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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel

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lilydalexf · 4 years ago

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Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Rae

Rae has 16 stories at Gossamer. If you like MSR, you should go check them out, including (but not limited to) the fun-titled, banter-filled The Cat, an Espresso and a Bag of Sunflower Seeds. Big thanks to Rae for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It surprises me that anyone reads my fanfic at all, let alone they are reading it 20 years after I wrote it!

But in the same vein, I am still actively reading xfiles fanfic and I tend to read the older fics, or new fics by authors I recognize or remember from back in the day. I cannot explain this lack of rationale. 🤷

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I had a great experience with the X-Files fandom! I made some fantastic friends - many even attended my wedding! I didn't really get involved in the dramas that went on. I was aware of it, but really, I just wanted to discuss my show with people that loved it like I did and read the fic, so I ignored all the other static.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Mainly message boards. AOL chat rooms, Yahoo groups, etc. We would all sign on after the episode aired and chat about it. Deconstruct it. And then we started traveling to meet each other and the real fun began!

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

It was definitely a growing experience. It forced me to step outside my comfort zone a little bit. Traveling to NYC, LA and Chicago to meet people just to fangirl with. Meeting Gillian and getting a picture with her - it was wild.

Different shared experiences that "real life" family and friends just didn't understand. It was fun and exciting.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

So I came to the show late in the game. I was sick, lying in bed channel surfing and caught the last 5 minutes of Fight the Future and immediately wanted to know why this woman was sitting in the snow holding onto this man. I spent the summer recording episodes on FX during the week and watching them all weekend and was somehow able to pretty much catch up on the first 6 seasons in time for the 7th season premiere.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

In my quest to know all the things that summer before the 7th season, I discovered AOL chat rooms that led me to different discussions on the show in general and at one point, a link was posted to whatever fanfic was hot that minute and I was instantly hooked.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I often feel like a wallflower at a party. I'm on the fringe, looking in to see what's going on. I don't bother anyone and most people don't even know I'm there. Every now and then I'll send feedback on a story, or I might even participate in a random discussion, but I feel it's a little more difficult these days without the chatrooms and discussion boards. Following people on tumblr or twitter and trying to engage in those platforms is more awkward since it feels so much more personal. It's like I'm intruding on someone's personal space. Or having to scroll through non-fandom stuff to find the fic. The message boards were a more even playing field I guess? It's hard to explain.

When I'm hardcore searching for something...anything to read, I'll refer to "The Classics" list. There are still many on there I haven't read.

I miss ephemeral.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

No. No other characters have ever interested me beyond the story we're given within the confines of the show/movie/book like Mulder and Scully did. My friends would dive into Harry Potter or Marvel or (fill in the blank with anything) and I would try to get excited, but there's nothing.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

Well, Scully because she's so bad-ass. She's always so certain of her convictions. We don't see her second-guess herself often.

Anne of Green Gables because against all odds, she still sees the beauty in everything.

Jo in Little Women because she is just so tenacious. She knows what she wants.

Hermione in Harry Potter. She knows the most important thing she'll do is help Harry and there is value in that, so she gives it all she's got.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I do. A couple of years after the original run was over, I lost a dear friend (met because of XF) and then later I had my first baby and life just got busy in a very different way so I fell out of the fandom and just dropped all of it.

And then there was the revival. I waited until all episodes aired and then binge-watched them. And I did the same with season 11, but waited about 6 mos after it aired to watch it, rewatching the whole series from the beginning, first.

But now I turn it on a few times a week while I'm folding laundry or making dinner or some other chore. It's nice to have it on in the background because I don't have to pay close attention because I know what's going to happen. I've actually watched the whole series a few times this way.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I still read XF fic. It's still my favorite thing to read. I am always looking for the next great fic to lose myself in. Back in the day, I would read any pairing, any genre...I was game for anything, as long as it was XF fic. I'm a little more choosy, now, but only because my free-time is more limited. I only want to read MSR and I'm not at all interested in revival fics.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I am partial to the novel-length AU and canon-divergent stories. I love everything by Prufrock's Love and Bonetree. I have read Paracelsus, A Moment in the Sun and the Goshen/Secret World series countless times. Journal 1999 and Journal 2000 by MD1016, The Mastodon Diaries by akaJake, Blinded by White Light by Dashak, Deliverance From Evil by Char Chaffin and Tess.

I could go on all day.

My absolute favorite story is Arizona Highways by Fialka.

I am partial to Scully angst. And the Emily storyline just kills me, so when authors take those elements and write a kick-ass story, I am there for it.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

How awful is it that I had to look up my fics to answer this question? I don't know that I have a favorite. That's like asking a mother which child she favors. Maybe One of the Damned.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

I won't say never, but I don't think so. I've tried to start one or two with some ideas I've had, but I haven't gotten far with them.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

No. I don't even have time to read as often as I would like to.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Usually what if scenarios - I try to work out different ways the story could go in my head. I would usually have the guts of the story written in my head before I typed the first word.

What's the story behind your pen name?

There was already a well-known Rachel posting fic when I got started, so I just decided to go with a nickname - Rae.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

My husband is crazy supportive and tries to convince me to write again All. The. Time. I never hid my XF obsession from anyone, but I don't think I told many people about my writing.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I am on tumblr and twitter, but like I said above, I don't really post. All of my stories are at Gossamer.

(Posted by Lilydale on February 9, 2021)

#new post #old school x #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #xf fanfic author interviews #rae

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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I think I’m just gonna ramble a bit-- nothing earthshaking-- so here’s a nice, unrelated picture of Cooler to set that up.

I managed to get through Camp Nano in April with about an hour to spare. I’m still frustrated with my pacing, because I’ve gotten pretty good at finishing the November writing goals with time to spare, but I always end up falling behind on the shorter goals I try to do during the rest of the year. July is up next, so I’m kind of hoping I can turn this around by then.

April was difficult all over, so I’m trying to use May to chill the fuck out. Somehow I find that hard to do. Like if I’m relaxing, I just get bored or feel unproductive. That’s one reason I’m writing this post. I just want to get some thoughts out of my head so I can move on.

For whatever reason, I got sucked into watching YouTube videos about the Nostalgia Critic and his various blunders from 2012 to present. That sounds pretty sad now that I write it out, because I never followed the guy that closely, so I keep forgetting the hellacious filming schedule discussed in the Change the Channel movement happened years earlier, and the movies themselves were ridiculed as debacles, so it’s not just one bad year, more like nine or ten. Anyway, watching all of this has given me some stuff to think about.

I think I first heard about the NC when he started doing that “feud” with the Angry Video Game Nerd. They did some videos together teasing a crossover, and then they finally went through with it, and it wasn’t terrible, but I had no idea who the other guy was. It was like Batman teaming up with some indie comics character you never heard of. Batman doesn’t need the rub. From the beginning, I got the sense that Nostalgia Critic was the one driving this concept. Once I heard about Channel Awesome and all these YouTube reviewers crossing over with each other, I was sure of it.

Looking back on it all, I get the sense that NC has never really had much of a creative agenda. His early work involved “reviewing” movies by playing long clips of them to recap the plot, and then making some snarky commentary. Not the worst format, except he kept getting copyright strikes from YouTube, which was why he started his own website to host his videos. Over the years, it feels like people have begun to recognize the flaw in that format. Past a point, you’re not really “reviewing” anything. It’s more like an MST3K style thing, only shorter and less authorized.

Years ago, I used to read this site called “The Agony Booth”, which sort of did the same thing but in text. Before YouTube really got going, the only way to lambast a movie or TV episode properly was to meticulously describe it in prose, with the occasional screenshot here and there. Nostalgia Critic probably represents a point where people realized they could do the same thing in video form, except it starts to cross the line from commentary to something else. Siskel and Ebert never did a blow-by-blow synopsis of a movie. Reviewers like the Agony Booth crew did, because they were often discussing old material, and couldn’t show it to you or assume that you had seen it yourself. A lot of NC’s early stuff was the same deal, where he’d recall something from his childhood and rewatch it to see how it holds up in the present. So I’m sure a lot of his content covered old, out-of-circulation things. But he’d do more recent stuff too, and the attitude surrounding YouTube at the time was that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted as long as you kept it under ten minutes.

Anyway, the Channel Awesome thing looked like an alliance of similar YouTube reviewers, and they kept appearing in each other’s stuff, and then they did the anniversary movies, which were basically “mega crossovers” with all of them appearing together in the same... story, I guess? At the time, I wrote the whole thing of as a masturbatory power fantasy. Comic books did crossovers like these all the time, and YouTube seemed to have hundreds of “reviewers” and “personalities” who would put on silly costumes and carry toy weapons like they were about to fight Thanos instead of discussing the ALF cartoon. The second Channel Awesome movie was about high fantasy tropes, and the third one was a space opera, so that seemed to support my assumption.

From watching all these videos about the movies, though, it looks more like each one was mostly about the Nostalgia Critic talking all his “friends” into another one of his kooky schemes, and they all just sort of go along with it, even though they know him to be a self-centered jerk. Then the third one ends with NC quantum-leaping out of the story itself and meeting Doug Walker, the guy who writes and plays the character. They try to sell the audience on the idea that NC had some sort of character development across the three movies, and he decides to sacrifice himself to save the day or something. This was touted as the finale for the character. Except it turned out later that Doug Walker wasn’t just playing a self-centered jerk, he really was a self-centered jerk, because he treated the others like crap during the filming and didn’t tell any of them that he was killing off their website’s top draw.

That leads into Demo Reel, the series Doug Walker introduced to fill the void. From what I’ve seen, it sure looked like he wanted/expected this to be a big hit, and he killed off his biggest meal ticket to make this happen. But everyone hated it. I think the pilot episode asks the question “What is Demo Reel?” about three times. Each time, the answer makes less and less sense. “Demo Reel” the show is about a studio named “Demo Reel”, run by Donnie DuPre, a self-centered jerk who seems to think there’s big money to be made in plagiarizing movies. The whole thing is just a flimsy plot device to explain why Doug Walker and two other actors would bother making a no-budget parody/re-telling of three Batman movies smooshed together. There’s no real-world or fictional reason for three people to do this, it’s just that Doug Walker wanted to make a YouTube video about Batman, but he didn’t want to use the NC format, and he couldn’t just talk over a Batman movie without getting in trouble with Warner Bros. And I guess just... dressing up like Batman and making jokes needs some sort of context, so that’s where the Demo Reel concept comes in.

What really annoys me is that Demo Reel has this “mockumentary” thing going on at the same time, so you end up watching their parody movie and the scenes where they make the parody movie, and you get these interview segments where they talk about talking about making the parody movie. It’s like “The Office” except every character is completely delusional. They’ve all convinced themselves that this is a really good idea, and I guess the joke is that this is a really stupid job and they must be pretty stupid to work at it.

No one knows where Demo Reel was originally headed, because it was so reviled by the audience that it got cancelled in five episodes, ending with the revelation that Donnie DuPre was the Nostalgia Critic all along, in some sort of amnesiac state. Or maybe that was the plan all along, I’m not sure which scenario would be dumber, honestly. New Coke was a sincere effort to phase out the original Coca-Cola formula, but it was such a failure that everyone thinks it was a brilliant ploy to make consumers appreciate the original. So who knows?

Anyway, this started the next phase of NC, where he would just remake scenes of whatever movie he’s covering that week, a la Demo Reel. I don’t know if that’s just a strategy to avoid YouTube copyright strikes, or a stubborn refusal to give up the core concept of Demo Reel, or what. Then he got around to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, and everyone crapped on that, big time. I haven’t seen the original movie or his “review”, but from what I gathered, Doug

a) basically did a shot-for-shot remake of the movie, only shorter and cheaper.

b) spent the whole video lambasting the movie and the band for making it.

c) offered his parody songs for sale on iTunes, calling them a “love letter to Pink Floyd.”

The big question is: Why did he put so much work into making the thing when he had so little to actually say about it? There’s no clear opinion expressed about the movie, even though the video is supposed to be a “review”. He kind of acts like he thought “The Wall” was okay, but the parody lyrics read like the awkward part of a celebrity roast. Why go to all this trouble unless you really love or absolutely despise “The Wall”?

Eventually, I started to figure out that this guy really just doesn’t have much to say. He wants to make videos, make movies, make reviews, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any real opinion or thought that he wants to express. I was watching him freak out over the credit card scene from “Batman and Robin” and thought “Are you that upset over Batman having a credit card?” That’s not even in the top twenty dumbest things in that movie. Sure, it’s worth a snide remark, but not much more than that. But he’s “doing a character”, and the NC’s whole schtick is to flip out over stuff like that.

Except it’s not a character, because NC is just Doug Walker wearing a stupid hat, right? In the movies, NC’s whole persona is that he’s a self-centered jerk who treats his friends like a personal army, and the real Doug Walker was doing the exact same thing off-camera. Donnie DuPre was another “character”, wearing a different hat, only whoops, he’s the Nostalgia Critic too. And even if he wasn’t the same guy, his persona was... you guessed it, a self-centered jerk who treats his friends like a personal army.

There was this whole era on YouTube where it seemed like all these “content creators” were trying to adopt silly gimmicks. I’m guessing the Angry Video Game Nerd started the trend, because he dressed up in a white button-down shirt with a pocket protector and glasses. He looked like a stereotypical nerd, you see. And he’d drink a particular kind of beer, and lose his temper and set Nintendo cartridges on fire, because AVGN was a character. You watch James Rolfe being himself and he’s a whole other person, always smiling and talking about horror movies and filmmaking, because that’s what the real guy is about. There’s a separation there.

I think that was the disconnect. A lot of these YouTubers saw James Rolfe playing the Nerd and just assumed the secret was to rant and rave about some topic, and he used a Nintendo Zapper to shoot a pickle monster once, so dressing up like a Power Ranger in a trenchcoat didn’t seem like a bridge too far. Well, no not if you’re trying to make a movie or tell a story. If all you want to do is talk about Star Wars, you should probably keep it simple. I think one of the consequences of Nostalgia Critic’s fall from grace is that modern YouTubers are more grounded. I’ve watched a lot of Jenny Nicholson videos and she’s pretty funny and animated, but she’s not trying to be a charicture of herself. She’s just this lady sitting on her bed surrounded by porg dolls. It works a lot better.

I used to watch the Game Overthinker unironically. Does anyone remember Moviebob? Well once upon a time he wasn’t completely bonkers. The GO series was reasonably well done and uncomplicated... until the dude started appearing on camera and introducing “characters” and storylines that killed whatever point he was trying to make in his video essays. Then I started watching him ironically, and then I sort of stopped caring about him altogether, and then he pissed away whatever goodwill he had. I can’t help but feel like he might have been better off just staying behind the camera, or if he had to be on-screen, just sit on a bed with a bunch of Mario dolls or whatever.

The fad of YouTube personality as wannabe superhero got me thinking of the whole “Mary Sue” and “self-insert” thing. They’re really poorly defined terms, and they’ve been overused in so many unfair criticisms that I don’t think they make much sense anymore. When I first got into fanfic, I saw a lot of people simply writing themselves into their stories. That’s what a self-insert was. You literally inserted yourself in the story so you could tell Wolverine to his face that his haircut looks stupid, or whatever you wanted to say to him. I always found this idea infuriating, because I know who Wolverine is, but this other guy telling him off is a complete stranger, and why should I care about him? Why should Wolverine care?

One response to that problem would be to present your self-insert like a bigger deal than you are. You could put yourself in this story and not only talk to Wolverine, but give yourself an elaborate backstory, where you’re a high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, and you and Logan go way back, etc., etc. But that’s a tricky proposition, because if you’re doing it right, you’re just inventing a new character with the same name as you. Or you can overdo it and make the character too big a deal, at the risk of outshining the other characters. The Mary Sue concept originated from this, with Star Trek fanzines getting all these story submissions about young, super-talented ensigns who join the crew and immediately win over Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

The dirty little secret of character creation is that every character you write is a self-insert or an author surrogate, to some degree. You can have one that’s meant to be your alter ego, the one who’s based on you and tends to react the way you would in a similar situation. But you’re writing all the other characters too, and deciding what they think and say and do, so to a certain point they also think a lot like you do, whether you meant for them to or not. The trick is not to be super-blatant about it, or to revel in the creative freedom to break the fourth wall. Readers hate that stuff, because they don’t know you well enough to get the joke.

That’s the advice I’ve always had at the ready in case anyone ever asked me. But, watching all this stuff about the Nostalgia Critic has made me realize that it applies from the other direction. It’s very easy to say you’ve created a character, distinct from yourself, only for it to turn out to be more of a reflection of you than you intended. I can’t tell if Doug Walker is self-aware or not, but it seems like the joke with all his “characters” is that they’re extremely selfish and shallow, and yet he seems to also be selfish and shallow. So is he aware of this, and he’s trying to exaggerate his flaws for his characters? Or does he just not realize that he’s telling on himself every time he plays these roles? Or does he think everyone is selfish and shallow, and that this is just boilerplate information, like blinking and wearing shoes?

I’ll pick on myself, because it’s handier to do so. I’ve made a bunch of original characters over the years, some that were supporting players, and others who were designed to be big deals. One of my villains was this bitter misanthrope, and eventually I realized that I was a lot more like him than the outgoing group of buddies that he was trying to oppose. That hit me and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with that ever since.

I wrote a butler in my Hellsing fic, basically an anti-Walter based on Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones movies. He was clueless and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and he was really old, so he told the vampires that if he ever had a heart attack and dropped dead on the job that they shouldn’t pass up the free meal. Is that me in there? I tend to think a lot about the world moving on without me, and my own obsolescence. I just didn’t think I was tapping into that when I wrote the character. I wouldn’t even bring it up, except I liked writing the guy so much, and that’s the main thing I remember about him.

A lot of my villains in Luffa are representations of things that I’d like to see punched, because Luffa is an unapologetic Mary Sue Self Insert. I made her all these other things that I’m not: brave, a woman of color, a good cook, a charismatic lover. But fuck that, this was all just a ploy to keep people from noticing any resemblance to me and my imaginary punching agenda. But the villains hold all these shitty attitudes and shitty behaviors, things which I consider to be wrong but sometimes catch myself turning a blind eye to. Jealousy, greed, fear, resentment, and so on.

You end up putting a lot of yourself into your writing, there’s really no way to avoid it. The only real trick is to disguise it a bit so it looks like a story instead of just an essay or an autobiography. I think that’s where some of the YouTube personalities got it wrong, because they would try to tell a story AND write an essay at the the same time, and that’s tough to pull off. One of the big things that came out of that whole Channel Awesome document was this problematic scene in “To Boldly Flee” where Linkara has been replaced by a cyborg duplicate, and he converts Lindsey Ellis into a cyborg, and someone hears all these suggestive noises and thinks they’re having rough sex. It’s awkward anyway you slice it, but it gets even worse because it’s basically the real Linkara and Lindsey Ellis. Their “characters” are so poorly distinguished from the real people that there’s no other way to describe it.

Also, one of the most salient points I picked up from watching all these commentary videos is that real people can’t have character arcs. You can’t just stick Filmdude and Captain Snark and Filmdudette and Movie Sniffer and The Comics Complainer all into the same scene and expect anything important to happen to any of them. They can’t learn anything or grow in any appreciable way during the story, because they’re real and the story is fictional. The only “character” to their roles are the bit where they review pop culture stuff, which might as well be non-fictional, so why bother? Even if I’m wrong, and there really is a more complete fictionalized version of everybody in the Channel Awesome Trilogy, the waters are so muddied that you can’t make sense of it.

And that’s the real danger of leaning too hard into putting a 1:1 replica of yourself into your stories. Stephen King can be a bus driver in one of his movies, and Stan Lee can be a bus driver in Avengers 3, but if Stan Lee just started kicking the shit out of Ultron it’d be confusing, especially for people who didn’t know who he was. And if Joss Whedon started kicking the shit out of Ultron, it’d be even worse, because he’s not as well-known as Stan Lee. You’re better off making up a guy like Thor or the Hulk who can do it for you, and then putting just enough of yourself into those characters that you won’t get caught.

At least, that’s how I see it.

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finding-fallen-stars · 4 years ago

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YGO Questionnaire Part 2 Electric Boogaloo

So, my gf/bf @howaboutalittlehelpneos tagged me to do this again a... good long while ago, and I had wanted to wait until I'd finished my GX rewatch before trying this again. But ouch oof I accidentally also got through all of 5Ds again before getting to this lol

But the 5Ds rewatch definitely reshaped a lot of my thoughts, so... cracks knuckles. This won't be spoiler free, fair warning~

Favorite Series: ugh the formatting killed my original essay on this but okay GX and 5Ds are pretty tied in my book, now-- I love them equally, but in different ways! GX fulfills my love for subversive coming-of-age stories with a heartwarming, humorous, and also soulcrushing touch, and I love how each season brings a new story and new characters-- it's like reading installments of a novel series, and I think the formatting works wonders for it as a whole. It has some absolutely phenomenal character writing, too-- even the characters I dislike are ones I can appreciate for what they introduce to the story! And honestly, not enough people give the first two seasons of GX the credit it deserves: they're half the charm, really. How are you going to feel the full impact of the heartbreaking content in seasons 3 and 4 if you aren't properly attached to the characters?

But on 5Ds's side of things... it fulfills my love for stories with time loops, found family, human nature, and of course, love and death and how they intertwine. I love how the leading characters are just a bunch of broken kids from broken circumstances who all find a home with each other, and of course, how it highlights class disparity and how fucked up the prison/"justice" systems are. Yea, sure, maybe it underwent executive meddling and all, but I genuinely love it for what it is and I wish more people appreciated it... my only problem with 5Ds is the untwist with Z-ONE and then the ending s m h I adore it overall and I could go off for a long while on it. Overall, these are my two instinctive recommendations for anyone getting into Yugioh!

(look at these boys they're so important) Favorite Protagonist: Oh, believe me, absolutely nothing has changed here-- Yusei Fudo is and always will be my favorite protagonist, and my rewatch only solidified that.

I just... love him so much? He's seen so much hell in his life and carries so much guilt on his shoulders, but he still has room in his heart to believe in others and to believe that anyone can defy fate and find hope even at rock bottom. I love that he's initially introduced as this quiet, brooding figure when he really just turns out to be a huge softie who wears his heart on his sleeve half the time and wants to bring about change for Satellite and its people. Plus I just really love that his greatest flaw is something that would ordinarily be a positive trait-- he's Overly self-sacrificial, to the point where he's basically setting himself on fire to keep others warm, and that's not really framed as something Heroic

Just... he makes me so happy. I have two Yusei charms that I ordinarily keep on my keys (one was a gift from Zenzen) and they're a constant source of serotonin for me. He's Peak comfort character for me. Best protag in my book Favorite Rival: Same deal here-- still Manjoume!

look at him he's so important

While he spends a lot of the anime getting the good old damsel in distress treatment (getting suckered into a cult, getting knocked into a coma, becoming a zombie, getting fucking Killed, etc), I still think his character arc is really well-written overall and I only appreciated it even more when I watched GX again. I love the fact that he's got a soft heart he buries beneath the edgy facade, and that he's simultaneously really sharp and also kind of dense lol. He's just a fun character and watching how he evolves from episode one to episode one hundred eighty is such a satisfying journey.

Plus, props to him for being such a versatile duelist-- 50 wins in a row is HARD as is, let alone with a deck full of cards he just found laying around in the Arctic. Three ace monsters, three different archetypes... he's a really good duelist and I'm proud of him for it

Oh, but honestly, I don't really dislike any of the rivals-- I'm neutral towards Revolver and Reiji, but the remaining four (Kaiba, Manjoume, Jack, and Shark) compel me. yes I accidentally wound up liking Jack Atlas shhh Favorite BFF: Honestly, I really like most of the characters who fit this archetype-- Joey, Crow, Gongenzaka, Soulburner... I still lean a little bit more towards Joey, but I really appreciate all four of them. I'm gonna say Joey again, just because I find his evolution as a character the most compelling, but I appreciate the other three a lot. Soulburner has the best design though Favorite GFF: Oh absolutely still Aki, but I honestly... really love most female Yugioh characters? I'm assuming this is lead girls only, but like. I'm dumb and gay and I love Girls so this is naturally the most difficult one for me to answer lol

Aki just resonates with me the most because she's the prime example of how trauma doesn't always manifest in palatable ways-- when we first meet her, she's angry and lashes out at anyone and anything just because she wants the world to suffer in the same ways she's suffered, and then... we get to watch her grow from that, once she's free from Divine and able to heal the way she needs to heal. I know the second half of 5Ds didn't give her character the attention it deserved, but I'm still proud of her for winding up on the path she did-- seeing her channel her power and energy into wanting to heal and help others was just so good and was one of the few things I really Loved about the 5Ds ending.

oh, but like. Asuka Tenjoin and Aoi Zaizen are very close seconds for me!!! Aki just has a vice grip on my heart Favorite Villain: Okay, it's still technically Vector-- I think he's the most entertaining, well-written, and effective villain out of all of the ones we've seen so far, but... I also want to add Takuma Saiou and then all of Yliaster as honorable mentions?

As someone fond of tarot myself, I was naturally pretty intrigued by Saiou the first time I watched GX, but my attachment to him only grew the second time around where I actually got the chance to understand his character better. Plus, like... the visuals with him are fucking astounding and he's always so interesting to watch.

As for Yliaster, I just... really love how the big bad of 5Ds turned out to just essentially be a broken man desperate to save anyone and anything and three robotic reconstructions of the friends he'd lost. I still think the untwist with Z-ONE was stupid and I much prefer the idea of him and Yusei being the same person, but I'm still compelled by the other three-- well. Paradox less so, because we don't get a lot of Paradox lore, but. Aporia and Antinomy for sure.

ugh Yugioh has some damn good villains

Favorite Card: now that I actually play the TCG game...

Stardust is always going to be my favorite of all cards because it checks every box for me (my favorite YGO character's ace monster, space theme, what more could I want), but Aromaseraphy Rosemary has really become one of my aces in my best TCG deck! I'm still mastering irl plays, but I'm happy with my progress and I love my plant gang...

Favorite Episode: alright, here's where there's actually been a Lot of change, so...

Season 0: Episode 16: "Turnabout by a Hair's Breadth - The White-Robed Crisis" -- The more I think about this one, the more I love it; there's a... lot of corruption in the medical industry, and I've seen a lot of it firsthand, so just. Seeing a corrupt doctor get what he deserved at the end was cathartic, in a way? Plus, a Jounouchi-centric episode is always a good time.

Duel Monsters: Episodes 96-97: "Darkness vs. Darkness/One Turn Kill" -- this hasn't changed, I still love seeing Marik and Bakura bitch at each other for two whole episodes LMAO

GX: Episode 152: "Activate Super-Fusion! Rainbow Neos" -- This one hasn't changed and it likely never will-- I take so much pride in seeing Judai push forward, past the fear and guilt he's carrying, all to save Johan... it's cathartic and I never get sick of watching it.

5Ds: sweats. still all of Crash Town, but also episodes 137-147-- the Ark Cradle is one of my favorite parts of 5Ds and one of my favorite YGO arcs period, and even though each duel is a fucking gut punch, I love the emotional intensity and weight in each episode... It hurts but in a mostly good way

Zexal: Episode 143: "The Aloof Duelist 'Nasch': The Destined Final Duel" -- this one hasn't changed! Still hurts, still love it, I still weep over Ryouga Shark Kamishiro on a daily basis

Arc-V: Episodes 81-82: "Our Respective Battlefields/The Ultimate Falcon VS The Black-Feathered Thunder" -- Okay, honestly, this was hard because I... genuinely. really don't like Arc-V very much at all lol (it's just not my cup of tea, but more power to those who do like it!), but I thought this duel was a lot of fun! Shun is my absolute favorite from Arc-V and I really like the friendship he struck up with Crow a lot, so here we are

VRAINS (so far): Episode 25-26: "Virus Deck Operation/Three Draws Leading to Hope" -- honestly I am so biased because I just really love Blue Angel and I loved seeing her get a well-deserved victory like this lol. I'm not done with VRAINS, so this is probably gonna change, but anytime Blue Angel or Soulburner are on screen, I'm happy

Favorite Decks to Use: Aromages will always have my heart, but I adore Cyber Angels too! I'm building my Trickstar deck, my Synchron/Stardust deck (just waiting on Dawn of Majesty...), and my Magician Girls deck, too! Fusion, Ritual, Synchro, XYZ, Pendulum, or Link?: Synchros my beloved... but also Ritual Years in fandom: I've been here for just a little over one year now! and I wuv it... I'm never looking back Who am I tagging: no one I'm too shy

#yugioh #ygo tag meme

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rylie-studies · 4 years ago

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ten questions! ✨

I was tagged by the amazing Yasemin (@study-van) who’s absolutely lovely and sweet; thank you for tagging me, loves! 🤍

Rules: Answer the questions, then tag ten people with ten other questions of your own.

#1: What achievement are you most proud of?

Although I’m proud of many of my achievements as they have helped me to become the person I am at the moment, I’d say that graduating high school was one of my proudest achievements so far! It wasn’t that I thought I wasn’t gonna be able to graduate, but because I just think about how challenging those high school years were (especially junior & senior year) in terms of balancing everything, my mental health, taking care of myself, everything dealing with applying to college, etc and how I continuously felt so exhausted and wanted to give up so many times. However, I didn’t and I was just so extraordinarily happy once I got that diploma last month! Absolutely over the moon.

#2: Would you go to space if given the chance?

Of course! Space has always been this concept that I always think about everyday (especially at night when I’m just relaxing in bed) and I would love to just observe everything, see all the beautiful stars, galaxies, and planets, and see what’s out there. My heart has been calling for space ever since I was born!

#3: What’s the kindest thing someone’s done for you?

Whenever someone’s kind to me, I’m always so grateful for it and I don’t think I can choose the kindest one; however, one thing that I vividly remember is when my friend, a few years ago, made me a personalized painting of everything that I’m fascinated with and love such as tennis, reading, books, writing, and more!

#4: What experience changed who you are as a person?

Moving to the United States at a young age is definitely an experience that has changed me as a person; I feel like living here has really shaped my perspective and the person I’ve become. I often think about what my life would’ve been if my family had stayed in the Philippines and I just know that I’d be a completely different person now if that happened.

#5: What show got cancelled/ended that you wished didn’t?

Game of Thrones, all the way! I feel like, due to the groundbreaking popularity of the show, the directors could’ve made a few more seasons to really invest their time on character development and allowing the storyline to end well. Although I watched the whole thing last summer (took me about four days), I’m still so frustrated by how they ended it and how the directors (or is it writers idk y’all) just wanted to throw away the whole franchise and move on to other shows bcs it was clearly rushed and incomplete and I just genuinely hate Season 8 so much. It’s to the point where I watch so many clips of the show and want to rewatch everything so bad, but I can’t even physically bring myself to do that because it just ends so....terribly.

#6: Dusk or dawn?

Although I’m content with both, I’d have to choose dawn! I just love seeing the sunlight early in the morning (and watching the sunrise is a whole entire cosmic experience tbh) and it allows me to be thankful for getting another opportunity to live again!

#7: If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?

There’s a lot of things that I would change about the world, but one of the biggest ones would be to change the way we see people and how we become attracted to them. I saw this post in the past where it said, “I wish we could see each other’s souls rather than our faces,” and I think about that thought every single day because I feel like, as a society, no matter how hard we try, we still use appearances as a major factor (especially when it comes to love) and I think it’d be really fascinating to see each other’s souls first and go on from there!

#8: What’s your favorite candy?

Okay tbh I’m not really a candy type of person?? Like I guess I prefer salty foods over sweet ones, but if I really had to pick one, I’d pick Twix, maybe? I used to eat it a lot before and, one time, for Christmas, my mom’s friend got my siblings and I each a really long Twix bar and, yeah, needless to say, we never finished it.

#9: What is the last song you’ve listened to?

Comethru by Jeremy Zucker! I’ve always known about the chorus of the song, but I never actually listened to the full song then I heard the chorus again in a Tiktok yesterday and I finally decided to listen to the whole song and ended up listening to it for like four hours. It’s such a soft and beautiful song!!

#10: Do you listen to ASMR?

Not really, well I guess I’ve never really tried to listen to it before? I think it’s a relatively interesting concept though!

Here are my questions!! 🤍

#1: What are you looking forward to the most in the upcoming school (both high school and university level) year?

#2: If you could choose to live in any country in the world, which one would it be and why?

#3: What’s a book that resonates with you the most and you’ll read it as many times as you possibly can?

#4: What do you usually do before you sleep at night?

#5: If you got the chance to converse with your ten year old self, what’s one thing that you would say to them?

#6: If there weren’t any expectations or pressures given to you, what would you want your life to look like in the future? What job will you have? Where will you live?

#7: What’s a song that seems timeless to you and it always feels like you’re listening to it for the first time everytime?

#8: What’s the first show that you can remember ever binge watching?

#9: Did you watch Disney Channel when you were young? If so, what was your favorite show and why? Or, if you didn’t watch Disney Channel, what was your favorite show as a kid?

#10: Choose a random line from your favorite song of all time/the song that you’re currently obsessed with if you can’t pick one.

I’m gonna go ahead and tag these lovelies: @lunarduckstudies, @vazublr, @studyfajr, @redlitmusbluelitmus, @headgirlstudy, @seltzerstudies, @serendistudy, @procrastilate, @elleandhermione, and @fluencylevelfrench!! I hope you guys have fun with the questions if you choose to do it!! 🤍✨

#tagged #tag game #i really had to think hard with those questions fkfjksjf #i was gonna ask a lot about romance but then i was like. Sweetie. not everyone is a hopeless romantic like you #and i was like: you know what self you're absolutely right & i love you for that #self-care ladies self-care

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the-u-s-s-enterprise · 4 years ago

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This is a long one, but I love Undertale.

Eighteen-years old, fresh out of their sheltered hometown and onto a liberal arts college with more diverse people than they had ever experienced in their life. They’re nervous about school, the up in ante, the new lifestyle, the new freedom. They found their place with some friends that they wouldn’t think about in a few years time, people that would come and go, and a couple that would stay, but the first step on their journey into adulthood.

This is fall of 2015. Their parents dropped them off with a teary goodbye less than a month ago, and Undertale comes out today. They don’t know about it. At least not until Steam Train plays it not too long later. They watch a cute game played and commentated by a duo from their favorite YouTube gaming channel. It’s exactly their style, a cute, fun game with interesting and lovable characters.

The first episode doesn’t even span the tutorial, and the kid doesn’t bother waiting for the rest. They load up steam and buy it, playing it well into the night, sobbing at the heartbreaking conclusion and not knowing that five years later they would break into tears over hearing “Home” for the first time in years.

I played Undertale because I thought it was cute, the designs were fun, the mechanics were interesting, the story was easy enough to follow. I liked video games, but not enough to spend money on them only to get bored halfway through, so I watched a few Let’s Play YouTube channels to experience them without having to devote my constantly overstimulated brain to playing them.

Undertale was different. I don’t choose the things I become obsessed with (do you think I would be thinking about It: Chapter 2 over a year later if I could?), but when I fall into something, I fall hard.

I played it through, and then I watched Steam Train, and then I watched Press Heart to Continue, and JackSepticEye, and Markiplier, and Dan and Phil, and streamers I don’t even remember the names of in order to see every single reaction and playthrough I could see. Don’t get me wrong, I played again and again, too, even forcing my friends not to play it if I wasn’t there to watch.

In fact, I distinctly remember a friend, I was watching him play and telling him where the secrets were and the background for every little thing that wasn’t explicit in the game. He loved it. We played the entire game in three sessions, the first involved us going through the Ruins and saving after meeting Sans and Papyrus, the second going about halfway through Waterfall, and the third was the rest of the game in a six-hour session.

All in all, I can’t even count how many times I’ve witnessed the game, nor how many times I’ve read the Wiki pages, clicking “random page” over and over again until I had circled back around to the start. If I had to guess, I’ve played the pacifist playthrough about ten times on my own, and watched it anywhere between 20 and 30 between different YouTubers and rewatches of the same playthroughs. I’ve seen the genocide run a fair number of times, likely close to ten, and various neutral runs in the teens.

Not only that, I spent hours in the library with my headphones on doing homework, listening to not the OST, but the ten-hour extended versions of my favorite songs, “Bonetrousle”, “Hopes and Dreams”, “Death by Glamour”, and the ever so aptly named “NGAHHH!!” just to name a few.

And don’t get me started on the glitch characters. The hours I spent looking up information on Gaster because I was too scared to mod my own game are endless.

So, I guess you could say I’m very familiar with the game. It meant a lot to me as a young adult with fresh freedom, a story about a lost child finding a family of their own. My first and only tattoo is of the delta rune (although people will try to tell me it’s from Legend of Zelda).

It’s hard to talk about, but I don’t have the best mental health, with constant long-running depression, social anxiety, and mild OCD, my brain tends to run a mile a minute, and I had a really hard time making friends in high school, which resulted in me not having any friends at all after my friends from middle school decided they were too good for me.

I spent the better part of my four years in high school eating lunch alone and not going out on the weekends because no one wanted me to. In senior year, I managed to make friends with a few people, but nothing deep or long lasting.

Cue college, a fresh start where I could be exactly who I was supposed to be. I came out as asexual on the second day there, not knowing that my involvement with the LGBT organization would lead me to realize that I was also nonbinary and a lesbian. But needless to say, I was an outcast looking for a place to call home.

I found it at school, making a couple lifelong friends (I love you girls!) and finding a place in coming to my own leadership abilities and my desire to be a role model and resource for young LGBT people. Always in the background was Undertale.

Here was this game, though with a few flaws, was the greatest game I had ever played, as I remarked on every little detail from the stunning backgrounds to the fun yet challenging fight mechanics to every little piece of witty dialogue.

I remarked on Toby Fox and his ability to create this game almost entirely on his own, coding and designing and writing music. He didn’t do it alone, but so much of the game was him, and seeing someone accomplish something that meant so much to me was an inspiration.

I looked at this game and saw a breathtaking story, hints of the twist being woven into every pixel, parallels at every turn, tidbits that you had to play the game ten times (like I did) to catch pieces of backstory that were so vital to fully understanding a character.

Not only that, but I looked at this game and I saw me. I saw the cute and honestly rather stupid love story between Alphys and Undyne, between a shy (presumably) bisexual lizard girl and a buff (presumably) lesbian fish lady. They were awkward and uncomfortable and bashful and I loved every part of their interactions. They cared for each other and their story being thrown in and accepted, not a word said about it except outside the game. And don’t get me started on the guards.

But beyond that, I saw Frisk, a child without a denoted gender, which many people took to mean you could impose the gender you wanted, but to nonbinary people, to people like me, they saw a main character that used they/them pronouns without it being a joke, without it being asked about, without the characters ever slipping up or even having to guess. They did it because that’s who Frisk is, and they love Frisk.

I see this game, this funny, heart-wrenching, sweet, and wonderful game, and I see found family. I see a child who we know went up Mount Ebbott knowing that children who went up there didn’t come back find people (monsters) that loved them, cared about them, even after only knowing them for what we can assume is a day.

Frisk finds these monsters and they loved them for who they are. The love these characters share meant more to me than I ever could have imagined they would, the background to my introduction to freedom, the meeting of my best friends, the discovery of myself, the growth of my leadership and motivation. They were there. They were always there for me, and now, today, on the day of the five year anniversary of my own self discovery, I listen to “Home” and I cry.

I cry for Toriel, who lived alone in the Ruins for years, I cry for Sans and Papyrus who take care of each other in more way than they know, I cry for Undyne who’s desperate to prove herself and protect her people, I cry for Alphys who lived with the guilt of her mistakes and wanting nothing more than to make amends for the monster she thought she was, I cry for Asgore who was so overcome with grief he became the worst version of himself.

I cry for Asriel for obvious reasons. And I cry for Frisk, a child that wanted love and found it in the journey, just like I did.

I listen to “Home” and I cry because it is home. It’s a story about love in the time I needed it the most, shaping me into the person I am today, even five years later.

Because despite everything, it’s still me.

#undertale

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peachywander · 5 years ago

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Around this time, 5 years ago, was when I first watched The 7D, and I'll tell you how I found out about it and how much it meant to me.

It was somewhere around early-mid june 2015, aka the last days of school from 6th grade. I was in my room, bored to death because I just wanted to watch new cartoons. So I simply started browsing. But there was a liiiiittle problem... I did not like. Any. Of. Them. I thought they were either uninteresting or terrible. To give you a hint, I watched some cartoons from nickelodeon that had...nasty stuff to say the least. I was like: cartoons these days are that bad? Oh my gosh... (Mini side story, ignore if you want)

My hope for finding something new to watch was gone forever lol. I thought it'll be back when I saw Fairly OddParents again on air after like 5 years in my country. No, there were just new episodes from season 7 or 8. I grew up with FoP, but with the first 2 seasons only. Oh oh!! It's that one show I watched 5 years ago! Can't wait to rewatch it! Guess what. I found those new episodes horrible too! :) And nowhere as funny/ cute as the season 1 I grew up with... Maybe I'll watch more, who knows? Maybe it gets better, idk. "C'mon, dude, you are clearly much better than this!" And then I gave up. Y'know what? This show died. I'mma go watch season 1 later because that was miles better. Bye. (End of mini story xd) After I watched whatever I watched, I went to Disney Channel, and The 7D was on. Let's see what's this. I'm sure it won't be any better than what I've already saw. There was the Goldielocks episode, I don't really remember, but I do remember that after it, I fell for this cartoon. It was different, I really liked everything, the animation, the characters, the humour wasn't nasty like...the other shows...and reminded me of Looney Tunes or any (g)old cartoons similar. Honestly, I started my day with watching The 7D since then (I started school in the afternoon and yeah) and i was all happy n cheerful inside during the whole day. The toon really lifted my mood. The characters now. All of them are super likeable and not a single one I despise. My favourite was Bashful. During that period I used to be very shy and quiet, and I usually relate to shy characters (Like I did with Fluttershy for example), so obviously he got my attention first lol Another thing I loved about the show were the dynamic between the chars. My favourite was Grumpy and Happy's dynamic. They always made me laugh cry lmao. How could I forget about Grim and Hildy?? They were so adorable together! They reminded me of Cosmo and Wanda (in their early days on the show) as in they were sappy and always talked about how much they love eachother. I got bitter again because that cartoon got screwed kdgkfl Guess what happened when I found out about that one game on the app store? Yes. I played that game day and night lmao. Also I loved the little introductions of the chars. The love for my show got big and big, so at the end of the year I wanted to reach the fandom. And so I did. I found a lot of nice people in here! ... honestly I never expected to love Sneezy as much as I did after I joined the fandom. He was pretty popular so I was like Oh it's that sneezing dwarf that I really haven't paid attention to? I thought he's kinda cute...he really grown to be one of my fav characters. I wanted to see him do more on the show, though. I made a lot of friends in the fandom, and was also my first fandom on Tumblr. There was also an artist that drew fanart of 7D and their artstyle was so cute, and I remember I wanted my artstyle to be as cute as theirs so I just kept on drawing. And since then I got to more and more fandoms. And then I heard of the cancellation. I felt how a part of my heart broke. And I got angry, cause there should have been some 20 episodes more but they got cut because Disney had other plans. Thanks, Disney. I remember the staff got a Tumblr account and they engaged a lot with the fans, even with me. I got head over heels when they reblogged some of my posts and answered my questions. They were really nice to their fanbase! And then...it ended. Until this day I still keep on visiting old 7D posts, and get reminded of how much fun I had. And how it made me keep on drawing/ becoming the artist I am right now. It started as a relief because it wasn't as nasty as some recent cartoons I watched at that time, to something that made me cope with anxiety/sadness whenever I had it. Now I'm teary eyed lmao. I'm a very nostalgic person by nature, so I get rlly emotional of things that remind me of the past. I'm definitely gonna rewatch this show soon, I keep saying it. But it's hard to make some time because a super important exam is in less than an year for me and I have to choose wisely the college I'll go to. But when I'll do, I'll pretend I'm 12 years old again. Yeah... I-It's weird. I keep thinking, bro, I first started to watch the 7D like...2 years ago. But no. 5 years. It felt like yesterday I was 12 and preparing to go to school, and watching the 7D at the same time. So yeah, I miss the 7D. A lot. Sorry for this super long essay lmao, but I just really love this show so much. Thanks to the people who woked on 7D, the fandom and everyone involved! I'll never forget you! 💖💖💖

#The 7D #disney #mfngjdk im so sorry

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mcrmadness · 5 years ago

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Music tag game

Got tagged by @hanhan156, thanks!

Again my texts got super long and you don’t NEED to write this much, just mention a song and go to the next one, but nope, not me :D I love talking about music anyway even tho I understand absolutely nothing of it but idc, at least I’m having fun XD (Plus I apparently haven’t been talking nor writing too much lately because of exhaustion and migraine so now all that talkativeness came out in the form of this post lol.)

☀️ A song stuck in your head when you woke up this morning: Today there was nothing, but I recently listened to the Lindemann album F&M again and have had those songs randomly play in my head. Currently I think it’s Knebel, but this other night it was Ach so gern (Pain Version) (it was playing in my dream and then I woke up with it still playing in my head) which I’m actually almost obsessed with now and I like this version so much more than the original version, and it might even be my favorite song on the album now :D The synth and chorus melody in this song is just what gets me every time.

⚠️ A song you love by a band you strongly dislike: I don’t really have bands I’d dislike? There’s just bands I love/like or don’t like. There’s some songs from bands or artists that I might even enjoy hearing when they play on radio (radio rant later on lol) but it just more of makes me disappointed and sad when a band does not have more good songs than just one or two. So I don’t really listen to them ever either because if something is good, I want MORE but when there’s no more, I just... it’s like “all or nothing” :D But I think I could mention here now a song that I’m pretty much obsessed with atm and it’s again the only good song I’ve heard from this band, and I know this band only because the singer-guitarist used to be in Apulanta in the band’s earlier times. This song is Korvaamaton by Varjo. I wouldn’t say I love the song tho, but currently it sounds pretty good but who knows, maybe I’ll find it boring in the future. But the last minute of the song is my favorite part of the song, I’m a sucker for instrumental music and long instrumental solos and that part is just amazing and I probably would find this song pretty dull and would not go back to it this often if it didn’t have that ending.

🙄 A song you dislike by a band you love: This is like the biggest unpopular opinion to exist probably but I just cannot stand Geschwisterliebe by Die Ärzte. I’m sorry Farin, but I just cannot listen to that song :D Sometimes it makes me feel so bad because it’s become so iconic song for the band and Farin seems to be kinda proud of it and I totally get that, but for my own personal reasons, I just cannot listen to that song. I never liked it even when I didn’t know what it was all about and even less when I learnt what it was about, and now it’s literally making me feel sick whenever it starts playing because I’m now so far at my German skills that I’m starting to understand German lyrics whenever I listen to music. And it’s just making me so uncomfortable because of my anxiety and stuff that I just always have to skip this song. The punk rock version they did a few times live is good, tho, that one I like but the original or other live versions? Not so much.

🐤 First song you recall from childhood: Hmmmm. This is hard because the FIRST song??? I remember so much music from my childhood and I don’t know if I should talk about music that was made for kids or maybe other stuff I was into as a kid. Probably my oldest music memory is again about movies, probably even The Lion King or Toy Story, or the Moomins! Those have definitely defined my taste in music too because I hated every Disney film with their boring songs but I loved The Lion King and even Toy Story had such a good soundtrack. But I don’t want to mention these as the first songs because technically they are not songs but scores... so hmmmm. Damn, this is so difficult! :D It’s probably some kids’ song I’ve been singing too, even tho I more often was singing songs I came up with while I was singing (and I stopped that somewhere when I was 7 years old or so). But gosh, I don’t know. I was often listening to the cassettes by this “rock band”, Fröbelin Palikat, that made music for kids in rock sound and damn they were good, my absolute favorite was “On vanha ukko kuollut”, it’s still pretty dope :D

And Rölli (originally a troll character that was to make music for kids but later got his own tv show and movies) was also awesome, I actually had the second album on vinyl and I was listening to that often, I think, and I still get nostalgic when I listen to that album and I’m sure it’s somewhere at my parents’ house but I just can’t find it anywhere! But Itsensäpelottelemislaulu is what I definitely remember from my childhood!!! The title means something like “A song to scare yourself” and I remember it being so terrifying when I was a kid, because he sings there things like there’s a scull somewhere and it made him scared, but it ended up being just an old football :D It’s like the definition of anxiety, first having panic over something irrational and then you find out it was nothing to worry about. And damn this whole album now, the next song also brings back some nostalgic memories that I can’t remember but can feel!!! I think this is it, this is the album and the first songs I can recall from my childhood.

😳 A song no one would believe you’d ever like: Hmmm... classical music! I don’t really listen to it because it’s super difficult to, like, start listening to? There’s so much and I have no idea where and how to start to. And I’m not into operas and I don’t know, it’s like it’s own world and you should know what you’re doing and it just sounds so difficult process so I’ve never done so, but sometimes, if I need music for concentration, I just look for “classical music for concentration/studying” or so from youtube and try to find something with Mozart in it. I don’t know too much about composers but I was very much obsessed with the movie “Amadeus” (-84) when I was younger and I still love that movie (I just rewatched it a few days ago!) and because of that movie, I notice some of Mozart’s music even now and I remember how at school we had to study composers, and how I liked Requiem already because of the movie but also overall I found it interesting, and I still get chills when I hear that certain part of this composition. I don’t even know how long this composition is and if there’s more to it than what’s in the movie and what was played to us at school, but I still like what I’ve heard and I’m always waiting for the moment this starts playing in the movie. Maybe I should go now and look for it from youtube and give it a listen if it’s not several hours long :D (I just looked for it and the full one if almost an hour long. Just like I guessed ::D But I also found a shorter video and omfg I’m getting so much chills from the violins and stuff.)

Of course it’s possible that I just associate the music so strongly with the movie because I also love movie soundtracks and video game soundtracks but I get obsessed with them only when I have seen a movie or played a game myself, otherwise it’s hard for me to get behind a movie/game soundtrack because the music usually is there to add more athmosphere to the events, so I think I love certain soundtrack pieces so much because they remind me of the events but I also feel so strongly about the events because the music is so overwhelmingly good there, and the combination is sometimes something that feels like it’s making my head to explode.

😯 A song you probably shouldn’t love but do: Why shouldn’t I tho? I don’t think I have any like these. But something I could mention here is that I don’t know why but for some reason, so often my favorite songs aka the songs with best melodies and sounds are either the most or only songs with some really strong sexual themes or vulgar stuff in them. And I don’t know why bands make the best music for songs with those lyrics??? I personally don’t really care about lyrics and the sound is what defines for me if I like a song or not so I don’t stop listening to a good song if I dislike the lyrics. But this is a reoccuring theme for me now and for example, one of my all-time-favorite Rammstein songs is called “Pussy” because of the melody and stuff. I have no problem with listening to the song but sometimes it feels a bit awkward if people are hearing because normally I’m safe here in Finland as not too many understand German, but this song also has parts in English in it and people here understand English a lot more. And I honestly don’t care what people think, but I just find this such a funny thing because I myself am an asexual. So I could’t even care less about sexual themes in anything but still so often my favorites HAVE those themes in them because bands just somehow makes those songs always sound the best :D And I have examples from so many bands and I still don’t know what’s with it because I literally don’t care about the lyrics there at all :D Or maybe it’s why - when I can’t relate to lyrics then it’s pretty much the same what they sing there and I can pay my full attention to the sound then. (But this doesn’t make sense because e.g. DÄ and Rammstein both sing in German and I’ve spent years without understanding a word and still I end up finding out my favorite songs are about the same themes. And there’s also another German band and my favorite song on an album has a vulgar word AS the title. So weird :D)

• You always switch it off when THIS one comes on: Pretty much just anything on radio. And the whole radio. Rage oncoming: I just HATE radio so much and at work it was always driving me mad when I wanted to listen to just _something but every channel and song made me angrier and angrier because they played nothing but shit. And even if the channel was okay, then the ads started to really get on my nerves. And some channels play this random compilation “ad” of the songs they play on their channel and when you hear this same clip with the same snippets of the same songs after every song, it starts to get REALLY frustrating. And you also start to memorize it too and whenever you hear some of the clips as a full song and that certain part comes, you actually hear the clip of the song that was next in this snippet compliation ad. This was why I started boycotting one of the stations. They also ruin songs for me when they use just one song from a band and play it every week. But to answer to the question properly: anything to do with Finnish reggae music. I just HATE THAT SO MUCH. It’s terrible, they sound like they don’t know how to sing or that they’re just standing somewhere with no posture and the wind is waving them around while they try to get random sounds out of their throats and it ends up sounding like they have super weak throats and it makes my throat hurt to listen to that (I don’t even sing but I can still physically feel people’s singing or speaking styles in my throat). I legit don’t know if it’s just the Finnish reggae style or if they are terrible singers disguised as reggae. I also can’t stand rap but especially not Finnish rap. Or pop songs that are nothing but random sounds made with computer and where they sound like a broken violin. So yeah, I have lots of hatred towards radio and what people nowadays call as music ::D (On top of all that, the radio station in Finland I hate the most plays only Finnish pop music. And it’s awful. And the same songs pretty much every day. Drives me crazy.)

💜 A song that makes you smile: Westerland (to the Max) by Die Ärzte, altho I’m from Finland even I’m already pretty fed up with this song so I skip the normal parts and listen to the funny ones only ::D And the other random remixes they did in the 80s always make me not only smile but laugh (Farin’s yodeling in 2000 Mädchen Wumme-Mix gets me every time), I normally hate remixes but DÄ has always taken that to another level too and I love it :DD

💔 A song that makes you cry: I don’t think I have any like this. I don’t really cry ever and especially not for songs, I can’t even recall ever crying for songs? o_O (WAIT now I know one! That one song in the Lion King where a major plot event happens!!! It’s called “To Die For”. I think pretty much everyone has seen this movie at some point but because of that scene, also the music alone makes me cry! :D I’m listening to this one now and I’m already (almost) crying lol. But it’s again linked to a movie scene and not because of the music itself. Also Hans Zimmer is a genius and my other favorite movie composer.)

🔥 A song that gets you motivated: Anything with happy energy in it. DÄ’s music is often great for this, but especially their album Planet Punk. But sometimes I don’t get only motivated but bit too energetic too and then I become hyperactive and then I’m unable to focus on anything really but hey, at least I’m having the happy energy myself, then :D

I’ll tag @stufenlosregelbar and @cupcakecurl again :D And remember that you can just write there a song title and nothing else if you don’t want to, and not do as deep dive into music stuff as I did here ::DDd

#mcrmadness' random stuff #tag games #music talk~

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sauciesauce · 5 years ago

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Dear @aphmau

It’s currently 3 AM. I just spent two full weeks of doing nothing but binge watching all of MCD AND MyStreet. My heart hurts. I’m feeling stupid nostalgic. And I haven’t cried as hard as I am crying in a hot minute.

Thank you, Jess. Thank you for being such an impactful part of my life. You’ve inspired me in more ways than one.

I’ve been a fan of your channel since I was 11, when for some odd reason a video about a woman playing this video game I kinda liked popped up in my recomended. Her kitty litter box exploded. I remember.

At the time I was so young and confused, I didn’t even think that subscribtions to channels were free, so every day after school I would rush to my family’s computer and refresh your page until the new episode came out.

I remember losing my shit when we heard the voices of these characters you created for the first time. I remember sobbing my brains out when Aaron died. I remember being so emotionally confused when the time jump happened. I remember wanting to kill Zane myself. I remember being so excited to see what you would do next.

After a while I... distanced myself. Part of me could tell that you were feeling the same way about the series, but the other part of me was just growing up and moving on. But I still showed my support.

I no longer watched it, but for my birthday I wanted an MCD poster SO badly. We were moving houses, and I wanted my blank walls to not feel so blank anymore. When I opened it on my birthday, all of the other boys scoffed at me. Minecraft was lame. And Minecraft roleplays were lamer.

I followed the trends of the Internet, and found myself becoming lost after quite some time. I wandered amongst bad skits and funny cat videos. But I always gravitated towards storytellers. No matter how far I drifted away, I always found myself coming back to your content.

I’d pop in every so often to watch mini games, and I showed tons of support to all of the VAs and their channels. As a growing actor, I know that even the slightest bit of support can mean the world.

But nothing really grabbed my attention until the thumbnail for “When Angels Fall.” I recognized that character. It was Irene, and I knew it. I rushed to it, but quickly realized I had no clue what was going on.

I backtracked. I couldn’t watch everything, but I watched what the fanwiki deemed as “important” and got caught up. I turned notifications on, so every time the series got updated I knew about it.

I don’t know how, but you and your team managed to bring me back to those times I remember. Those times before worrying about college and my upcoming reality that will settle in shortly after high school ends.

I am 16 years old now. And since Minecraft has once again blossomed in popularity, I can tell you I was enthusiastic to spend my summer free time rewatching Diaries and the entirety of the MyStreet series (PDH and FCU included). Not only that, but the day after I began rewatching it, the first episode of the revival was put out. It is beyond impressive that you and your wonderful team have come this far, and you should be so proud of the work you’ve done.

I just spent two weeks rewatching EVERYTHING. And I mean no sleep, no productivity levels of binging. I can confidently tell you that I wouldn’t want my summer to go any other way.

You’ve done something that a lot of people take for granted. You’ve taken something from YEARS ago... something that wasn’t meant to ever become anything... and turned it into a work of art. You’ve managed to create something that is authentically yours in every way, and I admire every bit of that.

Not only that, but you are ADDING to it!! You are creating new worlds!! You are putting more into this simple game about blocks than most put into their own lives!!!

I want to do what you do, Jess. I want to be a part of something that makes people feel the way your content makes me feel. I want to make them feel.

So as I sit in my room at 3:45 AM, tears streaming down my face, my Woof plush in arms, I’ll never be able to thank you enough. I’ll never be able to repay you for what you’ve inspired me to do. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it yet, but I’m going to find a way to create.

I edit videos for all of my friends who try to be “YouTube famous” to get practice in premiere. I draw digitally three times every week so I can improve. I act in my high school theatre program. I’m writing two full length novels. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t for you. These aren’t just my hobbies. These are my passions.

Thank you so much for helping me find them.

With much love,

Sawyer Reid

#aphmau #minecraft diaries #mystreet #thank you :')

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bentenharuki · 5 years ago

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I generally don’t do these but...

I will do this because it’s a badge of honor and a thank you for @todayintokyo who gives me a daily vibe out of my second fav Country in the world (first one is my own, of course. My messy, chaotic, genius Italy).

So for everyone interested (I won’t tag people either... if you are among my 250+ readers, do it as freely as you like to share this unexpected hard time along others. Sharing makes us all feel less stranded I guess :))

1. Are you staying home from work/school? Yep. My University (Milano Bicocca) holds in-house lessons and curses and also exams and testing are/will be online. What I miss most are the lab works and the exchanges with foreign schools. I took one a few months ago in London and I was supposed to have another in May but... NOPE, of course.

2. If you’re staying home, who’s there with you? I am alone in my apartment. At first it was supposed to be shared rent with somebody else but then my parents just bought this out and lent it to me. I know. I am spoiled. But very grateful for what I have. I always try to give back the best I can because no one has merits in being born in a family instead of another. (pieces of second-rate philosophy in all my LONG answers courtesy of my mum and her influence on me. She’s a University Professor and her field is.. guess what.. ETHICS PHILOSOPHY)

3. Do you have pets to keep you company? Nope. Not allowed. But I like cats. Cats. CATS. They are elegant, refined, very clean, and they give you consideration and affection ONLY if they like you. I prefer to conquer somebody’s love instead than to have it by default. Then I am naturally a cat person instead of a dog’s. But I like all animals (I like snakes as well, so my range is pretty wide ;)), even though I don’t feel missing any in house. Generally I would be out of home most of the day and no pet would be happy in staying that much alone. I miss my grandparents’ kitty tho :)

4. Who do you miss the most? Family. Friends. Meeting new people when out. And... (is it fine to say it?) Well... in these lockdown times I miss... human touch. (You get what kind). I was seeing a guy when this all started and my old boyf also came back into the picture somehow. All on hold. And I avoid to think how that makes me feel because even in case I’d figure it out, what comes if one can’t act on the awareness? Exactly. So I put it all in a LONG pause. But yeah... I miss contacts. A LOT.

5. When was the last time you left your home? I go out every Thursday to buy all my grocery stuff. I am very methodic. My supermarket is pretty near and it’s BIG and I get there right before it opens (well... one hour almost before it opens, so I can be among the firsts in line). I look like a ninja: very sporty and technically dressed (like for a running competition!) with clothes and shoes which are easy washable, tech mask (it is for cycling competition, with filters specifically medical: the mask is washable as well after you’ve used it, while the filter is obviously not), cotton fit gloves and over them medical gloves (I can’t wear directly medical gloves because my skin is very sensitive and I suffer from nickel allergia, which makes latex gloves a NO NO directly on skin), teck googles which cover also the side of my face (those are from cycling items too) and of course PODS in my ear because I can’t live without music :)

6. What was the last thing you bought? I bought online a few garden tools for my biggest balcony. I have ZERO skill with plants (and I am supposed to become a biologist... the nerve! LOL) but I am keen at making grow at least rosemery for my recipes. I have a little peach tree and it is all fine so far. I have hope I can do better and anyway I have time now ;)

7. Is quarantine driving you insane or are you finally relaxed? I try to keep my routine as it was before. I wake up and perform all my tasks exactly as I was doing before this all started. I am VERY organized and to lax on that would ruin me, so I carefully focus on what I can control the best I can. It feels strange to say it maybe but... this way my mood isn’t particularly affected by this heavy revolution in my (and everyone elses’s) life.

8. Are you a homebody? NOPE. I love people, I love my Milan and its being always full of people everywhere. I love living in my town a TON, I love meeting friends anywhere, go dancing, I love to live my University life in this beautiful and renewed part of Milan; I like being surrounded by my people and meeting new ones. So being stuck at home would seem insufferable for me. But I learnt from this (there’s always something to learn in any experience) that I can be surprisingly ok with staying home too. I came to know better my neighbors. I feel a sense of community with everyone living nearby and I have come to love my domesticity too. It was a surprise for me first ^.^

9. What movies have you watched recently? In Italy, Italia 1 channel has had the WONDERFUL idea to rebroadcast all Harry Potter saga every Monday and Thursday. Today and tomorrow there are the last two installments, so I can say that is what I looked out the most for as in movie things these past weeks (funny how I never particularly adored the books of HP, I mean, I liked them but... being a Tolkien’s devotee Rowlings’ literary efforts always seemed lackluster to me.. and still I have always liked the movies. It’s incoherent I know ;)). But I have Sky at home so I can watch whatever movie I like to whenever I want to. And that leads to VERY little watch actually. I am reading a ton though. I watch what passes on in the National channels actually, out of digital and cable and decide to watch it or not. For instance last Friday Rai 1 (main Italian Channel) broadcasted one of my fav movies from the past three years, GIFTED (with Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer) and I rewatched it with immense pleasure.

10. An event that you were looking forward to that got cancelled? OLYMPICS. I was supposed to be back in Japan with a a couple of friends and my bro for experience the Olympics (especially the volleyball tournaments) between July and August and that got (of course) cancelled. We plan to move it all to next year of course. But it hurts SO MUCH because it was easily what I was looking forward to BEST for all 2020. Hands down.

11. What’s the best and worst thing you’ve had to cancel? Look up. For the other question, I never plan things I don’t like (or at least I try my best not to) and I almost never find myself in the position of being happy for something I had going on which I had to pass due to circumstances. I am a very honest (sometimes to the point of bluntness, though with age I got trained in the fine art of diplomacy, which for me is declined especially in the “IGNORE WHAT IS NOT WORTHY degree) person and if there is something I don’t like I tend to not get involved with it in the first place.

12. Do you have any new hobbies? Eh... the longest list... I love so many things. Sport don’t count as hobbies to me because I treat them as part of my daily life constantly. So take them off. I like to write, to draw, to paint... I like reading, I like learning... I am a tech geek; I like gaming (but that I have to cut it or it would absorb me too much)... I like TRAVELING (that is cut off too of course nowadays), and many other things so I guess I don’t literally have SPACE for new hobbies. My many ones makes it impossible to fall for new things though lately I am becoming a better cook out of needs ;)

13. What are you out of? My lists are made as soon my things become “two items in from having 0″. This way I can’t run out of anything. Did I say already I am a HUGE control freak? THAT ;)

14. What music are you listening to? My itunes collections lists so far 12376 ALBUMS. Then I have the random songs. Latest one I bought (because I buy them all) is Achille Lauro’s latest 16 Marzo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb-9RESbeWA

I am also listening a lot to one of my bro’s fav bands Radiohead and as usual a lot to my beloved Imagine Dragons. My mum and dad are also telling me to listen to Bill Withers (who recently passed away) whole discography because he was amazing. I love many music genres. I love ALL which makes the spirit soar and rage and evolve and love and cry and hope.

15. What are you reading? So far in quarantine I read 5 books. I have now to start ORIGINS by Dan Brown. I pick the books I have left unread randomly and that was the pick this time (people gift me with books constantly because they know I am a bookworm when I have spare time).

16. What are you doing for self-care? Keep loving myself and life and the world exactly the way I used to before this all started.

17. Are you exercising? Yup. Tapis roulant, golf training, stepper (all in my house lucky me) and mat and weight training. I have a routine for which I have to train at least one hour a day. NO EXCEPTION. I miss swimming but I will do. I am also in recovery after January’s knee meniscus intervention so my schedules are also taking that into consideration.

18. How’s your toilet paper supply? I'm OK. :)

19. Have you made any changes to your hair during quarantine? Nope. I love to stylize my hair but I don’t have specific cuts. It grows long and then I play with them hairstyles: braids, buns, ponytails, partitions and the likes.. But I have bleached hair and I had to follow my hairdresser advice because I can’t allow ugly roots to take dominance of me ^.^ So I bought the necessary to self bleach them. No need to say as soon as I will be able to, Hairdressers and Massages and SPA will be my first destination ^.^ (beside visiting family and friends of course).

I am fairly sure I put lots of typos and mistakes in this but I have my online lesson just starting in 8 minutes and I can’t review this (I generally never do it anyway). So forgive me and have a beautiful day ;)

STAY SAFE OUT THERE!!! Hugs K.

#ask list #wow my first one #and probably my last #covid19 #quarantine #lockdown #italy #milan #tag your friends #coronavirus

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