#like intentionally taking every joke in a bad movie so literally and out of faith that its like ok dude cmon

[steveharrington]

i <3 drew gooden

[tearlessrain]

I’m about to watch Arthur and Merlin, which is free on youtube and came up in my suggestions randomly. I have no idea what it is but I am hungry for the arthurian Content so Imma watch it and see how it goes

update: it was way better than I expected and accidentally SUPER gay. that merlin tv show everyone loved was amateur hour compared to how gay this was.

“there is magic in the air, and in the water, but it has been forgotten by many in these lands” wow why does that sound familiar I wonder

the funny thing is I watched fellowship of the ring literally yesterday so this will be hilarious

but there is hope [extremely unsubtle cut to a baby who is definitely important]

now I think... and I could be wrong... but guys I suspect this baby might be the chosen one.

oh god there was no father he was conceived by midichlorians

THE SKYWALKERS HAVE INFILTRATED THE CELTS

okay place your bets is it arthur or merlin

it’s Merlin. or Merddyn rather, in a surprise twist this movie was written by Fucking Nerds

so far mild cheese aside this is surprisingly watchable

“your crops fail and so you ask the king for help, but do not help yourselves! where are your alters?? starvation is punishment for your lack of faith!” THE RNC HAS INFILTRATED THE CELTS

okay so near as I can figure out the mark is from the old gods but there’s a druid who I guess speaks for the king or something who wants them to worship different old gods and now he’s demanding the villagers make a human sacrifice and it’s gonna be Smol Merddyn.

aw no they killed Celtic Shmi. Merddyn got away though and is now wandering the Forbidden Forest

I’m mad this is actually a solid movie so far. absolutely nothing unexpected has happened but I didn’t click on a movie called “Arthur and Merlin” to be surprised

oh wait that kid who freed him was Arthur

fifteen years later arthur is... a military leader who looks strangely like one of those romans played by obviously white actors in older movies

I honestly can’t pinpoint when this movie was made on aesthetics alone

ooo some Roving Misogynists™ are here to cause trouble and assault random women for being christian. by order of the druid no doubt.

“you mock us!” “I do.” okay I’m starting to like this arthur.

oh my god is that. he just fucking. tripped over excalibur while wading in like a two foot deep pond to get this woman’s cross back for her. best interpretation ever.

wait Olwen??? as in Ysbaddaden’s daughter Olwen?? once again I assumed they’d go with Guinevere or make someone up but I forgot, this movie was made by Fucking Nerds.

okay I know insisting everything is gay is a constant thing on this site but I want to point out that Arthur has showed nothing but very platonic friendship to Olwen but this is the face he makes when he sees Merddyn in a vision

and I mean to be fair to him this is what Merddyn looks like now

goddamn

oh no they’ve immediately made it very clear that he’s Romantically Involved With Olwen In Secret Look They’re Kissing Nobody Is Gay

so now I really want to know who wrote this movie because what I’m seeing here is people who intentionally chose to use the name merddyn, and know that olwen exists, but then decided to pair her romantically with... king arthur. and culhwch just doesn’t exist I guess. not that this is the most off the wall welsh mythology ship I’ve encountered but still it’s a weird one for this kind of media even if it’s an indie film

who are you people. how did this movie get made. I mean I like whatever it is but for real how and why did you do this.

I love how there’s just this trio of random dudes who don’t even have names who are arthur/olwen’s friends. and yet somehow they’re likable and I’m rooting for them. whoever they are.

so the only real problem with this movie that’s denting my enjoyment is that nobody has names and they all have the same haircut so I lose track of who’s doing what. see these are arthur’s friends:

and these are bad guys:

and Olwen is the only person in either screenshot who has a name

if any of them ever changes into a new outfit I’m screwed.

I’m gonna be real with y’all I love me a cursed forest

in an ironic twist, excalibur is now firmly stuck in a tree trunk and arthur cannot get it out

why is this movie GOOD what the heck. I mean the druid and king situation is blatantly ripped from wormtongue and theoden but I still like. care about the king. they’ve done it well.

“I’ve already told you, I am no longer a man.” “are you so sure???” see I know nothing will happen since this is a movie not a fanfic but that line is the quintessential hate-makeout segue

THIS IS VERY HETEROSEXUAL they’ve had most of the argument while approximately that distance from each other

oh god what the fuck arthur’s friends got sacrificed by the druid just to make a point to olwen. this is the opposite of a Sacrificial Girlfriend.

they do not need to be this close to each other to argue but they keep on doing it

they’ve been on screen together for less than five minutes y’all

arthur: maybe you’re right, you are no longer a man

merlin: [conjures an entire patch of flowers for him to make... some kind of point I guess?]

okay now they’re arguing again but there’s all this “I thought I knew you” talk (which, again, it’s been five minutes) and the actors have clearly decided that their dynamic is based entirely on constant, roiling sexual tension

why does every single thing they say scan like dialogue from a slow burn enemies to friends to lovers fanfic

“the girl in the village, did you love her once?” “I know little of love” “Surely a man who can control the growth of a flower must be able to make love blossom” JUST FUCK ALREADY

this is how they’re having this conversation by the way

there was only one shrub hollow

“to control nature is one thing, but only the most powerful sorcerer could control the mind of a man- OR WOMAN,” he said, heterosexually.

y’all I’m gonna be honest I thought I was just projecting at first but this is the gayest thing I’ve seen since the baseball song in high school musical 2. this is just absolute beleg and turin levels of probably unintended but utterly blatant homosexuality. I’m so glad I decided to watch this movie and youtube was right to recommend it to me.

this movie really speaks to me because on a spiritual level I too am a mystical but irritable and socially stunted forest hermit with sexy hair just waiting for a brash but pure-hearted warrior who looks like a roman statue to draw me out of my cave with homoerotic banter. 

oh it’s not excalibur it’s... nuadu. which I guess in this movie is not the king of the tuatha de danann but a sword forged by them? see my first impulse would be to assume that the way they’re mangling everything, the writers knew nothing about Celtic folklore, except that they’ve chosen such weirdly specific things to mangle. they know their shit, they’ve just deliberately chosen to go absolutely buckwild with it.

THEY’RE DOING IT AGAIN THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF ARGUING WHILE STANDING MORE THAN TWO FEET APART

for real though character-wise this might be one of my favorite interpretations of merlin/merddyn I’ve ever seen. I feel like everyone involved was genuinely super passionate about the subject matter they were working with. like all jokes aside he’s really honestly well acted and well written.

STOP IT NOW YOU HORNY SIMPLETONS

uh oh they’ve been captured by... bandits?

oh it’s olwen’s uncle

“TO GOOD WOMEN... WHY DO YOU NOT DRINK, MERDDYN”

it is a mystery, olwen’s uncle.

a mystery.

this motivational monologue could have been so cheesy but like. I’m here for it. I would follow arthur into battle.

aw come on. olwen’s uncle betrayed them. I kinda saw it coming but dammit.

again, the druid should be absolutely stupid but he’s kind of a cool villain.

yay olwen’s uncle unbetrayed them. probably so would I if I’d seen what merddyn just did to the druid’s guys.

so the druid is trying to sacrifice ten thousand souls to raise a god from the underworld and merddyn is on the fucking warpath. and olwen’s uncle is ON BOARD HELL YEAH.

THE HOBBITS THE HOBBITS THE HOBBITS THE HOBBITS TO ISENGUARD TO ISENGUARD

arthur and merddyn have escalated to clutching each other’s clothes during their heated two-feet-apart discussions

olwen is a badass in her own right like she has her own whole thing going trying to save the king from basically his own literal dementia and the druid who’s taking advantage of it, which is somehow way more compelling than just magical mind control.

“I thought the cave taught you fairness” “well... you taught me fighting” JUST KISS.

okay let’s see how they pull off this dark god on the shoestring budget they definitely have, at this point I honestly believe in them.

by avoiding showing the god entirely apparently but they made it work even with that.

aw the king has named him his heir. which again we all knew would happen but it’s still so well done.

and we end on merddyn placing the crown on arthur’s head while lovingly quoting his own words back at him, while olwen looks on with the kind of approval that implies they’ve ended up with some kind of road to el dorado situation. solid.

so I was expecting this to be absolute garbage with bad actors and checked out writers just trying to make another mediocre coattail-riding medieval fantasy movie and what I got was some weirdly good actors and writers who are clearly obsessed with celtic folklore and desperately wanted to just run amok with it for an hour and 45 minutes. and they did. they poured every ounce of their hearts and souls and tiny, tiny budget into it. and it was beautiful. 10/10

[mr-kamiyama]

So I went to a store called Dollar Store today. Next to the name, it said "1.25$ and up." Most items had no price, and were actually 1.75$ Even the saleslady seemed to realise how disingenuous it was, and I bought nothing.

See my last post--the dollar has been in freefall for decades.

It's not just that store. 99Cents Only stores have also not only shrunk the size of their 99 cent goods (e.g., cream cheese went from a normal 12 oz. pack to somewhere between five and eight ounces. I haven't been in one in a while), but now sell many goods at the 1.99$ (aka 2$) and 2.99$ (3$) price points, and even higher.

At this point, I think calling them "dollar stores" is just false advertising. Call them Value Shops or Bargain Shops (which the reason all supermarkets can claim to have the best value, an advertising trend that began in the '60s, is because things like "best value" are vague and completely subjective) But calling them dollar stores, even if they can legally get away with it, much the same way F*X News can legally get away with that just being a name even if it's just a mix of handwringing about how dare poor people have refridgerators and blatant white supremacists, and say "oh, that's just a name," it is just *false.*

I get where companies like BP are going with different brands of gas station marketed as different lifestyle brands ( e.g. Amoco appeals to the muscle car crowd, AM/PM is relaxed West Coast and always there with coffee, day or night, etc) Lifestyle branding isn't something that can be true or false, just like you can have a depressive disco dancer or a ridiculously optimistic and bubbly punk rocker.

But when you're blatantly misrepresenting the type of product you sell, like "dollar stores" have become or F*X News may have always been ( they definitely are now, but I don't know if they were always like this or not), there really needs to be a line drawn that prevents this.

The Better Business Bureau used to, and had its teeth taken out to save abusive and tyrannical megacorps like Wal-Mart, Papa John's, or McDonald's (McDonald's in America is *evil* to its employees, explanation because they're global, and in some countries, their behaviour would be instant corporate suicide)

I dunno if they'd have domain over media. I mean, you can easily find the racism and lies that newspapers spread about internment camps for Japanese Americans, but it also remained uncontested. Even today, racism against Asians is totally cool with the rest of y'all. And y'all smother our voices and gang up to gaslight us when we do speak out. So I can't really look at that and ascertain anything from it.

But my main point is that while yes, advertising in its particular modern shape of things like lifestyle branding was actually literally Freud's nephew experimenting with peacetime uses for propoganda, it's not like Pepsi associating itself with hip youthfulness makes it any less of a cola. It's the advertisers trying to get you to associate a certain feeling with their product. But it doesn't make their product any less what it is or alter the actual product in any way. It's deceptive in a way, if you lack any sort of critical thinking, I guess, because I can drink Pepsi until I'm passed out from sugar spike, but I'll never bring my hairline back to where it was ten years ago or not have arthritis again?

But they're also not actually claiming a youth serum or anything, so I guess it's more like going to a roller rink looking for what you felt in your local one in '82.

But all these so-called "dollar stores," which mostly used to actually be "everything is a dollar," since the branding is considered to mean that, even though it's arguably legacy naming, it's not that anymore, and so, I find it deceptive enough to cross a line. Just like F*x News, which is entirely bigoted hot-takes and not actual news.

(Note that I'm not saying that decieving about what you sell and Nazism are equated, but that both have names that lure people in by easily disproven falsehoods. That's why I'm comparing. Not a whole lot does that. I'm really just putting this here because most of the English internet is made of bad faith actors who will deliberately twist others' words)

There really needs to be something done about outright easily proven deception to lure people in. Even if we consider the legacy branding aspect of the stores at hand, it's just no longer true, and they really need to rename to "Bargain Shops" or something.

But even if it's somehow just too gosh darn hard for people to, yanno, not hate everyone who's not exactly like them to care about the people making your McDonald's orders or people dying of blood poisoning like it's 1803 because of lack of insurance, people generally want stuff that's not made to break and be irreparable after two years. When I tell young people about the shrine to 1987 I live in and all of this stuff being made to be maintenanced and repaired, it always sounds so wonderful to them. And every repairman left is super depressed because buying a new unit is cheaper than bare cost of parts, and they can't complete. I don't think anyone's happy about modern technology being intentionally flimsy. Americans are also beginning to realise American food makers take more chance on variety in overseas markets. There are things the average American consumer is upset about, even if the treatment of the people who serve them isn't one of them.

But the US is just such an oligarchy. A few big companies rule everything and pay off the government like a mob.

So these companies can get away with luring us in with lies. And we're more split up, isolated than ever. I'm Gen X. We were eraced into the shadows. And I'm also Asian American and trans male, two other demographs that's happened to. Mixed is a fourth one I am. As I am pointing out,erasure of a demograph makes its members become very isolated. But I do see Millennials talking about being lonely and having trouble socialising a lot. So I think the movement of socialising to the internet did *something,* and it's actually a lot of people that are having trouble reaching out.

Never mind that 21st Century society's rule is "it's wrong to hate me but fun to hate my neighbour." Divides have gotten worse/become the rule rather than just oppressor Vs. all oppressed, and that *is* fed by social media. We should also be taking action against this! Even *I* get far-right v-logger recommendations on YouTube, and the only thing I use YouTube for is music that came out before any v-loggers were born! I watch zero v-logs. It tries to shove v-logs so massively known for being hate screeds that even *I* know those names are bad news, at me. We should be protesting Tumbler... doing a lot of things, and all sites letting Nazists flourish net-wide while I've literally seen some cartoon fish meme-style joke about white cops get people banned on Twitter.

But every so often, people do band together and still get something done. Remember the internet blackout? The "pipes" are still "dumb"!

Just like that post I have about the ways voting does still matter even though gerrymandering, rigged voter machines, etc., are all true, consumer action still matters.

But no one's ever listened to me, because I'm a mixed, Asian, immigrant, disabled, trans, ace Xer. No one wants to be forced to admit I exist. So you probably won't either. You would rather contend with a lousy hand than admit I'm right.

(I literally called the US The Ring when it came out, and subsequent similar movies "unnecessary blond hair versions" over a decade before people really started saying these things were "whitewashed." Just one example)