#like 2012-2016 were such iconic years of my life and it’s because of them

[eywaseclipse]

I think what hurts the most for us og directioners, is that we’re the same age as the boys and we were all supposed to grow old together. Mourning the loss of Liam is now mourning the loss of my teen self who watched the video diaries, the Kevin references, the kid who put all the posters on her wall, dressing as them for Halloween with friends. I have friendships that can be traced back to when I first met them and bonded over being a “Harry girl, Niall girl” etc. like this is, hard. It hurts. And it’s just a new wave of emotions i probably haven’t felt since I was about 15. I’m going to be in denial for a bit… they’re still just goofy kids who got formed into a boy band on the X factor to me..💔

[orchidsangel]

hi ro!

i know you’ve talked about your love for bratz on here, so i was wondering if you had any opinions on the monster high dolls or any other dolls from the 2000s-2010s

xoxo sunnie (@fic-over-cannon)

Sunnie, I am so so glad you asked this because talking about my love for fashion dolls is literally one of my favorite things.

Monster High - So, my love for Monster High started LONG before my love of Bratz. I'm an 05' baby, so by the time I started playing with and caring about dolls in around 2011, Bratz was already past their prime and in their flop era, BUT it was just in time for the monster high renaissance, which truly took the world, and my life, by storm.

My first monster high doll was the Physical Deaducation Ghoulia Yelps doll, and I put her through the WRINGER. She currently has a poorly executed pixie cut, sharpie tattoos, and permanent discoloration around her forehead from the multiple times I tried to dye her hair and failed. She is a testament to my childhood, and I love her so dearly. I even bought an original Physical Deaducation Ghoulia NIB (new in box) a few years ago to keep on display just because she's such a big part of my childhood.

She was really the beginning of a lifelong affair, and even now, at 18, I still collect Monster High dolls and keep up with Mattel creations drops because they use the same face and body molds as G1 (generation one), as opposed to G2 or G3 which I don't like nearly as much. I actually hate G2, but that's universally felt.

The Monster High doll I acquired most recently was the 2024 SDCC (San Diego Comic-Con) exclusive Deadfast Ghoulia Yelps, which is actually an upgraded/reproduction version of the 2011 SDCC Deadfast Ghoulia whose current resale value is upwards of $700 out of box, and $1000 NIB. My dream SDCC doll is the 2012 SDCC Scarah Screams doll. She's one of my favorite Monster High characters, and she has only had five dolls released in the entire fourteen-year history of Monster High, all of which were G1.

That was a lot of unnecessary info-dumping, and I could honestly go on and give you my entire history with Monster High, my fave lines, the dolls I wish I had, and how I dropped the ball not collecting sooner, but I won't because there are other doll lines to talk about eek!

Bratz - I'm gonna start off with bratz even though I know that everybody already knows how much I love them because it hasn't always been this way. I knew of Bratz as a kid, and I played with Bratz as a kid at other people's houses, but I didn't have any of my own because, as I said, it was well past their prime, and I was very much locked in with Monster High. I liked their clothes, and I liked how many accessories came with each doll. Although I never really saw them in the boxes, my friends who had collections of them had so many little bits and pieces to go with each doll, and I thought that was really cool.

The one thing that turned me off of Bratz dolls as a kid (because realistically, as a child, I had no concept of what their prime was and probably would've bought the dolls anyway if it weren't for this fact) was that their feet were weird. If you're not familiar, instead of their shoes coming off, their entire foot did, and that pissed me off so badly as someone who bought fashion dolls to mix and match fashion.

While it didn't entirely stop me from liking the doll line, I never felt tempted to buy them. I only ever owned a Bratz styling head, two Bratz dolls (2011 Stylin' in the City Yasmin and 2015 Selfie Snaps Cloe), and a bunch of their movies that I watched religiously. I loved Bratz more as movie characters than dolls until around 2015/2016, which was when I became interested in buying them, but I didn't actually act on it until years later. Now they're my favorite doll line.

Barbie - I don't know if Barbie counts as a 2000s-2010s doll line because she originated in the 50s, but I'm still going to talk about her because she's an icon, and her 2000s-2010s run was what I grew up with. Barbie, like for many people, was my introduction to fashion dolls, and boy, did she have an impact on me. I would even go as far as to call her my first love. I will always hold space for Barbie in my heart, even though Mattel's constant need for Barbie to be the #1 fashion doll has resulted in so many of my favorite doll lines getting nuked, but that is the fault of corporate greed and NEVER Miss Barbara Millicent Roberts.

I think Barbie's play-line dolls have gotten more and more mediocre over the years. Even as a kid, while they were fun to play with, they paled in comparison to other doll lines' concepts and play sets of that time, which is why I feel like they're so easily duped, and you can find low-end versions at any dollar store. Where Barbie really excels is her collector lines, and if I were to ever collect any Barbie dolls, they would be the ones that you can't just buy off the shelves of Target and Walmart.

When I was very young, maybe four or five, my grandma gifted me a black label, Target exclusive Barbie basics red accessory pack, and the accompanying doll. That's my earliest memory of being introduced to the more sophisticated side of Barbie, the side I'm still so fond of. When I was in elementary school, an administrator who I became close with gave me a magazine about the history of Barbie and her fashions. It was the first time I had seen Barbie dressed up in such extravagant and elegant ways beyond the animated movies, and I became utterly obsessed.

I discarded that magazine at some point in my adolescence, most likely after succumbing to the peer pressure of hanging up my dolls in exchange for social media and boys, but it stuck with me. I have searched far and wide for a copy of it and have come up with nothing. To supplement it, I've acquired numerous books detailing Barbie's history and the countless collections that have been released in her name. They're more detailed than the magazine, but none of them will ever touch the emotional significance attached to it.

Ever After High - Ever After High is another doll line where I was more attached to the accompanying media than the actual dolls. I watched the Netflix original series more times than could be considered healthy, and I owned more of the books than I did the dolls, which wasn't that crazy considering I only had two (dolls, that is). The ones I had were the 2014 Briar Beauty Thronecoming Book playset (which came with Briar Beauty), and the 2015 Way Too Wonderland 17-inch Madeline Hatter doll, which wasn't nearly as iconic as the 17-inch Freak Du Chic Gooliope Jellington doll that Monster High released that same year, which my friend gifted to me for my 10th birthday.

Conceptually, Ever After High was similar to Monster High: sons and daughters of famous and beloved characters, but where Monster High were monsters (obviously), Ever After High were fairy tales, and they even existed in the same universe, which I liked. But in terms of visuals and quality, their fashion wasn't on the same level as Monster High at all, and that's where it fell short for me as someone who really cared about the fashion aspect of fashion dolls. I also thought their heads were way too round, which was something I could've gotten past if they were dressed to the nines, but they weren't, so it added fuel to the fire.

The only time I really put my Ever After High dolls to use was to dress up my Monster High dolls in their clothes, which didn't even fit properly because their body molds were different, or to use them as background characters in stories where my monster high dolls were front and center.

My history with Ever After High dolls isn't nearly as long or meaningful as my history with other doll lines of that time, but as characters, I was able to find joy in them through the show, so that will always mean something to me.

American Girl - American Girl as a brand obviously predates the 2000s-2010s, but the girl of the year tradition, which is one of the hallmarks of the franchise, originated in 2001 and became such an important part of cultivating a love for dolls within people of my generation.

My mom used to get monthly American doll catalogs delivered in the mail, and she would give them to me to look at the different dolls and sets they were coming out with. I would mark it up with pen and marker, circling sets I would never get, calculating costs that, even at that age, I knew were outrageous. It was the beginning of my love for miniature things, and even now, when on trips to Target, I walk through the Journey Girl aisle and feel tempted to buy the tiny foods and knick-knacks.

I got my first and only American girl for Christmas in 2013. It was a Truly Me doll that, ironically, looked nothing like me. We didn't even share a name. I called her Olivia. My mom splurged on it after I begged her for months, and I had never been more excited for anything else in my life. Oh, to be an eight-year-old girl in New York City at one of the American girl flagship stores around Christmas time.

Unfortunately, a few months after I got Olivia, trailers for the first Annabelle movie were put on YouTube as unskippable ads and paired with her scary blinking eyes, an incident I had with a Disney princess doll a few years prior, and R.L. Stine's the haunting hour's "really you" episodes, I was very quickly put off by her, and she ended up sitting in a closet up until last year when I finally decided to give her away to someone who could give her the love she deserved.

If I had the opportunity to buy one now, I'd get a historical doll. Out of all the American girl lines, that was the one that consistently piqued my interest. I loved the outfits, the vintage-style play sets that took you back in time, and the rich, era-accurate stories they gave the girls. My favorites growing up were Kit and Julie.

There are WAY more doll lines of the 2000s and 2010s: my scene, Novistars, Bratz's supernatural counterparts Bratzillaz, and I'd be happy to share my thoughts on those as well, but since this is so long since I went into detail about the impacts of these doll lines on my life I'll cut myself off here!

This question really meant the world to me, Sunnie; thank you again <3

[homo-sex-shoe-whale]

Online shipping, the fetishisation of gay men, and the romanticisation of queer trauma

An essay by me!

Word count: 2.8k

A link to the Google Doc version of this essay.

A big thank you to my friends Nathan @themeerkatnate, Mav @not-mavv , and Duke @dukedark-ness for reading this essay and giving me their thoughts as mlms on the topic. Make sure to check out their blogs and give them a follow!

So I was on a lovely website by the name of Twitter.com yesterday, just scrolling through while having my afternoon cup of coffee, when I saw that viral post of a girl reading a Larry fanfic through a classroom projector. I'm sure most of you have seen it. It's gone viral on Instagram, TikTok, and likely Tumblr too, and if you haven't come across it I'm positive you will soon.

Now, after getting through my initial reaction to that post which was, holy fuck, that's so embarrassing, I had a second reaction of... wait, this ship is still around?

And after I had some thoughts on the incredible permanence of some online ships and the weird obsolescence of others, I did get to thinking of how lots of these popular ships seem to stem from the same types of perceived relationship dynamics and homophobic stereotypes.

These online fandoms often seem to have an obsession with objects of queer trauma, such as having to hide a relationship, lying about sexuality for self-preservation, and even social rejection. So, after some opinions from my followers and the great archive that is the internet, I've decided to discuss some of the most popular examples of online shipping and the particular nuances they came with.

NOTE: Out of respect for all these people, I won't be sharing viral images or videos of them in perceived romantic proximity (or even kissing, as is applicable for some examples), but I will be describing certain moments I deem to be relevant. So even if you're unfamiliar with them, you won't be confused as to what I'm talking about.

NOTE 2: Although not all people within these fandoms were/are toxic, this essay is focused on the overall toxicity of the fandoms, and how they are toxic more so as a "hive" than as a group of individuals. When I refer to a fandom I don't mean every person involved in the fandom, but rather the collective impact of the group.

 1. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson 

This is arguably the most popular example of online shipping. The absolute permanence of this ship, and how its fandom never seems to fully die off even beyond the lifespan of One Direction as it once stood, is downright impressive.  

I'm going to be the first to admit I was never in the loop with this fandom. My childhood best friend was actually a massive Larry shipper and asked me to beta read one of her fics, but that was before I even knew who tf Harry and Louis were! Not because I avoided the fandom or even because I rejected the online shipping, but just by coincidence, I delved into the world of pop punk music right when One Direction began gaining its popularity. I bought my first ever album, Riot by Paramore, in 2011- only a year after One Direction made their X-Factor debut. So, this fandom just bypassed me by a sort of weird coincidence.

But I don't need to be in the loop with this fandom to know the astronomical obsession with these two men, no, these two BOYS, was extremely toxic. In 2010, when One Direction made their debut, Harry Styles was only 16 years old. And Louis Tomlinson wasn't much older at 19! This made the two of them incredibly young when this unprecedented wave of shipping hit the internet, and although that must be traumatising for anyone, I cannot even fathom how overwhelming it must've been for two boys that young.  

I'm 18, almost 19 now, and I cannot begin to imagine how scary it was for the two of them to have their every interaction nitpicked within an inch of its life by thousands upon thousands of people online. I do not know this myself, but from numerous recounts by some of my followers, this massively impacted Harry's and Louis' nondescript relationship in real life, seemingly driving the two previously close friends apart. 

Now, before we move on, there's something we need to talk about. And that is the obsession with the dominance/submission dynamic within the world of gay shipping. 

With almost every popular mlm (an acronym meaning man-loving-man) ship based on real people, it seems that fandoms have a particular fascination with power imbalances in these relationships. You don't even need to look at the insane amount of fanfictions based on BDSM to figure this out. In almost all of the examples I'll be citing today, there is an age gap within the perceived relationship and a person the fandom has seemingly decided to be the top/dominant figure. 

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are 3 years apart in age. Although it isn't all that relevant now, an age gap of 3 years when you're in your late teens is a lot more significant. In 2012, for example, when this shipping really started gaining traction, Harry Styles was 18 and Louis Tomlinson was 21. That power imbalance, albeit not that significant, is enough for a fandom to latch on to. We'll see this a lot more in the coming example with Dan and Phil.

 2. Dan Howell and Phil Lester

It's impossible to have a discussion about internet shipping without talking about Dan and Phil.

 Dan Howell and Phil Lester, although being popular YouTubers individually, are arguably one of the internet's most iconic duos. The two creators published their first videos together in 2009, and while their relationship was already a motive of speculation back then, the peak of the "Phan" shipping definitely came in the 2013-2016 era of Tumblr.

Now, I'm going to admit… I was actually on Tumblr when that happened. 

The 2013-2016 period perfectly aligns with my middle school days (I started middle school in 2013 and high school in 2016), and I was not only on Tumblr back then, but I was on Wattpad too! Again, this wasn't a fandom I had much contact with as I had a huge anime phase in middle school and I was on Tumblr posting mainly photography and Soul Eater content more than anything. 

But I did watch some of Dan and Phil's videos! And the occasional "Phan" content did not completely evade me as one of my closest friends in middle school had a fanchat for them. I wasn't involved in the fandom myself but they were actually one of the few English-speaking YouTubers I watched once in a blue moon (back then I watched mainly Brazilian YouTubers). One thing I did in fact notice over the years, around 2014ish perhaps, was that the two of them seemed to grow increasingly "awkward" around each other, in a way that many folks on the internet thought was reminiscent to Markiplier/Jacksepticeye, two YouTubers who also dealt with extraordinary amounts of shipping.

I'm not the only one who thinks this. The change in Dan and Phil's relationship, at least to the outside world, was clear to almost anyone who watched their videos for a while. I cannot blame them at all. The shipping was nuts. Between the countless fan videos, speculative comments, and insurmountable number of fanfics, there's no way the two of them didn't feel the weight of the shipping. The term "demon phannie" made its way into internet vernacular and there it stayed for years. Even Shane Dawson, who was one of the largest creators on the platform at the time, made several videos speculating on the nature of Dan and Phil's relationship and their sexual orientations. 

There was even porn made in which actors with similar appearances to the creators were made to have sex on camera. 

Now, this is actually a rare example where the two people involved in the ship actually came out as gay once the shipping seemed to die down. I'm incredibly happy Dan and Phil both reached a point where they were comfortable being publicly out, but I hate to say I'm shocked this day ever came. If I'd gone through what the two of them did, I don't know if I'd ever trust the internet. 

And again, this ship's fandom definitely had an obsession with the power dynamics they thought existed between the people within the ship. Dan Howell is 4 years younger than Phil Lester, and was only 18 in 2009, when they started making videos together. From my personal understanding, the shipping was often quite focused on this dominant/submissive dynamic especially in discussions from their early relationship. And this is in no way exclusive to Dan and Phil.

This general fascination with the older man/younger man dynamic, in my opinion, plays into the homophobic stereotype that gay men are predators. The idea that gay men usually seek younger men, and somehow "convince" them to engage in homosexual relationships, is popular homophobic rhetoric. The popularisation, exaggeration, and fetishisation of these power imbalances, in age and/or in relationship dynamics, is directly harmful to the mlm community. 

Not only that, but the romanticisation of a "hidden/forbidden relationship" is also detrimental not only to gay men and the mlm community, but to queer people as a whole. Queer people face huge trauma having to hide their relationships; queer attraction is already a societal taboo. And acting like this is good, or even desirable, is harmful to queer people as a whole, regardless of whether or not it's actually applicable to the people being shipped. It normalises this trauma not only to cisgender, heterosexual people, but to impressionable queer youth who grow to believe this type of trauma is to be expected. 

3. Frank Iero and Gerard Way

This is another example where the perceived power imbalances between the two subjects of the shipping were directly exploited online. Now, this ship did precede the others mentioned above. If we're looking at this topic chronologically, this particular ship did come first in the shipping timeline. It's closer to the origin of the shipping extended universe, if you will.

In case you aren't familiar with them, Frank Iero and Gerard Way are both members of the American emo band My Chemical Romance. This ship is the first one here of which I don't recall the full popularity. It really peaked in popularity around the late 2000s, circa 2008. And I don't remember this moment online as in 2008, I was only 6 years old and believe it or not, I wasn't really all that concerned with rumoured homoeroticism as a first grader. 

However, the popularity of this ship did carry over into the 2013-2015 Tumblr shipping boom. The emo fandom (or "bandom" as it was called) involving not only My Chemical Romance but other similar bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and Pierce the Veil, found its hub on Tumblr. 

During this time, I did in fact listen to this style of music, but was focused a lot more on the anime side of Tumblr as mentioned earlier. Of course, I wasn't 13 years old like, "hey, this type of content might be harmful and can inadvertently perpetuate homophobic stereotypes," I just happened to care more about my silly little anime and ended up not getting involved. 

This ship does involve a discussion that the others don't, however. With Frank Iero and Gerard Way, there is quite often a certain sentiment of, "Oh, they brought this upon themselves!" as the two band members very famously kissed during a show in 2007. In my opinion, though, this doesn't really justify all the obsessive shipping. If you look at Green Day, a band often grouped in with MCR as another famous pop punk group, the members don't follow too different of a trajectory. Billie Joe Armstrong has, on numerous occasions, kissed both of his fellow band members onstage- particularly Tré Cool, the drummer. And Billie Joe Armstrong is openly bisexual, which none of the members of MCR seem to be but some, or even all of Billie's bandmates, are too. 

You'd think Green Day would face a lot more shipping as the more persistent onstage homoeroticism and Billie Joe's openness about his sexuality would warrant more "substantiated" speculation. However, Green Day faces nowhere near as much shipping as My Chemical Romance. Why is this? I actually don't know. It might've been because Green Day has been around for over a decade longer and generally has an older fandom, but I really am not that sure. 

 It could also be because of the lower lack of potential for forced relationship dynamics. The members of Green Day are all less than a year apart in age and are even similar in height. However, Frank Iero is 4 years younger than Gerard Way, who is not only the frontman of My Chemical Romance, but also considered to be the group's intellectual and creative "leader". Even beyond that, Gerard Way is quite visibly taller, and the perceived power difference between the two of them definitely did not elude their fans. 

This difference could even be partly due to the lack of a "mystery" with Green Day. There's not as much to speculate as, well… the members of Green Day are already open about their sexual orientations. It might be that shipping in the Green Day fandom has less of a forbidden appeal for most people. 

Of course, I won't just keep repeating myself, but my previous points about forced relationship dynamics still stand.

4. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch

Better known for their roles in BBC Sherlock as Sherlock and Watson, Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch unfortunately had their roles follow them well into real life. This is the example I know least about, so have these thoughts from a follower by the name of @indubitably-a-goblin, who had the following to say:

"the main issues i had with it were:

a) they were both married at the time, freeman to amanda abbington and cumberbatch to sophie hunter (in which both had children)

b) the main reasoning for it was their chemistry in the many projects they've done together. which is, shockingly, their Whole Job. They're actors! That's what they're supposed to do! if they weren't good at interacting then they wouldn't be good actors! i don't know how people can't understand this.

c) they're real people. we don't know them. we aren't friends with them. we aren't their family members. we have zero right to be pushing this onto them and ruining their friendship by doing so. (this one relates to most of the ships you've mentioned though)

d) healthy friendships between two men are ignored so plainly in most medias and in fandom. its obvious that these two men have a relationship, but that doesn't mean it's a romantic one.

e) its fine to ship their characters, but actors shouldn't be treated as less-than-human or some sort of prop. they're doing a job, and once they are off-screen, they aren't here for your entertainment."

I believe she did a great job of summing it up on her own, and for the sake of avoiding redundancy, I'll leave it at that!

5. Corpse Husband and Sykkuno- an emerging yet subtle example

I am absolutely positive you remember how popular the game Among Us was a couple of months ago. And with the popularity of this game, some of its most prominent content creators became the targets of online shipping- as is the case with YouTubers and streamers Corpse Husband and Sykkuno. 

Although the shipping involving these two creators is nowhere near as strong as it was/is with the examples above, I do think there is once again a reemergence of a common theme here. Whilst Sykkuno is known for his happy-go-lucky, almost "innocent" persona, Corpse Husband is the antithesis of this, known for his much darker and moodier personality. 

Do I even have to mention what the common theme seems to be?

Again, although the popularity of shipping - at least with real people - seems to have died down a bit since the Tumblr shipping boom of the early to mid 2010s, I do believe this example is worth mentioning. Even though the creators are still close, they have in fact expressed discomfort regarding the shipping, and I can only hope the internet as a whole lets their friendship blossom and exist naturally without obsessive speculation. 

My final thoughts

As explored in the essay:

The romanticisation of objects of queer trauma as a part of online shipping normalises queer trauma to both cishet and queer youth. 

Online shipping, especially at a high intensity, can end up negatively impacting the very relationships they pine over. 

The relationship dynamics often forced on mlm ships perpetuate homophobic stereotypes about non-heterosexual men. 

If anyone else has thoughts on this matter, do share! This essay is moreso an opinionated observational piece and isn't meant to be taken as fact but rather just as my thoughts on the matter. I hope it was useful as a reflective piece regardless!

Date of posting: June 16th 2021

[mercurygray]

So, I Hear You Liked: 1917

More World War One Films

I was very excited about 1917 when it first came out because it almost perfectly coincided with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, a conflict that I love to read about, write about, and watch movies about. This period is my JAM, and there's such a lot of good content for when you're done with Sam Mendes's film.

Obviously there are a lot of movies and TV shows out there - this is just a selection that I enjoyed, and wish more people knew about.

Note: Everyone enjoys a show or movie for different reasons. These shows are on this list because of the time period they depict, not because of the quality of their writing, the accuracy of their history or the political nature of their content. Where I’m able to, I’ve mentioned if a book is available if you’d like to read more.

I'd like to start the list with a movie that isn't a fiction piece at all - Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2019) is a beautifully produced film that allows the soldiers and archival images themselves, lovingly retimed and tinted into living color, to tell their own story. It is a must watch for anyone interested in the period.

Wings (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), A Farewell to Arms (1932, 1957), The Dawn Patrol (1938), Sergeant York (1941), and Paths of Glory (1957) are all classics with a couple of Oscars between them, and it's sort of fun to watch how the war gets changed and interpreted as the years pass. (The Dawn Patrol, for instance, might as just as easily be about the RAF in World War 2.)

All Quiet is based on a famous memoir, and A Farewell to Arms on a Hemingway novel; both have several adaptations and they're all a little different. Speaking of iconic novels, Doctor Zhivago (1965) based on the Pasternak novel of the same title, examines life of its protagonist between 1905 and the start of the second World War.

I think one thing historians agree on is that the start of World War One is worth discussing - and that there's a lot of backstory. Fall of Eagles (1974), a 13 part BBC miniseries, details the relationships between the great houses of Europe, starting in the 1860s; it's long but good, and I think might be on YouTube. The Last Czars (2019) takes a dramatized look at the Romanovs and how their reactions to the war lead to their eventual demise.

As far as the war itself, Sarajevo (2014) and 37 Days (2014) both discuss the outbreak of hostilities and the slow roll into actual battle.

The Passing Bells (2014) follows the whole war through the eyes of two soldiers, one German and one British, beginning in peacetime.

Joyeux Noel ( 2005) is a cute story - it takes place early in the war during the Christmas Peace and approaches the event from a multinational perspective.

War Horse (2011) is, of course, a name you'll recognize. Based on the breakout West End play, which is itself based on a YA novel by Michael Morpurgo, the story follows a horse who's requisitioned for cavalry service and the young man who owns him. Private Peaceful (2012) is also based on a Morpurgo novel, but I didn't think it was quite as good as War Horse.

The Wipers Times (2013) is one of my all-time favorites; it's about a short lived trench paper written and produced by soldiers near Ypres, often called Wipers by the average foot soldier. The miniseries, like the paper, is laugh out loud funny in a dark humor way.

My Boy Jack (2007) is another miniseries based on a play, this one about Rudyard Kipling and his son, Jack, who served in the Irish Guards and died at Loos. Kipling later wrote a poem about the death of his son, and helped select the phrase that appears on all commonwealth gravestones of the First World War.

Gallipoli (1981) is stunning in a way only a Peter Weir movie can be; this is a classic and a must-see.

Gallipoli is a big story that's been told and retold a lot. I still haven't seen Deadline Gallipoli (2015) an Australian miniseries about the men who wrote about the battle for the folks back home and were subject to censorship about how bad things really were. For a slightly different perspective, the Turkish director Yesim Sezgin made Çanakkale 1915 in 2012, detailing the Turkish side of the battle. Although most of The Water Diviner (2014) takes place after the war is over, it also covers parts of Gallipoli and while it didn't get great reviews, I enjoy it enough to own it on DVD.

I don't know why all of my favorite WWI films tend to be Australian; Beneath Hill 60 (2010) is another one of my favorites, talking about the 1st Australian Tunneling Company at the Ypres Salient. The War Below (2021) promises to tell a similar story about the Pioneer companies at Messines, responsible for building the huge network of mines there.

Passchendaele (2008) is a Canadian production about the battle of the same name. I'd forgotten I've seen this film, which might not say very much for the story.

Journey's End (2017) is an adaptation of an RC Sheriff play that takes place towards the end of the war in a dugout amongst British officers.

No look at the Great War is complete without a nod to developing military technologies, and this is the war that pioneers the aviation battle for us. I really wish Flyboys (2006) was better than it is, but The Red Baron (2008) makes up for it from the German perspective.

One of the reasons I like reading about the First World War is that everyone is having a revolution. Technology is growing by leaps and bounds, women are fighting for the right to vote, and a lot of colonial possessions are coming into their own, including (but not limited to) Ireland. Rebellion (2016) was a multi-season miniseries that went into the Easter Rising, as well as the role the war played there. Michael Collins (1996) spends more time with the Anglo-Irish war in the 1920s but is still worth watching (or wincing through Julia Roberts' bad accent, you decide.) The Wind that Shakes the Barley covers the same conflict and is excellent.

The centennial of the war meant that in addition to talking about the war, people were also interested in talking about the Armenian Genocide. The Promise (2016) and The Ottoman Lieutenant (2017) came out around the same time and two different looks at the situation in Armenia.

This is a war of poets and writers, of whom we have already mentioned a few. Hedd Wynn ( 1992) which is almost entirely in Welsh, and tells the story of Ellis Evans, a Welsh language poet who was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. I think Ioan Gruffudd has read some of his poetry online somewhere, it's very pretty. A Bear Named Winnie (2004) follows the life of the bear who'd become the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh. Tolkien (2019) expands a little on the author's early life and his service during the war. Benediction (2021) will tell the story of Siegfried Sassoon and his time at Craiglockhart Hospital. Craiglockhart is also represented in Regeneration (1997) based on a novel by Pat Barker.

Anzac Girls (2014) is probably my favorite mini-series in the history of EVER; it follows the lives of a group of Australian and New Zealand nurses from hospital duty in Egypt to the lines of the Western Front. I love this series not only because it portrays women (ALWAYS a plus) but gives a sense of the scope of the many theatres of the war that most movies don't. It's based on a book by Peter Rees, which is similarly excellent.

On a similar note, The Crimson Field (2014) explores the lives of members of a Voluntary Aid Detachment, or VADs, lady volunteers without formal nursing training who were sent to help with menial work in hospitals. It only ran for a season but had a lot of potential. Testament of Youth (2014) is based on the celebrated memoirs of Vera Brittain, who served as a VAD for part of the war and lead her to become a dedicated pacifist.

Also, while we're on the subject of women, though these aren't war movies specifically, I feel like the additional color to the early 20th century female experience offered by Suffragette (2015) and Iron-Jawed Angels (2004) is worth the time.

As a general rule, Americans don't talk about World War One, and we sure don't make movies about it, either. The Lost Battalion (2001) tells the story of Major Charles Whittlesey and the 9 companies of the 77th Infantry division who were trapped behind enemy lines during the battle of the Meuse Argonne.

I should add that this list is curtailed a little bit by what's available for broadcast or stream on American television, so it's missing a lot of dramas in other languages. The Road to Calvary (2017) was a Russian drama based on the novels of Alexei Tolstoy. Kurt Seyit ve Şura (2014) is based on a novel and follows a love story between a Crimean officer (a Muslim) and the Russian woman he loves. The show is primarily in Turkish, and Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, who plays the lead, is *very* attractive.

Finally, although it might seem silly to mention them, Upstairs Downstairs (1971-1975 ) Downton Abbey (2010-2015) and Peaky Blinders (2013-present) are worth a mention and a watch. All of them are large ensemble TV shows that take place over a much longer period than just the Great War, but the characters in each are shaped tremendously by the war.

[avatar-news]

The Fire Nation Awaits 🌺 An in-depth look at the ever-elusive islands in the era of Korra and when we will finally pay them a visit

[Artwork by Avatar News; not official.]

Note: This article was published before the official announcement of Avatar Studios at the Paramount+ investor day.

“Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.” We’ve all heard those words a million times. The four elements, and the power to control them bestowed by four subspecies of giant lion-turtles, are at the very heart of the world of Avatar. The balance between them was once upon a time broken by one of the four, the Fire Nation, forming the main conflict of Avatar: The Last Airbender. For much of Aang and the Gaang’s quest at the close of the Hundred Year War, the Fire Nation was a forbidden, far-away location, until the curtain was finally drawn back in the aptly-named Book Three: Fire when our heroes entered the inferno, undercover behind enemy lines. A dramatic tropical destination! New outfits! Culture shock! Needless to say, it was a big deal.

→ 🌺 The big reveal of the Fire Nation in Book Three: Fire had its own marketing push, matching public anticipation.

When the Hundred Year War ended, the newly-instated Fire Lord Zuko dedicated his life to righting the wrongs of his forefathers and working with Avatar Aang to bring the Fire Nation back into the fold under peace. By the time Aang’s successor debuted as the next Avatar in the titular The Legend of Korra, Zuko had abdicated the five-pointed crown and his daughter, Fire Lord Izumi, took the stage leading a reformed, rebalanced Fire Nation.

There was no more war, no more enemy lines, yet the Fire Nation became more distant and mysterious than ever before.

Korra’s close encounters with the land of fire

To this day, Korra has never visited the Fire Nation, nor has it been seen at all, nor do we know anything about it in her era. In fact, practically the only thing we do know is that its leader is a noninterventionist, which conveniently gets it out of the way of making an appearance in Korra’s journey as the Avatar so far.

The closest we have come to seeing the Fire Nation in The Legend of Korra was in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Five: Peacekeepers. In the midst of the Water Tribe Civil War, Korra sets out across the sea to get help from the royal family, however, she is intercepted by a dark spirit and never makes it to her destination. In the next episode, she washes up on a secret island home to the Bhanti sages, which probably technically counts as Fire Nation territory, but as we know from The Shadow of Kyoshi (more on that later), this faction predates the Four Nations themselves so it doesn’t really count.

→ 🌺 Korra washes up on the beach of Bhanti Island in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Six: The Sting.

No, as cool as that location and the events of the Beginnings two-parter that happened there were, it wasn’t the main draw of seeing the Fire Nation that we’re still waiting for: seeing how the Fire Nation, which was already industrializing in Aang’s time, changed over the decades, compared to places like Republic City and Ba Sing Se; meeting new characters; visiting new and familiar locations; worldbuilding both new and expanding on what we already learned.

After this aborted tease in Book Two, we never come close to the island country again (at least not with this Avatar and in her era; yes I’m leading up to something...). Instead, the focus turns strongly to the Earth Kingdom in the third and fourth Books, and beyond.

Keep in mind that The Legend of Korra aired for about two-and-a-half years total from 2012 to 2014. Since then, the story has continued in comics. The comics era has lasted from 2015 to present-- seven years to the animated series’ two. In that time, there have only been two comic trilogies due to various production troubles, and neither have touched the Fire Nation. Instead, they directly continue the Earth Kingdom-focused threads started in Books Three and Four of Korra, both originally airing in 2014. Or, in perspective: we had a focus on Republic City in 2012, the Water Tribes in 2013, and the Earth Kingdom from 2014-2021.

Will we finally see the Fire Nation in the next graphic novel trilogy?

This question comes to mind every time new Korra content is supposed to roll around, and the powers that be know it-- it’s a pretty obvious gap in the world of Avatar right now. This franchise is iconically built around four elements and the Four Nations based on them, so one of them being MIA is quite glaring, and for that reason everyone is understandably always asking about it.

The most concrete confirmation we’ve gotten was this AMA answer from franchise co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino in 2016, two years after the show ended and a year before the first graphic novels did come out:

“Yes, hopefully in the [Korra] comics, we’ll have a chance to go to the Fire Nation and see how it has changed since A:TLA.”

Since then, as previously discussed, two comic trilogies have come and gone, obviously not getting closer to the Fire Nation-- and I would actually argue entrenching themselves further away from it.

I want to make it clear that I’m against fan entitlement. Creatives telling the tales they want to in service of the story and the artform is how the industry should run. I’m just hoping to offer some perspective on how we got to where we are almost a decade into the era of Korra and the metatextual pacing of the franchise itself.

Either way, the next Korra comic trilogy has been official confirmed by the editor for Avatar at Dark Horse Comics in this informal statement on Twitter:

We’re not ready to announce any details yet, but we are working on the next trilogy. I really appreciate your patience and hope it’s worth the wait! ✨

There’s currently some kind of holdup for which we really have zero context or information, and we of course have no idea what this next trilogy will be about. (I do speculate a bit on what it could be a few paragraphs down.)

But, like what turned out to be Ruins of the Empire before it, I faithfully made a mockup graphic for my post announcing the confirmation of the next The Legend of Korra graphic novel trilogy. And like before, I chose to completely speculatively and blindly make it Fire Nation-y, as if the next comic could/would(/should?) feature it. This is mainly because I feel like that’s what most people’s eyes would be caught by and thus result in the most successful post (hey, at least I’m honest), but also because it’s just fun.

Here are both images, from 2018 and 2020 respectively:

→ 🌺 Speculative edits I made for my posts on the announcement of previous and upcoming Korra comics before we knew anything about them.

In both cases, the response was huge, and people were super excited about the prospect of Fire Nation content just from my quick speculative mockups. I am of course hoping that the new artwork I made of the Krew for this post will have a similar effect (it’s the first time I just straight-up drew it instead of editing existing images) but again it’s really mostly just for fun.

Anyway, until the next trilogy is properly revealed, we’ll just have to wait and see.

However, that’s not the only place this could happen.

Are they saving the Fire Nation for an animated movie?

With Avatar’s HUGE success on Netflix last year, interest in the franchise rocketed to an all-time high. The streaming wars have begun, and Avatar’s owner and its parent company, Nickelodeon and ViacomCBS, have finally started to notice.

ViacomCBS is launching Paramount+ on March 4th, a relaunch of its existing streaming service CBS All Access. Paramount+ is meant to be a big expansion and refocus to compete with the big hitters: Disney+, HBO Max, and, yes, Netflix. (There’s quite an entanglement there, with Netflix being the home of Avatar’s big year and the upcoming live-action series.)

One of the keys to a successful streamer today is high-profile originals to drive new subscribers. ViacomCBS knows this and they know Avatar has just become among the highest profiles a property can have, breaking records and going toe-to-toe with other big-hitting sci-fi/fantasy/genre franchises. This knowledge goes right to the top of the food chain: the CEO of ViacomCBS mentioned Avatar by name when discussing potential originals for Paramount+.

I have previously discussed how The Search relates to this. The Search was the second ATLA comic trilogy, focused on the search for Zuko’s mother in the thick of the Fire Nation, and if you didn’t know, it was originally pitched by Bryke as an animated movie after the original series ended.

I just want to be clear that what I’m discussing here is purely speculative, but this is the only other piece of the Avatar franchise that we know was optioned for animation besides the shows themselves. It’s possible they would be interested in going back to this idea as a Paramount+ original (and it would certainly be popular among audiences), but it is of course set during the era of Aang and thus covers both a time period we’ve already seen, and also by nature of already being released as comics, events we’ve already seen too.

However, the whole point of this article is that there is one major, huge thing we haven’t seen yet, with massive anticipation building for a decade behind it: the Fire Nation in the era of Korra. So, again, this is just speculation, but it’s also possible that they could return to the very smallest seed of the original idea for a The Search movie, and do a Fire Nation-focused Korra movie now.

→ 🌺 ATLA’s Fire Nation-focused The Search was originally pitched as an animated movie.

You can skip this next part if you don’t want to see me embarrassingly promote my fan idea 😆 but this is where the artwork I made for this article comes into play. The general idea for it, and the reason I tried to replicate the show’s style as much as possible, is that it’s what a Fire Nation-focused movie could maybe look like. Something as standalone and unrelated to Earth Kingdom drama as possible, with fresh new looks for the Krew to get people excited for something fresh and new! I really feel like the Avatar franchise has so much potential for expanded content like this, that’s why I have high hopes that Paramount+ will make the most out of it! You can see the individual characters’ artwork in larger size here. Ok I’m done back to business.

If the idea of a movie seems too impossible to you, we can also take a deeper look at Bryke’s involvement with upcoming comics instead.

After Korra ended, they officially each went their separate ways. They vaguely consulted on Avatar stuff, and Mike of course wrote the Korra comics, but Bryan was planning on writing and drawing his own original non-Avatar comic series and Mike was releasing his own non-Avatar novels. This all appears to have come to a stop when they signed on to showrun the live-action retelling of ATLA at Netflix, officially reuniting the partnership and committing to Avatar again in a big way. Of course, they ended up leaving that project over creative differences, but it did result in a big, lasting change: this time they remained official creative partners and have indicated they’re still working on Avatar now, together. This is a far cry from the official breakup after Korra, so it begs the question what exactly they’re working on. I of course have my fanciful predictions of a sprawling expansion of the Avatar franchise at Paramount+, but what if it’s actually a combination of the ingredients from before the live-action series...

More speculation, but what if the reason for all the mystery behind the next Korra comics is because they will be made by Bryke, with the two of them co-writing and Bryan doing the art for the first time? If that’s the case, they could want to make them a bigger deal than the other Avatar comics have been so far, and maybe that’s why it’s taking so long to iron everything out, have a more significant story, have more of a marketing push, etc. If they’ve been saving the Fire Nation for something big, this could be it.

I personally think this is less likely than a show or movies or something, but it is possible. Anything is possible right now since we know so little about the large-scale direction of the franchise moving forward, just that it’s gonna get big.

⛰️🌋 The Fire Nation in the era of Avatar Kyoshi

We’re not done! Despite everything I’ve written here, believe it or not, the Fire Nation was actually the star of the show in the last year.

With the debut of the Avatar franchise’s first original novels, Kyoshi made a huge splash (in a way only she can). If you haven’t read them yet, you NEED to-- they’re some of the best Avatar content EVER. The Rise of Kyoshi hit shelves in 2019 and The Shadow of Kyoshi followed in 2020. The latter is of particular interest here, because it was almost entirely set in the Fire Nation and featured practically everything and anything you could want from a visit to elusive islands. Though obviously set in a historical period some four hundred years before Aang’s time, Kyoshi’s sojourn in the Fire Nation gave us a huge amount of new information, a depth and breadth of worldbuilding, culture, and character we’ve never really seen in Avatar before. It truly makes the most of the literary medium, so hats off to author F. C. Yee for the passion and effort he put in.

In The Shadow of Kyoshi, we learn about the era of the previous fire Avatar before Roku, Avatar Szeto. Through Kyoshi and her own Team Avatar, we learn about the different clans and islands of the Fire Nation, as they experience the fraught early reign of Fire Lord Zoryu and the conflict between the Keohso and Saowon clans, culminating in the Camellia-Peony War. We get a multitude of fleshed-out perspectives from the upper crust to the flea-bitten underworld, matching the heights of the worldbuilding quality of Republic City. It’s such cool, intricate stuff, and really shows Avatar’s potential (and that’s all just the worldbuilding-- the character work is also top-notch).

That’s not the only place the Fire Nation has shone recently. One of Insight Editions’ awesome scrapbooks, Legacy of the Fire Nation, gave us a tour through the royal family’s history, including never-before-seen looks at young Iroh and Ozai and much, much more.

All this just goes to show that the Fire Nation has been a hot ticket throughout the ages and there’s one conspicuous gap in that history: the era of Avatar Korra. With so much recent expansion and development of the Fire Nation in our world, it would be perfect to see the culmination of it all in the current time period in the world of Avatar too.

If this made you excited for the potential of what the Avatar franchise could look like in the coming years, same boat!

The next concrete date where something could be announced is February 24th, when ViacomCBS will host their investor day and present their streaming strategy, including Paramount+ originals. There’s no guarantee Avatar is mentioned, but I’m keeping a hopeful eye out.

As for comics, Dark Horse’s schedule marches to its own beat, so there’s no way to know when the next drop of information is coming our way.

Could this finally be the comics that take us to the Fire Nation, or could the much-anticipated visit be in another medium like animation? Stay tuned-- as always I’ll post as soon as we learn anything new!

[kachulein]

Check-In Tag

I was tagged by @calcifer-rose and @marculees to do this tag. Thank you🥺💞💞

1. why did you choose your url?

Kachu is my nickname and "-lein" is a German diminutive to make it sound cuter since kachu by itself was already taken.

2. any side blogs?

Yes! I have quite a few but the only one that I actively check up on/post on at the moment is my astrology blog @dreamyaqua ...and even there I have been quite inactive due to studying for exams.

3. how long have you been on tumblr? 

Since December 2012 :')))

4. do you have a q tag?

Yes! I mainly use my "q: daydreaming💫" tag but I also have one for sleeping (that I keep forgetting to use) and I kind of replaced my "busy busy" queue tag with the daydreaming one as well. Rarely, I might temporarily make a new one with "sick/ill" or something to kind of also explain why I might be inactive/not replying to messages.

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

I'm actually not sure... I made a tumblr but didn't use it for a few years because it was too confusing to me. Then in 2014/2015 I used it here and there to reblog emo posts and then in 2016 I started getting into the kpop side of tumblr and became gradually more active (only really started interacting with people after starting my writing side blog in 2018, though).

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

Because it fits my current blog aesthetic/colour theme and Yeonjun is one of my ult biases.

7. why did you choose your header?

Pretty much the same applies to my header as well. Yes, I'm a sucker for Yeonjun. c:

8. what’s your post with the most notes?

Oof...on main, I really don't know. I've made my fair share of kpop meme posts that garnered >1k notes but I couldn't say which one of those is number one. But my most popular post overall is a Bang Chan blurb I wrote on my (now mostly inactive) sideblog @fluffyheadcanons that counts >2.1k notes as of now.

9. how many mutuals do you have?

I used to keep track of them in a little booklet so that I didn't forget anyone (especially with tag games, checking up on them, and also to update their url changes) because I had >100 mutuals. I've lost touch with most of them and a lot of them aren't active on tumblr anymore, so now I keep a small circle of lovely moots with some that I've been friends with for years and others I've met in the past year!^-^ 💞💞

10. how many followers do you have? 

It keeps fluctuating but it's around 1.5k~

11. how many people do you follow?

About 271 as of now~

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

Ever? You mean, all the time? Yes, that sounds more like it. :')

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

Hmm...some days more, some days less. I probably pop in at least once a day (most of the time) but I'm not as crazily active as I was in the earlier days (I literally lived on here ok😭).

14. did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog?

Hm... not a fight per se... but there were a few instances.

1) Back in 2019 I believe, I got an anon ask saying that one of my mutuals was talking shit about me on their blog and they asked me whether we had a fight (we didn't). So I went and messaged said mutual and asked what this is about and whether I've done something to upset them. They never replied and also unfollowed me and all, so to this day, I still have no idea what the heck happened.

2) I had a similar situation with a second mutual as well, there wasn't an anon involved but I just suddenly realized that they unfollowed me on every social media we connected on and same as above, to this day, I still have no idea what I did wrong/whether I did something to upset them.

3) I won't go into much detail here because what happened is very personal but this mutual was one of my first friends here on tumblr and they were without a doubt the person I talked to the most. We had similar struggles and could relate to each other well. Then there was a personal issue and I confronted them about it... I wasn't mad but I just wanted to know the truth because I don't like being lied to... but they never replied to me and it marked the end of our friendship. This one is the hardest for me to get over because we weren't just mutuals, we were so much closer than that. More than anything, I just miss them and think it's sad how we went from talking all day every day to being strangers. But life goes on...

15. how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this’ posts? 

Depending on what it is about they make me a bit uncomfortable. I know that those posts who threaten you are all about superstitions but it still scares me/I don't wanna risk anything y'know😔

16. do you like tag games?

Yes!! I really love these type of games, so moots or anyone who's reading this, feel free to tag me in games, I'm always up for doing them! And I don't mind getting spammed either, it just means more fun games for me!^-^

17. do you like ask games?

Yes, I love them! But I don't want to annoy people so I haven't reblogged one in ages ^^"

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

Hmm... I'd say Qiu (@stealerz) and Key (@key201303)!!🥺💞💞

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

I'll join Niamh here and say squishes! I do have those on my moots because you're all so precious and ily!!!👉🏻👈🏻🥺

20. tags?

@jsczclpjs @jellihye @stealerz @key201303 @interstellix @oddlittlefandomist @marriael @jbemin and anyone else who'd like to do it!~💞💞

[kwistowee]

Blog Tag  

I was tagged by the lovely @rainbow-motors

1. Why did you choose your url? -  When I was teeny weeny and couldn’t say my name yet (Crystal Marie), Kwistowee was the best I could do and my older brother stated calling me that again when I was 16. It’s the only nickname I’ve ever had and it cracks me up, so I use it because it’s unique, and is, therefore, never already taken.

2. Any side blogs? - Nope! Just retired blogs and networks (the retired blogs are listed in my description; feel free to explore if you like). I stepped way back from Tumblr at the beginning of 2016 and I’m keeping it simple with just the one blog from here on out.

3. How long have you been on Tumblr? - Since June 2012  (as @mostly-jensen ), but I created this blog in March of 2015. 

4. Do you have a queue tag? - Nope. I’m always in ninja mode.

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place? - I wanted somewhere I felt free to post about any of my assorted interests ( @mostly-jensen and @mostlybenedict were pretty specifically curated). 

6. Why did you choose your icon/pfp? - I don’t often like photos of myself but that one’s pretty good, and I wanted a real representation of myself associated with my blog.

7. Why did you choose your header? -  Back in 2008 I was a missionary for my church in New Zealand for 18 months, and I was specifically assigned to learn and teach in the Sāmoan language and spend all of my time with Polynesians. I’d already learned French and German when I was younger and they were relatively easy but this language was a beast. 

Once I finally got it down, I got more double takes than at any other point in my life. These big Polynesian dudes and ladies just did not expect this little 5’3”, blonde haired, blue eyed girl to know what the heck they were talking about or to understand their culture. But I worked really hard to and they called me their little blonde Sāmoan. They said I was a reverse coconut: white on the outside but brown on the inside. And even though it’s been years, I still love that culture and that language fiercely. I like to carry a little bit of that part of my life with me wherever I go, hence: Little Blonde Sāmoan. And I miss living on a tropical island, so waterfalls...

8. What’s your post with the most notes? - Ok, I’m doing one for this blog and one for my retired blogs (because I still love them): #beast,  Dean Walking through the Seasons, and  Hey guys, look ^ : SherKhan.

9. How many mutuals do you have? - 23... unrequited love and all that.

10. How many followers do you have? - Not many when compared to the 80k + I had on @mostly-jensen but I’m happy to have every single one of you!

11. How many people do you follow? - 107

12. How often do you use Tumblr each day? - Enough to find fun stuff, make fun stuff and populate my queue.

13. Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? - No, I’m not a fighter (except in the mama bear sense). I did have major issues with other blogs reposting my stuff back in the day but it was never nasty on my part.

14. How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts? - I love my freedom to choose.

15. Do you like tag games? - Yes, when I’m in the mood. Major introvert!

16. Do you like ask games? - Yup! As long as we keep it clean, tag me, ask away and I’m up for it!

17. Which of your mutuals do you think is Tumblr famous? - Um, I don’t know... is Tumblr famous still a thing? They certainly all deserve to be!

18. Do you have a crush on a mutual? Yes. Every single one of them, definitely. 

I tag: @spnjensenlove02, @demberly, @novembersguest, @piracytheorist, @pirateherokillian, @mryddinwilt, @hollyethecurious, @spartanguard, @laschatzi, @jlsadphoenix

[bucksblr]

tagged by @leonzhng​ thanks for making me dig through my most embarrassing crushes 😭✋

i’ll tag @highwarlockkareena​ @yibobibo​ @lan-xichens​ @purplexedhuman​ @aheartfullofjolllly​ @lanzhansmiles​ @nyx4​ i feel like i tag you guys in everything i am so sorry please ignore this if u don’t wanna do it !!

putting this under a read more for reasons

MEN 2010 – 2016

literally nothing more embarrassing than falling on the same type of white man over and over again (with the exception of minho from shinee bless his heart)

tommy joe ratliff → he was the bass player for adam lambert during his glamnation era (think of songs like for your entertainment and if i had you) idk why exactly i liked him so much but i just did.... however i searched him up again quite recently and found out he’s one of those republicans that says the dumbest shit on twitter so Big Yikes

harry styles → “baby you light up my world like nobody else, the way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed, and when you smile at the ground it ain’t hard to tell...” and BOOM 13-year-old me was sold for well over two years

louis tomlinson → basically i liked harry most until around 2013 when for some reason i started to like him a little less, and i got more focused on louis tomlinson, and although i didn’t like one direction anymore louis tomlinson always had a special place in my heart

ashton irwin → so ashton is 5sos’ drummer, i discovered 5sos through one direction & i stanned them until late 2014

harries twins → the harries twins (jack & finn) are basically the reason i started spending a lot of time on youtube, they were funny and pretty and they just had good videos in general, so for almost two years i’d watch their content regularly

choi minho → my first steps into kpop happened bc i was watching videos on youtube (most probably the harries twins) and suddenly i saw the sherlock mv in my recommended videos so i clicked on it and then 14-year-old me proceeded to fall for minho like an idiot

brooks twins → still youtubers, the brooks twins were 3/5 of the janoskians (jai & luke brooks, beau brooks, daniel sahyounie, & james yammouni), an australian youtube comedy group that was active from 2011-2018 though i was only around from 2012-2014 (when jai brooks was dating ariana grande)

jc caylen → surprise! another youtuber! jc caylen was part of o2l (our2ndlife) a youtube collaboration channel on which each of the 6 members posted videos on a certain day in the week (mondays with connor, tuesdays with ricky, wednesdays with sam, thursdays with jc, fridays with trevi (my 2nd favorite member bc she participated on the x factor), saturdays with ricardo, and then they had surprise sundays every week) and i remember how much joy jc & the others always brought me with their silly videos

misha collins → up next, you might know him as the gay angel that was sent to superhell after confessing his love to the homophobic hunter on supernatural, it’s misha collins! basically misha was a huge source of comfort for me, and i even went around calling myself emmisha for almost two full years (cringe)

henrik holm → he played even bech naesheim in skam and my crush on him reached that level of ridiculousness where i actually tried my hand at learning norwegian (i can only remember how to introduce myself and some curse words i would make a great first impression on him)

MEN 2016 – 2021

min yoongi → okay so my baby steps into kpop happened through shinee’s sherlock, but i only got really invested when yoongi dropped agust d 1 because Holy Fuck y’know??

kim namjoon → oh man i remember thinking namjoon was cute and a very good leader and then BAM he dressed like THAT at the 2016 mma’s and i fell in love. hard

park seojoon → i started liking park seojoon whilst i was watching hwarang (you guessed it, i watched it bc of taehyung), although he wasn’t my favorite character by far, but he was very silly off camera & i liked that (i’m not that into him anymore tho </3)

kim seokjin → OH BOY LET ME TELL U i liked seokjin from the very beginning (i got to know bts in late 2014) and i always liked seeing him perform and be himself and god once i realized i had a crush on him it just hit me like a mf truck, and he’s still one of my favorite people to this day

jung hoseok → god fake love era hoseok really hits different.... also yes i know i have all of bts’ hyung line on my list BUT bts was a really big part of my life for almost 6 years soooo honestly they deserve it i still think they’re great guys

choi san → when ateez made their debut in 2018 i immediately fell in love with san, he was such an amazing dancer and he captivated me right from the very beginning, to this day he’s still my bias in ateez uwu

xiao zhan → AND THEN, OCTOBER OF 2019 HAPPENS AND I WATCH CQL AND... i fall in love with xiao zhan, something i’d never expected would happen bc when i watched cql for the first time i wasn’t as invested in the story, but i really really really liked xiao zhan and one thing led to another and now here i am as a xfx

wang yibo → the thing is, i’ve known yibo since eoeo except i didn’t know cql yibo was uniq yibo (bc i’d forgotten his name) and when i looked it up i can tell you my jaw dropped to the floor bc holy shit????? also he is very silly and i love him loads ok

lee minho → ah, the man who has been my skz bias since 2018, not only is minho my bias i also kin him (there’s a lot of aspects of myself that i see in minho and vice versa) and he’s very comforting to me

bang chan → honestly, it was only a matter of time before i’d fall for bang chan, i knew the moment i got into skz again that i’d start biasing him and, well, here i am, double biasing chan & minho

WOMEN

this list is shorter bc i’ve in general always had less crushes on women than on men??? blame society forcing me into thinking i was straight for a LONG time

ariana grande → remember the 2011 layout of twitter?? where u could not only have an icon and a header, but also a background and ur twitter page was smack in the center of ur screen with the big ugly menu bar at the top??? yeah ariana grande was always my background for my l*rr* st*l*n*s*n layouts

perrie edwards → this was right around the time she was dating zayn & little mix was breaking out into the spotlight, yeah i just really loved her

andrea russett → okay so remember o2l?? andrea russett was kian’s girlfriend for a pretty long time and they always did videos together and i always thought she was super pretty

lily collins → maybe i don’t like clary in tmi all that much but i sure liked the way lily collins looked

alona tal → MY BISEXUAL AWAKENING, it’s only when i saw alona tal in spn that i realized, fuck i might be gay

park jihyo → i discovered twice (my 2nd jype group after day6) through the like ooh-ahh mv and red-haired jihyo really did something to my heart (i just rewatched it and god zombie bang chan is so mf cute)

kim jisoo → when bp made their square two comeback i was immediately smitten for red-haired jisoo in playing with fire, it’s also when i realized she was my bias out of the four members

shin ryujin → the reason that i have blue hair is partially bc of ryujin and her amazing intro in wannabe :D

xuan lu → her portrayal of jiang yanli was SO ON POINT and she’s just such a kindhearted wonderful person wow i want her hand in marriage

lee yoobin → god i’ve known dreamcatcher from back when they were still called minx and ever since i’ve always looked at dami that bit more than the rest, i was also able to see dreamcatcher live in october of 2019 and the whole experience was just so amazing !!

FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

there’s a whole lot more than just these 10 but i wanted to fit the evolution into one (1) slide as best as i could lmao

peter pan → this movie came out in 2003 (?) and he’s honestly the first fictional character i remember ever having a crush on

legolas → i was really doubting between placing haldir or legolas here but i only really got a vague haldir obsession when i was like 14

zuko → LOOK. ZUKO IN ATLA? HOT. ZUKO IN LOK? HOT EVEN IF HE’S AN OLD MAN.

will turner → man was annoying sometimes but i really liked him and his relationship with elizabeth was cute

jo harvelle → gosh i can’t believe she’s the only female character in here???? yeah she was one of my two spn faves and i’ll never forgive the screenwriters for the way they killed her off

castiel → does your fave ever get sent to super hell for being gay? no? well. mine did

kili → fili and kili’s storyline tore my heart out, spit on it, and then laughed straight in my face, KILI WAS LITERALLY MY FAVORITE DWARF

howl → i only watched this movie for the first time in 2020 so i kinda fucked up the tl cause i watched cql in 2019 but shh, anyways howl with his blonde hair was good looking but howl with his black hair just hits differently. i want a howl

lan jingyi → MY BABY BOY, TINIE LITTLE BABIE WHOMST I MUST PROTECT ok no but seriously this kid. i love him a lot

mu qing → BARK BARK. that’s all (that’s not all i love him a whole lot and it hurts me to see so many people misunderstand his character and only see the bad parts of him when they can forgive others for fucking up (eg. xie lian himself & feng xin) but bc mu qing doesn’t deal well with emotions suddenly he’s the bad guy??? i s2g if ppl are gonna do to him what they did to jiang cheng in the tgcf la i will RIOT)

[nct-lian]

lian’s official but unofficial profile

basics!

birth name: lianna bae

stage name: lian

korean name: bae haneul (배하늘)

nicknames: lian, nana, cupcake, marijuana, lilipad, nation’s main dancer, professional debuter, dumpling

date of birth: december 19, 1999

age: 21

zodiac sign: sagittarius ♐︎

birthplace: toronto, canada

hometown: toronto, canada

nationality: canadian

ethnicity: korean

languages: english (native) korean (fluent) mandarin chinese (fluent) spanish (semi-fluent) japanese (learning)

height: 152 cm (4’11”)

weight: 41 kg (90 lbs)

blood type: a

mbti: isfp

family!

father: bae seongmin

mother: jung hyunjoo

older brother: liam bae (b. 1991)

career!

occupation: dancer, singer, actress, choreographer, model, k-pop idol

company: sm entertainment

group: nct (2016 — present) soloist (2017 — present)

subunit: nct 127 (2016 — present) nct dream (2016 — 2018, 2020 — present) nct u (yestoday, boss, faded in my last song, coming home, volcano, déjà vu, music, dance, from home, work it, dream of you)

positions: main dancer, main vocalist (2019), female visual, center

training period: four years (2012 — 2016)

years active: 2016 — present

special talent: gymnastics / waacking

individual endorsements: papa recipe (2017) shiseido (2018) nike (2019) sudden attack (2019) lg u + 5g (2019) bosslave (2019) sprite w/ jang kiyong (2019 — present) clinique (2019 — present) guljak teokpokki chicken (2019 — present) dolce & gabbana beauty (2020 — present)

rankings!

dancing: 10 / 10

vocals: 10 / 10

rapping: 6 / 10

visuals: 10 / 10

acting: 10 / 10

stage presence: 10 / 10

songwriting: 5 / 10

producing: 2 / 10

choreographing: 10 / 10

modelling: 9.5 / 10

fun facts!

lian was originally supposed to debut in red velvet with yeri as their maknae, but lee sooman believed she fit nct’s concept better so she was pulled from their lineup in 2014. though they’re no longer part of the same group, they’ve remained amazing friends and are called “red velvet ot6” whenever they have interactions with each other.

she’s been dancing since the age of two years old! her parents enrolled her into a toddlers ballet class where she would learn cute little dance moves that she and about five other girls would perform for all their parents every month.

her love of music began when she discovered k-pop at around the age of seven.

on lian’s birthday in 2018, her brother posted an old ballet video of her when she was 6 on his instagram account, captioning it, “oh where has the time gone?”

it’s now something haechan loves to use against her

she was able to have a solo song for resonance pt. 2 called dream of you! it was all in english and all of the other 23 members reacted to it at once ^.^

was named the second best cook in nct 127

her grandmother “halmeoni lim” once surprised lian at the 127 dorm while she was filming an episode of “i live alone” with a whole bunch of homemade food. the camera that was placed in a corner of the kitchen zoomed into her reaction as her grandma brought in all the food and became a meme ◞‸◟

back when she was asked to act as a dance mentor for some of the sm trainees, she met shotaro and developed a good friendship with him.

a bunch of her friends pulled a prank on her during isac 2019 that began with haechan asking seulgi to hide lian’s phone in her pocket, and it somehow ended with kevin moon running around while she chased him.

speaking of kevin moon, he and lian were requested to host inkigayo for a month in 2019! they have an amazing friendship with one another now and still hang out when they’re available (･ω･´)

lian rapped in kick it era !!

she was very awkward with the members of nct at first because of how little she knew them and she almost left sm entertainment entirely because she was uncomfortable with the sudden change in plans. she never participated in the 2016 episodes of nct life and would be seen sitting further away from the members during award shows. it definitely got better in 2017, though, and now they’re all the best of friends!

while playing scream in silence with nct 127, all she had to say was “18,” but because the pronunciation sounds so much like “fuck” in korean, jungwoo thought she was swearing at him. *cue lian’s now iconic, “yah! someone set me up!”*

she can be super duper persuasive if she turns on her aegyo switch ఠ ͟ಠ

she gets babied a lot by the older members

ever since she was a child, she’s had to carry around a pair of glasses because her right eye often twitches at random times

she struggles with anxiety :(

she has a dog named kkuma!

[tessandscottforever18]

Sept 12

Fresh off the UK release of Amazon Studios’ reimagined 'Cinderella', pop icon Camila Cabello talks to Nick Levine about her starring role in the film and her next chapter.

Camila Cabello is in a very good place right now. The utterly joyous video for “Don’t Go Yet”, the lead single from her forthcoming album Familia, shows her dancing around a dinner table surrounded by family, friends and RuPaul’s Drag Race star Valentina. An eyepopping colour palette definitely complements the song: a bright and buoyant Latin bop banger that hits like musical serotonin. In the comments beneath the YouTube video, the singer has added a sweet message: “Hope you guys love this and that it inspires many wine drunk kitchen dance parties for you and your familia.”

The video may be a visual feast, but it’s no fantasy. Cabello says it reflects a recent healing period during which she focused on “collective joy and community and really growing the seeds of my relationships”. The casual dinner parties she threw with partner Shawn Mendes became a nourishing ritual as she stepped off the pop star treadmill for the first time in nearly a decade. This breather was long overdue given that Cabello’s career has maintained an upward trajectory ever since she entered the US version of The X Factor in 2012. Though she auditioned as a solo artist, she ended up landing a record deal as a member of Fifth Harmony, a girl group formed One Direction-style on the show. Four years later, she went solo and cemented her A-list status with “Havana”, one of the bestselling digital songs of all time. She now has more than a dozen platinum singles to her name, including 2016’s collaboration with Machine Gun Kelly, “Bad Things”, and 2019’s “South of the Border” with Ed Sheeran and Cardi B.

Still, Cabello’s pace of life slowed down last year for one reason only: the pandemic. “It’s been an absolutely traumatic thing that’s happened to the world,” she says today, speaking on the phone shortly before she records Spanish overdubs for her movie debut in a feminist reimagining of Cinderella. “But in terms of my mental health, before that particular moment, I was really approaching… ” The 24-year-old pauses, then corrects herself. “I mean, I don’t think I was even approaching, I think I was burned out. And I feel like that necessary forced pause [caused by the pandemic] just allowed me to look at my life differently. It allowed me to recalibrate what makes me happy and what is important to me. I feel like it saved me in a lot of ways.”

Cabello has spoken candidly in the past about her struggles with anxiety, which in turn led to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Today, she likens managing this anxiety to a “constant ebb and flow”, which is made easier by her new therapist, but says the pandemic let her rethink her attitude towards work. “I’m fortunate enough to choose what I say yes and no to,” she explains. “That’s what’s really important to me this time around. If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

“I feel like the public and the media could almost have become a third person in our relationship.”

A project she’s clearly fully invested in is Cinderella, a new film version of the familiar fairy tale, directed by Pitch Perfect’s Kay Cannon. Cabello stars as the title character opposite Broadway legend Idina Menzel as her non-wicked stepmother and Pose actor Billy Porter as her fairy godparent. According to Cabello, these reimagined characters are just two of the film’s progressive elements. “Those classic fairy tales were all written by men. That’s why the story [of Cinderella] is that of a woman who’s saved by a prince,” Cabello says. “But in our version, which is written and directed by a woman, she’s saved herself and is trying to build her own life. It’s a much more empowering version of the story.”

In fact, Cabello’s Cinderella story has “no evil people in it at all”, because it places the focus firmly on the heroine’s self-actualisation. “Cinderella’s dream is to live an independent life at a time when women aren’t allowed to have careers,” she explains. “So she’s seeing something that’s wrong in the world and not waiting for someone else to correct it for her – she’s doing it herself. I think that’s a really necessary, positive update.”

Cabello has also been using her formidable social media presence – 54.5 million followers on Instagram, 11.9 million on TikTok – to spread some very necessary positivity. After being papped on a run in mid-July wearing “a top that shows my belly”, Cabello told her TikTok followers she thought “Damn!” before remembering that “being at war with your body is so last season”. Today, she says she experiences much less body insecurity since sharing this post. “I felt like I was not alone in feeling that or alone in my frustration,” she says. “And so next time there are pictures of me where my belly is out, there’s gonna be a community of women who have heard me talk about the way that makes me feel and who support me. And that is honestly so liberating.”

She has even used TikTok to break down a human rights issue that is close to her heart. In July, Cabello shared a well-received video explaining that recent protests in Cuba aren’t “about lack of Covid resources and medicine”, but are really “the latest layer in a 62-year-old story of a communist regime and a dictatorship”. She says speaking out in this way was a matter of moral obligation for her. “You know, I’m Cuban and I still have family on the island,” she says – Cabello was born in Havana, then moved to Miami with her parents when she was six. “And so much of what I do is Cuban culture. I mean, ‘Havana’ is one of my most successful songs so far,” she adds. “So when I’m in the United States, showing the beautiful part of Cuban culture, I feel like I also have to be there for the hard part, for the people there who are struggling.”

“If it’s affecting my mental health in a negative way, I’ll say no and do it another way.”

“Havana”, a sultry and infectious celebration of the Cuban capital, was so huge that it could easily have overshadowed her debut album. But thankfully, 2018’s Camila was a cool and cohesive affair that also spawned the brilliant angsty banger “Never Be the Same”. Then in 2019 Cabello launched her second album, Romance, with “Señorita”, a massively successful duet with Mendes that has now racked up 1.9 billion Spotify streams. When Cabello and Mendes confirmed they were dating shortly after its release, they became gossip-site staples – something they remain today – and were accused of faking the relationship for publicity. The impact of this negative coverage on their mental health was barely even mentioned.

Still, more than two years later, Cabello says she and Mendes have managed to maintain their privacy. “I feel like the public and the media could almost have become a third person in our relationship,” she says. “But that’s not been a thing for us because Shawn and I don’t even look at social media like that. Even though we know it’s there, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist for us. And that’s why we don’t live in LA. We live in Miami or Toronto, where there’s less paparazzi and that kind of attention is less of a thing.”

Looking ahead, Cabello says she’s excited for fans to hear Familia, which she feels has greater “intimacy” than her previous albums because she worked so closely with core collaborators Scott Harris, Ricky Reed and Mike Sabath. Because she trusted them implicitly, Cabello says she was able to “freestyle” during recording sessions and really pour her heart out. “You know, there’s one song [I’ve recorded for the album] where I’m talking about my mental health and anxiety without [specifically] saying it’s about anxiety,” she says. “But it’s about what anxiety looks and feels like for me in my body and in my mind. And that wasn’t something I came into the room intending to write about. Ricky just showed me a piece of music he had and it all came out of me.”

Cabello says this “stream of consciousness” songwriting style “never would have happened” when she was recording Camila and Romance because, for her, there was still too much “tension” in the room. But this time around, she felt comfortable enough to be truly vulnerable. In this respect, Cabello draws a comparison between her own creative evolution and that of Billie Eilish, who recently released her acclaimed second album, Happier Than Ever. “I saw this quote from Billie where she said, ‘I wasn’t scared, it wasn’t forced, there was no pressure, it was just really nice.’ And I feel the same way about this album’s process for me,” she says. The message is clear: in both her personal and professional lives, Camila Cabello is in a very good place.

[retronator]

The last 10 years of pixel art

Retronator the blog is exactly 10 years old right now (+ an hour or so more since I can’t seem to stop editing this post)!

I want to take this opportunity to look back at the teenage years of the 21st century and reflect on how the pixel art scene has grown over the years. I only promise a personal perspective, pieced together from my faulty memory and a bit more reliable archive of 1,700 posts on this blog.

2010

Social media sites emerged already in the late 2000s (Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007), but it took quite some time before they caught on, especially outside the US. I joined Tumblr in July 2010 and there were relatively few pixel artists active on the site. @jinndevil​ and @unomoralez​ go the farthest of those that I followed. The first post I reblogged was a Back to the Future piece from @megapont​ (via some blogpost share, since Megapont duo didn't join till 2013).

What was huge on the network however was sharing retro-gaming artworks by blogs like @it8bit​ and @gameandgraphics​. This included many pixel art pieces and it helped grow a community of fans that adored both old games and pixels.

2011

I'd put 2011 down as the start of the hi-bit era of pixel art games, championed by the release of the iconic adventure game Sword & Sworcery. Pixel purism of the initial pixel art movement was left behind by mixing pixels with high-res special effects like soft shadows and vignetting. Also, spaghetti legs started their fad period.

Artists such as @probertson​, @drewpixel​, and @merrigo​ started their days on Tumblr, gathering huge audiences over the years. Meanwhile, Retronator grew to a whooping 100 followers by the end of the year.

2012

Tumblr's fan spirits were going stronger and stronger, to which I threw my own logs on the fire by releasing Tribute, my biggest and most popular piece of fan art I created so far.

The highly anticipated FEZ got released (to critical acclaim and other more controversial consequences), further bringing pixel art in front of the mainstream gaming audience.

From newly-followed artists, @johanvinet​ was damn inspiring with his smooth animations. Anything GIF did immensely good on the Tumblr dashboard.

2013

This was THE year for Tumblr. So many new artists joined, it was hard to keep track. Anyone from established names like Mojang's art director @jnkboy​ and @konjakonjak​ of Noitu Love 2 fame (later Iconoclasts) to pixel art beginners such as @waneella​, now one of the most well-known illustrators in the scene.

The push for modern art direction with pixel art games wasn't stopping either. Not that amazing, more traditionally styled titles (with fresh color palettes) weren't present, as Chasm's debut on Kickstarter showed, but it was Hyper Light Drifter that really stole everyone's heart (machine) on the same crowdfunding platform. Gradients and smooth dynamic shading became unapologetically part of the pixel art (gaming) vocabulary from then on.

When Papers, Please got released at the end of the year to universal appraisal, a new example was set for showing that pixel visuals don't necessarily need to be the most polished, technically-impressive pieces of artistic expression, they can also be simple—the majority of detail-filling can be offloaded to the player's imagination.

2014

Pixel purist ideology was a highly debated topic. Dan Fessler, the background artist on Chasm, did a strong push against the tighter set of constraints which said you should only use 'clean' tools such as the pencil and color fill to complete your artworks. Dan instead only cared about clean results, pioneering in the process the technique of HD Index Painting that used the depths of Photoshop layer magic to get otherwise identical results. And there were plenty of others right around the corner that wouldn't even care about keeping the results married to traditional pixel art ideals.

Still, the majority of pixel art at this point was very orthodox. I started the Artist Feature series that showcased my favorite artists and none of them did anything controversial (nor they needed to). The biggest break from the old days was mainly highly increased color counts that allowed for subtle transitions without dithering, and free color picking without creating predefined color palettes. Octavi Navarro started his highly iconic @pixelshuh​ scenes, and the completely unknown @8pxl​ started her journey towards experimentation with pink sky gradients.

Even more importantly, Pixel Dailies were born on Twitter, following Ben Porter's 365 days of doing pixel art daily.

2015

I called 2015 The Year of Pixel Dailies in the end-of-the-year article in my newly started Retronator Magazine. The Twitter community really exploded this year, bringing in many new artists to the medium, with Pixel Dailies serving as a platform to raise visibility to everyone, old and new. I found out about @weilarddrake​ and @orange-magik​ this way, Slynyrd, @iceztiqarts​, @igorsandman​ … Other freshly-discovered people on tumblr were @kirokazepixel​ (one of the most prolific artists on the scene), @faxdoc​ (his learning journey was inspiring enough for its own article), and Talecrafter with @deathtrashgame​ (starting a whole new style of aliased, low-res painting without caring about individual pixels).

The discussion whether pixel art could survive past its nostalgic roots was still in the air, stirred by opinions such as A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art. History is proving them wrong however, with pixel art stronger than ever in 2020. It's not a visual language people born after the 80s couldn't understand.

New-school voxel art pieces started trending with the advent of Magicavoxel, pioneering the development of pixel art's sibling in 3D. The first pixel art convention Pixel Art Park was held in Tokyo. And (important for me personally), I came up with Pixel Art Academy, an adventure game that would take my ambitions in pixel art education into the future.

2016

After 9 years in development, Owlboy released! Also Hyper Light Drifter! And Stardew Valley! And Kingdom! Pixel art games were not dying, they were on the rise.

Edge (the popular British video game magazine) published a special 200+ page issue called Art of the Pixel. It featured contemporary artists outside the gaming context, championing the aesthetic's transition from its video game roots into its own art form.

Pedro Medeiros of @studiominiboss​ started his famous series of GIF tutorials, subsequently encouraging many others to share their knowledge in the popular square format. Tumblr still saw new artists joining the platform, such as @motocross-arts​ and @apolism​ (two thirds of the Japanese trio The Ultimate Pixel Crew), while others like @6vcr​ started their first pixel explorations that year. @brunopixels​, an old-schooler on the platform like me, sparked the Octobit movement, a pixel art alternative to Inktober.

2017

Further new names on Tumblr included @guttykreum​ (outdoorsy perspective pieces) and @scrixels​ (one of the most consistent daily posters with over 1,000 artworks by now).

The annual Shibuya Pixel Art Contest joined Pixel Art Park at promoting the art form in Tokyo, Japan (and worldwide really). Lospec became the new go-to resource site for pixel art, picking up the mantle from PixelJoint and Pixelation that—while still active—stagnated technologically and feature-wise.

More than anything, pixel art games were everywhere. Maybe it only seemed to me this way since I was able to go to the Game Developer's Conference as press and had the chance to interview many many people in the scene, leading to over half a year of daily content on this blog. Indie games felt stronger than ever with so many of us full-on realizing our dreams of creating our own games professionally. The one that left the biggest splash on the scenes was no doubt The Last Night, announced front and center in-between AAA titles during Microsoft's E3 conference. The brothers Soret pushed the art direction even beyond the hi-bit era moniker, fusing 3D, shaders, and modern cinematography with pixels in an iconic combination that, like Sword & Sworcery's spaghetti legs, was so atmospheric that it couldn't be resisted by future imitators.

2018

Another game that pushed technological boundaries was Pathway, finally stepping into full light in 2018 and releasing one year later. I still think it has the most advanced pixel art graphics engine to date, using voxels and other tricks under the hood to deliver a completely dynamically lit environment while retaining the pixel-perfect 3/4 view aesthetic. Pixel art games were firmly part of mainstream gaming by now, with Celeste winning many awards alongisde pixelish Return of the Obra Dinn, further cementing the presence of pixels as an ever-evolving medium capable of expressing very different art styles.

I decided to focus solely on developing Pixel Art Academy in 2018, putting this blog on relative hiatus with very sporadic updates towards the end of the year. But I never let it die. I thoroughly enjoy writing about the scene and my interest in the art form only grows with time.

2019–2020

Ironically, the closer the years are to the present, the less I remember what things stood out most. Maybe it's because my brain hasn't had the chance to automatically prune my memories yet from the overload of information that is the interwebs these days. Pixel art seems so out there, so much of my everyday life, encompassing me on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, DeviantArt … Even on TikTok you see kids zooming out of their freshly pixelized Minecraft photographs they call pixel art. The medium is alive, and more than ever.

As for the Retronator blog, from its zero followers exactly 10 years ago, it grew to 100 after a year and a half, 1000 the year after, 10k when it was 5 years old, and 30k just last month. Tumblr is still the platform where most of you follow my pixel art reports and I don't intend to stop anytime soon.

Here's to the next decade! Thank you all for reading. <3

[phroyd]

Oh My, what terrible timing, and what a great loss! Rest In Peace Justice Ginsburg, thank you for all you have done for our country! - Phroyd

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington surrounded by family. She was 87.

"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice."

Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.

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Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the Court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.

Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent, and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012 the high court upheld the law by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another Trump appointment that would give conservatives a 6-to-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016 he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Obama's supreme court nominee.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if President Trump were to lose his re-election bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it."

So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did--until age 90.

"My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019.

She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless an historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.

That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-to-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, said Ginsburg, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.

"Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote.

She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails."

By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover, and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.

Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future Justice would graduate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell on full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said.

After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of over 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man."

At Harvard, she was the academic star, not Marty. The couple was busy juggling schedules, and their toddler when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.

"So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," said Marty Ginsburg in a 1993 interview with NPR.

The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of Marty's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to Ruth. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day."

Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated, and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried that she would be diverted by her "familial obligations."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pictured in the justice's chambers in Washington, D.C., during an interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg in September 2016.

A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Berzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Berzelius co-authored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers law school, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her new baby was born.

While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.

The 'Mother Brief'

Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.

The tax court concluded that the internal revenue code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case, he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional perspective.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the United States Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.

The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male supreme court: no.

It was the first time the court had ever struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.

And that was just the beginning.

By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.

Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.

"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.

Over the ensuing years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but to women as well.

In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.

"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.

During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.

The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.'"

After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.

The Supreme Court's Second Woman

In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.

She was not first on his list. For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.

But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her--hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.

Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.

In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."

Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.

"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."

And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.

Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020. During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.

Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell....The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."

Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."

Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.

Some liberals criticized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.

"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. "

And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.

Phroyd

[we-rate-tmnt]

I request: Leonardo. Please and thank you 🙏.

Idk if everyone loves Leo or if my header and avatar just remind everyone about this amazing blue boy. (This one’s super silly btw. I’m just sillier as time goes on. Character development I guess?) 

The iconic leador Leonardo (1987)

Bro idk why but I loved this Leo. I have a tiny memory, especially with this version but I clearly remember that I thought he was the funniest and the coolest. I mean, he had swords, what was I supposed to do as a 7-year-old. NOT like him??? Anyway, while Raph was the best at insult comedy, I think Leo had the best puns and punchlines. I really like how nonchalant this Leo is compared to his iterations, going along with really silly ideas and having fun along the way. But because of this, his leadership is a little forced at times, he seems like such a chill and fun dude that when he gets serious, I have to squint and ask ‘are you Leo? Or were you just putting on act a moment ago?’ Or my perception is entirely warped over time. Either way, good turtle boy, could have used some work tho. 5.7/10

Here comes grumpy lad wooo this is all read very monotone btw Fearless Leader (2003)

What. What the fuck happened. I was actually so confused when Leo turned really angry and serious and almost manic. I thought that episode when he popped into Casey’s window and was like ‘Hey bitch lets go beat the shit out of some lowlifes’ I was WOAH THERE BUDDY BACK UP BACK UP BACK TF UP. It was so sudden to me and when it was finally explained, it made some sense??? Like yeah, character development is great an’ all but this ain’t it chief. I can’t imagine what it was like having to wait for these episodes to release one at a time. Bc I watched every episode back to back on Youtube and I was genuinely bamboozled. But when you have an experience like that where guilt is weighing down on you from a situation you couldn’t control, it would’ve been HELLA HELPFUL to have at least a flashback, like a line saying ‘I was so useless!’ at BARE MINIMUM. Like right after Shredder is booted off to Planet Zula, Donnie would notice that Leo didn’t seem all that happy and would ask why and Leo would get upset and yell at Donnie saying that ‘You wouldn’t understand’, ‘You don’t know how I felt, how I feel because of that’, etc. Like you don’t even have to say he felt guilty or helpless, just give us something to grab onto. We’re merely six-year-olds who thought they could climb the YMCA rock wall in easy mode but instead the script riders harnessed us up on the hard one and wouldn’t let us come down until we rang the little bell at the top. I think that is the only problem I had with his Leo. The sudden change of calm and decisive to angry and irrational was so jarring that it felt unnatural without that crucial context. If you want a surprise reveal, at least hint at the reveal (like just about every Disney movie with their ‘twist’ villains) not wait until the very last moment. I think this might be my least favorite Leo and I think the season where he stood out the most and seemed the strongest was Fast Forward (Which was GOOD FIGHT ME), especially in scenes with Dark Leo, his clone. He sees so much of himself in Dark Leo but he also sees something he had once grasped (AKA the poorly written character arc, I CANNOT stress how bad I thought it was). Although, I honestly think he’s a really good character and he’s a pretty neat guy. However, this score is entirely held up by Fast Forward and his connection with Usagi, sword bros to the end of time. 3/10 (2 for FF and 1 for Usagi)

And now a Leo that makes me genuinely feel UWU Leo (2012)

I cannot stress how much I like this guy! Like his design is so appealing, his dedication, his obsession with Space Heroes, like I FUCKING LOVE IT. And everyone knows, that shit with Karai, at first when they didn’t realize they were related, I can let slide but kajsdflksadf what even like why did the writers feel the need to add in more ‘love interest’ implications like yuck yuck yuck. The only two interactions with Leo and Karai that I really like are when Leo defeats her using the healing hands technique and when Leo has a goth/emo/punk/idk I’m new here phase and they team up and EXPLOSIONS. He was introduced to us as being incredibly naive and his idea of leadership is from some old cartoon that’s basically star trek but ethically questionable. After his fights in season 1, to the finale with the technodrome, you can see his growth. He’s able to formulate plans and make life or death decisions. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. When Leo got hurt, I felt like the oof sound effect mixed with some tears I normally shed at some Shojo manga bs. While the episodes following were super weird, it was a nice way to help Leo recover, not only physically but spiritually (Although I don’t remember the spirit arc at all except the epic Raph vs Fishface fight, so we’re skipping that). When Master Splinter really died, you could tell there was a huge impact on Leo, but he had to remain stoic and lead the family now. A lot of heartbreaking moments in this series came from Leo and I’m glad they took at least some thought into developing him. Tiny head Leo will haunt my nightmares, but the giggly fanboy will warm my heart constantly. 6/10

I only have one word for this Leo (Heroes in a Half Shell: Blast to the Past)

This is a super crazy bad idea accent on the super crazy bad part have I mentioned it’s also a really terrible idea/10

Okay, spoiler alert, didn’t really think this Leo was that grand Leo (2014/2016)

Painfully average. He didn’t stand out that much, Raph was part of the focus and had that touching scene at the end, Donnie was ICONIC and Mikey (with his weird-ass eyes) was super lively and funny! Leo? Uh, I don’t remember a single line he said. Because he never really grabbed my attention, I don’t have too much to say on this version. The Raph and Leo fight felt forced and the whole ‘keep this stuff that could turn us human a secret’ was pretty pointless and was added just to cause drama, I don’t even remember what that Splinter and Leo conversation was about. Design-wise, really neat! You can see some more traditional Japanese clothing/style mixed with modern (I’d feel a lot better about this assumption if some could tell exactly what the heck he’s wearing, but I get traditional Japan warrior vibes from it) in his look which was super neat! Other than that, if you like him, please tell me why because I don’t get. He was just kinda eh. 5/10

AHHH MY BOY YASSS WHOOO!! Neon Leon (2018)

Okay, I loved Ben Schwarts already from Parks and Rec but like him being Sonic AND Leo, like DUDE. He’s super funny by himself but teamed up with this shows writing and animation, it makes it hilarious. I literally love this Leo so much, maybe because we’re alike but honestly, he’s amazing. I love his design with the red and yellow crescents accenting his skin and livening up his color pallet. He has a very healthy and natural dynamic with his brothers, he’s the first to know what’s wrong and tries his best to make up for his actions. This is really prominent in the most recent episodes, along with the episode portal jacked. In both, Leo is separated from his brothers. Portal Jacked is in a more literal sense, while Air Turtle handles in more of an emotional sense. While both are brief, Leo sees his error and tries his best to make it up to them. I love his dynamic so much and it’s so nice to see something like this compared to the unnecessary drama and tension between the brothers in the previous series. It’s refreshing and this is something a younger audience needs to see; instead of fighting, it’s better to work together and improve yourself along the way. Improvement is a big theme for Leo here. He’s a goofball, makes jokes at every opportunity and isn’t quite skilled at fighting or using his weapon. But he grows over time, he learns to manage his power and he’s working on mastering it. He’s trying to put aside his narcissism more and focuses on his family. I think the approach they took with him rising to leader rather than slapping it on his forehead was the goddamn best decision they could make. He’s making plans, finding loopholes, helping out and getting out of his comfort zone. I cannot stress how well this show has handled Leo, along with the other characters. I can’t wait to see more episodes about his growth and I am awarding him with one of the greatest honors I could give... 10/10

Storytime: I drew a super cute 2012 Leo, you should look at him. Shameless self-promo, but you should follow me on my main blog bc I’m nice and I draw pretty pictures. Also. I have a little 2012 Leo Happy Meal toy??? I think??? guarding my window and he’s been there for YEARS. I need to bring him in and refresh his paint job.

Wow! I didn’t expect this many requests for Leo, so the blog will be momentarily spammed with the requests, but it shouldn’t be too much! Up next should be the last turtle (Mikey) and then we can get to some REALLY great requests I’m eager to answer. As usual, please comment and reblog! I’d love to hear your opinion!

[mickstart]

36, 49, 65, 77 :)

ahhh hi Mari thank you!!! Sorry for ramblinggggg.

36. What were some of your favourite races?

God this is such a hard one tbh uhh just from races I actually watched live and can remember: Canada 2011 and Brazil 2012 OBVIOUSLY I know everyone’s going to say that but they really were That Bitch. Turkey this year was an Instant Classic. I have a love hate relationship with Brazil 2008 also because “is that glock” is iconic but it’s also my “cishet dad crying as he tells his grandkids about the time he saw his football team knocked out of the world cup by one point” moment. MONACO 2009 just for Jenson parking his car in the wrong place and running to the podium bc he’d never been on the podium at Monaco before and nobody sdjdsghds told him. Japan 2012 also bc! Kamui!! Madness caused by penalties! A twist in the championship!

49. What would be your ideal F1 team? Who would drive for it, who would be the team principle and so on?

Oh my god another hard one. Ok. One absolutely batshit wish fulfillment impossible one involving heavy time travel first: Mika and Michael teammates bc we were robbed, Toto for team principal bc he knows what he’s doing and also if he fucks up Susie can fix it, we clone Rob Smedley and have two Robs on the pit wall and put Andrea Stella in charge of the engineers as a whole and Ross Brawn in charge of the car and if the FIA ask us what he’s done to the car we pretend we don’t even have a car, our pit crew is exclusively made-up of the red bull crew. Merc twitter admin but McLaren’s PR.

More reasonable one with less time travel: Mick and Callum driving, Seb as team principal or Lewis. Rocky and Bono for race engineers and still Andrea as like a development head or something, we still steal Red Bull’s pit crew and I pay Sabine absolute billions, more than the drivers, to do our PR.

65. Do you have a favourite underrated ship?

Everybody praises Sewis without talking about the fact they’re baby Mika and Michael. I am starved :(. Also.... mayhaps I’m extremely in love with the concept of Jenson and Nico and I stare up at the ceiling and think about them but you didn’t hear that from me.

These aren’t underrated just forgotten bc the drivers are retired now but I still wanna talk about them: Rolipe is an elder god and you ignore them at your peril. Rob calling Felipe baby is the origin of driver radios as a source of entertainment I CAN cite my sources. Also saw someone saying Fernando was watching the Seb, Jenson, and Mark antics uncomfortably bc he’s Too Straight For This the other day. You look at any photo of 2009-2016 Fernando looking at Mark or Andrea or Jenson and try to say that to my face. Fernando used to google “do I have a crush on him or is he just tall” in his hotel room.

Also these are like. Not underrated, just ancient: Cevert and Stewart? That Was Quite Homoerotic. Also Gerhard and Ayrton’s ridiculously soft dynamic is understandably overshadowed by The Looming Figure Of Alain but I can’t ever get over them.

77. Would you still become fan with the knowledge you have today?

Huh. I... don’t know? I think if I could stop myself becoming a fan of a corrupt sport suffocating itself with its own greed then yes but it being my special interest and a part of my life growing up it’s like... I don’t know i can’t imagine having a choice if that makes sense.

[jmsa1287]

The 10 Best Films of the 2010s

my 2019 pick has already changed since this published lol oh well! 

Compiling a list and picking just 10 films to represent the 2010s is extremely difficult if not nearly impossible — it's hard enough picking a handful of movies for lists that sum up a single year. Films change as the years pass; something you adored in 2011 may not hold up on a re-watch in 2019. Maybe that's because so much has changed in the world this decade, or you've experienced a personal philosophical shift, or a film is tied to a certain experience and emotion that has since soured. And, of course, the opposite can happen. A film you didn't respond to five years ago may have become a new favorite.

This list is a bit of a cheat — or a break — from the typical best films of the decade lists you may have seen online. It will have 10 films representing the best film from each year this decade (2010 through 2019). Though easier, making this list was still difficult mostly because there were so many brilliant and exciting films that were omitted (masterpieces like "Tree of Life" and "Gravity," for instance). Below, find the films that did make the cut and a brief blurb as to why they belong in the cinema hall of fame.

2010: "Black Swan," directed by Darren Aronofsky

Obsession and perfection are two ideas that were constantly explored this decade, thanks to the rise of social media. (There was even a horror movie released on Netflix this year called "The Perfection," starring Allison Williams.) In Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan," a young ballet dancer named Nina Sayers (played by an outstanding Natalie Portman, who won the Best Actress Oscar for the role), slowly detaches from reality as she prepares for the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." The film's sound design is unlike any other film this decade. With each bone crack, nail clip, and flesh wound, Aronofsky makes "Black Swan" a social psycho drama melded with body horror, which also features a wild Winona Ryder performance.

2011: "Drive," directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Nicolas Winding Refn's movies aren't for everyone but his neo-noir hyper-violent "Drive" is an undeniable classic and game-changer. Starring Ryan Gosling as an unnamed stunt driver and for-hire getaway driver, "Drive" sparked a sea change in cinema, spawning an aesthetic that featured synth-pop bangers (glittery songs by Chromatics and a pulsating score from Cliff Martinez) and neon lighting. "Drive" tells an age-old story in a new and fresh way that audiences hadn't seen before, going beyond its ultra-cool style, to show a classic L.A. noir tale of betrayal and heartache. NWR also uses Gosling in the best way; boiled down to a few emotions, putting the handsome Hollywood hunk in a twisted role you'd never expect. Oh and Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Bryan Cranston and Albert Brooks show up!

2012: "Spring Breakers," directed by Harmony Korine

"Spring Breakers" might be the best prank this decade. An arthouse film disguised as a sexy college romp, Harmony Korine's film features young college students — played here by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson — desperate to venture from their Christian college and indulge their wild side during spring break in St. Petersburg, Fla. There, they meet Alien (James Franco), a local rapper and drug dealer who Korine uses to show the dark side of unbridled partying, sex and excessive drinking. Intense dubstep, closeups of fleshy bodies doused in alcohol and an iconic rendition of Britney Spears' "Everytime," "Spring Breakers" has gone on to become a twisted cautionary tale and also put the indie distributor A24 on the map.

2013: "Her," directed by Spike Jonez

If "Black Mirror" shows us the evils of technology, Spike Jonez's melancholic love story "Her" is the other side of the coin. It's a warm and strange film where Joaquin Phoenix delivers a breathtaking performance. As does Scarlett Johansson, who voices Samantha, an A.I. a la Siri but begins to form a romantic relationship with Phoenix's sad-sack Theodore. "Her" is more than a movie about technology; it's an emotional film about change, loss and what it means to be alive that is tucked inside a fully realized not-too-distant future L.A. with a brilliant aesthetic.

2014: "The Wind Rises," directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has made some of the most successful and culturally significant films since the 80s, including "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro." But his so-called last film "The Wind Rises" is an impeccable emotional epic based in realism that is a gut punch to the soul. It's a devastatingly beautiful movie that is half dreamlike and half haunting. It is undoubtedly the most moving film on this list.

2015: "It Follows," directed by David Robert Mitchell

If Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" started a new wave of cinema, David Robert Mitchell's retro throwback "It Follows" is the epitome of it. With a vibrating score from video game composer Disasterpeace, DRM's film winks at slasher films of the 80s, most notably "Nightmare on Elm Street," but dials the aesthetic up to an 11; it's got nothing on "Stranger Things." In this brooding film, a young woman named Jamie (a wonderful Maika Monroe) is cursed after she has sex with her boyfriend, who ties her to a chair and warns her he's passed "it" on to her. "It" is a sinister force that inches itself closer and closer to Jamie in an attempt to kill her. Many saw "It Follows" an allegory to HIV/AIDs or STIs and a commentary of female characters in 80s horror films. It's the film's open-endedness and reinvention of tropes embedded into American cinema that make "It Follows" one of the most thrilling and fascinating films of the decade.

2016: "La La Land," directed by Damien Chazelle

"La La Land" may forever be tied to one of the Academy Awards' biggest blunders in the institution's history, but Damien Chazelle's love letter to the Hollywood Musical is an impressive feat of filmmaking. A romantic saga with musical numbers that don't shy away from its influences (the MGM musical and the Technicolor delights of yesteryear), "La La Land" is an earnest if not corny film. But its Chazelle's impeccable craftsmanship that makes his movie soar while it tells a modern love story about when two figuring out if their passions are more important to them than a future together.

2017: "The Lost City of Z," directed by James Gray

James Gray's mind-blowing epic "The Lost City of Z" will go down as this decade's most under-appreciated film. Like many of the movies on this list, it is a film about obsession, perfection and family trauma. Based on a true story, "Lost City" follows British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) over several years on his plight to find an alleged hidden city deep in the Amazon jungles. There's a World War I sequence and Tom Holland shows up as Percy's son, who is eager to follow in his father's footsteps and head to South America with him. It's devastating and moving in that Gray way even though it is his first movie not set in New York. "Lost City" perfectly melds the personal with human history, resulting in a film that is technically impressive and emotionally shocking.

2018: "Hereditary," directed by Ari Aster

Somewhere in the late 2010s, the term "elevated horror" became part of Film Twitter's lexicon. It's used to described artful films that are grown from horror tropes, most notably "The Witch," "Get Out" and Ari Aster's masterpiece "Hereditary." And though it is definitely a scary movie, labeling it an "elevated horror" film or a horror film, in general, doesn't feel quite right. It's a family drama about trauma that is demented in the same kind of tone of an Edward Albee play. It's more visceral than the late playwright's work, to be sure, and at the center of "Hereditary" is a career-defining performance from Toni Collette. She plays Annie, a grieving mother who is haunted by deep loss and grapples with keeping her sanity and her family together. Aster's film explores family relations and how tragedy can infiltrate the cracks in relationships unlike any other movie this decade.

2019: "Parasite," directed by Bong Joon-ho

"Parasite" is the summation of Bong Joon-ho's work. The Korean filmmaker has long made movies about marginalized folks navigating their way through certain systems. Unlike some of his movies, "Parasite" is rooted in reality; there's no giant elephant-pig or mutated sea creature here. The evil lurking in "Parasite" is privilege and capitalism and if that's not the biggest theme of the late 2010s I'm not quite sure what is. The film is a genre-shifting story told by an expert, who has made a few near-perfect films ("Memories of Murder," "Mother"). When "Parasite" begins to unfold and show its cards, you know you're in the hands of a master and that it won't go off the rails. Here, Joon-ho successfully tells his story with effortless dynamic filmmaking and ease that is completely hypotonic and engaging while being unnervingly gripping and universal.

[myhauntedsalem]

Horror Movies Based on True Events

Open Water (2003)

When a couple goes scuba diving in Open Water, their boat accidentally leaves them behind in shark-infested water. It’s based on something that really happened to American tourists Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were left behind by a diving company off the Great Barrier Reef. By the time the mistake was realized two days later, it was too late, and they were never seen again. A shark attack seems not to have been the cause of death, however, as the couple’s dive jackets were eventually found. The jackets weren’t damaged, which suggested that the Lonergans likely took them off, “delirious from dehydration,” and drowned.

Borderland (2007)

When three friends head to a Mexican border town to have some fun in this movie, they get mixed up with a cult specializing in human sacrifice. The concept loosely stems from the life of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a drug lord and cult leader who was responsible for the death of American student Mark Kilroy.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

The iconic baddie Freddy Krueger kills teenagers via their dreams in Wes Craven’s franchise-launching film. Craven told Vulture that the idea stemmed from an article he read in The Los Angeles Times about a family of Cambodian refugees with a young son who reported awful nightmares. “He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time,” said Craven. “When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Black Water (2007)

Set in the swamps of Australia, this movie sees a group of fishers attacked by a humongous crocodile. It was inspired by an actual crocodile attack in the Australian outback in 2003 that killed a man named Brett Mann in an area that his friends said they’d “never, ever” seen a crocodile before.

Dead Ringers (1988)

In David Cronenberg’s movie, Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists who do messed up things with patients and ultimately die together in the end. Cronenberg adapted the movie from Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s novel Twins, which was inspired by the lives of actual twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. TheNew York Times noted that the Marcuses enjoyed “trading places to fool their patients” and that they ultimately “retreat[ed] into heavy drug use and utter isolation.”

Deliver Us From Evil (2014)

The movie follows a cop and a priest who team up to take on the supernatural. It’s based on self-proclaimed “demonologist” Ralph Sarchie’s memoir Beware the Night, in which he tells supposedly true stories, such as the time he found himself “in the presence of one of hell’s most dangerous devils” possessing a woman.

Poltergeist (1982)

In Poltergeist, a family’s home is invaded by ghosts that abduct one of the daughters. The film was inspiredby unexplained events, such as loud popping noises and moved objects, that occurred in 1958 at the Hermanns’ home in Seaford, New York.

Psycho (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock’s essential film traces a woman who embezzles money from her employer and runs off to a mysterious hotel where she is (58-year-old spoiler alert) murdered by the man running it, Norman Bates. Bates is said to have been based on Ed Gein, a Wisconsin man who was convicted for one murder in the 1950s, but suspected for others. He also was a grave robber, and authorities found many disturbing results of that in his home, including bowls crafted from human skulls and a lampshade made from the skin of someone’s face.

Scream (1996)

The classic ‘90s slasher flick uses dark humor to tell the story of a group of teens and a mystery man named Ghostface who wants to murder them. But the real story ain’t funny. The movie was inspired by the Gainesville Ripper, real name Danny Rolling, who killed five Florida students by knife over a span of three days in August 1990.

The Conjuring (2013)

The movie stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as ghost hunters helping out a family in a haunted 18th-century farmhouse. The hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are real people, as is the Perron family that they assist. Lorraine was a consultant on the movie and insists that many of the supernatural horrors really happened, and one of the daughters who is depicted in the film, Andrea Perron, says the same. She recalled an angry spirit named Bathsheba to USA Today:“Whoever the spirit was, she perceived herself to be mistress of the house and she resented the competition my mother posed for that position.”

Annabelle (2014)

The creepy porcelain doll from The Conjuring gets her terror on in this spin-off of The Conjuring. The ghost-hunting Warrens have claimed that there was a real Raggedy Ann doll that moved by itself and wrote creepy-ass notes saying things like, “Help us.” The woman who owned it contacted a medium, who claimed that it was possessed by a seven-year-old girl named Annabelle who had died there.

The Disappointments Room (2016)

Kate Beckinsale stars in the movie as an architect who moves to a new home with a mysterious room in the attic that she eventually learns was previously used as a room where rich people would cast off disabled children. It was reportedly inspired by a Rhode Island woman who discovered a similar room in her house that she says was built by a 19th century judge to lock away his disabled daughter.

The Exorcist (1973)

Two priests attempt to remove a demon from a young girl in this box office smash. The movie was based on a 1949 Washington Post article with the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip.” Director William Friedkin spoke about the article to Time Out London: “Maybe one day they’ll discover the cause of what happened to that young man, but back then, it was only curable by an exorcism. His family weren’t even Catholics, they were Lutheran. They started with doctors and then psychiatrists and then psychologists and then they went to their minister who couldn’t help them. And they wound up with the Catholic church. The Washington Post article says that the boy was possessed and exorcised. That’s pretty out on a limb for a national newspaper to put on its front page… You’re not going to see that on the front page of an intelligent newspaper unless there’s something there.

The Girl Next Door (2007)

The movie follows the abuse of a teenage girl at the hands of her aunt, and it was inspired by the murder of Sylvia Likens in 1965. The 16-year-old girl was abused by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, Baniszewski’s children, and other neighborhood children, as entertainment. They ultimately killed her, with the cause of death determined as “brain swelling, internal hemorrhaging of the brain, and shock induced by Sylvia’s extensive skin damage,”

The Possession (2012)

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick star in the movie as a couple with a young daughter who becomes fascinated with an antique wooden box found at a yard sale. Of course, the box turns out to be home to a spirit. The flick’s “true story” basis came from an eBay listing for “a haunted Jewish wine cabinet box” containing oddities such as two locks of hair, one candlestick, and an evil spirit that caused supernatural activity. The box sold for $280 and gained attention when a Jewish newspaper ran an article about its so-called powers.

The Rite (2011)

In The Rite, a mortician enrolls in seminary and eventually takes an exorcism class in Rome, where demonic encounters ensue. The movie was based on the life of a real exorcist, Father Gary Thomas, whose work was the focus of journalist Matt Baglio’s book The Rite: The Making of an Exorcist. A Roman Catholic priest, Thomas was one of 14 Vatican-certified exorcists working in America in 2011. He served as an advisor on the film and told The Los Angeles Times that in the previous four years he had exorcised five people.

The Sacrament (2013)

In the movie, a man travels to find his sister who joined a remote religious commune, where, yep, bad things happen. It was inspired by the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones led 909 of his followers to partake in a “murder-suicide ceremony” using cyanide poisoning.

The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece is about a man who is driven to insanity by supernatural forces while staying at a remote hotel in the Rockies. The movie Derives from Stephen King’s book of the same name, which was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where plenty of guests have reported seeing ghosts. The Stanley wasn’t actually used in the movie, however, because Kubrick didn’t think it looked scary enough.

The Silence of the Lambs(1991)

The Oscar-winning film tells the story of an FBI cadet who enlists the help of a cannibal/serial killer to pin down another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who skins the bodies of his victims. FBI special agent John Douglas, who consulted on the film, has explained that Bill was inspired in part by the serial killer Ted Bundy, who like Bill, wore a fake cast. Ed Gein is also believed to be an inspiration, what with the whole skinning thing. And per Rolling Stone, 1980s killer Gary Heidnik was a reference for how Buffalo Bill kept victims in a basement pit.

The Strangers (2008)

Three killers in masks terrorize the suburban home of a couple (played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) in this invasion thriller. Writer-director Bryan Bertino has said the film was inspired by something that happened to him in childhood. “As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it,” he said. “At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn’t live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses.”

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974 & 2003)

Ed Gein also reportedly inspired elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its remake. The movies are about groups of friends who come into contact with the murderous cannibal Leatherface. The original film memorably features a room filled with furniture created from human bones, a nod to Gein’s home.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976 & 2014)

The original film follows a Texas Ranger as he tracks down a serial killer threatening a small town, and the 2014 sequel of the same name essentially revives the same plot. Both are based on the Texarkana Moonlight Murders of 1946, when a “Phantom Killer” took out five people over ten weeks. The case remains unsolved

Veronica (2018)

The recent Netflix release follows a 15-year-old girl who uses a Ouija board and accidentally connects with a demon that terrorizes her and her family. The movie’s based on a real police report from a Madrid neighborhood. As the story goes, a girl performed a séance at school and then “experienced months of seizures and hallucinations, particularly of shadows and presences surrounding her,” according to NewsWeek. The police report came a year after the girl’s death when three officers and the Chief Inspect of the National Police reported several unnatural occurrences at her family’s home that they called “a situation of mystery and rarity.”