cry from the original Carrie that had arrived at her home in a kind of stupor, washing herself methodically as if in shock or perhaps still possessed.

One improvement over the 2002 film was that they did kill Carrie as in the original. But one misstep? They still needed Sue Snell to make a final appearance in the final destruction. To what purpose? So that Carrie could tell her with preternatural ability, that she was pregnant. Why add this to Carrie's powers? Why have this scene at all? And instead of Carrie simply haunting Sue's thoughts as in the 1976 original, now she seems to be possibly, somehow, haunting Sue's baby. It's a ridiculous decision and I have no idea why they made it.

Final rating? 2/10

[raymundsuacillo-blog]

TABOO: The Medieval Mind Within the Modern Filipino

In an era where humanity trails behind the coattails of technology, it is inevitable and evidently expected that people alongside their values progress in pace with the environmental shifts occurring around them. Not much can be said about the Philippines. We are in a nation with conservative presets backed with roaring liberal judgments. As much as history tried to weather the eastern storm with a more westernized narrative, it only gave birth to a nation and people whose sights are poised towards the future yet whose minds are grappled in the past.

Traditions, beliefs, and values are intertwined with history and the culture that serves as society’s foreground. But these historical and cultural facets should not overwhelm the business of politics and the social advancements we have made so far. It is wrong to disregard and sideline these factors in political movements. But to let our medieval values hold our social norms and politics by the neck is a sin in its own sense.

This is taboo. These are the conversations we tried strenuously to avoid and the discourse we vied to kick under the dinner table. In a conservative-esque nation like the Philippines, there are lines one must not come across and there are moral boundaries planted within every social framework. These restrictions have been in place for centuries and we haven’t grown since. We can never genuinely comprehend and understand these issues we deem taboo if we aren’t open to discussing it freely. Only if we learn to pin the obscure will we only find a clearer path to modernity?

Religion in the Philippines is no taboo. But its side effects have been evident long enough for it to mend the social fabric and tinker with our politics. Over 90% of Filipinos are Christian, 80% of which are Catholic. Banking on such foothold, the Church has held power in its pulpits and has even used its sweltering influence to dictate the change in society and in our government. The Church bore the power to take down a dictator. And it still has the power to do so. There is a reason why you can’t look down upon the altar.

But where does the Church fit in this medieval discourse? Frankly, it sits pompously at the center. Like tradition, the Church has embedded its values down to the very helm line of our society. Its propositions, morals, and policies are infused with our cultural norms and have even become our norms. It is through this fusion of Church and stately influence which has quarantined the Filipino mindset from tackling issues that the world has learned to take inconveniently. We have been living with one-sided truths. It is not in the Church’s doctrines neither is it in the Bible where we establish our policies. For the Church heeds its own narrative. And that narrative is not shared by everyone.

The Last Man Standing

What God has put together, let no man separate. This beating mantra has been the battle cry of people who stand at the frontlines against Divorce. We have been told tirelessly told to honor the sanctity of marriage in Filipino households. But when taps run dry, emotions run deep, and domestic violence remains a common Filipino feature, there is really nothing to honor here.

According to recent data by the Philippine Statistics Authority, over 30% of women experience spousal violence from their current partners. In a society where love and matrimony are held to such a high standard, we can never truly tell that love is a safe haven for all. This domestic abuse has led to physical, emotional, and mental bruises that no man can even dare to bear. Abused partners have merely one option to turn to, annulment. But the tedious and blaringly expensive process takes months even years to come into motion. It leaves the abused with no other choice but to exit the process and force themselves to stay with their violent partners or leave such abusive households and face retaliation from a hypocritical society where religious presets become a way of life and personal values become the morals of a 100 Million.

In the years 2017-2018, the Senate has made progress in legalizing divorce. This conversation sparked headlines internationally as the massively conservative state is finally taking steps in swallowing the divorce pill. This is considering that the Philippines is the lone sovereign state to still have divorce illegal after its anti-divorce partner Malta made the act legal in 2011. While commendations trickled down from the thrones of the Vatican, on a global and more realistic sense, we are left grappled in an idea the world has long kept in the past. The world cannot imagine a life where divorce is illegal. But as they say, there is always something unique and painstakingly exotic about the Philippines.

The Talk

In an age of advanced technology, social media has usurped the need for newspapers and tablets have seemingly overtaken the necessity for books. Social media has tightened the loose ends of communication and has engaged millions of people into easier and more convenient discussions and conversations through online platforms. It is easy to think that topics such as Sex Education are more openly brought into light with such technology. But how can the youth initiate such crucial forums on such if Sex Education remains a vague construct and talks about sex and health are literally still kept under the sheets?

According to the Commission on Population (Popcom), Filipino parents still refuse to discuss the barebones and complexities of sex to their children. Sex discussions and Sex Education go beyond the flirtations and the foreplay the general public tags them to be. SexEd opens about sexual health, sexuality, and the repercussions that early and premarital sex may have. Encapsulated within this is the necessary measures in preventing the rampant spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases such as HIV and AIDS among others. While sex education is being dabbled upon by educational institutions, what echoes within the classroom aren’t generally comprehensive enough for the youth to grasp. These discussions must come from their parents in order to break the stigma around the topic.

It is through this stigma why troubled youth fear opening up about their sexual past. It is in this stigma why HIV/AIDS are set to peak at 15,000 cases in 2019 in a 140% jump because we try desperately to keep the conversations quiet. 500 Filipino teenagers become mothers each day. If Premarital sex, HIV/AIDS, and Teenage Pregnancy aren’t enough to spark discussions, then it is basically useless to even try to fix the problem.

In a country where the age of sexual consent is age 12, parents must exhibit the necessary precautions to keep their children from engaging in premarital and unsafe sex. Schools cannot stress this further for textbooks could only do so much. Despite the common notion, leaving our children ignorant about sex does not safeguard them from doing the act. The retaliation of youthful curiosity is lethal. It’s best we hand them the information rather than letting them seek the information themselves.

#Pride

The colors, festivities and the celebrations are blinding. But if you deep dive into the segregated sectors of society, there is nothing worthy of celebration for the LGBT+. Pride marches are symbols of unity, strength, and the progressive march society is willing to take for the LGBT Community. But that’s all there is. We see gay fashion icons trailing the asphalt in Instagram-worthy outfits together with LGBT couples that find their way at the pulpit of Twitter stardom. Pride marches have only become a mere symbol of the flamboyance of coming out and is somehow sidelining the fight for basic civil rights.

The Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) Bill has breezed through the House of Representatives yet has been gripped with strict judgment and brash political backlash at the Senate. The overtly over-religious solons have lionized themselves as preachers to turn LGBT rights into an over-sensationalized lobby for Same-Sex Marriage. While it is respectable to heed religious belief into the Senate floor, it is despicable to use subjective religious doctrines as an excuse to deny people of their right to self-expression.  

While we tirelessly demand genuine separation of church and state, what the system dictates, the operator does not follow. Numerous religious groups staged a rally against the legalization of the SOGIE Bill for some stated that it would eventually lead to Same-Sex Marriage. It just goes to show how we only value the LGBT on-screen as best friends or comedic figures but not for the humans they are. We are only tolerant of their actions but never respectful of it.

There are currently no laws protecting LGBT from hate crimes or workplace discrimination. While the Philippines is open to homosexuality, its mindset remains clasped in the past. We will constantly deviate from this conversation long enough for the people to forget. Long enough for the Filipinos to forget once more.

This is a nation that has cultivated numerous ideologies and ideas yet has faltered in comprehending them all. There is no grey area. For as long as we keep these topics and issues in the shadows of the conversation, we can never truly taste the fruits of the progress we have long yearned for. Because these should be embedded into the foundations of our social structures and yet they aren’t. Progress isn’t really about technology. Or how many asphalts we’ve paved and concrete we’ve poured. Progress and change still rest on our moral presets. Our values dictate where we trace our future and where we build a better nation. Unless we are willing to open ourselves to new values then we shall remain in the crevices of our past, in the castles of our Medieval mind.

[gelissaleveille]

mother!: an exploration in biblical violence

If you take a glance at the Bible—an anthology of poems, prophecy, and prose—a pattern emerges. Nestled between chapters of instruction are tales written with R-rated carnage. Its violence is breathtaking. Graphic and uncomfortable, the Bible uses many of these stories as metaphors, warning the reader of the consequences of disobedience or failing to honor those around you. I’m not going to be the one to say that I know exactly what the Bible intends to say. Theologians have studied it for years and there’s still more to know. Because of its colorful nature, it’s been the inspiration for much of the Western world’s art. However, in current America, much of culture has changed and has turned away from the demanding confines of religion (that isn’t to say that it doesn’t seep in where it can, being that the U.S. is generally a Christian nation). Film and the Bible have a conflicting relationship. In a medium that attempts to create an immersive world, whether realistic or not, the Bible fits into its own subset of fantastic realism. For some, it is literal. For others, it’s a book of mythology. So what is the filmmaker who wishes to recreate these passages to do? In Darren Aronofsky's mother!, he tackles this problem the only way he knows how: by making something you might wish to never watch again.

mother! tells the story of a husband and wife, who live secluded in a grand house that is under repair. One day, a visitor happens upon their home and this intrusion leads to the cataclysmic demise of the household. Its themes are derived from the creation story and the subsequent fall from God’s grace that Adam and Eve are subjected to. It isn’t violent to the same extremes as some action films, which feel justified in their bloodiness, but it does include violence which is deeply inappropriate. Inappropriate in that it is given to people who really don’t deserve it. The violence depicted in mother! come from Aronofsky’s desire to utilise the sort of violence that is found in the Bible while also describing the allegory what man’s violence does to Earth.

From watching Noah, Aronofsky’s 2014 dramatization of the Great Flood, it is evident that an environmental consciousness underlies the premise. With that film, he hoped to humanize and somewhat villainize Noah and his family for doing what God wanted, even though it would destroy the human race. Because it would destroy the human race. Noah battles with his family, his choice, and his relationship with God because of his insistent following of God’s plan. People died as a direct result of Noah’s choice, but it doesn’t necessarily matter, because they were meant to die anyway.

It seems like there are only two ways to make a Bible-based film. One way, create a warm story loosely inspired by the benevolent platitudes found in old-school Christian sermons. The second way is to create a period piece, make it almost completely literal down to the dialogue, and profit solely off private schools. Aronofsky leans towards the first way, without shying away from the explicit biblical themes. For a long time, Darren Aronofsky was my favorite director. Take note, I had only seen two of his movies (Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream), but I liked how raw they are. His films have a way for biting a hole right into you and digging a finger to make it hurt worse. They tend to deal in the obsessions that ruin people’s lives, which as a consumer that is aware of the evils of capitalism, I appreciate. Humanity is ugly, it is jagged, it is violent. When using the “Good Book” as the foundation of a film, an interesting thing occurs: the violence is erased. When it’s included, the idea of God’s goodness being confronted with his inherent violence is shocking. It also seems impossible to make Bible-based viewers comfortable with the depiction of biblical stories when the director takes a liberal amount of creative freedom. You’re (maybe literally) damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Old Testament violence is insanely violent. It goes beyond the scope of necessity in order to illustrate the ways in which God’s people were not following His plans, or as a direct consequence of their actions. God’s wrath is nothing to toy with, and often it feels unnecessary.

And you know what, maybe it is. I haven’t gotten a chance to make sense of it yet. Is it necessary for artists to represent violence in these ways? When it feels justified—like against criminals or even when depicting historical events—it doesn’t feel noticeable. But when artists frame violence against truly undeserving fictional character, how is the audience meant to react? Should we succumb to the sensibilities of the filmmaker? And do they even need to offer us an explanation? In a way, maybe I’m asking what the point of the film is if people are disgusted straight away. mother! still makes forces me to ask these questions. For many films, there is no real point in their conception. Yet, when making something as an apparent cultural critique, it’s vital for the point to jump out. Even after months of deliberation. Because of this, and also because of Noah, Aronofsky has fallen out of my favor. His interest in critiquing religious lore is poorly framed as pseudo-intellect when it could be something more. And that’s really too bad.   

[greasetanalopez]

TGO QUESTIONNAIRE

PERSONAL

Full name? Santana Anahi Lopez.

Favorite color? Red.

Favorite food? Abuela’s home cooking.

Dream job? Santana doesn’t have high aspirations for herself so she’s never truly contemplated what kind of career she would love to be able to do with the rest of her life. Although, when she was younger, she did dream of being a singer/dancer.

Any pet peeves? Far too many to list.

What are their worst habits? She represses a lot. So much so that she doesn’t deal with things until she blows up and has no choice but to face it. // She sleeps around and it’s gone beyond her simply being unable to express affection in any other way. It’s how she gets validation. How she avoids feelings and situations. It’s something that she’s come to rely on because, somehow, it makes her feel good, wanted and simply helps her forget for a little while. And she’ll often take someone not responding to her advances as a personal slight against her.

Do they hide their emotions or express them openly? Santana does her best to hide her emotions although that becomes a difficult task when she feels something intensely -- like anger.

Who was their first crush? She would never admit it but she had a bit of a crush on Puck when they first met. It’s something that she’s never spoken about, not even to Bree or Puck himself.

Describe their first kiss. They were at a friend’s 9th birthday party when little Michael Davidson took a dare to kiss Santana. He pulled her aside and talked to her for a little bit. When she was in the middle of a sentence, he leaned in and gave her a peck on the lips. A few of the kids nearby that witnessed the event ‘ooh’ed and laughed. None of them really expected Santana to react the way she did -- with a fat lip, Michael fighting off tears, and a furious Santana. // Her first real kiss wouldn’t come until years later where it all happened on her terms and she was the one to make the first move.

Last thing they’ve lied about? Her mother found a wad of cash tucked away in Santana’s jacket, not for the first time and confronted her about it, going so far as to ask if Santana was stripping for the cash. She wasn’t too far off the mark since some of it had come from her online activities but mostly it was money from the Stop. It took her ten minutes of assurances that the money came from waitressing, babysitting jobs, and that some of it came from her simply tucking away a few dollars every now and then.

What’s their outlook on life? Dim. She’s had to witness a lot in her 18 years of life and, because of that, it’s difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. She doesn’t see any hope for herself or the city and she can't even bring herself to try because she knows it’ll only lead to disappointment. The most she can hope for is to be able to tolerate what the future holds for her.

Biggest insecurity? That she’s not enough. Not strong enough to protect her little brother. Not good enough to be loved. Not smart enough to have a future that won’t end in an unplanned pregnancy and living paycheck to paycheck.

Greatest achievement? As lame as it may sound to a lot of people, Santana is extremely proud of having been chosen as captain of the Cheerios. She worked her ass off because, despite what many may think, she actually does enjoy it. And to have Sue, who has made her love of her Social cheerleaders abundantly clear, pick her above the rest of them fills her with a sense of pride.

What do they fear? Snakes. // That she’ll end up like every other woman in the Southside, with a shitty life and no way out.

When was the last time they’ve cried? After Sebastian managed to convince her to take her clothes off for him only to have him walk out on her, appearing disgusted. She cried as she pulled her shirt back on after she was sure that Sebastian wouldn’t be coming back. She’d never felt more humiliated. Not even after her job as a webcam girl was exposed to the whole school. // She almost cried after Marley was Carrie’d at the Bash but she felt more disgusted than she did sad about that situation.

Most embarrassing moment? Having fliers passed around at school, advertising her online activities and implying that she’d exchange sexual favors for money.

Do they have any scars? Santana has a scar on her palm from an incident with a broken window and barely-there scars on her knees from her childhood.

What about tattoos? She doesn’t have any tattoos yet but she plans on getting one sooner or later.

Aesthetic? During school hours, Santana is rarely seen without her Cheerios uniform. Out of the uniform, she’s your typical Greaser. She’ll wear jeans (dark wash) with a low cut top that accentuates her cleavage. Short skirts and skin-tight dresses. While she does own two denim jackets, she is almost never found without her leather jacket. She wears it with everything, wears it with pride. Her hair is typically worn down in loose waves. Her everyday make-up is minimal with only some eyeliner to accentuate her eyes and a little something on her lips -- if not sporting a red lip, her lips are left nude and are perfectly glossed.

HOME LIFE

Who are their parents? (Ideal FCs can be included here) Maribel Lopez Gloria Estefan, Gabriel Lopez Yancey Arias

Do they have any siblings? A little brother named Dylan, after her father’s love of Bob Dylan.

Do they have any pets? They don’t but that works out just fine because, with a baby in the house, there’s enough to deal with without adding a pet to take care of.

Are they in charge of any household duties? (Paying bills, cooking, doing chores) Santana does chores and helps pay bills. She’ll cook if necessary but, for the most part, she prefers to do the eating than the actual preparation of the food.

What is their relationship like with their family? Santana and her mother are close -- as close as she’ll allow herself to get. She knows that she could tell Maribel almost anything and she’ll still be loved, but it’s her desire not to completely disappoint her mother that keeps her telling lies about where she goes and where the money she has comes from. They co-parent little Dylan so they’ve come to really lean on each other. This is a relationship that Santana would never wish to lose. // Santana and her grandmother used to be so close but things started to change as she grew older. She tells herself it’s because of all the lying that she and Alma grew distant but that’s not true. If she’s honest then she’ll admit that she started to pull away from her grandmother once she realized that she was attracted to women. She loves her grandmother so much but if she were to find out about Santana’s sexuality then she’d disown her own grandchild in an instant. And that would kill Santana.

Earliest memory of their family? Being around four years old, sitting on her father’s lap with her little hands on the steering wheel. The car was barely moving but it didn’t change how exhilarating it was for her to feel like she was actually driving. What she remembers most, though, is the sound of her father’s voice as he sung along with the radio and his laughter at whatever silly thing she may have said.

The best memory with their family? While her parents were legally married before she was born, she was six when they decided to renew their vows and have a church wedding. She remembers how happy her grandmother was to have her son finally be married in the eyes of God. She remembers how beautiful her mom looked and how pretty her own dress was. She remembers laughing with her mom and dad and dancing on his feet.

What about the worst? Standing at the graveyard, watching her father’s casket be lowered into the ground. Her grandmother was openly weeping and her hand was linked with that of her mother. They hadn’t stopped touching since they arrived, quietly drawing strength from one another.

Describe their home. It’s a simple four bedroom home. The place is decorated with a combination of her mother’s knick-knacks, pictures of family, and religious objects of her grandmother’s (statute of the Virgin Mary and crucifixes). There is no particular color scheme because it’s a mix of everything as things such as the couch and armchair were bought more based on their functionality and comfort than looks. Despite the mix and match feel to everything, it works. With Dylan around, there is no room that doesn’t have at least one baby object in it, from his toys scattered around the living room and a blankie tossed over the arm of the couch to his little rubber duckie in the bathroom. 

What does their room look like? Santana tries to keep things simple in her room. She sticks to neutral tones with the occasional splash of red here and there. Her bed is soft and, by far, the biggest thing in her room, taking up most of the space. She has a small closet and a dresser where her clothes are typically tucked away into though it’s not uncommon for her to have few articles of clothing on top of the dresser or on the small desk tucked away in a corner of her room. The desk has a lamp and just enough space for her to work with but it’s rarely more than just another flat surface for her to place her belongings on as she tends to sit on her bed while doing her school work. And the desk chair? It’s where she hangs up her leather jacket every time she comes home (with another, old jacket tucked away in the back of her closet). She’s not one for knick-knacks though she does have one or two that her mother gave her. Mostly, she has pictures. By her bedside, she has a picture of Dylan and her mom and another of herself and her father. On her walls, she’s forgone posters, instead choosing to tape up pictures (with a few framed) that she’s collected over the years -- pictures of the lot and her friends, of her cheering and some childhood pictures.

LIMA

What do they love about Lima? The Greasers. Sometimes Santana thinks that she’s made it as long as she has because she has them. Other times they’re just good people to be around. But, mostly, they’re her family.

What do they hate about it? The entire Northside.

When was the first time they realized that not all Lima residents were the same? It wasn’t just one incident that made her realize the truth. She was five and in kindergarten. It started with some teasing of her name and that she could handle. There weren’t that many Santanas running around, after all. But it was what came after that began to open her eyes. The jokes involving her clothes, her mother’s junky old car that she’d pick her up in. Noticing the stark differences between herself and the Socials. It was during that time that she was first called a Greaser. And, maybe, it was that day that changed her. It was as though she were officially branded and she could no longer be sweet and naive.

Do they see any hope for change? Not at all.

Is Lima ‘home’ or do they have plans to leave? Santana doesn’t think that the city, as a whole, would ever truly feel like home, yet she doesn’t see herself ever leaving.

What is their favorite place in Lima? The Lot is like a second home to her. It’s the one place that she doesn’t have to worry about Socials ruining. The one place that she could just be herself and have that be enough. 

If they could change labels for one day, what would be the first thing that they’d do? Use all of that money to get the hell out of Lima.

[khalilhumam]

Diaries from the Frontline: Supporting and Engaging Teachers during COVID-19

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Diaries from the Frontline: Supporting and Engaging Teachers during COVID-19

Schools in most of the world have been closed for the last couple of months and most developing country governments have not yet announced plans for reopening. Teachers are facing a great deal of uncertainty during this time about school reopenings, the impacts of closures on children and their ability to catch them up, and, fundamentally, about their own livelihoods and the economic effects of the crisis. Following the 2008 economic crisis, there was a dip in education spending in lower-middle income countries which did not recover for years. Case studies indicate that many places did not cut teacher salaries, but may have responded by increasing workloads or pupil-teacher ratios, or freezing teacher hiring and salary increases. The economic downturn from coronavirus is expected to be worse than the 2008 financial crisis, but even if countries choose to protect teacher salaries within public budgets, private school teachers will remain vulnerable. Low-cost private schools in particular have been unable to continue paying teacher salaries with schools closed and parents unable to pay fees. Last week we looked at how two education nonprofits are trying to sustain learning from a distance during COVID-19. This week, we are looking at how these organizations are supporting their own teachers and principals. The Citizens Foundation (TCF) and the Luminos Fund are operating in different contexts but both have been able to sustain operations and continue to support teaching staff and other personnel. Their experiences show that teachers, not buildings, are the backbone of any school system. And even while schools are closed, there is evidence that teachers are continuing to keep students engaged with learning.

The Luminos Fund: Teaching during emergencies

Teachers in Luminos’s Second Chance programs are young men and women hired from the counties and communities that Luminos serves. Similar to students, many teachers’ families in Liberia face fragile economic situations during COVID. When the COVID crisis struck, Luminos recognized the importance of keeping staff and teachers on salary even if schools closed. First, from an educational standpoint, if Luminos laid off teachers in Liberia, it would be challenging to be ready to reopen schools or proactively re-enroll students when the crisis ends, particularly if teachers relocate to live with family members. Second, from a humanitarian standpoint, putting a hold on salaries adds enormous financial strain to an already vulnerable population. Holding salaries would actively harm poor families. Thanks to increased flexibility from its core funders, Luminos has been able to continue paying teachers their full salaries. This support has also enabled Luminos to pivot quickly and shift staff from core classroom programming to providing learning materials, rice, soap, and detergent to students’ homes in Liberia.

One of the communities served by a Luminos school.

Teachers have gone above and beyond to help students continue learning during lockdown. Varney is a Second Chance teacher who lives and teaches in a rural village in Liberia. When the government issued guidance to limit gatherings to ten people at the start of coronavirus, he continued teaching his class of 30 children, broken into smaller groups of ten or less. Since the full lockdown began and Luminos began distributing learning materials (which were designed with input from some of Luminos’s teachers), Varney walks by students’ houses, keeping a distance, to give them lessons and make sure they have completed them. He says his students are eager to return to school. Varney and his family, like many teachers, have also been personally affected by COVID: they’ve faced economic hardship and are eating less. Another teacher, James, also goes door-to-door to check on his Second Chance students—from a distance—to ensure they are making use of the books that Luminos provided. He says his students’ families are most concerned about food security, and notes that his own family is also eating less during COVID. He is confident his students will return to school when it reopens but says it will be challenging for them to catch up. He says he hopes this academic year can be extended to ensure these children “come out victoriously.” Other Second Chance teachers do not live in the communities where they teach and, due to the lockdown and curfews, have few options to ensure their students are making progress on the reading and math materials that Luminos provided, or help students on a day-to-day basis. In these cases, Luminos supervisors check in with the students weekly. Luminos’s experiences could provide lessons for Liberia more broadly and other countries. George Werner, former Minister of Education in Liberia and a member of the Luminos Fund’s advisory board, recently observed that the organization’s model for recruiting and training teachers could be scaled to build a cadre of "emergency teachers" to work alongside mainstream systems and provide rapid response capacity to get children back to school after crises like COVID. "The Luminos Fund hires high potential young people who are often only Grade 10 graduates and provides them with three weeks of intensive training followed by weekly in-classroom coaching," Werner says. "For countries with massively stretched school systems and average class sizes already in the 50+ range, this is an effective, practical auxiliary option to educate children. "Education is in an emergency now worldwide, but for many countries in Africa, education has been in an emergency for decades. Normalcy does not apply in an emergency. All emergencies need radical thinking."

TCF: Supporting female teachers

Imagine writing your employer a thank you letter for paying your salary. That’s what happened at TCF last month. When salaries were disbursed in the days before May 1, principals and teachers responded with letters of appreciation, including messages like, “When our world is in lockdown, jobs and salaries are not safe, our organization did not abandon us… Even in this lockdown, we were given our salaries at our doorsteps in a respectful manner. It is rare to find such examples among other organizations.” TCF employs only women on its faculty and is the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. Often, these are young women who got permission from their families to work as teachers because it was seen as a safe and respectable way to engage in employment, even in a small village or katchi abadi (informal settlement or slum). Now with COVID-19, they may be the only ones in their households who are still receiving paychecks on time (or at all) when their husbands, brothers, or fathers may not be. This impacts their role and the way their employment is perceived by their families. Continuing to pay and support teachers and principals has enabled TCF to concentrate on ensuring that children in their schools are cared for and have access to learning materials. Like a group of Teach for Pakistan fellows who evolved the idea of a WhatsApp-based school, TCF school leaders have, on their own initiative, been collecting the phone numbers of their students and forming WhatsApp classrooms using videos, voice notes, and text messages. “Our WhatsApp group has a timetable. Teachers assign tasks based on the timetable, and students share their work on the group, which teachers give them feedback on,” said Sumaira Aslam, a principal in inner-city Karachi. “There are many students who don’t use WhatsApp. For them, we send them the same tasks over SMS. For students we haven’t reached, we have put a sign on the gate and asked teachers to convey the message throughout the community.” Sajida Ambreen, a principal at another school in Karachi, has made students responsible for collecting the phone numbers of their friends. She monitors the participation of students and teachers. “Girls have the strongest participation,” she said, “The boys are busy. But they can listen to the voice note lectures when they get off from work.” She said despite the lockdown boys were working as shopkeepers, drivers, tailors, or doing overnight shifts at the nearby textile mills. “In our community, kids support the parents to run the house. Some parents have just let go and the kids pay their own fees. Others have fathers who are ill.”

TCF principals connecting with students via WhatsApp.

These programs are led by TCF’s principals. To reach the many students who do not have mobile phones or internet, another principal posted notices on the school gates and enlisted the chowkidhar (gatekeeper) to deliver the message to families. Alongside these faculty-led initiatives, TCF is designing learning materials that can be exchanged with teachers via drop-off points in the community. Although families pay a small fee for children to attend schools, TCF operates mostly through philanthropic donations. The current economic recession, combined with the cancellation of fundraising events, could be a threat to TCF’s ongoing ability to cover costs. However, TCF’s philanthropic base is diversified, with a mix of local, diaspora, corporate, foundation, high net worth individuals, and crowd-funded philanthropy. Also, a large proportion of giving to TCF is motivated by zakat, a religious requirement that Muslims must donate 2.5 percent of their wealth. Zakat is calculated as a proportion of wealth, rather than income, so it is less affected by economic cycles of growth and recession. In these uncertain times, these aspects of TCF’s funding model can help protect their large school network.

Next week, we will take a deeper look at how these organizations are planning to prepare teachers, school leaders, and children for school reopenings. Thanks to Maryam Akmal, Dave Evans and Susannah Hares for their helpful comments.

[djseaward]

what you need for a merry little czech easter

the country in which i currently live, the czech republic (or as some are trying to make happen, "czechia"), is currently not known for being a very religious country. they certainly have had their share of religious leaders and famous reformers (such as jan hus and jan of nepomuk), but communism pretty effectively killed off what dedication to religion remained, and the country currently stands as one of the most areligious in europe. 

which is then interesting why last year, in 2016, the parliament successfully voted to make good friday (or rather as czechs call it, big friday - velký pátek) a public holiday, which will officially go into effect for everyone this coming friday. long holidays for everyone! huzzah! 

that shouldn't make a lot of sense, but easter in this country is revered not only for religious reasons, but rather as a spring rite of passage. who doesn't enjoy a long holiday at the chata or a nice easter lunch with babička? (note: going to the grandparents’ house is generally the number one pastime of my students during school holidays, but i digress)

so, i've hung around these parts long enough by now to generally learn all about the nice czech easter traditions here, from the obvious to the not so obvious....

imagine our surprise our very first easter here when alex was presented with a giant white box before easter holidays. when i opened it, i squealed -- it's a giant lamb! lamb cakes, as i've taken to calling them (or beránek) are practically a standard in every kitchen before this holiday. you'd be hard-pressed to find a family not baking a lamb cake around the easter holidays! lamb and rabbit molds are in shops everywhere this time of year, as are the typical chocolate easter bunnies. (but seriously, buy those things early because there is nothing to be found the week of easter in shops!)

additionally, mazanec (easter bread) is also widely baked or purchased and eaten. this bread, i've been told, is essentially the exact same loaf as the christmas vánočka bread, but just in a simple circular loaf form. 

i recently found this advertisement that recently came in the mail quite laughable; the front page seeming to show all the czech easter classics: we got tulips (alright), lamb cake (yep), a sliced ham (uh-huh), and.... big ol' bottle of tullamore dew?

why would a giant bottle of irish whiskey be in the center of this advert? upon investigation, the two reasons for this would be, a) obviously, it's a holiday weekend. drinking with family and friends, and perhaps the biggest reason, b) easter monday festivities. it still is beyond me why easter monday is much more celebrated here than easter sunday, but you'll need to keep some liquor at the ready because that's the day the village (or neighborhood) boys come around, with their easter sticks (woven willow branches, adorned with ribbons called pomlázka) to whack the girls and women of the household.

beating the women on easter. i know.

actually, the reasons behind it seem kind of sweet and endearing. to lightly 'thwack' the women with a (fresh!! always fresh!!) willow branch is said to bring them good health, longevity, and apparently most importantly, fertility. in return, the women should present the visitors with painted eggs, chocolates, and liquor. hence, the tullamore dew.

i myself was thoroughly confused my second easter here when i unassumingly sat outside in the garden reading on a perfectly normal easter monday afternoon only to be ambushed by our neighbors with the pomlázka. it definitely made for a more unforgettable easter monday than most!

another fun tradition: as each day of the week of easter seems to have a special name, thursday's is called "green thursday" (zelený čtvrtek, in english, maundy thursday) and the tradition goes that one should aim for eating loads of green things (cabbage, leafy greens, peas, other spring vegetables) this day. however, we are in the czech republic. this means green beer, and i'm not talking about the dyed atrocity us americans know from our rowdy st. patrick's day celebrations. 

in order to follow this green thursday tradition, the starnobrno brewery created a special green beer, produced only at this time of year and is naturally colored with a secret blend of herbs. it actually tasted very normal to me, but if you'd like to taste a more herbal-tasting green beer, might i direct you to one of my favorite prague breweries?

besides all of the egg dishes that must then be made on or after easter to use up all of those eggs, that's about the run-down for the easter situation in the czech republic. i am really looking forward to a nice cabin holiday in the forest with hopefully good weather -- crossing all fingers and toes, here!

this post is a part of wanderful wednesday. (beer photo via)

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Reopening In The COVID Era: How To Adapt To A New Normal

As many states begin to reopen — most without meeting the thresholds recommended by the White House — a new level of COVID-19 risk analysis begins for Americans.

Should I go to the beach? What about the hair salon? A sit-down restaurant meal? Visit Mom on Mother’s Day?

States are responding to the tremendous economic cost of the pandemic and people’s pent-up desire to be “normal” again. But public health experts remain cautious. In many areas, they note, COVID cases — and deaths — are still on the rise, and some fear new surges will follow the easing of restrictions.

“Reopening is not back to normal. It is trying to find ways to allow people to get back out to do things they want to do, and business to do business,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We can’t pretend the virus has gone away. The vast majority of the population is still susceptible.”

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So far, state rules vary. But they involve a basic theme.

“They are making assumptions that people will use common sense and good public health practice when they go out,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director with the American Public Health Association.

As states start to reopen, people will have to weigh the risk versus benefit of getting out more, along with their own tolerance for uncertainty. The bottom line, health experts say, is people should continue to be vigilant: Maintain distance, wear masks, wash your hands — and take responsibility for your own health and that of those around you.

“It’s clearly too early, in my mind, in many places to pull the stay-at-home rules,” said Benjamin. “But, to the extent that is going to happen, we have to give people advice to do it safely. No one should interpret my comments as being overly supportive of doing it, but if you’re going to do it, you have to be careful.”

An added caveat: All advice applies to people at normal risk of weathering the disease. Those 60 or older and people with underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems should continue staying home.

“Folks who are at higher risk of having a more severe reaction have to continue to be very careful and limit contact with other people,” Plescia said.

So, should I go to the beach?

There’s nothing inherently risky about the beach, said Benjamin. But, again, “if you can, avoid crowds,” he said. “Have as few people around you as possible.”

Maintain that 6-foot distance, even in the water.

“If you are standing close and interacting, there is a chance they could be sick and they may not know it and you could catch it,” Plescia said. “The whole 6-foot distance is a good thing to remember going forward.”

Still, “one thing about the beach or anywhere outside is that there is a lot of good air movement, which is very different than standing in a crowded subway car,” he said.

Even so, recent images of packed beaches and parks raise questions about whether people are able or willing to continue heeding distancing directives.

But if we’re all wearing masks, do we really need to stay 6 feet apart?

Yes, for two reasons. First, while masks can reduce the amount of droplets expelled from the mouth and nose, they aren’t perfect.

Droplets from sneezing, coughing or possibly even talking are considered the main way the coronavirus is transmitted, from landing either on another person or surface. Those who touch that surface may be at risk of infection if they then touch their face, especially the eyes or mouth. “By wearing a mask, I reduce the amount of particles I express out of my mouth,” said Benjamin. “I try to protect you from me, but it also protects me from you.”

And, second, masks don’t protect your eyes. Since the virus can enter the body through the eyes, standing further apart also reduces that risk.

Should I visit Mom on Mother’s Day?

This is a complex choice for many families. Obviously, if Mom is in a nursing home or assisted living, the answer is clearly no, as most care facilities are closed to visitors because the virus has been devastating that population.

There’s still risk beyond such venues. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows 8 out of 10 reported deaths from the coronavirus are among those 65 or older. Underlying conditions, such as heart or lung disease and diabetes, appear to play a role, and older adults are more likely to have such conditions.

So, what if Mom is healthy? There’s no easy answer, public health experts say, because how the virus affects any individual is unpredictable. And visitors may be infected and not know it. An estimated 25% of people show no or few symptoms.

“A virtual gathering is a much safer alternative this year,” said Benjamin.

But if your family insists on an in-person Mother’s Day after weighing Mom’s health (and Dad’s, too, if he’s there), “everyone in the family should do a health check before gathering,” he said. “No one with any COVID symptoms or a fever should participate.”

How prevalent COVID is in your region is also a consideration, experts say, as is how much contact you and your other family members have had with other people.

If you do visit Mom, wear masks and refrain from hugging, kissing or other close contact, Benjamin said.

My hair is a mess. What about going to the salon?

Again, no clear answer. As salons and barbershops reopen in some states, they are taking precautions.

States and professional associations are recommending requiring reservations, limiting the number of customers inside the shop at a given time, installing Plexiglas barriers between stations, cleaning the chairs, sinks and other surfaces often, and having stylists and customers wear masks. Ask what steps your salon is taking.

“Employees should stay home if they are sick or in contact with someone who is sick,” said Dr. Amanda Castel, professor of epidemiology at Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. “Also, employers should make sure they don’t have everyone congregating in the kitchen or break room.”

Some salons or barbers are cutting hair outside, she noted, which may reduce the risk because of better ventilation. Salons should also keep track of the customers they see, just in case they need to contact them later, should there be a reason to suspect a client or stylist had become infected, Castel said.

Consider limiting chitchat during the cut, said Plescia, as talking in close proximity may increase your risk, although “it feels a little rude,” he admitted.

What if your stylist is coughing and sneezing?

“I would leave immediately,” he said.

What about dining at a restaurant?

Many states and the CDC have recommendations for restaurants that limit capacity — some states say 25% — in addition to setting tables well apart, using disposable menus and single-serve condiments, and requiring wait staff to wear masks.

“That’s the kind of thing that does help reduce the chance of spread of infection,” Plescia said.

If your favorite eatery is opening, call to ask what precautions are in place. Make a reservation and “be thoughtful about who you are having dinner with,” said Plescia. Household members are one thing, but “getting into closer physical contact with friends is something people should be cautious about.”

Overall, decide how comfortable you are with the concept.

“If you’re going to go to a restaurant just to sit around and worry, then you might as well do takeout,” he said.

And travel?

Consider your options and whether you really need to go, say experts.

Driving and staying in a hotel may be an option for some people.

If hotels are adequately cleaned between guests, “you could make that work,” said Plescia. Bring cleaning wipes and even your own pillows. Again, though, “if you’re going to see an elderly parent, you don’t want to contract something on the way and give it to them.”

Regarding air travel — airlines are taking steps, such as doing deep cleaning between flights. Fresh and recirculated air goes through special HEPA filters. While there is little specific research yet on the coronavirus and air travel, studies on other respiratory and infectious diseases have generally concluded the overall risk is low, except for people within two rows of the infected person. But a case involving an earlier type of coronavirus seemed to indicate wider possible spread across several rows.

Maintaining distance on the plane and in the boarding process is key.

“Wear a mask on the plane,” said Benjamin.

And plan ahead. How prevalent is the coronavirus in the areas you are traveling to and from? Are there any requirements that you self-isolate upon arrival? How will you get to and from the airport while minimizing your proximity to others?

But if it’s not essential, you might want to think twice right now.

“People who absolutely don’t have to travel should avoid doing it,” said Plescia.

Worship services are important to me. What precautions should be considered?

The distance rule applies as houses of worship consider reopening.

“As much as you can within religious rules, try to avoid contact,” said Benjamin.

He is not giving any advice on Holy Communion, saying that is up to religious leaders. But, he noted, “drinking from the same cup raises the risk if a person is sick or items are touched by anyone who is sick.”

Finally, keep in mind that much is being learned about the virus every day, from treatments to side effects to how it spreads.

“My own personal approach is, try to play it on the cautious side a bit longer,” said Plescia.

Castel agreed.

“We need a little more time to fully understand how COVID-19 works and more time to ramp up our testing, find treatments and hopefully a vaccine,” she said. “We all have social distancing fatigue. But we can continue to save lives by doing this.”

Reopening In The COVID Era: How To Adapt To A New Normal published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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Reopening In The COVID Era: How To Adapt To A New Normal

As many states begin to reopen — most without meeting the thresholds recommended by the White House — a new level of COVID-19 risk analysis begins for Americans.

Should I go to the beach? What about the hair salon? A sit-down restaurant meal? Visit Mom on Mother’s Day?

States are responding to the tremendous economic cost of the pandemic and people’s pent-up desire to be “normal” again. But public health experts remain cautious. In many areas, they note, COVID cases — and deaths — are still on the rise, and some fear new surges will follow the easing of restrictions.

“Reopening is not back to normal. It is trying to find ways to allow people to get back out to do things they want to do, and business to do business,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We can’t pretend the virus has gone away. The vast majority of the population is still susceptible.”

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So far, state rules vary. But they involve a basic theme.

“They are making assumptions that people will use common sense and good public health practice when they go out,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director with the American Public Health Association.

As states start to reopen, people will have to weigh the risk versus benefit of getting out more, along with their own tolerance for uncertainty. The bottom line, health experts say, is people should continue to be vigilant: Maintain distance, wear masks, wash your hands — and take responsibility for your own health and that of those around you.

“It’s clearly too early, in my mind, in many places to pull the stay-at-home rules,” said Benjamin. “But, to the extent that is going to happen, we have to give people advice to do it safely. No one should interpret my comments as being overly supportive of doing it, but if you’re going to do it, you have to be careful.”

An added caveat: All advice applies to people at normal risk of weathering the disease. Those 60 or older and people with underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems should continue staying home.

“Folks who are at higher risk of having a more severe reaction have to continue to be very careful and limit contact with other people,” Plescia said.

So, should I go to the beach?

There’s nothing inherently risky about the beach, said Benjamin. But, again, “if you can, avoid crowds,” he said. “Have as few people around you as possible.”

Maintain that 6-foot distance, even in the water.

“If you are standing close and interacting, there is a chance they could be sick and they may not know it and you could catch it,” Plescia said. “The whole 6-foot distance is a good thing to remember going forward.”

Still, “one thing about the beach or anywhere outside is that there is a lot of good air movement, which is very different than standing in a crowded subway car,” he said.

Even so, recent images of packed beaches and parks raise questions about whether people are able or willing to continue heeding distancing directives.

But if we’re all wearing masks, do we really need to stay 6 feet apart?

Yes, for two reasons. First, while masks can reduce the amount of droplets expelled from the mouth and nose, they aren’t perfect.

Droplets from sneezing, coughing or possibly even talking are considered the main way the coronavirus is transmitted, from landing either on another person or surface. Those who touch that surface may be at risk of infection if they then touch their face, especially the eyes or mouth. “By wearing a mask, I reduce the amount of particles I express out of my mouth,” said Benjamin. “I try to protect you from me, but it also protects me from you.”

And, second, masks don’t protect your eyes. Since the virus can enter the body through the eyes, standing further apart also reduces that risk.

Should I visit Mom on Mother’s Day?

This is a complex choice for many families. Obviously, if Mom is in a nursing home or assisted living, the answer is clearly no, as most care facilities are closed to visitors because the virus has been devastating that population.

There’s still risk beyond such venues. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows 8 out of 10 reported deaths from the coronavirus are among those 65 or older. Underlying conditions, such as heart or lung disease and diabetes, appear to play a role, and older adults are more likely to have such conditions.

So, what if Mom is healthy? There’s no easy answer, public health experts say, because how the virus affects any individual is unpredictable. And visitors may be infected and not know it. An estimated 25% of people show no or few symptoms.

“A virtual gathering is a much safer alternative this year,” said Benjamin.

But if your family insists on an in-person Mother’s Day after weighing Mom’s health (and Dad’s, too, if he’s there), “everyone in the family should do a health check before gathering,” he said. “No one with any COVID symptoms or a fever should participate.”

How prevalent COVID is in your region is also a consideration, experts say, as is how much contact you and your other family members have had with other people.

If you do visit Mom, wear masks and refrain from hugging, kissing or other close contact, Benjamin said.

My hair is a mess. What about going to the salon?

Again, no clear answer. As salons and barbershops reopen in some states, they are taking precautions.

States and professional associations are recommending requiring reservations, limiting the number of customers inside the shop at a given time, installing Plexiglas barriers between stations, cleaning the chairs, sinks and other surfaces often, and having stylists and customers wear masks. Ask what steps your salon is taking.

“Employees should stay home if they are sick or in contact with someone who is sick,” said Dr. Amanda Castel, professor of epidemiology at Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. “Also, employers should make sure they don’t have everyone congregating in the kitchen or break room.”

Some salons or barbers are cutting hair outside, she noted, which may reduce the risk because of better ventilation. Salons should also keep track of the customers they see, just in case they need to contact them later, should there be a reason to suspect a client or stylist had become infected, Castel said.

Consider limiting chitchat during the cut, said Plescia, as talking in close proximity may increase your risk, although “it feels a little rude,” he admitted.

What if your stylist is coughing and sneezing?

“I would leave immediately,” he said.

What about dining at a restaurant?

Many states and the CDC have recommendations for restaurants that limit capacity — some states say 25% — in addition to setting tables well apart, using disposable menus and single-serve condiments, and requiring wait staff to wear masks.

“That’s the kind of thing that does help reduce the chance of spread of infection,” Plescia said.

If your favorite eatery is opening, call to ask what precautions are in place. Make a reservation and “be thoughtful about who you are having dinner with,” said Plescia. Household members are one thing, but “getting into closer physical contact with friends is something people should be cautious about.”

Overall, decide how comfortable you are with the concept.

“If you’re going to go to a restaurant just to sit around and worry, then you might as well do takeout,” he said.

And travel?

Consider your options and whether you really need to go, say experts.

Driving and staying in a hotel may be an option for some people.

If hotels are adequately cleaned between guests, “you could make that work,” said Plescia. Bring cleaning wipes and even your own pillows. Again, though, “if you’re going to see an elderly parent, you don’t want to contract something on the way and give it to them.”

Regarding air travel — airlines are taking steps, such as doing deep cleaning between flights. Fresh and recirculated air goes through special HEPA filters. While there is little specific research yet on the coronavirus and air travel, studies on other respiratory and infectious diseases have generally concluded the overall risk is low, except for people within two rows of the infected person. But a case involving an earlier type of coronavirus seemed to indicate wider possible spread across several rows.

Maintaining distance on the plane and in the boarding process is key.

“Wear a mask on the plane,” said Benjamin.

And plan ahead. How prevalent is the coronavirus in the areas you are traveling to and from? Are there any requirements that you self-isolate upon arrival? How will you get to and from the airport while minimizing your proximity to others?

But if it’s not essential, you might want to think twice right now.

“People who absolutely don’t have to travel should avoid doing it,” said Plescia.

Worship services are important to me. What precautions should be considered?

The distance rule applies as houses of worship consider reopening.

“As much as you can within religious rules, try to avoid contact,” said Benjamin.

He is not giving any advice on Holy Communion, saying that is up to religious leaders. But, he noted, “drinking from the same cup raises the risk if a person is sick or items are touched by anyone who is sick.”

Finally, keep in mind that much is being learned about the virus every day, from treatments to side effects to how it spreads.

“My own personal approach is, try to play it on the cautious side a bit longer,” said Plescia.

Castel agreed.

“We need a little more time to fully understand how COVID-19 works and more time to ramp up our testing, find treatments and hopefully a vaccine,” she said. “We all have social distancing fatigue. But we can continue to save lives by doing this.”

Reopening In The COVID Era: How To Adapt To A New Normal published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/