#last friday date

[acapulco-goldd]

you and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals

so let's do it like they do on the discovery channel 💋

🍓🍓🍓

[duskholland]

entering my lover era.

[faunandfloraas]

i love being friends with girls and then they get a boyfriend and then he becomes the center of her entire existence and all she talks about and all she focuses on and i sit there and i smile and i nod and i feel myself becoming genuinely evil

[papercutslut]

All the Pines family can say the F slur but only Mabel would be willing to drop it casually

[starfleetwitch]

Friday night activities

A Script. A drawing. A glass of wine. Milk with cookies.

One of these drinks belongs with one of these screens and it's not the one you think it should be.

[lauryn-order]

If a guy says they’re taking you to coffee for the first date, you think a cute coffee shop, right?

Not Dunkin Donuts?

And definitely not the drive thru, right?

Or is that just me? Am I crazy?

[theninjamouse]

Kind of nsfw rambling thoughts in an ace way

Ok so, I'm very strongly ace, more recently aro as well and like, I'm the type to have an interest in terms stories and fictional characters. In terms of real life, I have found I love the idea of love and romance and physical relationships but can't stand actually engaging in it. There’s a number of reasons I won't go into because it's too personal, but for the most part, I've come to accept that it won't happen for me because. Well, I just don't ever really feel any kind of urges. I don't get all hot and bothered.

However.

For years I would sometimes, very randomly and with months if not years in between, get into a weird antsy mood. Kind of like when you have a craving for a specific type of food but have no idea what will satisfy it. It drove me crazy, made me truly wonder if it was some kind of manic episode. But I could ignore it or find other things to keep me busy and it would go away in a day or two.

Let's just say after some deep conversations with people about personal trauma and breaking a religious mindset and sensory issues and so on and so on, I've realized what it actually is.

And now I'm like, 'People feel this all the time??? This is normal?? Oh dear GOD' because it is so ANNOYING

I'm no innocent little uwu baby, I've read and seen plenty of stuff. But yeah, it still just baffles me, and I've been thinking about it the past few days.

Makes me want to actually write the stupidly steamy Shorby oneshots that make me go red in the face if I think about people reading them

[pb-dot]

Film Friday: A formal apology to Last Night In Soho

People who have followed me for a while, or done some serious backreading may remember an early essay I wrote about the Edgar Wright film Last Night In Soho and how I couldn't make myself to watch the thing again. I've been trying to dig the thing up again so I could do a good follow-up, but Tumblr's search function continues to be Like That, so I'll just have to go by my memory of the thing for now. Last Night In Soho spoilers and some dreaded nuance below the cut!

In short, I struggled with how mean-spirited the film felt to me. Protagonist Eloise Turner gets chewed up and spitten out by a London that is sleazy, cruel and unforgiven even in the genre of "country mouse goes to the Big City and has a Terrible Time of Things" stories. It's a morally messy and gray kind of tale, where our hero narrowly evades a victim turned villain by the cruelty of the world around her by confronting her with the cruelties she herself indulged in. It's a real Bad Vs. Evil kind of situation, and just thinking of how much of an exhausting, terrifying experience the story would turn to for young Eloise made her early scrappy, if naive, enthusiasm turn to ash in my mouth.

The thing is, upon actually watching the thing again, and through explaining what's going on to my parents that, bless 'em, weren't quite following along on the plot, I came to realize something. All of the things mentioned above are true, that is what happens in the movie, and that's ok.

Eloise gets the utter shit kicked out of her by the plot. She falls down the tree of Moving to the Big City and hits just about every branch on the way down. Her natural empathy gets hijacked by a tale more sordid and violent than she's ready for, and there's no pot of golden rectification at the end of that rainbow, just a sad, twisted murderous grandmother dying in a house fire surrounded by the ghosts of her murdered abusers. It didn't have to end this way, Sandie didn't have to try killing Eloise to cover everything up. If she wasn't so warped from the abuse she suffered she might've even understood that Eloise has a lot in common with her, even when you ignore that she has, through her paranormal powers, Eloise has literally BEEN her. Eloise has literally felt her pain, her fear, her desperation. There is nobody in the world, maybe not even Sandie herself that has as good of a reason to be charitable and kind fo Sadie. It's no good, though, Sandie is too far gone to even consider empathy a possibility.

This is, of course, bleak as shit, and how bleak it is kind of blinded me to the point the movie was making. Upon a rewatch it seems almost absurd to me that I missed it in the first place, but the movie actually has a pretty clever thesis on Nostalgia built into it. Eloise goes to london, expecting it to be as magical of a place as she imagine it being in the late 60's. It is not, of course, even if the 60's was a stylish wonderland like she imagines it, the wear and tear of time and several generation-defining economic crisises (and entirely too many Tory governments if you permit me to talk politics for a hot second) have changed the place up. That is, however, just the starting conditions, the base camp from which Eloise's nostalgic dreams get confronted with the nastiness of reality.

Sadie is in many ways the perfect person for Eloise to project onto. She strides into the world of late 60's Soho with the effortless confidence of youth. She's not from around here, but she is going to make her dreams come true withher gumption and her beautfy and her unflinching confidence. Sounds a lot like Eloise, except Sadie is more of a girlboss than Ellie ever gets to. Of course, Sadie also falls out of the tree of moving to the Big City and hits a whole ton of branches on the way down, but that's not all there is to it. See, if the takeaway of the whole thing was "the protagonist thinks Before was better, but she learns that Before Was Pretty Terrible Actually," Last Night would truly be too cynical, full of pain and suffering, signifying nothing.

That's not what's happening though, if it did, Eloise would take half a look at what Sadie's life turned into and gotten the fuck out of dodge. It'd be a tale of the depravity of the city that a good soul narrowly escaped. That's not the movie Last Night In Soho is, and it's not even close. If anything, Eloise's obsession with South London and the sad life and assumed death of Sadie only deepens as she learns of just how bad things get for the doomed starlet.

It's one of those plot things that effectively illustrates that the difference between a character strength and a character weakness is highly dependent on context. Eloise is an emphatetic person, mirroring her openness to ghostly visions by her openness to other living people. It does her no favors in most interractions with her new classmates, but Eloise can no more stop feeling sympathy and openness to experience and feelings any more than a tiger can change its stripes.

So, Eloise is an admirable character because she can not stop being kind, even when it's a disadvantage. She could no more fire back at her queen bee bitchy roomate than she could walk on water, and so she choses to resolve the solution by moving out entirely. It's that kind of "too nice by half" personality that's mostly present in fictional characters to give them a place to grow out of, to learn to stand up to themselves and so on. That's not the angle Last Night goes for though, I'd argue what it does is a much more nuanced take on such a character.

I would argue, though, that throughout Last Night In Soho, Eloise's empathy is in fact her most grievous character flaw. She almost ruins her life and her future by actively seeking out Sadie's tragedy, soaking in it like she can redeem the time period she is so enamored by absorbing Sadie's misery and quote-unquote saving her from her ignoble end. The world does not require this of Eloise, she puts this unreasonably huge demand on herself because it's the only way her unquestioning love for the time and place of Sadie's life can remain unexamined. Sadie's tragedy can only be an emergent flaw in the system of that time and place. If late 60's Soho chewed up and spat out young ambitious women like her and Sadie as a matter of course, how could it be the magical place of the movies and music that Eloise loves so much?

It's with this in mind that the ending scene where Eloise displays her new clothes designs goes from being a "oh, nice for her I guess" kind of denoument into a pretty powerful thesis statement. Eloise still loves the things she loved about the 60's, she still loves the music, the aesthetics of it, the style of the clothing, but it is tempered by a distinctive and conscious sense of anachronism. This isn't the 60's coming back, this is Eloise, a modern young woman, showing the world what she loved about those bygone times filtered through her own experiences. This is, the movie says, what Nostalgia should be, an ongoing conversation with and about the aesthetics of the past without attempting to restore some sort of prelapsarian way of things that never existed in the first place.

In a world where an increasing amount of people start looking at the 50's with a worrying level of fondness, I think a movie like Last Night In Soho is important. It's ok to like rockabilly, it's ok to like stepford housewife chic, it's ok to like three-piece work suits, the movie all but says, but don't try to make today like the times when these styles arose. They weren't the Good Old Days the way it's tempting to think of them. They were Days, and depending on who you were they could be the farthest thing from good. Love the things and looks you love, but let the thoughts patterns and politics that informed them remain in the past where they belong.

So in short, I fear that in my initial piece on this movie, I did the Classical Tumblr Mistake of reading ill, conservative, will into a nuanced work that deals with complex topics in a surprisingly elegant way. So, that's my bad, and I'm glad that actually getting off my ass and giving it a second look has opened up my eyes to a lot of beautifully shot, artfully presented nuance. Last Night In Soho is a great move y'all. Go see it. Hell, if you've only seen it once, maybe see it again?

[clairedaring]

JACKIE JACKRIN as BANK and PUNPUN SUTATTA as PLOY

CLUB FRIDAY 16: SECRET OF DATING APPS (2024) | 1.05

[prettycottagequeer]

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[thelittlebeekeeper]

excellent excellent weekend :) yayyy

[frozenambiguity]

«This year, the Kaeya council will reunite exactly two times --- one in September, one in December. Until then, we wait». This... probably sounds more ominous than it is intended to. Good. Let them fear.

[lunarrosette]

I’m like slowly falling back into a bit of my musical theatre phase so here are some dad songs from musicals I like and I’m assigning them to dndads dads

The pants song (bmc) - Ron stampler (the song is so spot on it’s a little scary from the pants to the slight incompetence but still caring so much it’s so Ron)

What tim wants (Black Friday) - Glenn close (easy same kind of grief and the lyrics talk in a way that’s just very what Glenn was trying to do)

If I fail you (Black Friday) - Darryl Wilson or Glenn close (this song works for like almost all of the dads but I think it works the best for Darryl or Glenn, Glenn for the talking about grief and failing and shit but Darryl also for the failing and not knowing his son and trying to be what his dad was even though that’s not what grant needs)

To break in a glove (dear Evan hansen) - Henry oak (I feel like this is a little controversial and idk how well it really fits but in my head it fits to how he tried to be with lark after the rogue card probably later in life like high school and shit but that’s just my interpretation)

[vriska-serketboard]

it’s understandable if y’all are tired of me talking about this but I mean this when I say that my past few days have been a fever dream in the best way possible and I’m only starting to process the fact that we’re together and that my feelings for them are reciprocated

[kevin-sedai]

The vibe really deteriorated as the day went on, and now I'm sitting in bed, awake, feeling like garbage

[mxgyver]

how I'm feeling right now because the first week of my semester just started and I've already had some of my classes changed TWICE