#maybe it getting mainstream was a bad idea like i love to see more works and all but

[chiisana-lion]

"doomed by the narrative" you don't even pay attention to the narrative

[yumantimatter]

Death-Neutral Antideathism

[epistemic status: a statement of personal philosophy. questions and responses welcome, but please argue the tractability of ending death with people who are more invested in it as a goal than I am]

I'm pretty normie for an anti-death transhumanist. I haven't signed up for cryonics and don't plan to unless it gets way cheaper and better, I donate neartermist, I have pierced ears and zero other body mods, etc etc.

I still consider myself a part of the movement, because it's straightforward and obvious to me that if people don't want to die they shouldn't have to, and if they want to change their bodies and minds they should get to.

Personally I'm fine with dying someday. I think I am going to grow up into an old person who has had plenty of experiences and is comfortable with not having many more of them. If I found out today that I had a terminal illness, I would rather spend my time and money on fulfilling my bucket list and leaving my loved ones good memories (and donate the rest) than in the hospital desperately trying out low-probability treatments. (See my opinion on cryo)

(Then again, I certainly wouldn't turn down a miracle cure! Or a known, tested treatment with a decent chance of getting me through! Or something that was unlikely to work but low financial and opportunity cost to try! This is also the same as my opinion on cryo)

I don't view death as bad inherently. It's just a change of state, if one that's uniquely impactful in its irreversibility and all-encompassing scope. I don't agree that people dying is always a great screaming moral emergency, that death is a yawning horror for anyone who looks at it clearly, or that we are all fooling ourselves. For me, the way modern culture treats death is actually a pretty good match to how I feel about dying.

But, um, *gestures at anti-deathists more broadly* *gestures at all the people who do try any possible treatment for their terminal illness* *gestures at the instinctive struggle for self preservation when it would be so much less effort to stop* It sure seems like there's a lot of not wanting to die going around! And it sure seems like a horrible idea to just ignore that!

People who make peace with their eventual death even though they'd prefer to live longer are fine, and not making a mistake. People who make a thought-out choice to die or to risk their lives for other goals are fine, and not making a mistake. And people who desperately want to live, who cling on to cryo and fund anti-aging and search for any possible means of continuing on, are also fine and not making a mistake.

I think death is bad for the many many many people who want to continue living, or decide to live, or endorse being alive, and who die anyway. A natural death after a long fulfilling life isn't an exception to that. This is the part where I do wholeheartedly agree with the standard anti-death talking points, and want them to become more mainstream. That competing perspective which validates the desire to not die, and which spurs people into looking for ways to do something about it, is vitally important for the sake of people who don't work like me.

Maybe this is just a long winded way of saying I'm a preference utilitarian (ish) who takes weird and hard-to-fulfill preferences seriously? If so, I'm happy to take up that flag. Weird-preference-fulfillmentism all the way!

(I haven't even brought up the transhumanism, which I support on the same lines - I don't think my position there is particularly unusual in these parts though, seeing as this is the transgender website.)

For now, I am in coalition with the anti-deathists. And I will keep being in coalition with them, until and unless the world shifts far enough to count my viewpoint as neutral.

[ursulanoodles]

Shane Headcanons pt. 1 (spoilers)

He’s a cuddler

Secretly enjoys being the little spoon

Secretly listens to sad country/folk music, but acts like he wouldn’t be caught dead doing so

Maybe the same thing with mainstream pop music, like Taylor Swift. I could definitely see him being a secret T Swift fan

Loves naps

Gives bear hugs

Super affectionate once he’s comfortable in a relationship

Will probably kiss your face off/squish you from cute aggression 

Resisted the idea at first, but unashamedly lets Jas paint his nails on the reg

Jas is the reason he dyes his hair purple because it’s her favorite color

Smokes a lot of weed for his anxiety, but doesn’t make it his personality

definitely buys it from Sam at work or Seb on Friday nights outside of the Stardrop

Is kind of friends with Sam and thinks he’s hilarious. They get up to all sorts of shenanigans at work when Shane isn’t in a bad mood or hungover.

They totally ride pallet jacks around the back room together

Was totally a punk/emo kid (clothing therapy anyone?)

Started drinking too much after Jas’ parents’ deaths, though he was probably a frequent drinker before that but it sent him over the edge

Their deaths hit him hard and he couldn’t take care of himself, let alone a kid– hence the reason he moved in with Marnie

Looks frumpy in his depression clothes, but smells like clean laundry and whatever body wash and deodorant he uses (I like to imagine like fir/pine/citrus scents)

A lot of people like to say he doesn’t shower, but I think it’s the opposite. I think he takes a lot of hot showers and is meticulous about smelling good because he’s socially anxious. Too depressed to buy new clothes, but not depressed enough to smell like shit.

Not a vegetarian, but sometimes avoids meat and tries not to eat chicken, especially if it’s a chicken he’s raised.

Has undiagnosed ADHD and/or autism. Definitely neurodivergent in one way or another. 

Soccer, chickens (birds in general if you’ve seen his summit scene), and Journey of the Prairie King are his special interests/hyperfixations. 

Hums to himself and whistles a lot when he’s working or walking to/from work if he’s not in a bad mood

Definitely talks/mutters to himself, especially if he’s angry or anxious

Loves soccer/played soccer in school (not American football)

His Tunnelers shirt looks more like a soccer jersey and I think there’s a glaringly obvious discrepancy between the gridball/Tunnelers that Alex refers to and the Tunnelers that Shane refers to

He has a soccer ball in his room ffs

Also, in his 10 heart even he yells “Goal!” not “Touchdown!”

[batri-jopa]

Why Queer TV is Getting Worse? (by verilybitchie)

What was I expecting of a 44 minutes long YT video showing "Bad Bi Representation"? Not sure but I definitely got muuuch more than I could have wished for!❤️ I love the analysis of what queer representation is, what's considered "good" and "bad" representation, and why the "good" ones are so f* boring while "bad" ones are the best stories, and why bisexual representation is one of the most difficult one to make... And also it set my interest on Desiree Akhavan:

(...) Lucky for me, Akhavan's work is in direct opposition to squeaky clean "gaystreaming". She is what scholar Maria San Filippo calls a "bad queer" filmmaker. She's not interested in creating characters that will convince you that "bisexuals are good, actually". Rather she portrays bisexuals that embody all the dreaded stereotypes and ask the questions you're not allowed to ask. This is the opposite of the Hollywood sanitised bisexuals.

Some quotes:

(...) They're not love stories, they're break up stories. "Appreciate Behavior" is non chronological and the first scene mirrors the last, telling us that all of these ideas about life milestones, whether gay or straight, are fake. It's not about your carrier, or coming out or getting married. Life is an ongoing journey in which you cannot be defined by the standarts others set for you

But I love the "bad queers"! They reclaim artistic freedom and create space for self-reflexive humour. They're not laughing at the LGBT community, they're laughing with the LGBT community, from within the community, from a deep understanding of how ridiculous our politics and interactions can be. They reject the impreative to write relentlessly positive role models in favour of flawed and human figures. And in a way, a bisexual perspective is inherently a "bad queer" perspective which will often clash with what GPAAD and Twitter think queer media should be. That's the challenge in bisexual strytelling: if it's honest, it will make some people cranky.

(...) So really, publicly owned broadcasting is the only way these alternative bi stories get made. And who wants to see a story about explicitly bi Iranian woman? Maybe no one who isn't bi will ever really want to see bisexual stories that aren't "gaystreamed". But that's the point: there are some minorities whose experiences can't be mainstreamed (and I'm not just talking about bisexuals here), and there are undoubtedly some stories which can never be told if we depend on consumerism of art. We need broadcasters like Channel 4 in order to tell those stories.

[peachjagiya]

Oh can I submit a controversial opinion?

We all know and hate the nonsense claim about Tae being "just a visual". I know we mainly talk about the company vs Tae. But I also feel like sometimes that was driven by the group/members too...

I know they are brothers and all support each other (and I love their group dynamic). I know that within the group that different members have different bonds and the changes and evolves over time. I also know that there were a lot of times when it was more about actions than words -- how Namjoon really worked to "understand" Tae and now he plays along with him so seemlessly; how Yoongi helped make sure he got to participate and was understood, etc. But, like even those examples rely on the company narrative of him being weird. I'm not saying all the time, obviously. But it just feels like there were times when they reinforced the company narratives and roles -- and we know those still play a role in the fandom today. JK was the perfect, golden maknae. JM was sweet, hardworking dancer. Tae...weird. It could sometimes feel feel like his talents and contributions weren't always valued at the same level as the other maknae line.

*runs away and hides*

Gosh I really really agree. He's very often "othered" and it does actually bother me a lot. I am settled on the idea that it's mainly about narrative and that the day to day interactions aren't so hinged on it? But that public facing separation of Tae as weird is troublesome to me. (Made worse by my suspicion that it's a deliberate effort by the company but that's just a theory.)

With the absolute caveat that I do not diagnose any members with neurodiversity - or neurotypicality! - and don't think it's helpful to do that unless they speak about it themselves, speaking as a neurodiverse person, I think any unique thinking in anyone is often shut down inadvertently. Maybe you think about life a little different, maybe your speech patterns are different, maybe your humour is different, maybe your goals are different. And maybe people side eye that without even realising that it's kind of invalidating.

No pity party from me, I'm actually a very happy person despite bouts of depression, but I was always weird and aside throughout my life. I can get along really well with people who think I'm weird but I get along much better with people who just get me.

Interestingly, I don't know if you'd agree but I feel like JK is also kind of separated by being a little unusual in his thinking or behaviours but it's been less reinforced by company narrative. If anything, the company narrative paints a mainstream acceptable macho image of JK that doesn't reflect him at all.

I think this might be why JK and Wooga are Tae's safe space. I don't doubt for a single moment that BTS are super important to him, they're his brothers, but the people that take you exactly as you are and never unconsciously place you as weird and other are the ones who you want to be around a lot.

I see a lot of myself in Taehyung but it's a bad idea to assume that means he's also ADHD or whatever. It does mean I feel protective of his so-called quirks though. I always say that even if Tae turned out to be straight, his queer coding is important to me as a queer person. Similarly, his (and JKs) neurodivergent coding, regardless of whether he is diagnosed or identifies that way, is important to me as a ND person. And to see him being referred to as an alien or as weird... I dunno. It's not comfy even if I know it's not meant to hurt.

Thanks anon. What a cool conversation to get into. ❤

[tithe2hell]

an amusing thing to me about the Yuri vs yaoi forever war fandom struggle discourse is that for the f/f fans mad about yaoi popularity and making lots of extremely funny (to me) Song-of-Roland-esque posts that make it sound like "we are going to WAR against the evil man-centering fujos terrorizing and colonizing our yuriship spaces!!!" Is that I never see the loudest trumpeters actually go to "war" or do any work organizing or strategizing to "win" their cause.

The only tactic they have is trying to do a "win hearts and minds by telling yaoi shippers they should feel Bad for Centering Men and being "dick-obsessed" (hmmm!) and "interrogate your kinks"-ass rhetoric (double hmmm!!!) which ok, let's take that at face value....that's a purely INTERNAL process. You're asking someone to sit down and Correct Their Thoughts and Soul, with hopefully ending towards the End Product of "After they've been Corrected, they will make More Content I Like, and the Big Number or AO3 stat will go up and surpass the Content I don't Like"

Which ok fine...but very hilariously ineffective, a very passive activism. Vague steps to take (be aware!!) It doesn't even really make or give people any steps to reach the supposed goal of Surpassing in Number for the Sake of the Number. The loudest ppl who seem to freak out whenever the stats number is down, I never see working to build connections of support and love for the people who make the stuff you want.

Like even framing as a matter of representation for real life women and wlw, we've had discussions for ages re: media industry how the conditions of ppl who create behind the scenes so that they have freedom of expression and control of their stories is essential to having "good representation." Even if the marginalized ppl in general end up making stuff that is maybe "gross" or "trashy" or Sexual in a Way You don't Like*, that support of the actual real creators and enthusiasts is what's important.

For fujos, I feel most of us are used to getting shit on so we don't really care what people say and will continue to toil in the posting mines make what we make, even if it's rare and gross so someone trying to simply make an Hearts and Minds "war" move is not very effective. We have our own work to do, the work (of play) is what makes things meaningful, bc if is done for its own sake. The best f/f fans and creators I've seen, the ones I see be lambasted for being "weird and gross" are the ones who are passionate and who commission and discuss and have relationships, don't need to bother with the Hearts and Mind because they are building castles and fortifications And making discoveries themselves, rather than worrying what other ppl think of them or if their ships or themselves are "approvable" or defined by a general public. The tactics that fujos use to boost and celebrate THEIR rarepairs etc are certainly not exclusive.

When I think Abt cool projects and esp stuff that has contributed to say, communities and celebration of media and creatives especially re: f/f fandom stuff, I think of stuff like Empty Movement and their massive decades-long archiving of utena materials, of people making zines and creative works around ships I wouldn't even consider until I see the cool ideas, or my friends who review and write and talk extensively about the novels and works they are reading both to reflect their tastes and raise interest. That builds foundations and connections between people . That is how you fight. That is how you wage your proper war...it does not have to be fruitless...

*I have maintained that if people REALLY wanted their numbers to go up they'd support the people making siscon and momdaughter stuff bc there's a sheer lack esp of the latter...a big part of yaoisms popularity is bc everyone loves Dadson, which imo is basically a very big fantasy even for heteros and pops up gratuitously in like every mainstream movie ever. Now that we are getting really mom generational trauma narratives it's time for momdaughter to shine. But unfortunately every time I check up on a false loud war trumpeter wondering where all the femslash is they're also recoiling with disgust about incest And agegap and other problematic tropes so like maybe they really don't care about the Number Going Up-just acceptability, and of things they personally can relate to? One can never know.

[thefaultinoursprinkles]

the fallout show is actually pretty enjoyable. maybe because I’m obsessed with the world and love the new perspective. and yes the props look like they’re from Amazon and the humor is a little “Reddit” for lack of a better term, but the plastic-y look and cringy humor matches the vibe of the games to be quite honest.

with the props/sets though it’s interesting, like they all have this cheapass look but also it’s clear a lot of care and detail were put into the set pieces/costuming, so it gives the vibe of like a YouTube skit where everything is super cheap but you’re like “wow this looks really good considering what they had to work with” except that this show had a fucking $153 million budget so it’s like. come on man.

I DO think that the sets are amazing, for the most part, even if the costuming and props leave something to be desired. like it’s clear that’s where most of the budget went.

I also appreciate that basically the whole cast is unknowns or up-and-comers rather than the marvel-starwars-disney Big Names Only casting that seems to be the only way mainstream media is cast. so that’s cool, I always love the potential for new talent to cut their teeth and get their big break. plus I hate seeing the same shitty fucking actors over and over again. if they’re good idc but like Scarlett Johansson or Jermey renner just suck. like they are not even good at the craft. even like Chris whatever the fuck who plays Thor has some genuine talent and can be enjoyable to watch, but so many of them are just so baaaddd.

the soundtrack is great, honestly, all the picks are bangers & I love the Johnny cash & I actually love the choice to use sound effects from the games in the sound mixing. it’s very fun. like again, cheesy, but it’s a cool design choice.

and like ultimately, that doesn’t really impact my enjoyment of it. all in all it’s so far above my expectations. I’ve been dreading it since it was announced bc I love fallout as a “mythos” (basically) and I did not think a nostalgia-bait fan service big budget mainstream major release could ever have any redeeming qualities so the fact that it’s “fun to watch” and “has a plot” is pretty neat.

also one of the brotherhood people is a they/them which I thought was neat. as of yet they have not gendered them at all like no “brother” or “girl” or “man” or “he/she” it’s been exclusively they/them or their name.

oh! speaking of the brotherhood, I like how they are portrayed. like they are fucked up clutists with a self righteous god complex and I think they’ve really shown that, rather than the brotherhood fanboys ‘fascism is awesome’ characterization that you see in the fandom. the main brotherhood guy having to deal with his idealistic idea of what the brotherhood “should” be versus what it is is intriguing and I’m excited to see more. also very excited to see more prewar stuff.

And so far my biggest complaint so far is the weird ass ghoul. like they make this big deal about him basically being a corpse and he looks like some dude got a bad sunburn. like with all the gore and horror elements I wish they would have made the ghoul look more.. you know.. like a ghoul.

[gayalienwilde]

I could write an infinite amount of essays about the possible meanings of the alien gay sex pin in Velvet Goldmine, but I'll just write a couple, feel free to add your own theories/analyses I would absolutely love to read them!!!

Everything's under here because otherwise this post is too long to scroll by, nonetheless enjoy <3

First an observation, the fact that the pin has a lifetime of its own in the movie: Oscar Wilde has it since birth, Jack discovers it in his childhood, Brian steals it in his early 20s, Curt gets it around his mid 20s and Arthur in his late 20s/early 30s, this is connected to both the theories I'm gonna talk about so keep that in mind.

The first theory I want to discuss is that of the pin as a metaphor for queer identity and it's connection with art, all the people that own the pin in the movie are queer and almost all of them are artists, it's easy then to see the pin as a physical manifestation of how queerness inspires art and artists, it's not shown since the movie ends but it would make sense then for Arthur to also get inspired after receiving the pin and start focusing more on his passion, whatever that might be. As a viewer it's also very inspiring and validating to see people connect to their identities and passions no matter their age, so don't worry too much about "lost" time, your moment with the alien gay sex pin will come :^)

The second possible meaning for the pin I want to analyse is that of queer connection and community. Just like the green carnation, the pin as a symbol for gay community is "born" with Oscar Wilde, and it's alien powers are manifested in the way it always appears when it's needed the most, this also connects to the way the pin changes ownership throughout the movie. After Wilde the pin (read as community) is found by Jack at his lowest, and it gives him hope, all of this is clearly stated by the voiceover that talks about his unhappy childhood that changes "one mysterious day, when Jack would discover that somewhere there were others quite like him", maybe he doesn't meet other queer people immediately, but he probably discovers he's not alone through learning about Wilde (at school or maybe thanks to the pin), it's even more obvious later seeing Jack being fully confident and comfortable in his identity that he'd been sure of who he is from a pretty young age. Then the pin is stolen by Brian. We're shown Brian as a newcomer to the Sombrero, so Brian knows where to find community, and he's not doing bad like Jack was when he finds it, so it makes sense for him to be the only person that has to steal the pin, he doesn't find it and it's not gifted to him either, he greedily takes it even if he's already got everything it could offer. Alongside the pin Jack's entourage is also "stolen" and they begin to work with Brian, but it's not just them, we see Brian use people, fashion and ideas from the queer community for his own gains, Mandy, Cecil and even Curt become stepping stones for him to reach mainstream popularity. At his most confident, he gives the pin to Curt, and we go back to the pin's usual modus operandi. After the breakup with Brian he's left sad and alone in a foreign city where he can't find community on his own, that's when he connects with Jack, so the pin either predicted that he was gonna need someone or as soon as Brian gave it up it took its revenge for being stolen by causing Brian's downfall, as seen by basically everyone abandoning him and the community of fans turning on him. The pin reaches its final owner when it's given to Arthur by Curt. Even if young Arthur's story in the movie is all about him finding his community after leaving his house, we see that in the 80s he's all alone. In the movie Arthur says that "money, the future and a serious life" made him forget his past, but we can guess that having moved to a different country and the 80s being horrible is also something that probably caused him to lose his connection with other queer people. Arthur has clearly lost all hope until he starts doing his research and meets Curt again, he is no longer alone. To him Curt is both a connection to his past and queerness, but since in the 80s gay people need to hide once more they have to use symbols again to communicate with eachother, so Curt gives the pin to Arthur, to let him know that he recognizes him and also to give him something that will help him find his community of "unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort" again. So the pin is very important because connecting with an understanding community is very important, not just for gay people but for everyone, since it's easy to read the pin also a symbol of being a fan of something and finding other fans through wearing pins and merchandise of your favourite show/band etc... and of course many other symbols used by different communities to recognise each other. Funnily enough, even in real life the pin is the symbol of a community, our fandom of alien gay sex lovers <3

[librarycards]

im glad that my mom died anon back to explain myself:

well, honestly i keep thinking about this book in terms of it’s popularity and my opinion about it after reading it was - „it is popular to say anything”. to me, the most popular works are usually bad because they’re easy to digest and boring - so i’m stuck on No Opinion about igtmm - also with the argument of „i never read book like these (mental health memoirs/trauma memoirs) so i don’t have anything to compare to” and „i liked it only because it was relatable to me” and yet i keep thinking about it a lot. idk i think i’m just surprised that someone who reads as much as you do thinks that highly about the most popular book of 2022. maybe things sometimes get popular for a reason

no, I completely get that! i generally agree (and also generally avoid mainstream/popular books about disability, especially psych disability and ESPECIALLY disorderly eating). my curiosity about this book was mostly fueled by 1) an interest in some of the other topics mccurdy discussed, including religious abuse and sexual abuse in the entertainment industry, and, of course, 2) having grown up with icarly and loving/admiring miranda and jeanette as a kid, and also wondering "where jeanette went", especially in the wake of the news about schneider's vile abuse.

the centrality of mccurdy's experiences with anorexia and bulimia were actually a surprise to me, and initially made me worried to continue, and it was the sheer quality of mccurdy's writing and storytelling that compelled me to keep going - she is just a genuinely good writer, and a clever comedian in the style of hannah gatsby, able to exercise the full gamut of emotions in a reader without abandoning them/us to despair.

in terms of the actual depiction of ed-related stuff, I think that mccurdy has an exceptional sense of her own internality. her acting and dance training is undoubtedly an influence on this - she is able to coordinate her bodymind such that the internal experience she expresses are meaningfully readible by outsiders. that is to say, she doesn't write psychiatric disability as i do, and as i would, because she's different from me! she doesn't engage ideas of opacity and illegibility, rather, she highlights moments she is able to share with her interlocutors, and pulls on a shared script of lived experience. i value her depiction for its genuineness and intimacy. i think audiences broadly tapped into her ability to manage particularity and universality. we see ourselves in her work, while also understanding the sheer uniqueness of her narrative (and, as a result, respect her as the authoritative teller of her own story, which is kinda the whole conceit of the book!)

so, that's a longer-ish answer to my own admiration / love of the book! i also thought about what other "popular" books do this –– pretty much the only ones that came to mind were True Biz by Sara Nović, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and (for disorderly eating stuff) Milk Fed by Melissa Broder.

if you're looking for a more opaque // Mad depiction of psychiatric disability, try My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (disorderly eating), The Fast by Hannah Weiner (disorderly eating), and, broadly, A.S. King, one of my all-time favorite authors who writes Mad and narratively experimental YA books (and really deserves more love!!!!). She's best known for Ask the Passengers, but my all-time favorite of hers is Still Life With Tornado.

[motsimages]

Being the change I want to see on here and popping in to chat.

Are you watching all of the X-Men movies, or just X-2? I do think that one is the best of not just the early 2000s trilogy, but of all seven films (though First Class was excellent and Days of Future Past was... fun). Do you have a different preference?

(I remain pleased the MCU hasn't taken over the X-Men yet. While I understand the appeal of mutants being a part of it, I think the MCU would make extremely bland, dull X-Men stories)

I am watching all of them. Although, tbh, I had to leave for a work trip and didn't watch the Dark Phoenix, but I don't think I've missed anything :P

I really liked the X-Men when they first came out but after Days of Future Past, I was done with them (except Wolverine, but I didn't know I had missed movies). Bf downloaded them all, so rewatch was in order and boy was I right.

This will be long because you gave me a chance and I have it fresh in my head lol.

I agree with you that X-2 is the best. I understand that maybe nostalgia plays a role, but with all the defaults of even the very first movie, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart knew how to play these friends/lovers? who broke up but still care a lot about each other, supported by a script that also knew how to write them. And the stories are compelling too. Particularly in X-2, with the cure and all that, it is an interesting debate, and it gives Magneto a strong motivation for his evil plans.

The new ones... first of all, I don't know how it is even possible to make them less gay (Ian and Patrick weren't there to make it so [get it?], I guess), but they go full cisheteronormative ideals. Someone didn't read the LGBT allegory of the X-Men or something. And then, now that I have watched them all very close to each other, the evil plot is always the same. And they even kind of give Magneto some of the Wolverine arcs. They try to compensate with Mystique, but given that both Charles and Eric are different kind of assholes, why would she even be there? She spends the first 3 movies trying to not be there, but they bring her back because apparently these adult men need a mother. And Beast. Someday, these mainstream movies will be allowed to have an intelligent and sensitive man who is not kind of a gullible incel, but it will be too late for this Beast. In this regard, I agree with you that the MCU wouldn't do better.

Days of Future Past, I remembered worse but I liked it more than First Class this time.

I wonder if the director of the new movies even liked the X-Men to begin with. The old ones, even the bad ones, seemed to at least like the idea of the X-Men.

In all this, as I mentioned, Wolverine always has a special place for me. Do you have a favourite mutant? I really like Nightcrawler (particularly in X-2, I just love Kurt, I wish he was my friend). I also enjoy the tragedy of Rogue.

[asm5129]

Flash Thoughts ⚡ A New World Part 4: Finale

Well, here we are. The last episode of the flash, and a farewell to the arrowverse–at least, for the foreseeable future. God damn, i’ll miss it. I don’t care what anyone says, this world, these characters, they’ve meant so much to me. They’ve been by my side through the worst moments of my life, through into a better time where I feel more fulfilled and happy, I feel genuine joy in my life, my family is healthier, and my pain, while not gone, is lessened. That kind of reliable companionship, whether through a human or a story, is rare. And I will treasure it, always. My hope remains that in a few years, people will start softening on the Arrowverse the way they have Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man or the Star Wars prequels, and maybe all the work that was put into this world–ten years, 6 shows not counting Superman and Lois or Stargirl–can get a bit of a resurgence. It’s already built out the most complete multiverse brought screen after all.

 But anyways. The finale. I liked it a lot. It was imperfect to be sure, a bit rushed, and it really wasted it’s returning villains. But I liked it. It was really lovely and hopeful. And I know Grant Gustin pushed for a hero’s death, but I actually stand with Eric Wallace on this one. The Flash, long before Wallace was showrunner, was about hope, and love. We can argue whether he took it to places it didn’t work, but that was always what it was about. Barry brought a light Oliver couldn’t. That was established in the pilot episode. So him meeting a similar end to Oliver I think, as epic as it may have been, wouldn’t have made sense in the grand scheme of things. No, ultimately, it was the right call to make The Flash’s final episode about hope, and love, and family, and–most importantly–coexistence. 

 While I liked Khione, her inclusion had no real grounded logic to it. There’s no reason what Caitlin did in the season 8 finale should have created Khione. Yet regardless–I think she was the perfect vessel for the message of coexistence. As long as Thawne was the Avatar of the negative speed force, there was no chance for coexistence. There was no path forward with him. But the NSF screwed up when it chose to try and corrupt a good man. This is, genuinely, the first time Barry talking a Big Bad down worked in Eric Wallace’s Flash, because Eddie was a good man who was in pain. He hadn’t chosen to be cruel, so much as he felt he had to make someone cruel happy for him to be happy. But it wasn’t natural for him. And while it was a bit rushed, I think it worked well.

 There will always be those we butt heads with, those standing in our way. But if we’re smart, and we’re kind, that doesn’t always mean there has to be pain. Conflict and contrasting viewpoints are healthy and important, as long as it doesn’t spiral out of control. Barry could have sworn off Eddie as just another Eobard, but he knew Eddie. He knew there was more to him than the pain and the fear that was pushing him to these extremes. So he chose peace, and let Eddie see the man he was becoming. I know it’s very idealistic, but fuck it, there are a billion other stories that refuse to entertain the idea of coexistence, that have the heroes just murdering whomever they consider a threat, or even just getting mad and pursuing vengeance without any care for the lives of others. There’s maybe ten mainstream stories that entertain the idea that maybe some people could change and that could make a better world. Less, most likely. If you wanna expend your energy getting upset over that, god, what a waste.

 I also really, really like that Barry’s choice to let Thawne kill himself ended up really mattering here. I felt that was very strange in season 8 and the beginning of season 9 because such a big deal was made during Armageddon about saving him, even though he was only a victim of his own actions just as he was in the S8 finale So for Barry to know the same thing could happen to Eddie and being desperate to not repeat his choice in season 8 was a great payoff to that. You can argue whether it’s rational to want to save those trying to kill him and his loved ones, but it’s who Barry is. He values every life. Every single one. We need hope. We need idealism. We need kindness. And The Flash didn’t always execute it right, and it’s failures at it deserve criticism, but I don’t feel this episode was one of those failures.

 Onto some criticism though… As I mentioned, I think this episode absolutely wastes its returning villains. 

 The first episode of A New World really oughta have been the last appearance of the Reverse-Flash I think if this was all they were gonna do with him. I don’t think this episode cheapened that one at all, but it still felt like a much less satisfying final appearance. And Chester having black hole powers that protected him from being murdered by Thanwe was just cheap. 

 Savitar did almost nothing, and everything that made him interesting from season 3 was gone. 

 Godspeed was just…ugh. He did less than nothing, because he did something and it had zero impact on anything and then Cecile just knocked him out with a thought. Godspeed really was the most underwhelming of all of them, he was mediocre in season 7 and mediocre here, and I wish his slot was filled by the Red Death, just to at least connect her to the rest of the season somehow. Bart finally got a mention in the last 15 minutes or so, but he wasn’t part of the episode despite Godspeed supposedly being “his Thanwe”. I guess the actor just wasn’t available or something, but God it’s so weird that they have spent so, so much time this season on Nora and there was just a single mention of Bart all season. and Zoom was eh.

 Did kinda enjoy all their egos clashing and their grandstanding, and I did appreciate the tension between Eobard and Eddie. Honestly what I might have done instead of these villains would be to have Matt Letscher’s Thawne and Tom Cavanaugh’s Thawne be recruited together. Could have made for some fun dynamics, clashing egos and both Thawnes hating that they were recruited by Eddie–plus finally seeing the two Thanwes onscreen together would have been a great way to say farewell. 

 Ah well. Not sure how I feel about the return of Caitlin, but I did very much like that her and Barry got a chance to talk again and reconcile what happened between them. So regardless of how I feel about the fact that she’s suddenly safe and sound, I do like something we got from it. And Frost still being dead at least makes this not a total about-face. I do like Chester and Allegra together, but I do think the will they/won’t they didn’t need to go on as long as it did. I did however adore Joe FINALLY proposing to Cecile. There were times I had to actually look up whether they were married or not, since they were dating so long, living together, had a kid, etc 

 And after Joe having such a hard time with love before Cecile, in retrospect I actually really appreciate that she didn’t push him. Sure, the ring and everything is nice, and it’s made clear she wanted it, but she clearly didn’t need a ring or a binding piece of paper to know that Joe was in it for the long haul. It was a really, really nice moment for the finale. Nora being present at her own birth, and even holding herself as a baby…yeah barry was right, even for the Flash family that’s a lot. 

But I really appreciated all the moments with baby Nora, especially Joe singing with iris’ memories flashing across the screen and Barry asking baby Nora to believe in something impossible. 

and actually on that note, let me close out by saying–I fucking love that that line, the very first line of the pilot episode, was at the core of the finale. “I need you to believe in the impossible.” It began as a way to describe a world of metahumans, aliens, time travel and multiverses. 

 But here, it’s about believing in a new world, a better world, one that doesn’t accept that a cycle of pain and violence could ever pass for the natural order of things. And I dunno–maybe it’s also a little message that the Arrowverse might have a future some day. That it will get it’s due. Some say that’s impossible, but maybe I’ll listen to Barry on this one, and believe in it anyway. 

 Thank you for following my Flash Thoughts during this final season. It was really enjoyable to write them up for folks. Chat soon folks. You’re all wonderful. stay safe.

[ozma914]

Here's Who Will Be the Next President

 Yes, I'm going to tell you who will be named President on November Fifth, or possibly sometime in December.

In a minute.

I hate politics, and yet I follow politics closely. Why? For the same reason I used to pay close attention to where my dog did his business in the yard: The results could really screw up my day. Also, in both cases the results always seem to stink.

Every election the left gets lefter, the right gets righter, and the people in the middle question why we're giving so much power to a two-party system. It seems like the only people who want to start new political parties are even more extreme than the ones already there.

Then they wonder why everyone's so angry.

We should all be reminded of a song that might as well be about the present situation:

Clowns to the left of me Jokers to the right Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Most of the little people are regular and overall decent folk doing the best they can. The worst problem they have is hypocrisy: The other guy is ALL bad, and our guy is ALL good. They refuse to except that their candidate isn't perfect, and that the other candidate may (gasp!) have some good points. The opposition isn't just wrong: They're demons who eat children and kick dogs, or possibly the other way around.

The truth is, once they've achieved a certain level in their political climb, both sides tend to turn into crooks working not for the people, but for their parties. All you have to do is look at laws they pass that don't apply to them, perks they get that no one else does, and the way the system is designed to make their reelection almost a done deal.

Term limits? "Sure, everyone else should be voted out, but not my guy!"

 The increased hatred of career politicians is what brought us Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, but pay attention.

Me, I don't like either candidate, although most of my political beliefs lean right of center. Some in the middle, a few left. Since I don't like any of the Presidential or Vice Presidential candidates, it's a lot easier to think more in terms of policies and records. In that, there's suckage on both sides.

What am I looking for somebody in Washington to do? Show me how they will:

Seal our porous southern border and stop the flow of illegal immigrants and various bad guys, and get those who are already here out.

Make the process for legal immigration more streamlined and easier for the people who get in line.

Balance the budget and start doing something about the approaching firestorm otherwise known as Federal Debt.

On a related note, shrink the government (which could be accomplished by deleting every Federal function that directly conflicts with the Constitution. Remember that thing?)

Maintain a strong defense in the face of our new Cold War with the Chinese and other challenges, while also controlling waste and costs in the military, and boy did I just ask for the impossible. Nobody said it was easy.

Get tougher on crime ... including crime among politicians. Find a way to make health care more affordable for everyone, without leaving the decisions in the hands of red tape bureaucrats in Washington.

There's more, and I may not have listed the more important ones, but you get the idea. I'm not looking for an argument, so don't bother: I'm just calling it as I see it. And speaking of that, our next President will be:

Kamala Harris.

Maybe I'd be more thrilled if she'd actually showed up for work in the last four years, but she has a lot of advantages. Being a Democrat, she naturally has the support of almost all of the mainstream media. She's already established as VP (which isn't as much of an advantage as you'd think: Only six have been elected to the highest office). She has the correct gender and skin color. True, some will vote against her because of this, but many more will vote for her because of it, regardless of other factors.

So Harris will win, Trump will protest, and life will go on. The size of government and the debt will continue to grow. The border situation will maybe get better, with so much light being shined on it. And everyone will continue hating everyone else.And then it'll be 2028.

We and our books can be found ... everywhere:

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Remember: If you don't vote, don't complain.

[rmhashauthor]

Getting to the end of a book is always so tough - I've been with Valen and Fang for two and a half years, and now that it's winding down I feel lots of things. I'm sad because it's almost over, I'm excited to finish because the ending is going to make everything all right (I've done some terrible things recently, narratively speaking), and I'm ready to be dome with this story. I will admit that The Dragon Prince's Consort hasn't exactly been up to what I originally planned, but several people have already said they love it so I think I'll take the W.

I've definitely learned a huge lesson from this one: the quality of my writing suffers when I don't take the time I need to really focus on the story and characters. Maybe my readers are happy, but I certainly think I can do better. I'm not COMPLETELY dissatisfied, I just think I should have waited until I finished the story in its natural time as opposed to trying to stay a couple of weeks ahead of my posting schedule. I'd already finished STARFISH long before I had a Wattpad account, so I was under SIGNIFICANTLY less pressure each week. I can do GREAT work under pressure, but to do so consistently is REALLY BAD for my mental health as well as the quality of said work.

That leads me to the next book. I'm of the camp that if I talk about a project too much, I'll squeeze all the dopamine out of it and be stuck with a project I don't feel excited about anymore. That being said, I wonder if it would help promote my next book better if I did talk about it more. I want to do a LOT of different things with this one, I want it to be grittier and a lot more R-rated but with my usual moments of genuine emotion and character development. I see it as a vehicle to talk about mental health (anxiety and PTSD mostly), class, deep trust and less... mainstream forms of romantic/platonic relationships. I have a nifty new species and a character who I think will appeal to anyone who loves a morally gray MMC, especially a filthy-mouthed one who's seen some shit and doesn't really care much about things like "laws". I'll be playing with ideas like found family, the bitter outcasts rebelling against the systems that abandoned them, the difference between being a law-abiding person and a good one, the blurry lines between love and trust, and the complicated, messy relationship between two VERY angry, traumatized people who just happen to have complimentary issues.

I think it'll be a lot of fun, especially when all that anger, frustration and bottled-up pain bleeds into sexual tension and the need to love and be loved comes up against one's personal fears and feelings 😉 Up til now, my characters have gotten along very well and I'm excited to write something a bit more combative. Not abusive, mind you, just less inclined to immediate trust but not immune to the occasional "Let's just get this out of our systems so we can get back to work" shenanigans 😁 It could be a really dark, twisted romance but I think I'm going to lean more towards "darkly funny/sexy enemies-to-lovers revenge road trip"!

If you made it this far, thanks! Like most writers will tell you, there's your plan - and then there's the book's plan. I have NO IDEA if this one will follow the script or if my lovingly-constructed plot will veer off into complete anarchy. Probably the latter. But, this should be an interesting little experiment, writing about writing and making more of an effort to share my writing. Is it going to be corny? Probably. It's romance, the genre that has more corn than the entire Midwest. Am I going to stick with it? WHO KNOWS! We're going to find out together! YAY!

[mellow-strain]

A Revival & New direction for my blog

I haven't posted in a while, but here I am!

I have decided to basically dump my ideas here, because I have tonnes!

I hope to write long, rambly yet entertaining posts about my opinions focusing on fashion, sustainability and finances/anti-capitalism/anti-consumerism (as it connects to my life). It'll still incorporate my other interests too of course.

Fashion

What do I mean by 'Fashion'?

I mean in the development of my personal wardrobe. Those who know me IRL know that I am a fashionable individual, however, upon recent reflection I realise there's too much mainstream ideals that I may, sadly, only be following because everyone else is doing.

However, in saying that, I love a lot of my wardrobe and I'd never let a single piece in that I didn't have an appreciation or practical application for.

I really want to take a more historically inspired approach. Drawing from the 1900's (duh) but also, the 1800's and possibly even before 👀

My biggest focuses are Victorian, Edwardian, regency and

"what did the peasants wear? Because if it was good enough for them, it's certainly good enough for me!"

In more modern/broad ways, I will be drawing from

Lolita/J-Fashion

Gothic Fashion, mainly romantic but also many other subgenres.

Mermaids (not inherently 'mermaidcore' because I think that's a bit of a diluted version of what I seek)

Princesses in fairytales

Angels

Fairy's (again, not so much Fairycore because it really isn't resonating with my current vision)

This isn't to say you'll never see me reblog a post that has a #fairycore or anything, because I understand that people use hashtags for exposure. But also, that the 'core' versions of this aren't inherently bad! Just that's not the terms I would use to reflect myself.

Sustainability & Anti-consumerism

There's too much shit in the world. I go into H&M for a browse and it's just shitter versions of things that have always existed. For example, there's surely enjoy beige trenchcoats in the world. I recently saw that viral post of some celebrity from the 90's in a fishing jumper and a modern celebrity and like many other people, the quality difference shocked and appalled me.

In saying that and in the name of transparency, I will admit, I did do a Shien order. I feel guilty about this, but I also hope that any readers know that I do about one Shien order a year and it's no more than €100 worth of things. The things I ordered are also pieces that you generally can't get second hand. For example, tights (because they usually get super gross or break.

I am a firm believer that DIY and repair is punk. I don't really like a lot of punk fashion, so I'm not putting it in my list but just know I identify with many of the ideals and that I am striving to incorporate more of it into my life. For example, I've been using invisible repair methods a lot more on my own personal clothes. My family have said that it's pointless because the items I'm repairing cost cents to replace and maybe they have a point, but I find the repair process relaxing and a sign of love.

Finances and Cost

As you'll soon discover, I am not a particularly wealthy individual. For the sake of my privacy, I'll avoid details.

It's easy to say “I want to dress Goth and Victorian” then buy a few designer or custom corsets and call it a day, but I don't quite have that financial privilege.

However, if I budget for certain items that I know I will get excellent use from, I can make it work.

I'm not very good with money. It burns a hole in my pocket, but I'm making a conscious effort to change that. I will be posting reviews of my incoming orders and possibly some of my previous purchases.

Why now?

CW mention of weight loss and some numbers (in regards to sizes) for this section

Note: I will be adding CWs above paragraphs relating to anything weight or body changes related

As it's sure to come up eventually, I'll answer the question. I've been on a weight loss journey starting at about a UK18/US12, I strongly identified as plus size and I'm currently a little more than a UK12/US8 with plans to get down to about a UK8/US4. My old reliables don't fit me, and they won't fit me in the future. So I NEED to buy more things.

I hope to write somewhere about my identity as a plus size woman no longer applying.

Currently, when I am getting dressed and exploring what my wardrobe has to offer, it saddens me. Because I know that a lot of my favourite pieces don't work. I've given many away to good homes but I still miss them.

If I have to turn over a new leaf, I may as well march into the future with ambitious ideas.

Historical fashion is generally very adjustable which as my weight continues to change, I really need.

Because of my low budget and good taste, it doesn't make sense for me to buy things that may not fit me in a few months. This means that most things I buy I either need to be

Ok with getting rid of (ie. Giving away to a good home)

Forgiving fit (eg. Stretchy or 'oversize')

Easy to take in (eg. Adding a fold to a ruffled skirt)

If anyone has any ideas on how to make various items of clothes last, please do let me know and I'll see where I can go with it.

Thanks for reading!

Hopefully, you like it! And if not, then vanish into the abyss or just block me. This blog is mostly just as an outlet for my scatter brain.

[justinmoviereviews]

The Class of 2022

Bringing this feature back out. Some pretty good films this year.

Dog - Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum

If a movie about a damaged guy getting saved during his darkest night by a dog doesn’t make you weep, you don’t have a dog.

Barbarian - Zach Cregger

This movie slaps so fucking hard.

Don’t Worry Darling - Olivia Wilde

Basically I think this one was killed by its press tour. I think the critic class decided liking this wasn’t worth the risk so collectively expelled it, but going in without any idea anything had even happened I thought it was the best movie so far in the nascent Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity genre that’s become one of the few acceptable avenues for mainstream films. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the twist is so much more interesting than the Stepford Wives aura that hangs over this suggests it will be. And it’s a pretty good looking flick.

Bros - Nicholas Stoller

A very sexually explicit, funnier than average romcom. Allison’s take: I can’t tell if he’s making fun of romcom tropes or just using them. 

The Banshees of Inisherin - Martin McDonagh

More than any movie he’s ever made, this one invites interpretation. I’m still working on it, and I don’t imagine there’s a definitive explanation, but right now the one I like is that this is a movie about death. I’m not sure whose death. I look forward to watching this several more times.

Confess, Fletch - Greg Mottola

Has there ever been a talented actor worse at understanding his gifts than Jon Hamm? The dude is an unknowable phantom with the face of Adonis, not an Apatow comedian. This is not a bad movie, but the guy at the center of it doesn’t fit and never feels natural. They would have been better off with just about anyone else. Even an unknown would have worked better than our man.

Amsterdam - David O. Russell

For awhile this movie has a Thomas Pynchon quality to it, where a ragtag group of goofuses stumble into an evil global shadow conspiracy they’ll never defeat or understand or even directly encounter. Its so good for a minute that I wondered if Thomas Pynchon was somehow involved (maybe he is, I didn’t look into it). The end wraps everything up too neatly to really spin into anything great, and it ends up as an enjoyably forgettable ride, which I guess befits David O. Russell’s late career stage as a guy living in the purgatory of Netflix after missing a bunch of Oscars he still can’t believe he didn’t win. 

Prey - Dan Trachtenberg

I don’t know. It’s solid, I guess.

Emily the Criminal - John Patton Ford

This is a B action movie that caught extra attention because it stars Aubrey Plaza. A lot of people liked it. I’m happy for them.

Nope - Jordan Peele

Let’s see here. My first take was that it was his weakest movie because it didn’t have any neat core conceit at its center. Get Out was a revelation, and Us was I thought basically a perfect movie, a really cool idea from a filmmaker very good at realizing his cool ideas. Nope is more of a regular old flick. But the more I thought about it the more I saw that as a strength. I think most movies are not as good as Us, but it’s ultimately kind of a very expensive Twilight Zone episode. This movie is doing something he hasn’t done yet, which implies he’s going to continue to grow and get more ambitious. I still think there’s something a little undercooked about this one, and the mystery at the center is a little less cool than I think he wanted, but its beginning to seem very clear that greatness awaits.

Men - Alex Garland

If this guy wants to spin conceits out for awhile and then have his movies devolve into lunatic madness, I’ll come out for it every single time. The title and current political moment made me think this would be more of an indictment of the gender, another in the series of aforementioned Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity movies, and it’s sort of that, but its much more elemental, personal, and bizarre. I fucking love this director.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Rian Johnson

Like most sequels, some of the plot points go over the top as the movie attempts to outdo the original, and the billionaires are actually dumb plotline feels ripped directly out of leftist Twitter, but as long as Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig are involved I’ll watch every Knives Out movie they make. This is what happens when you let talented people do their jobs. Also as far as I know this is the first movie that includes Covid as a central life event. I love that for some reason. It is a central life event, its like making a movie about World War II.

Bodies Bodies Bodies - Halina Reijn

I’ll be honest, I was pretty drunk when I watched this on a plane. So this will be an impressionistic review. I thought it was pretty fun. There’s one scene that feels like it was written by people outrightly mocking woke culture. Pete Davidson is in it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once - Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

For the first hour I thought this was the Matrix, and wished that, as a movie about the literally unlimited nature of the universe, it was a little more creative. The second hour changed that thought. It is basically the Matrix, but while that movie was drab and minor key (by design) this movie is colorful and kaleidoscopic and wild and never ever ever not fun. The moviest movie I’ve seen in a long time, by which I mean a piece of art that could only be a movie, and one that pushes into new places what a movie can and should do. It’s big and beautiful and weird and exciting, and at 139 minutes it whooshes by. We’re in a weird place with representation at the moment, but this movie doesn’t feel like its correcting an error about who gets to star in Kung Fu movies, instead the Chinese heritage of the family is a natural part of the plot and makes the movie more than it otherwise would be. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t the best film of the year.

The Northman - Robert Eggers

The verisimilitude alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t think of a movie that’s setting feels so real since the Revenant. This is, and I guess I mean this as a compliment, the most normal movie Robert Eggers will ever make. If the Lighthouse was pure uncut Eggers, just a gonzo madhouse of his shit, this is basically Gladiator with a couple of spirit visions, which come to think of it Gladiator also had. I looked into it and learned that his compromise with the studio to make a big budget picture was to sacrifice final cut, which makes a ton of sense in retrospect and which I’m guessing is responsible for the movie’s worst parts, like when the main character monologues to himself about his motivation and plans for no reason. This is my take: the whole time I watched it I wanted it to be weirder. But as a bloody Viking flick, it’s a good movie. 

The Menu - Mark Mylod

A movie about a great chef who got so tired of cooking for shitheads that he went insane. Pitched at a tone that, for me, made any level of insanity make sense. The characters in this movie aren’t unlikeable so much as they are urgently deserving of death. And you’re never, for a minute, worried they aren’t going to receive it. It’s been a good year for fun horror flicks.

X - Ti West

Except for the obvious reason--they’re both primal feelings--it’s never been fully apparent to me why these movies are always structured to be one half sexual titillation then one half slasher-horror. But while in the 80s they just pumped them out cuz they made money, now we’re getting all sorts of deconstructions and meta commentaries and sex as terror merges. Anyway, this is the most cerebral sex ‘n’ death horror movie I’ve ever seen; the most knotty, the most intellectualized, the most constructed in its creators’ heads. I felt a sourness at first--Barbarian and The Menu are two brilliant horror movies that do something genuinely new rather than comment on the old method in increasingly myopic ways--but that’s gone now. The things this movie does are just too fun and smart. I guess every one of these flicks is in one way or another punishing you for enjoying the T&A it gave you in its first hour, but this is the first to make you watch its monsters actually fuck. The final line is both a compliment to the movie I’m not sure it deserves, and an objectively fantastic last line.

White Noise - Noah Baumbach

Nothing says Fuck It Netflix money quite like the existence of this movie, an admiring adaptation of a book that’s essentially a novelization of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas. I remember liking the novel a lot, and finding it, for a book about mass hysteria over everyday life, oddly soothing. This movie is mostly faithful to the book, but it isn’t soothing. Baumbach uses chaos and claustrophobia to convey the story’s existential anxiety rather than the artificial feeling of meek contentment that is DeLillo’s chosen mode. The movie is noisy and full of static and incredibly ugly, like watching an 80s sitcom through a fishbowl. Interesting choices, but not pleasant ones, which matters when you’re watching a movie. But Noah Baumbach is an obvious fan, and he understands the ideas he’s working with. He even gets in some pretty good Noah Baumbach jokes. It’s an amazingly timely story too, as we head into the fourth year of a global pandemic that has foregrounded our collective anxiety and shrunken our worlds to a degree that can’t not be causing long term damage. There’s a scene here where a guy in a quarantine camp riles the crowd by demanding his fear not only be recognized but made the center of the public’s attention, which if anything is quaint when put up against what the MAGA mutants in this country actually want. But here’s what I kept thinking about while I watched a movie that I liked but that never truly distinguished itself from its very good source material: in 1985 Don DeLillo wrote a book about the fear of death as a uniquely modern condition of our sad and shrinking reality. These days, that condition gets called anxiety and we validate it on social media. Our culture sucks now.

Father of the Bride - Gary Alazraki

Shit! I watched this right before I got married. I didn’t realize it was a 2022 release. It’s pretty good! Nice and warm. Andy Garcia is a boss. Recommended for right before you get married.

Elvis - Baz Luhrmann

- Here’s a movie I thought of when I was watching this one that I think would be good: young Elvis spends all his free time watching the black people in his town make the music he loves. Most of the movie takes place in churches and after-hours clubs. It’s musical performance heavy. It ends right as he’s being discovered.

- Here’s what I assumed this movie would be: A shy kid with a lot of talent gets discovered by a sleazy manager. He rises to the top, meets a girl, then money, fame, ego, and the influence of shady characters bring him down. A lot of musical performances.

Baz Luhrmann likes his spectacle, but I can’t believe how shoddy and lazy this movie actually is. There’s no structure, no real story, no actions of consequence. It's a three hour montage of events I don’t even believe really happened. Did Elvis really feel strongly about Bobby Kennedy’s death? I sort of doubt it. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman were trite, but here’s a director looking his audience in the eye and saying “I know you hogs like this shit.”

Tar - Todd Field

This movie is such a slow burn I didn’t even realize she kept two houses until it was almost over. It doesn’t tell anything and it takes its sweet time showing. Some of its early scenes feel largely pointless. I wasn’t sure why at first, other than the fact that it’s a type of storytelling, but upon consideration I get it: the movie is told in the first person. It doesn’t tell you anything for the same reason I don’t wake up every morning and tell myself the address of my house. This is the story of a monster told from her point of view, and as the movie progresses you start to see the cracks in her self-image. Its slow and controlled and quiet, with an intensity hovering offscreen that peaks its head in just enough to let you know its there. Because of the narrative style there’s a ton of stuff I missed, and more than any other movie I’ve seen this year I look forward to watching this again.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Edward Berger

It felt for awhile like we were done with old fashioned war flicks, and modern war movies would all have some kind of stylistic or thematic bent. But this is about as simplistic and plain a story as you can come up with. So maybe the lesson is you can do whatever you want as long as you do it really well. This is an incredibly effective movie. A battle scene where the French close in on the Germans like an unfeeling horde of aliens will stay with me for a long time. A scene at the end which exposes the brutal evil of men who control the lives of other men will as well. Maybe I’m getting softer, but this is the most haunting and disturbing war movie I’ve ever seen. We can do terrible, unspeakable things to each other, and we can do them for no reason. One way of understanding this movie is that it’s about the humanity of a nothing special enlisted man, and follows him until he finally loses it. It’s also about the machinations of power that control his life from afar without any humanity at all. Also, it looks and sounds incredible.

The Fabelmans - Steven Spielberg

At this point, you should know what you’re getting from Spielberg. His movies are impeccably made, stories told seamlessly with warmth and craftsmanship. He’s the ultimate major key filmmaker, with an intuitive understanding of how to compel audiences that the movie says he’s had since he was a kid. The Fabelmans is, for better or worse, a Spielberg movie. My sense is that how you feel about it will be determined by how you feel about him. If you think he’s the best to ever do it, you’ll probably appreciate this career retrospective about how he discovered the power and joy of cinema. If you’re cooler on him, maybe you’ll wonder why he gets to do it but Martin Scorsese or Federico Fellini, two guys who also probably grew up with cameras attached to their hands, don’t. I guess the obvious answer is that those guys never would, which is probably one of the reasons I like them more.

Black Adam - Jaume Collet-Serra

Jaume Collet-Serra is responsible for two of the best schlock masterpieces of the century, the Shallows and the Commuter, so I am hopeful he’s just paying his dues now before they’ll let him go back to cooking those up, and not that he’s been swallowed by the Comic Book Movie Industrial Complex, which really does gobble up everything cool or interesting or unique about filmmaking. That said, like most of them are, this is a perfectly fine beer watch. The Rock, who is straight up one of the most likeable people on the planet, has been a real life superhero ever since he didn’t care what your name was.

Triangle of Sadness - Ruben Ostlund

I got big The Lobster vibes from this one. Both from the structure--part 1 takes place in a hospitality center, part 2 takes place in the wilderness--and from the overt strangeness that keeps you on your toes the entire time; both movies could go anywhere. Ostlund makes so many choices that are so fun; one highlight being a drunken mock debate over economic policy between the ship’s raging alcoholic captain and a Russian oligarch who accidentally became incredibly rich and now lives with an acutely Russian nihilistic joie de vivre. The movie begins as a pretty open satire of wealth and grows increasingly hysterical until it suddenly transforms into something else--something smarter and more deft. A bunch of seemingly useless rich people are all forced to pivot into a society where none of their material gifts will benefit them at all, and do better than expected. What is Ostlund saying? I’m not sure. But another way he reminds me of my man Yorgos is that he sets up a wild premise and then explores it as he thinks it would go in real life. Its a fun way to make movies.

Bullet Train - David Leitch

So you’re an excellent filmmaker, just dripping with talent, but you’d rather make snappy action flicks than three hour Capital-F Films about classical music conductors (I loved Tar, just making a point). I can’t believe how good this movie is. Fast, witty, bouncing through timelines and stories with a throughline that keeps expanding and gets fuller and more fun as it chugs along. This is like if Guy Ritchie took better drugs, or if Tarantino didn’t have final cut. Brad Pitt is one of the best actors on the planet if you can find interesting things for him to do. Here he plays a reformed underworld professional who speaks almost entirely through New Age self-improvement jargon as he tries to find a new life path for himself. And that’s maybe the fifth best thing this movie does. 

Argentina, 1985 - Santiago Mitre

This is a pretty downbeat movie. The dialogue is spoken at a low tone, the color palette is dark and brown, it never gets too loud. Knowledge of the country’s history would help--I needed Google for things every Argentinian already knows. Otherwise this is a very straight trial movie, all the way down to the verdict resting on the prosecutor’s ability to give a sufficiently inspiring speech. Most of the movie takes place in the courtroom or a law office. One of the protagonists comes from a comfortably fascist background and at one point has to attend the world’s worst family gathering, but otherwise there’s very little on the periphery.

Nanny - Nikyatu Jusu

The structure is fucked. This movie takes ages to get started and then rushes its ending. It feels very messy and less clear than it wants to be. I'll need to chew on it some more, but I think the idea here is the titular immigrant nanny is carried through a consuming anxiety about the family she left behind by an African spirit that is committed to her survival but isn’t necessarily benevolent. It’s really not a horror movie, and the beats it hits in service of the genre are largely unnecessary and fairly lame--I think we can go ahead and put a period on scary dream jump scares. But despite its flaws, which are all just novice direction shit, I really liked this. It looks great, and it has a control over its tone that makes it consistently engaging even if it doesn’t ever really cohere. I’m starting to think the reason why there are so many good horror movies now is because they’re cheap to make and aren’t beholden to existing IP--essentially they’re a bush league for promising young filmmakers. I suspect Jusu is more interested in exploring the African experience in America than she is in the genre. It will be interesting to see what she does next.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - Jane Schoenbrun

I should say that the Internet didn’t invent loneliness, and things like these online sinkholes are just a new outlet for an old problem. If more people are isolating and detaching from reality, that has more to do with our culture and our politics (which the movie knows. A shot of a boarded Toys ‘R’ Us is as grim and unsettling as any of the webcam freakout scenes.) This is an incredibly effective film about a culture I don’t understand and have anxieties about. It seems pretty documented that more people are in fact isolating and detaching, and if they’re leaning into the type of solipsism that creates this stuff, that’s a fertile topic for new filmmakers. Maybe too fertile. Jesus Christ, this movie.

To Leslie - Michael Morris

The thing is, she’s really good in this! She’s not a sympathetic character for most it, she’s a full on addict, using the people who care about her and taking advantage of the Samaritans dumb enough to feel empathy for her. She’s resentful of the help she needs and then livid when people stop helping her. This is a movie I would not have heard about were it not for the insurgent Oscar campaign, but am glad I saw it. Sometimes its nice to watch small, universal stories play out. The third act redemption maybe comes a little too easily, and I’m not sure I buy what inspired it (a Willie Nelson song, apparently), but I’m just noting that for my own memory’s sake. This is a good one.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths - Alejandro Inarritu

There’s a scene here where the main character climbs up a giant pile of dead bodies until he reaches the top, where Spanish conquistador and founder of Mexico Hernan Cortes is waiting for him, and they get into a conversation about heritage. It’s a ripe scene, and its been set up perfectly, but the conversation isn’t as profound or layered as it could be, or that the height the director is reaching for suggests it should be. Then after a few minutes, some ash from Cortes’s cigarette falls on one of the dead bodies, who sits up to complain about it, and it’s revealed the whole thing is a scene from a film someone is making. Its not the first time and not the last time you want to throttle Inarritu. You’re one of the best filmmakers currently working, why do you keep fucking up your own good ideas with this jokey shit?!

I want to take my time with this movie because it deserves to be carefully considered. It is, without hesitation, the most ambitious movie of the last few years. My theory on Alejandro is that his life’s goal is to be Fellini; both this and Birdman shoot for the same surreal modernism that the Italian legend mastered back in the ‘60s. This one doesn’t get there the same way Birdman didn’t, and one of the reasons, at least in this case, is that he keeps telling us what he’s thinking instead of showing us. This film looks incredible, and the camera moves with the same fluidity it did in Birdman, but he runs out of tricks sooner than he should. His ideas could be conveyed visually, but instead he just has his characters say them out loud. 

All that being said, I loved it. I loved it more than I loved Birdman when I first saw it, before I decided it was a failed version of 8 1/2. This is also a failed version of 8 1/2, but it’s playing with a different set of ideas. Instead of being a satire of the industry, it’s considering Mexican identity, and its ultimately more interested in mortality than in the morass of being alive. It’s incredibly rare to get a director who swings this hard, who’s given the space to work out his ideas like this, or who even has the balls or vision to try. A lot of this movie doesn’t work. But the parts that do are incredibly good, and his visual sensibility is unparalleled. This should be a -10,000 lock for best cinematography, but it won’t win because no one saw it. Which is to the detriment of the discourse. This movie deserves to be debated and raged over. It deserves to have partisans and detractors who crucify each other online. The culture would be infinitely better if we got three of these a year.

Vengeance - B.J. Novak

Parts of this movie are so good I had trouble believing the bad parts could be as bad as they were. A New York journo douchebag goes to deep west Texas for the funeral of a hookup he barely remembers because she’s told her family that they’re in a serious relationship, then stays because he thinks he’s found a podcast. The parts about Texas are fantastic; his dialogue is sharp and interesting--down here we don’t have police, we have Mike and Dan--and incredibly well observed. During a scene at a rodeo somebody is eating a giant barbecue chicken leg, someone else is eating potato chips covered in queso. But B.J. is playing a guy so cartoonishly dopey it feels beamed in from a different, much worse movie (sample dialogue: “Have you ever been in a fight?” “Like a real fight, or like a Twitter fight?”) Scenes where he’s on the phone describing the story to his incredulous producer give off Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. It’s so much worse than the stuff around it that I figured it had to be intentional. Maybe he’s the villain or something. But no, he just learns to love these simple people and their small town. One other thing, Ashton Kutcher, playing a sort of deep Texas ghost, is legitimately amazing here. Easily the best thing in it. If people had seen this he’d have been nominated. It’s that kind of performance.

Babylon - Damien Chazelle

Damien’s learned how to direct. Watching the guy who’s floundered (in my opinion) ever since his his tiny little arthouse flick about ambition put him on the map get these giant scenes to work makes me legitimately happy for him. There’s a moment during the party scene at the beginning where he turns the bacchanalia into an organized dance sequence, which feels like a guy making a choice; we’re going to stick classic film elements in the middle of this chaos, because we like them and we can. As far as I can tell the idea here is simple--turn the end of the silent film era into the fall of Babylon, or the Weimar Republic, or Vichy France, or any other era of decadence that was always going to be on borrowed time. Was it really like that? Is this a story that needed to be told? Who knows? And who cares? Unlike with First Man, he’s justified his decision by doing it well. There’s a scene here where a cruel and careless death cuts to a giant party, and its more effective--drunk and sobering--than when Scorsese did it in the Wolf of Wall Street.

RRR - S.S. Rajamouli

Maybe I’d feel differently if I was better versed in Bollywood; as it stands this film represents the entirety of the industry to me. Maybe this is like showing a person who’s never seen an American movie before the Avengers, and an Indian friend who liked it tells me it is not representative of Bollywood. But it ultimately doesn’t matter. First of all, I think it’s genuinely awesome that this has become such a crossover sensation, and that more people are getting exposed to world cinema. Second of all, this movie whips so much ass. It took me a minute to get used to the style, but once I did I was all the way in. The first film ever to get me pumping my fists in my living room. And a thing I’ve always believed is that being good at dancing is incredibly manly.

KIMI - Steven Soderbergh

There are two ideas in this that I like a lot: 1. what would the kind of trauma most thrillers like this are about do to a person after the movie ends?, and 2. what does a corporation that has to pretend it cares about ethics after #MeToo and Believe Women even though it obviously doesn’t look like in the year of our lord 2022? More than any other top shelf filmmaker I can name, Steven Soderbergh doesn’t seem to have any throughline other than that his movies are all made with a certain level of quality. There’s no thematic cohesion that I can find, other than a healthy dislike for companies and governments, and not really any stylistic one either, other than that his movies are all really neat and tidy. And while he used to get nominated for Oscars, for the past few years he’s seemed to be content pumping out genre flicks like a gun-for-hire Woody Allen, which I wonder if is just him being prescient about the state of the industry now. This is a quick little film, something that comes out by the truckload in the era of Netflix, but if you watched it without knowing who Steven Soderbergh was you’d be surprised by how good it is.

Watcher - Chloe Okuno

Didn’t really respond to this one. The acting’s not great, the pacing is off--she gets pretty scared pretty quickly--and beats that should hit hard land harmlessly. High point: Bucharest seems like a cool city.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio - Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

Guillermo is very good at putting the things he likes in movies that are ostensibly pretty one-for-them--some of these images belong on his highlight reel. There’s also a sweetness here that’s got his name all over it. This was apparently a years in the making passion project, and I have no doubt the animation is a triumph, but its a status as a Kids Movie papers over some storytelling messiness that bothered me as a person who doesn’t care about kids movies. At its best this movie makes me wish he’d gone full tilt into del Toro creature madness. Fuck the kids, man.

Women Talking - Sarah Polley

My take on this movie was that it’s the first piece of art to explicitly lay out the tenets of modern feminist philosophy, like a No Exit for the 21st Century American leftist political moment. I have never felt less equipped to give my opinion on a film, but suffice to say I liked this and thought it was intellectually interesting. Here’s the best I can do: this is an interesting one. Less interested in anger or revenge than in compassion and the value of forgiveness, and by value I mean worth, as in what do we gain by forgiving and what is the toll that forgiving will take on us? It’s that kind of a movie, managing emotional states with a philosophical detachment. Deal with the problem first, figure out how we feel about it later. Every atrocity visited upon these women is described in a matter of fact way. Nothing is shown.

The Good Nurse - Tobias Lindholm

This is firmly in Movie of the Week territory, all the way up to a soundtrack and establishing shots straight out of Law and Order, elevated slightly by its inclusion of two of our better actors.

Top Gun: Maverick - Joseph Kosinski

Loses points with me because it sags in the middle; I don’t care about Maverick’s guilt over his friend’s death or his romantic life. It’s great when he’s in the air. This whole movie should take place in a plane. Late period Tom Cruise is beloved by many, but not by me. I feel like he should have more to say at this point in his career than lying about his age.

The Whale - Darren Aronofsky

A very strange film. I’m not sure what to say about it. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, exactly. The main character’s morbid obesity seems almost like body horror at times. The plot seems simple enough; a guy makes the decision to remove himself from life after he loses a loved one, but it’s never quite that movie. I’m not sure if he’s a good person or not, or if he’s meant to be. He left his wife and daughter for someone else and was never in their life afterwards, though if you listen to him, he tried to be. I wondered if he’s someone that seeks out the good in others and extends that to himself even if he doesn’t deserve it. But if that’s the case, why is he killing himself? There’s also a religious element that fits in somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I thought about this movie the whole car ride home. I’m still working on it. 

Empire of Light - Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes makes almost comically beautiful movies. This one, about a ragtag group of theater employees in England in 1981, takes place mostly in a movie theater, which is lit up and shot to look like a museum exhibit. This is a perfectly decent flick. It’s well paced, a simple story told well, emotional in the right places without being manipulative. It’s pleasant when its over. Not gutting, but pleasant.

Spiderhead - Joseph Kosinski

Quick, self-contained, well made, not too expensive, fun and kinda trippy, with a neat little twist at the end. I remember watching The Discovery a few years ago and thinking it was going to be the ur-text of a new genre called the Netflix Movie, and buddy was I right. These things now are being assembly-lined out by the dozen, and most of them are largely decent if a little bloodless. Sooner or later they’ll feel so packaged AI will start writing them, but until we get there I’m fine recommending a movie like Spiderhead. It’s a little bloodless in a way the similar genre grind-out KIMI isn’t, but it’s eerie while still being fun, holds its tone almost the whole way through, and includes the best Chris Hemsworth acting I’ve ever seen as a jocky nerd charming sociopath.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Ryan Coogler

The first one isn’t perfect, but like a lot of people I walked away from it thinking I’d just seen Marvel’s highwater mark. This one is even better. While the original stood above the rest by looking at real racial politics through the lens of a comic book movie, this one doubles down by bringing in a second superhero-ized colonized civilization with its own ideas about how to respond to the world at large and has the two of them meet and discuss. It even throws in for good measure a complex political dynamic at the top of the Wakanda power structure where every argument makes sense and is defensible. And while my biggest issue with the first one was that it could have used more world-building, some of the scenes here look genuinely great. All the standard Marvel movie objections apply--the dorky jokes, the dumb action scenes, the weirdly dark color palette these things are apparently mandated to have--but Ryan Coogler is possibly the only director franchised into the MCU who seems interested in making or allowed to make real movies.

Pleasure - Ninja Thyberg

A thing I learned the other day is that the movie Deepthroat was one of the highest grossing films of 1975. It is amazing to imagine the families of America lining up en masse to watch a movie, the premise of which is that a woman was born with her clitoris inside of her throat. I wouldn’t call Pleasure a return to a more sex positive past, exactly, but it’s explicitly sexually graphic in a way I’ve never really seen before outside of an actual porno. Parts of it are about the dark side of the porn industry, but other parts are about the light side, or the harmless side, and most of the characters are basically decent people. In fact one case this movie is making, maybe unintentionally, is that the ugly parts of the porn star life aren’t really any different than the ugly parts of the Hollywood life, or the sports life, or the investment banking life. The cost of success in this economy is your humanity, whether that means getting double-raw dogged in the ass or outsourcing a factory to Pakistan.

Ambulance - Michael Bay

Worth watching. Pretty fun. Basically incoherent. I will use this space for two observations: 1. Michael Bay has a fully singular visual style that if I had to give name to I would call Saturday afternoon barbecue full of hopefully not racist white men getting weepy after the fifth round of Coors Light, but its his, and as far as I can tell he created it, which means he fits my definition of an auteur. 2. Jake Gyllenhaal might actually be my favorite actor. He is incredible in this movie. I want to call it my second favorite performance of the year after Cate Blanchett in Tar. He’s not the most naturally gifted actor, it will never come as naturally to him as it does to, for instance, Cate Blanchett, but he makes up for that by going completely in on every role. He slips into raw nerve-ending panic within the first five minutes of being on screen in this movie. I think he also might be one the smartest actors in Hollywood. He has one particular line reading in this about a collection of plush flamingos that is so good, and so indicative that he knows exactly what he’s doing and what makes what he’s doing good, it singlehandedly bumps the movie up a letter grade.

[quincywillows]

OKAY going to try and just piggy back onto this with the remaining two answers. thank you for sending good enough ones that my brain just rambled on and on!

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules

the Lorem Ipsum threat is actually SO funny lolol. kudos to op for the phrasing on that one. goodness three writing wishes... how to choose...



1. Better natural organizational skills for outlining. I'm not bad at outlining, like I think I do an okay job, but it's so hard when I'm in the brainstorm phase (which I am for a lot of projects at the moment) to like, figure out how to best organize all the thoughts so that the story comes together in the best, most efficient way possible. Rather than having like... 700 different pages for things (you all do not wanna see our S4 AMBITION Notion. It's scary in there lmao). Like the thing is I love love love doing worldbuilding and character examination and all that stuff to build the foundations of a story, but I find one of my biggest friction points in the writing process is that transition from that phase of jotting all the things down to like... having it organized enough to write the thing. This is especially true for series (which basically everything I write is lol 💀), because I like to have as much of the FULL story planned out as possible as I believe that makes for the best, strongest execution in the end. So it can be really hard to know when to make that leap into the next phase.



2. More time set aside outside of the space time continuum specifically to be creative and write. Like, if my genie could grant me... two hours, each day, where time freezes for everyone else but I can just work work work like a little writing bee until I burn out or the clock runs out, and time resumes... gosh I would be so powerful. The productivity I would achieve. The time management improvements that would be had. And if the bonus to this idea would be that I would be guaranteed to be productive during that set aside window of time, then that would be a dream dream.



3. The ideal platform for sharing my stories. I mean this in the most literal sense of like, warehouse of space rather than the social media meaning of "platform." This is getting a bit #personal for my writing journey lol but I'm very much at a point where I've decided like... I'm going to self-publish but kind of do it in my own way? In a way that isn't the norm, gives me more freedom and flexibility, but still somewhat relies on a community. Like I've been so turned off by mainstream media creators these days (hence my former rant about tv lol but the same applies for the pub world, there's just so much valued in that world and put above things like writing quality and storytelling that I can't stand), but I don't necessarily want to get into the hustle bustle overselling myself vibe that self-pub in conventional routes sometimes has... my sort of dream set-up that I hope I can achieve in the near future is creating a hub of some sorts through a blog (on a like custom-built website, not on Tumblr lol, though I would keep my Tumblr for community purposes) where I basically drop chunks of updates on my ongoing original stories, it's all in one place, and I could have multiple stories running at once. It would be organized behind the scenes (I love a Schedule), but it would have this feeling like... a digital library specifically for my works. And all are welcome, there's no strings attached -- if you like my writing, great! Drop me a kind note or a dollar in a ko-fi, tell your friends, etc. There wouldn't be any pressure to write one genre because it makes money, or include x trope I hate because that'll sell, or feel like I'm taking advantage of my reader base because I need to constantly sell to them or market everything. IDK... maybe it's a pipe dream and only time will tell but my third genie wish would make all of that perfectly apparent to me so I could just jump right in without having to build the skeleton for the library myself first.



(I guess if what's described above sounds remotely like something you'd follow as a reader in general, not necessarily of me but as a type of platform, let me know because the encouragement would be v helpful right now as I am thinking about these things lol. Anyway sorry sensitive part over back to ur regularly scheduled writer grrl blogging)

14. Do you lend your books to people? Are people scared to borrow books from you? Do you know exactly where all your “lost” books are and which specific friend from school you haven’t seen in twelve years still possesses them? Will you ever get them back?

absolutely! i'm not at all precious about physical copies of books. in fact i'm kind of particular about what books i actually have on my shelf -- in a decluttering phase of my life a couple years ago i went through all of them and decided i only wanted books on my shelf that i genuinely loved or meant something to me at a specific time. so i don't necessarily have a ton of books TO share, but i wouldn't bat an eye if a friend asked. don't think i have any actively out in the wilderness right now though.

5, 10, 12 & 14 for the writing asks?

thank you so much for sending some! 😊 i'm glad y'all are alive out there even though i am not half the time lol (and my apologies dear tumblr followers)

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

oh hmm... i don't know that i do? the only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head that's kind of the opposite of a superstition is that i don't believe writer's block is a thing lol. like i do think that the symptoms of it are real and challenging (we all have phases where the sheer act of writing feels insurmountable, for one reason or another, often many little reasons cobbled together that creates a blanket feeling of "can't"), and i don't discount that, but i don't think the actual existence of a condition called writer's block is a thing. i think it's often a convenient band-aid we authors use to excuse ourselves for not writing for a day... or two days... or a week... etc., because oh we have writer's block we can't, when in actuality most times if you just sit down and push out a sentence or two, even if it's garbage and you'll have to cut it later, that helps and makes you feel 100x better than not writing at all due to a flimsy excuse.that being said, i do think i believe in the opposite idea of like... a writing Zone so to speak. like any kind of good exercise, i do think when you settle into writing and work at it consistently for a handful of time, at some point about 30 minutes in if the words are wording you enter a zen, flow state that is basically The Writing Zone. some of your best work can come from this and most importantly, you cover a lot of ground which brings you closer to your end goals for whatever the project is (or just does some writer brain decluttering if you're not working on a set project but want to be creative, which is equally important sometimes. i think of this kind of writing as like flossing my brain lol). the zone is rare to achieve, but so satisfying when it comes through.

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

gosh i love the concept of this, like a scene or piece being so impactful (whether because it's beautiful, or painful, or so blisteringly relatable or specific to you as a reader at that moment) that it sticks with you for a long time after... i don't think being haunted by a piece necessarily has to be bad either. haunting kind of has an inherent dark connotation to it, because of death, but i think being haunted by writing can be from a piece that was positive too -- it's just that the emotional stamp it left on you doesn't ebb so easily.i'm trying to think about if a piece of writing i've consumed specifically has ever hit me that way and still stuck with me, but considering nothing is immediately jumping to mind i would have to say no... at least for the moment. from my own writing i don't know that i've necessarily hit this benchmark yet either, organically speaking, but there have been a couple of scenes while working on AMBITION that left an indelible mark on me from writing them (the entirety of season 2 episode 10 could count towards this actually, as well the zc scene from 208. those are what always immediately jump to mind). i also have a handful of scenes or imagery from my current finished novel, Quincy Willows (ayeee shout out url) that i'm quite proud of and that evoke a specific feeling for me... i wouldn't call it haunted, necessarily, but just... a warm presence in my mind.i'm optimistic about works i have up my sleeve in the future as well to have some moments like this in store -- i have no idea if my writing has ever haunted anyone to this day yet, hahaha, but time will tell!