#misadventure may 2021

[monster-energies]

my harry potter masterlist

i will put a key here to indicate what kind of fanfic you’ll be reading please read my warnings before you read my fics:

🌻 - fluff

🌼 - gen/general 🥀 - angst 🌷 - smut

ℹ - implied

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severus snape x reader oneshots

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🌻1. please be mine - ao3 | tumblr ( published: 14.09.2021 )

🌻2. hold onto that feeling - ao3 | tumblr ( published 15.09.2021 )*

🌻3. love me, if thats what you wanna do - ao3 | tumblr ( published 20.09.2021 )

🌻🥀4. dawn is a feeling - ao3 | tumblr ( published 27.09.2021 )*

🌻🥀5. whatever a moon has always meant, and whatever a sun will always sing is you - ao3 | tumblr ( published 16.11.2021 )

🌻6. anything but ordinary - ao3 | tumblr ( published 30.11.2021 )

🌻7. blue skies are on the horizon for you - ao3 | tumblr ( published 06.12.2021 )

🌻8. be my birthday date if you may - ao3 | tumblr ( published 31.12.2021 )

🌻🥀9. a land of infinite wonders, a billion lightyears from here now - ao3 | tumblr ( published 09.01.2022 )

🌻10. if you want blood, you got it - ao3 | tumblr ( published 22.01.2022 )

🌻🥀🌷11. you’ll have me sooner than you know it - ao3 | tumblr ( published 10.02.2022 )

🌷12. this is the face of someone who loves you - ao3 | tumblr ( published 05.04.2022 )

🥀🌻 13. i’ve got to get better, and maybe we’ll work it out - ao3 | tumblr ( published 03.07.2022 )

🥀🌻 🌼 14. you don’t have to be sorry for doing it on your own - ao3 | tumblr ( published 31.08.2022 )

🌻15. always a woman - ao3 | tumblr ( published 9.03.2023 )

*note: oneshots 2 and 4 used to be apart of a series formerly called muggle misadventures but this has now been discontinued and are both standalone oneshots

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other

this section is for miscellaneous fanfics i have published, the character and fandom will be stated when necessary

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🌻🌼1. lionel shabandar/reader - you, me and these neon lights - ao3 | tumblr ( published 08.11.2021 )

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WRITING EVENTS

this section here is for all the of the writing events i have participated in.

snapetober 2021

this is my participation in @sxvxrxssnape​‘s snapetober month 2021. for the whole of october, i wrote a oneshot every day for a month with a list of prompts. if you are searching for my snapetober book on ao3, it is under the title severus’ tale.

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severus’ tale - ao3 ( published 01.10.2021 )

STATUS: COMPLETE

overall word count:  101,853

🌻🌼 prompt 1: autumn - title: fridays will always be better than sundays | tumblr ( published 01.10.2021 ) 

🌻🥀 prompt 2: “you have to let go” - title: letters ive written, never meaning to send. because i love you | tumblr ( published 02.10.2021 )

🌻 prompt 3: pumpkin carving - title: floral and fading | tumblr ( published 03.10.2021 )

🥀 prompt 4: regret - title: don’t you feel small | tumblr ( published 04.10.2021 )

🌻 prompt 5: apple orchard - title: love at first feel | tumblr ( published 05.10.2021 )

🌻🥀 prompt 6: hostage/trapped  - title: you almost made it through the fall | tumblr ( published 06.10.2021 )

🌻 ( ℹ 🌷+ 🥀 ) prompt 7: potions  - title: hands all over | tumblr ( published 07.10.2021 )

🌻🥀 prompt 8: emptiness - title: do you know what i’m seeing ? | tumblr ( published 08.10.2021 )

🌻🥀 prompt 9: old books - title: when you’re without love | tumblr ( published 09.10.2021 )

🌻 prompt 10: misunderstandings - title: time alone with you | tumblr ( published 10.10.2021 )

🌻 prompt 11: old friends - title: childhood’s end | tumblr ( published 11.10.2021 )

🌻🥀 prompt 12: alone - title: you deserve this | tumblr ( published 12.10.2021 )

🌻 ( ℹ + 🥀 ) prompt 13: spell casting - title: the spelling rules | tumblr ( published 13.10.2021 )

🌻🥀 prompt 14: cursed - title: she said you were a hero, you played the part | tumblr ( published: 14.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 15: ghosts - title: an ode to my family | tumblr ( published: 15.10.2021 )

🌻 ( ℹ + 🥀) prompt 16: “i’ve got you” - title: the things we do for love | tumblr  ( published: 16.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 17: witching hour - title: strange phenomena | tumblr ( published 17.10.2021 )

🥀prompt 18: (no) mercy - title: i’ve never been so torn up in all of my life, i should have seen this coming | tumblr  ( published 18.10.2021 )

🌻🥀prompt 19: headstone - title: all my daughters | tumblr ( published 19.10.2021 )

🥀prompt 20: night terrors - title: broken pieces shine | tumblr ( published 20.10.2021 )

🌻 ( ℹ +🥀 ) prompt 21: contemplation - title: i can hear this beat, it fills my head up and gets louder and louder | tumblr ( published 21.10.2021 )

🌻 ( ℹ +🌷 ) prompt 22: touch starved - title: i really should be holding you, loving you | tumblr ( published 22.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 23: vampire/bats - title: can we fly, can we fly away | tumblr ( published 23.10.2021 )

🥀prompt 24: fears - title: welcome to the panic room, where all your darkest fears are gonna come for you | tumblr ( published 24.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 25: rainy evening - title: its our time now if you want it to be | tumblr ( published 25.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 26: “don’t leave me” - title: would you really rush out for me now ? | tumblr ( published 26.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 27: unfinished business - title: you are love | tumblr ( published 27.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 28: flashback - title: it’s all coming back to me now | tumblr ( published 28.10.2021 )

🌻🌼prompt 29: costume - title: where did the party go | tumblr ( published 29.10.2021 )

🥀prompt 30: “how could you do this?” - title: you’re the only thing that’s keeping me alive | tumblr ( published 30.10.2021 )

🌻prompt 31: halloween party - title: we are the kids from yesterday | tumblr ( published 31.10.2021 )

[whileiamdying]

All the Films in Competition at Cannes, Ranked from Best to Worst

The twenty-two films that premièred in the 2024 festival’s main program offered much to savor and revile.

By Justin Chang May 26, 2024

The seventy-seventh annual Cannes Film Festival came to a startling and joyous conclusion on Saturday night, when the competition jury, chaired by Greta Gerwig, awarded the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, to “Anora,” a funny, harrowing, and finally quite moving portrait of a sex worker’s madcap New York misadventures. It was startling because the movie, though one of the best-received in the competition, had not been widely tipped for the top prize, which seldom goes to a U.S. film; with “Anora,” Sean Baker becomes the first American director to win the Palme since Terrence Malick did, for “The Tree of Life” (2011), thirteen years ago. And it was joyous not only because the award was bestowed on a worthy and remarkable film but because Baker used the occasion to deliver the best, most eloquent and impassioned acceptance speech I’ve ever heard a Palme winner give.

Reading from prepared remarks, Baker singled out two other filmmakers in the competition, Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, as among his personal heroes. He dedicated the award to sex workers everywhere, a fitting tribute from a filmmaker who has put their lives front and center, with drama, humor, and empathy, in movies like “Starlet” (2012), “Tangerine” (2015), and “Red Rocket” (2021). He tossed some exquisite shade in the direction of the “tech companies” behind the so-called streaming revolution—including, presumably, Netflix, which came away as one of the night’s big winners; its major acquisition of the festival, Jacques Audiard’s musical “Emilia Pérez,” won two prizes. And, in a moment that drew rapturous applause, Baker delivered a plea on behalf of theatrical films, declaring, “The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theatre.”

I was fortunate to see all twenty-two films in the Cannes competition on the big screen, projected under superior conditions in houses packed with fellow movie lovers. It’s my hope that, when these movies are released in the U.S., as the great majority of them likely will be, you will seize the chance to see them on the big screen as well—even “Emilia Pérez,” which Netflix may not keep in theatres for long, but whose bold dramatic and stylistic risks have the best chance of winning you over if they have your undivided, wide-awake attention.

I have ranked the movies in order of preference, from best to worst. Here they are:

1. “Caught by the Tides”

Jia Zhangke, a Cannes competition veteran, has long been the cinema’s preëminent chronicler of modern China (“Mountains May Depart,” “Ash Is Purest White”), mapping its social, cultural, and geographical complexities with great formal acumen, and also with the longtime collaboration of his wife, the superb actress Zhao Tao. Jia’s latest work, drawing on an archive of footage shot in the course of roughly two decades, unfurls a story in fragments, about a woman (Zhao) and a man (Li Zhubin) who fall in love, bitterly separate, and have a melancholy reunion years later. It’s an achievement by turns fleeting and monumental: a series of interlocking time capsules, a wrenching feat of self-reflection, and a stealth musical, in which Zhao dances and dances, standing in for millions who have learned to sway and bend to history’s tumultuous beat.

2. “All We Imagine as Light”

As the first Indian feature invited to compete at Cannes in nearly three decades, Payal Kapadia’s narrative début (after her 2021 documentary, “A Night of Knowing Nothing”) would be notable enough; that the movie is so delicately felt and sensuously textured is cause for outright celebration. Winner of the festival’s Grand Prix, or second place, it tells the story of two roommates, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who work as nurses at a Mumbai hospital. It teases out their personal circumstances—Prabha’s estrangement from her unseen husband, Anu’s frowned-upon romance with a young Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon)—with a quiet truthfulness that, like the glittering lights of the city, lingers expansively in the memory. (A forthcoming Sideshow/Janus Films release.)

3. “Grand Tour”

The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (“Tabu,” “Arabian Nights”) delivered some of the most virtuosic filmmaking in the competition—as the jury recognized by giving him the Best Director prize—with this characteristically yet extraordinarily playful colonial-era travelogue. Shifting between color and black-and-white, set in 1917 but full of fourth-wall-breaking anachronisms, the movie tells a story of sorts about a roving British diplomat (Gonçalo Waddington) and a fiancée (Crista Alfaiate) he’s in no hurry to marry. But its true fascination lies in the humid atmosphere and wanderlust-inspiring splendor of its East and Southeast Asian locations, ranging from Singapore and Bangkok to Shanghai and Rangoon. It’s a movie to get lost in.

4. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

It’s impossible to absorb this blistering domestic drama without thinking of its dissident director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who recently fled Iran after being sentenced to prison and a flogging. (His appearance at his film’s première made for one of the most emotional moments in recent Cannes memory.) Shot entirely in secret, the story follows a Tehran-based husband (Missagh Zareh) and wife (Soheila Golestani) who are increasingly at war with their progressive-minded young-adult daughters (Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki) during nationwide political protests led by women. The result is a thriller of propulsive skill and blunt emotional force, marrying the muscularity of an action film to the psychological intensity of a chamber drama. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

5. “Anora”

The director Sean Baker is near the height of his storytelling powers with this dazzling (and now Palme d’Or-winning) portrait of a Manhattan strip-club dancer (a revelatory Mikey Madison) who impulsively marries the ultra-spoiled son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch. Much comic chaos ensues, some of it pushed past the brink of plausibility, but Baker’s multifaceted love for his characters proves infectious and sustaining, as does his belief that acts of unexpected kindness can redeem even the darkest nights of the soul. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

6. “The Shrouds”

Early on in this elegantly sombre yet mordantly funny new movie, which stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce, the director David Cronenberg, a master of cerebral horror, unveils his latest invention: a technologically advanced burial shroud that allows people to watch a loved one’s body decomposing in the grave. So begins a drolly fluid inspection of classic Cronenberg themes—the deterioration of the flesh, the instability of the image, the paranoia-inducing incursions of technology into every aspect of life—but imbued with a nakedly personal dimension that the director has noted in interviews; the story was inspired by his wife’s death, in 2017, from cancer.

7. “Megalopolis”

In this legendarily long-gestating passion project, which I’ve written about at length, Francis Ford Coppola posits that our fragile, battered civilization is headed the way of the Roman Empire. The grimness of that prospect is unsurprising from a director accustomed to peering deep into the heart of American darkness (the “Godfather” movies, “The Conversation,” “Apocalypse Now”). For all that, the filmmaking here glows with a particularly hard-won optimism, even a welcome sense of play—borne out by an ensemble of actors, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and especially Aubrey Plaza, who fully embrace Coppola’s rhetorical and conceptual flights of fancy.

8. “The Substance”

Sympathetic or sadistic? Feminist or misogynist? Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror bonanza, which won the festival’s award for Best Screenplay, has been one of the competition’s more polarizing hits, which is unsurprising; divisiveness should be expected from a story about an aging actress and TV fitness guru who, desperate to regain her youthful bod of yesteryear, effectively splits herself in two. Whether the outlandish premise (think “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by way of “Death Becomes Her”) and its blood-gushing fallout withstand intellectual scrutiny, there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve as she pushes her ideas to their sanguinary conclusions.

9. “Motel Destino”

Just a year after the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz appeared in competition with a surprisingly stiff-corseted English period drama, “Firebrand,” it was bracing to watch him rebound with the competition’s most sexually uninhibited and flagrantly horny title; corsets don’t apply here, and even underwear proves blissfully optional. Set at a seedy roadside motel where the clientele never stops moaning, it’s a feverishly shambling erotic thriller starring three very game actors (Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, and Fábio Assunção) in a romantic triangle that plays like James M. Cain with sex toys—“The Postman Always Cock Rings Twice,” as it were.

10. “Emilia Pérez”

A trans-empowerment musical set against the backdrop of Mexico’s drug cartels might sound like a dubious proposition on paper, and, for the many detractors of this genre-melding big swing from the French director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “The Sisters Brothers”), what actually made it onto the screen was no better. But I was disarmed from the start by Audiard’s quasi-Almodóvarian vibes, his touchingly imperfect embrace of song-and-dance stylization, and, most of all, his three leads: the remarkable discovery Karla Sofía Gascón, a scene-stealing Selena Gomez, and a never-better Zoe Saldaña. All three (along with Adriana Paz) were recognized with the festival’s Best Actress prize, awarded collectively to the movie’s ensemble of actresses; Audiard also won the Jury Prize. (A forthcoming Netflix release.)

11. “Oh, Canada”

After a tense trilogy of dramas about male redemption through violence (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), the writer and director Paul Schrader has taken a gentler turn with an adaptation of “Foregone,” a 2021 novel by the late Russell Banks. (It’s his second Banks adaptation, after the 1997 drama “Affliction.”) In exploring the fragmented consciousness of an aging documentary filmmaker (played at different ages by Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi), Schrader bravely forsakes the narrative fastidiousness of his recent work and takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning, to formally ragged but sincerely moving effect.

12. “The Girl with the Needle”

This stark and terrifying black-and-white drama from the Swedish-born, Polish-based director Magnus von Horn (“Sweat”) was perhaps the competition’s bleakest entry. Set in Copenhagen immediately after the First World War, it pins us so mercilessly to the hard-bitten perspective of Karoline (an excellent Vic Carmen Sonne), a factory seamstress who becomes pregnant out of wedlock, that we scarcely notice her story shifting in a different, more sinister direction. It’s a bitterly hard-to-stomach brew of a movie, at once hideous and beautifully made, with a chilling supporting turn by Trine Dyrholm as a friend whose interventions turn out to be anything but benign.

13. “Three Kilometres to the End of the World”

The setting of this well-observed but emotionally opaque drama, from the Romanian actor turned director Emanuel Pârvu, is a small rural village where a closeted teen-age boy, Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), is brutally beaten after being caught in an intimate moment with a male traveller. Pârvu teases out the legal, psychological, and moral fallout with the pitch-perfect performances and laserlike formal focus that have become hallmarks of new Romanian cinema. But, though the movie is persuasive enough as an indictment of small-town religious fundamentalism and homophobia, it proves curiously incurious about Adi’s perspective, to the detriment of its own human pulse.

14. “Kinds of Kindness”

After his Oscar-winning period romps “The Favourite” (2018) and “Poor Things” (2023), the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos scales back—but goes long—with a sprawling, increasingly tedious compendium of comic cruelty. My favorite of the film’s three disconnected stories, all featuring the same actors, is the one where Jesse Plemons (the ensemble M.V.P., as the jury recognized with its Best Actor award) plays Willem Dafoe’s Manchurian candidate; my least favorite is the one where Emma Stone joins a sweat-worshipping sex cult. The one where Stone slices off her finger and cooks it for Plemons falls—much like the movie in Lanthimos’s over-all œuvre—somewhere in the middle. (A Searchlight Pictures release, opening June 21st in theatres.)

15. “Bird”

My admiration for the English filmmaker Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”) is such that I’m eager to revisit her latest rough-and-tumble coming-of-age story and find that I undervalued it. Arnold is certainly skilled at integrating recognizable actors, which in this case includes Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, into her grottily realist frames, and she has an appealing lead performer in Nykiya Adams, as a twelve-year-old girl who overcomes persistent abuse and neglect. But the story may lose you—as it lost me—with a magical-realist turn that magnifies, rather than minimizes, the tortured-animal symbolism that has often dogged Arnold’s work.

16. “Beating Hearts”

An exchange of insults at a high-school bus stop provides a saucy meet-cute for a good girl (Mallory Wanecque) and a ne’er-do-well boy (Malik Frikah); so begins a raucous and endearing love story for the ages, in which the director Gilles Lellouche, with outsized glee and little discipline, merrily appropriates the conventions of classic Hollywood musicals and gangster flicks. The result is much too long at nearly three hours—the story spans several years, with Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil playing older versions of the two leads—but I can’t say I didn’t warm to its rambunctious cornball charm.

17. “Limonov: The Ballad”

Why make a film about Eduard Limonov, the globe-trotting Russian dissident poet and punk provocateur reviled for his pro-fascist sympathies? The filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov never musters a satisfying answer in this muddled English-language bio-pic, despite an energetically uninhibited central performance by Ben Whishaw and a cheeky panoply of filmmaking techniques—jittery camerawork, lengthy tracking shots—meant to catch us up in the épater-la-bourgeoisie exuberance of Limonov’s revolt. Considering his earlier work, I prefer the rebel-youth vibes of “Leto” (2018) and the dazzling cinematic assaults of “Petrov’s Flu” (2021), both of which also screened in competition here.

18. “Parthenope”

Nearly every new picture from the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino could be reasonably called “The Great Beauty,” the title of his gorgeous 2013 cinematic tour of Rome. (It left that year’s Cannes empty-handed, but won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.) His latest work remains most intriguing for its ambivalent but still sensually overpowering vision of the director’s home town, Naples, from which springs a modern-day goddess, named after Parthenope, a Siren from Greek mythology. She’s played by Celeste Dalla Porta, a great beauty indeed and an empathetic screen presence, though only fitfully does her character seem worthy of this movie’s epic enshrinement.

19. “Wild Diamond”

Another disquisition on beauty and its discontents, this time from the débuting French writer and director Agathe Riedinger. She hurls us the life and busy social-media feed of a nineteen-year-old, Liane (a terrific Malou Khebizi), who has nipped, tucked, and tailored every part of herself to realize her dream of being selected for a hot new reality-TV series. Part influencer-culture cautionary tale, part bad-girl Cinderella story, the movie glancingly suggests the soul-rotting effects of beauty worship, but it falls victim to the trap that Liane is trying to avoid: in a sea of worthy candidates, it doesn’t especially stand out.

20. “The Apprentice”

Donald Trump’s attorneys have threatened legal action to block the release of this drama about his early rise to fame and wealth under the mentorship of the attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). It speaks to the useless proficiency of Ali Abbasi’s movie that the prospect of such censorship provokes more indifference than outrage. Shot to evoke cruddy nineteen-eighties VHS playback, the movie is well acted by Strong, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, and an increasingly makeup-buried Sebastian Stan as Trump himself, depicted from the start as a sack of shit that gets progressively shittier. It’s not dismissible, but it’s hardly the stuff of revelation, either.

21. “Marcello Mio”

In this trifling meta-comedy from the French filmmaker Christophe Honoré (previously in the 2018 Cannes competition with the lovely “Sorry Angel”), the actress Chiara Mastroianni embarks on a strainedly whimsical personal odyssey to examine the legacy of her late father, the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, and her own conflicted place therein. To that end, she spends much of this overstretched movie in “8½” and “La Dolce Vita” black-suited drag as she navigates a roundelay of industry in-jokes; among the French cinema luminaries making appearances are Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, and, most welcome, Chiara’s mother, Catherine Deneuve.

22. “The Most Precious of Cargoes”

The French director Michel Hazanavicius continues his uneven post-“The Artist” run with this animated Second World War fable, adapted from a 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg (and narrated by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant). It has an affecting opening stretch, in which a baby girl, thrown by her desperate father from an Auschwitz-bound train, is rescued and raised in secret by a woodcutter’s kindhearted wife. But when the child’s provenance is discovered, stoking local antisemitism, the movie becomes a bathetic wallow in Holocaust imagery, drowned in an Alexandre Desplat score whose every surge turned my heart increasingly to stone. ♦

[bestoflupiniiipoll]

Lupin III Poll Matchup Results!

Round 1:

Matchup 1

Seven Days Rhapsody (2006) vs Lupin III Part VI: London/Woman (2021)

Matchup 2

Is Lupin Still Burning? (2018) vs Operation Return the Treasure (2003)

Matchup 3

Voyage to Danger (1993) vs The Legend of the Gold of Babylon (1985)

Matchup 4

Lupin III Part III: Pink Jacket Adventures (1984) vs Lupin The 3rd Live-Action Movie (2013)

Matchup 5

The Hemmingway Papers (1990) vs Episode 0 First Contact (2002)

Matchup 6

The Fuma Conspiracy (1987) vs Farewell to Nostradamus (1995)

Matchup 7

Blood Seal of the Eternal Mermaid (2011) vs Tokyo Crisis/Memories of the Flame (1998)

Matchup 8

Elusiveness of the Fog (2007) vs From Serbia with Love/Bank of Liberty (1992)

Matchup 9

Swallowtail Tattoo/Stolen Lupin (2004) vs Lupin III vs Dectective Conan the TV Special (2009)

Matchup 10

The Last Job (2010) vs Green vs Red (2008)

Matchup 11

Strange Psychokinetic Strategy (1974) vs Inspector Zenigata/Zenigata Keibu TV Series (2017)

Matchup 12

Pursuit of Harrimao’s Treasure (1995) vs Prison of the Past (2019)

Matchup 13

LUPIN THE IIIRD: Goemon’s Bloodspray (2017) vs Dead or Alive (1996)

Matchup 14

Dragon of Doom/Burn, Zantetsuken! (1994) vs Goodbye Partner (2019)

Matchup 15

Manga Series (1967) vs The Secret of the Twilight Gemini (1996)

Matchup 16

Lupin III Part II: Red Jacket Adventures (1977) vs Alcatraz Connection (2001)

Matchup 17

Lupin III Part V: Misadventures in France (2018) vs Bye Bye Lady Liberty/Goodbye Liberty Crisis! (1989)

Matchup 18

Italian Game (2016) vs Lupin Zero (2022)

Matchup 19

Lupin III Part IV: The Italian Adventure (2015) vs Missed By A Dollar/$1 Money Wars (2000)

Matchup 20

LUPIN THE IIIRD: Jigen’s Gravestone (2014) vs Napoleon's Dictionary/Steal Napoleon’s Dictionary! (1991)

Matchup 21

The Colombus Files/Da Capo of Love: Fujiko’s Unlucky Days (1999) vs Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

Matchup 22

Island of Assassins/Walther P-38 (1997) vs Sweet Lost Night (2008)

Matchup 23

Lupin III vs Cat’s Eye (2023) vs Another Page: Travels of Marco Polo (2012)

Matchup 24

The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012) vs Lupin III vs Detective Conan The Movie (2013)

Matchup 25

The First (2019) vs Lupin Family All Stars (2012)

Matchup 26

Lupin III Part I: The Classic Adventures vs Princess of the Breeze: Hidden City in the Sky (2013)

Matchup 27

Mystery of Mamo/ Lupin vs The Clone (1978) vs Angel Tactics (2005)

Matchup 28

Pilot Film (1969) vs LUPIN THE IIIRD: Fujiko’s Lie (2019)

First batch of matchups will be posted no later than Wednesday. Get ready to place in your votes! And may the best Lupin win!

[mryaksalot]

Important changes to my Backstory AU(OUTDATED)

TW: This post is going to be sorta long, so buckle up.

As you may know, there have been a lack of many new chapters to my story The Road To Success on AO3 these past several months. I've been trying my damn hardest to keep up with updates, but I don't always have the free time in order to write. I have to attend school, work a job, deal with family matters; those things take priority too. I don't have as much free time as I used to back in 2021.

That being said, I still hold a lot of passion for this story. I first got the idea for this story all the way back at the beginning of 2021. It started as just an insightful thought, a drabble I created inside my head. Overtime, I kept expanding on the idea, fleshing out the world, making this story the best it could possibly be. Now we're at the point where the story is over 120,000 words, and it's not even half of the way done yet! I never anticipated for this story to be this long, but here we are.

Now if you are thinking that this post is about me throwing The Road To Success in the can, I just want to clarify that this story IS NOT being cancelled. But the way the story is written and formatted is going to change from what you have seen up to this point.

Just so I am transperent with you guys, here is a list of all of the changes to The Road To Success, as well as the Backstory AU as a whole.

1. The main story, The Road To Success, will be significantly shorter than the original version. The OG version, the version that I have stuck to while initially writing this story, was planned to have 40-50 chapters. That is just not possible anymore, with how busy my life has become. This new version of the story will now have roughly 30-35 chapters. As of writing this, the exact number of chapters has not been decided yet; that will be determined by the end of the year (at the latest).

2. The new version of TRTS (Acronym for The Road To Success) will be more Yakko-centric. I originally wanted to insert a bunch of extra sideplots into the main story, specifically after the Warners become actors. Wakko and Dot were supposed to have their own friend groups, and we would get the chance to see their perspectives as well as Yakko's. However, these sideplots take away from the main story, which is overall more important in the longterm. That dosen't mean Wakko and Dot won't be given any time in the spotlight (they are gonna play some significant roles later on), but I don't want their misadventures to take too much time away from the main storyline.

3. Some of the lore (the details on how the world works in this universe, how certain characters act, family trees etc.) have been and are subject to being changed and altered. I'm very much a perfectionist when it comes to the little details; they're very important imo. Sometimes, I will change my mind about a certain detail and decide to change it on a whim. I will try to restrain these changes to the lore based on what I have already written/talked about publicly, in order to not create too much confusion going foward.

4. The Backstory AU will be expanded beyond The Road To Success. That's right, folks! TRTS is getting a companion story, in order to fill in those lore gaps to answer questions that have yet to be answered. This story will focus on the parents of the Warners, covering their childhood, as well as their inevitable downfall as members of society. More details regarding this companion Peice will be elaborated on in a later post. I'm also cooking up a Christmas story, which will serve as somewhat of a flashback to previous events in TRTS. This story will come out on (you guessed it) Christmas of this year.

5. So you may be wondering to yourself: What's gonna happen to the scrapped segments of TRTS? Well that's where my drabble collection comes in. A month ago, I created a drabble collection titled Splats Of Ink, a collection of oneshots featuring headcanons, future story ideas, and now scrapped segments of already established stories. I'm thinking about fleshing out these Alternate scenes of TRTS, to show you what could have been. Expect the first of these scrapped-segment-reimagined drabbles to come out this April.

So, that's a decent laundry list of all the updates that I have made to the Backstory AU as of late. Chapter 15 is in the works as we speak, and will most likely come out sometime in March. Then it will be smooth sailing into Chapter 16 and so on! There's lots of exciting things in the works, and I can't wait to share it all with you.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read through the whole thing. Feel free to ask questions if you need me to elaborate further on these changes. Your patience and support is most appreciated.

[the-rewatch-rewind]

New episode!

Script below the break

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most frequently rewatched movies in a 20-year period. Today I will be discussing number 22 on my list: RKO’s 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks, written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, based on a story by Hagar Wilde, and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) has a lot going on. He’s about to marry Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker). The final bone to complete the brontosaurus skeleton he’s been assembling for four years has just been found. And the wealthy Mrs. Carlton Random (May Robson) is considering a million-dollar donation to his museum. But while David is golfing with Mrs. Random’s lawyer, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), his ball gets mixed up with that of zany, scatterbrained Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who leads him on a series of misadventures involving wardrobe malfunctions, a thieving dog, trouble with the law, and two leopards.

When my mom was starting to introduce me to Old Hollywood, she got Bringing Up Baby from the library and said something along the lines of, “I don’t particularly like this one, but you probably will.” And, um…that was an understatement. I was obsessed with this movie in my early teens. Like, to an embarrassing degree. I quoted it constantly. For example, whenever there was a curb or other uneven surface, I had to walk along it with one leg higher than the other in reference to the part when Susan loses the heel of one of her shoes and says, “I was born on the side of a hill.” I’m pretty sure I had watched it a few times in 2002 before I started keeping track; then I saw it five times in 2003, twice in 2004, and three times in 2005. And then as I got older, I started to cringe about my initial enthusiasm, and to listen to people I knew who didn’t like it. I watched it once in 2008, once in 2013, once in 2014, once in 2016, and then I decided I liked it again, so I saw it twice in 2018, twice in 2021, and once in 2022.

This movie flopped in its initial release, but its reputation has grown over the years, and it’s now generally considered to be the definitive screwball comedy, one of the greatest comedic films ever made, and according to some, one of the greatest films of all time of any genre. And yet, many of the people I know in real life who have seen it don’t like it – apart from my brother; I could always count on him to watch it with me. I think a lot of people find it too unhinged and chaotic and frustrating – and, to be fair, they are correct in that assessment. But it happens to be unhinged and chaotic and frustrating in all the right ways for me. I totally get that it’s not for everyone, and I think it does tend to be over-praised now, perhaps to overcompensate for the lukewarm response it generated in 1938. Back then, Howard Hawks attributed the box office failure to the fact that there were no normal characters in the film, so there was nobody for the audience to identify with. And maybe that is the problem. Perhaps the people who don’t like this movie are too normal for it, and the reason I enjoy it is because I have never been normal.

I think especially when I was young, I saw a lot of myself in both David Huxley and Susan Vance, even though they are pretty much opposites. David is mild-mannered and socially awkward, which is how I tend to be around people I don’t know very well. He also has a fairly passive role in the story; lots of things happen to him, while he’s unwillingly along for the ride, and that was definitely how I perceived my life at the time when I was most into this movie. Susan, on the other hand, is outgoing and self-assured when she shouldn’t be, and she frequently prattles on to the point of obnoxiousness, which is how I tend to be around people I’m comfortable with – again, even more so when I was younger. The fact that I’m basically a combination of the two leading characters is not something I consciously noticed until recently, but I think it explains a lot. Like why I find this movie comforting when it seems like I should find it irritating. I truly cannot overemphasize how ridiculous this movie is. Nothing about it makes any sense, which normally would bother me, but the thing is, it’s clearly not supposed to make sense. David refers to his skeleton as a brontosaurus, when at the time most paleontologists considered them the same as an apatosaurus (although recently that’s been called into question again). The final bone he’s waiting for is the “intercostal clavicle” which would be a shoulder bone in between the ribs, which…is not a thing in any animal that I know of. And the main leopard, Baby, is introduced to the story because Susan’s brother sent him to her from Brazil, which means either the brother or the leopard was very lost, since leopards are native to Africa and Asia. These factual errors introduced early in the story help set the tone for the nonsense that’s about to ensue, and oh boy is there a lot of nonsense. I mean, not that there isn’t a story at all; there definitely is, and the plot is relatively easy to follow. It’s just absolutely bonkers. Nobody would wind up in jail for trying to get a leopard off a roof, after mistaking it for a different leopard. But it’s very funny to see what would happen if they did. Ultimately, this movie is just trying to be a comedy, and it very much succeeds at that. Most of the movie is witty dialogue between wacky characters in ridiculous situations – basically my favorite brand of humor. There is also excellent physical comedy, including lots of falling down, which normally I’m not a huge fan of, but for some reason this movie’s brand of falling humor works for me. It’s a fun silly movie that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. And I would argue that its central romance isn’t meant to be taken seriously either.

Because this movie has a male and a female lead, predictably they end up together. But the thing is, I don’t believe that David and Susan truly have romantic feelings for each other. After they have run into each other a few times, Susan asks a psychiatrist she’s stumbled upon what he would say about a man who follows a woman around, and when she talks to him, he fights with her. Now, this is an extremely inaccurate representation of what has been happening – first she took over his golf ball, then she stole his car, then she dropped an olive causing him to slip and fall on his hat. He’s not just randomly picking fights with her; he has reasons to be upset with her. But based on what she said, the psychiatrist tells her, “The love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” That leads Susan to conclude that David must be in love with her, and she then decides that she is also in love with him. Which very much sounds like the behavior of someone who does not understand romantic attraction. Throughout the rest of the movie, Susan keeps coming up with ways to prevent David from leaving, which she thinks is because she’s in love with him, but comes across to me as a lonely person desperate for a friend. David spends most of the movie trying to get away from Susan. He does help her resolve some of the situations that she gets herself into, but mostly because she’s either tricked or trapped him. At one point, he tells her, “In moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you, but there haven’t been any quiet moments,” implying that he is not, in fact, drawn toward her at all. He does care about her wellbeing in spite of himself, but that doesn’t automatically imply romantic feelings. At the climax, when David is trying to fight off the wild leopard that has been mistaken for the tame Baby, he urges Susan to run, and she says, “No, I won’t leave you, I love you!” and he just responds with an unpleasantly shocked, “WHAT?!” Granted, at the end, David confesses to Susan that in hindsight, the time he spent with her was the most fun he’s had in his whole life, to which she replies, “That means you must like me a little bit,” and he says, “It’s more than that! I love you, I think!” But then she accidentally breaks the dinosaur skeleton that he’s spent four years working on, and before he recovers his power of speech, she says, “Oh, David can you ever forgive me? You do? And you still love me!” and she embraces him, and he just goes, “Oh dear,” and hugs her back, and then the movie ends without even remotely convincing me that they’re really in love. I think the psychiatrist’s suggestion combined with amatonormativity has convinced them that they were thrown together by fate and destined to fall in love, so they decided that that was what had happened without really feeling it. The characters strike me as being better suited for friendship than romance, and I hope they discover that after the events of the film. I can see them meeting up every once in a while for more absurd adventures, but I feel like they would destroy each other if they tried to live together.

Now, could this all be me projecting my aromanticism onto these characters so I could relate to them even more? Absolutely. But there’s something indisputably queer about this movie that is definitely not all in my head. These characters are just so fascinatingly quirky that they can’t possibly all be straight allos. Apparently the script had scenes of David and Susan declaring love for each other in the middle that Howard Hawks cut during production, which implies that the director agreed with me that the leads weren’t intended to be too into each other that way. And of course, there’s That One Line. If you’re at all familiar with this movie, you probably know the one I mean, but for those who don’t: after they take Baby the leopard to Susan’s aunt’s country house in Connecticut, Susan convinces David that he needs to take a shower before he can go back to New York to marry his fiancée, and while he’s bathing she takes his clothes and sends them into town to be cleaned, so David won’t be able to leave. When he gets out of the shower, he has nothing to put on but a frilly woman’s bathrobe. Then Susan’s aunt (who also happens to be Mrs. Carlton Random, but he doesn’t know that yet) enters the house and asks who he is, to which he replies, “I don’t know, I’m not quite myself today.” And then when she demands to know why he’s wearing the feminine robe, he can’t come up with a good explanation, so he bursts out, “Because I just went GAY, all of a sudden!” This was an ad-lib by Cary Grant that somehow made it into the film and is now probably its most famous line. At the time, the word “gay” was being used by the homosexual community to refer to themselves, but that use had not entered mainstream consciousness yet, obviously, or the censors wouldn’t have allowed it in the movie. Most uses of “gay” in old films were clearly meant in the “lighthearted, carefree” sense, or were at least ambiguous enough that they could mean that, but in this context, that definition doesn’t really make sense. I don’t like forcing labels onto real people, but it does seem like Cary Grant was probably bisexual, and therefore it’s reasonable to assume that he would have been familiar with the less common definition. Of course, David is saying this sarcastically; he’s wearing the feminine robe because that was the only thing available to wear when he got out of the shower – it has nothing to do with his sexuality or gender presentation. But the idea that the character would be familiar with that use of the word “gay” raises some interesting questions.

In addition to Cary Grant, it’s also been widely speculated that Katharine Hepburn was not straight. She certainly was at least somewhat gender-nonconforming, frequently wearing pants at a time when that wasn’t socially acceptable for women. Susan Vance is one of her more feminine-dressing characters, and she doesn’t say anything about being gay, but right after that scene, when she hears that David is looking for clothes in her brother’s old room, she cries, “If he gets some clothes, he’ll go away, and he’s the only man I’ve ever loved!” I’m told that making it to 30 without having loved someone of the opposite sex is not a typical straight, alloromantic experience. So even if my initial theory is wrong and David and Susan are attracted to each other romantically, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they’re some form of queer. And as for David’s fiancée, Alice, she’s not in much of the movie, but she makes it clear that her marriage to David is going to be more of a business arrangement than a romance. She has no interest in a honeymoon or children, insisting that the dinosaur skeleton will be their child, and like, I know she was probably meant to be a stereotypically frigid geeky girl with glasses, and it’s harmful to imply that women can either have brains or heart, but at the same time “why would we need to have sex when we have a dinosaur skeleton” is such an iconic ace attitude that I can’t help but admire her. Anyway, she breaks up with David after Mrs. Carlton Random finds out who he is and decides not to donate her million dollars to a museum that employs someone as unhinged as him, but I hope Alice finds happiness, preferably with another asexual dinosaur enthusiast. Most of the other characters also seem at least somewhat queer – Constable Slocum and his assistant Elmer kind of seem like they’re in a relationship with each other, for instance, and Major Applegate doesn’t seem very straight either. All of this might have been completely unintentional, but what the heck, in honor of Pride month, I’m declaring that every character in this movie is somewhere under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. This is my podcast and I make the rules.

Bringing Up Baby was reportedly very difficult to make. Production ended up taking 40 days longer than scheduled and costing $330,000 over budget. Part of that was because Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn kept cracking each other up and ruining takes, and because Howard Hawks had a fairly leisurely attitude on set, sometimes cancelling shooting early to take the cast to the races. They also had to deal with animals, which is always tricky. In modern films there are usually multiple animals playing the same character, but in this movie they only had one Leopard, named Nissa, who played both Baby and the vicious circus leopard. Katharine Hepburn seemed to enjoy working with the leopard, and she wasn’t afraid of it even though it did almost attack her at one point. But Cary Grant was terrified of Nissa, so most of his scenes with a leopard were either filmed with his stand-in, or his part and the leopard’s part were filmed separately. The visual effects were fairly advanced for 1938, and even though you can sometimes tell that the actors and the leopard weren’t actually together, it works well enough that you won’t really notice unless you’re watching for it. There’s also a dog named George who steals and buries the intercostal clavicle, and that dog was played by the famous Skippy, who had also played Asta in the first few Thin Man movies and appeared in a different Cary Grant movie called The Awful Truth. I haven’t heard any stories about how Skippy behaved on the Bringing Up Baby set, but I assume he was very professional.

Although the film’s box office failure did nothing to help Katharine Hepburn’s floundering film career in the late 1930s, I personally feel like it represents a significant turning point in her acting abilities. There’s a staggering difference between her pre-Bringing Up Baby performances and her post-Bringing Up Baby performances. Early in her career she was extremely overly dramatic, and while some of those films were still fairly good, many are painfully unwatchable. The story goes that initially, she wasn’t very good as Susan Vance either. She kept trying too hard to be funny, which ruined the comedy. Unable to get through to her himself, Howard Hawks asked Vaudeville veteran Walter Catlett to show her what she was doing wrong, and Hepburn found him so helpful that she asked Hawks to cast him in the movie so he’d be around to give her more pointers. So Walter Catlett played Constable Slocum, and Katharine Hepburn learned how to do comedy. Her character is relentlessly annoying and over-the-top ridiculous, but Hepburn commits. The knowledge that she needed help to get there in no way detracts from the brilliance of her performance. She plays everything Susan does as if it’s the most logical, natural thing in the world, and that’s what makes the movie work. If Susan was aware of how silly she was, the whole thing would have fallen apart. We all know that I love Cary Grant, and I do greatly enjoy his performance here, too, and I think they play off each other very well, but I feel like it’s mainly Hepburn’s performance that has compelled me to keep revisiting this film. As a young person, I related to certain things about Susan and wished I could be as carefree and self-assured as she was, although maybe a little less obnoxious. Now I relate to her less – I wish I had half her energy – but I still find her antics amusing. And it’s also fun to see how much better her acting got after this movie. Clearly she took Catlett’s lessons to heart, and combined them with her natural talent and determination and hard-working spirit to fully become the force to be reckoned with that she’s remembered as.

There is so much more I could say about Bringing Up Baby, like how much I love the scene when Susan pretends to be a gangster to get out of jail, but I’m worried I would just end up quoting the whole movie if I kept going, so I think I’ll wrap it up here. Thank you so much for listening, whether you love this movie, hate this movie, don’t have a strong opinion about this movie, or have never seen this movie. I appreciate you all so much! This will be my last solo episode for a while, as I have guests lined up for the next three episodes, so stay tuned for some fun conversations. Next up is the fifth and final film I watched 19 times while keeping track. As always I will leave you with a quote from that next movie: “A date! What’s a date?”

[eastern-lights]

Dune and the Ian Malcolm Rule of Writing Prequels

The Dune prequels have irked me for some time. I read them and immediately felt that there was something iffy about them, something that goes beyond quality of writing. Finally, I have concluded that they are a prime example of what happens if you break what I like to call “The Ian Malcolm Rule of Writing Prequels”, which basically says that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

Part 1 - Victor Atreides or “Surely they would have mentioned something like this”

The trouble with prequels is that you can’t make the events too impactful if they aren’t mentioned and elaborated on in the original text. That would cause a dissonance between the importance of the event and the characters’ apparent obliviousness of it. This can be avoided to a degree if you go the Clone Wars route and base a prequel around a throwaway line like “You fought in the Clone Wars?” that isn’t the primary focus of the conversation. Obi-Wan not elaborating on all the misadventures he had during the Clone Wars feels natural, because him and Luke have more important things to talk about at the moment.

The Prelude to Dune Trilogy is a different story, though. There are many examples of events that by all rights should be important enough to get a mention out of the characters by the time of the original Dune, but I would like to focus on the most glaring one: Victor Atreides, Leto’s firstborn son by his first concubine, a son that tragically died before Paul was born. There is nothing in Dune that outright says that Leto did not have another partner and another son before Jessica and Paul. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense. In House Harkonnen, Leto watches his son Victor die in an explosion that was meant for him. Come Dune, an assassination attempt is made on Paul, and we get a vivid description of Leto’s feelings on the matter, no less than 4 pages. Surely, if he had lived through a similar experience before, if he had lost a son before in such a similar fashion, he would have remembered Victor at that moment. He would have cursed himself for allowing such a tragedy to almost happen again. But he does not, because he did not lose a son before. Because Frank Herbert clearly meant for Paul to be his first and only son. Victor’s very existence feels weird, because it feels unnatural that Leto wouldn’t have given a single thought to his dead son even as he almost lost another. 

Part 2 - Death of the Old Duke or “Watch Out for That Symbolism”

All that we know about Leto’s father from the original Dune is that he raised his son to be cold and ruthless, and that he died while fighting a bull. The manner of his death is deeply symbolic and way more important than it may seem. Paulus Atreides (the name was given in the prequels, but I’m gonna use it anyway, because the alternative is Dune Encyclopaedia’s ‘Minotauros’ and I sure as hell ain’t calling him that) died completely unnecessarily, while showing off his strength. He did not have to fight bulls. That we know, because Leto never did, so it clearly wasn’t some super important unbreakable tradition. Paulus risked his life because he was proud and he wanted to keep up appearances. Now, why does Leto come to Arrakis, knowing full well what danger awaits him there, rather than take his family into exile? He is too proud to admit defeat. He would rather risk his life and fight against all odds than lose face before the Landsraad by refusing the Emperor’s order. And he suffers the same fate as his father. Arrakis was Leto’s bull. Denis Villeneuve understood this, and that is why in the 2021 movie, Leto dies underneath the head of the very bull that killed his father.

The prequels throw all that symbolism out the window by having the bull be drugged into a killing frenzy by an assassin, and implying that if it weren’t for the assassin, Paulus would have won. That takes away from the moral lesson about pride and risk-taking that Leto failed to learn until it was too late.

Now, I understand that there needed to be some drama and conflict in the prequels. The way they’re written, that conflict comes from Paulus having been killed on the orders of Leto’s mother Helena, something that Leto knows but has to ignore, because otherwise he would have to order his own mother’s execution, something that a) he can’t bring himself to do and b) would make him incredibly unpopular with the people. To preserve the bull’s head symbolism, why not have the conflict come instead from Helena becoming protective of her son, terrified to lose him as she had her husband, and Leto clashing with her because he feels that as the new Duke, he needs to show the same strength and bravery as his father? Maybe he would also have inner conflict, because he realizes that his father risking his life in an arena was stupid, but he also admires Paulus, and wants to match him? It is already hinted at in Dune that Paulus’ shadow still looms over Leto. There is so much conflict to be had even without uprooting the themes of the original.

Part 3 - Mistrusting Jessica or “There is such a thing as too much of a good thing”

Many fans would probably agree that one of the most beautiful and most tragic aspects of Dune is the strain that is put on Leto and Jessica’s relationship, how all of us could merely watch in horror as the two drifted further and further apart, even as we, who as the readers knew all their inner thoughts, were completely aware of just how much they loved each other. I suspect the authors of the prequels tried to evoke the same emotions by having them drift apart to the point of divorce not once, but twice, and each time because Leto suspected her of treachery. At one point, he even holds a knife to her throat (!) (#NotMyLeto, #MyLetoHasAngerIssuesButNotThisMuchFfs). Again, there is nothing in the original that outright states that they haven’t had problems in the past, but consider Leto’s reaction when Thufir Hawat suggests that Jessica might be the traitor they are looking for:

(abridged) “I see.” Leto shook his head, thinking: There can’t be anything to it. I know my woman. “My lord, if-” “No!” the Duke barked, “There is a mistake here that-” “We cannot ignore it, my Lord.” “She’s been with me for sixteen years! There’ve been countless opportunities for-- It’s impossible, I tell you!” The Duke’s shoulders slumped. He closed his eyes, looking old and tired. It cannot be. She has opened her heart to me.

These are not the thoughts of a man who had such suspicions of his lover before. He goes through all the stages of grief, except for acceptance, because despite everything Thufir brings forth as evidence, in the end, he still trusts Jessica more than himself. I find it very hard to believe that he would be this hurt and deny the very idea of betrayal so vehemently if he had been through something like that before. He sounds exactly how you would expect him to sound if he really did not have a single reason to doubt Jessica throughout their entire relationship.

The romantic plotline of the prequels should have focused on them slowly building this incredible bond of trust, instead of breaking it over and over again. Instead of creating arbitrary conflict between Leto and Jessica in every single book, the prequel authors should have shown us their love at its peak, so that its deterioration in Dune would hit us that much harder.

Conclusion (Finally)

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson somehow managed to make their prequels both too similar to the original (by recycling plot points, thereby diluting the original) and too different (by straight up inserting characters and events that don’t fit in with the original). I have mentioned before on this blog that few things upset me more than wasted potential in a book, and I stand by this. Leto Atreides and Jessica are very popular characters in the fandom, and many people would love to read more books with them as the protagonists. But the authors simply tried to make the prequels too big, too dramatic and packed to the brim with events that are seem too impactful not to be mentioned in the original. Prelude to Dune and the Caladan Trilogy should have been smaller, more personal stories. The story of a young man struggling to rule a planet after his father died for nothing is compelling enough. So is the story of a woman caught between her loyalty to an order that raised her and her love for a man who was perhaps the first person in her life to show her genuine kindness. We did not need a great tragedy like Victor’s death, nor a great betrayal like Helena’s plot. It would have been enough to depict what has been hinted at in the original, no more and no less.

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

art by em year in review!

Not the greatest year by far, but I made it to the end, so let's celebrate! For the third time ever, I present to you my reflections under the readmore (this year, linking back to where they were posted so if you want to see them in situ, you can!)

January: "the nearness of you"

started the year off strong with my favorite femslash pairing of women that never met in canon. this piece really rode the wave of progress i made in the latter half of 2021, when i made a custom brush for lineart in sketchbook and watched my quality go up in response. compared to this time a year previously, the color of my lineart looks way more natural than before. it's a solid piece of work and i still like it very much overall.

something i will say though is that at the time, i was really struggling with skin color, particularly on theresa: you could even see this in last year's retrospective, especially when put next to linda. however, instead of actually addressing the issue at its core i just slapped a warm overlay on top, which was the drawing equivalent of slapping a band-aid (plaster?) over a gash and hoping that would fix things. (spoiler alert: it didn't.)

February: "ain't shit"

in all my retrospectives, there’s at least one which i like the least. for this year’s, this one has to be it. i really adore the concept i was going for, which was f1!au bobsled. f1!au bobsled is kind of an exploration into the ship having a darker side, which i kind of thought was missing from the wider scale of interpretations. so putting them in a position that slightly equalized them gave me the ability to explore that darker side.

anyway, background aside, the concept was something i clearly visualized but didn’t quite get on paper the way i wanted to. this was a case where i should’ve realized that things like warm ups and preliminary drafts are really helpful for pieces that have a clear vision but have a large scale, like this one. otherwise this concept is still super appealing to me and i’d draw it again!

March/April: unposted, "the transcendent third"

this detail section is part of the mock cover i made for a webcomic that i never followed through with, which was supposed to fictionalize my time and misadventures in a lab i was taking for credit. i enjoyed this work as a study on foreshortening (though i can't show the whole foreshortening thing without showing off other details i don't want visible, so you'll just have to take my word for it.)

though the transcendent third never came to fruition, it directly inspired another work i was, in fact, able to complete later in the year. you can probably guess what that work was.

i was extremely busy this time of year, so i didn't draw much.

May: "reunion"

this one i honestly forgot about because i wasn’t a fan of it when i finished. again, i really could have benefited from warming up since i was so out of practice at the time! i suppose that’s the big takeaway from this year 😅

June pt. 1: "circular story"

some progress, corresponding—no surprises here—with the end of the academic year. after years of using the same (very off) coloring for theresa's skin, i finally bit the bullet and twiddled with it, and what a difference it makes (at least to me!). next to herc and douglas and especially linda, she looks more natural, which makes the overall thing more cohesive.

fun bit of trivia is that the positions are meaningful. something that i (tried to) communicate in the f1 AU is the gray areas. who's in control here, really? who is fulfilling what? who is using who? herc and douglas both look to their left toward the women, reminiscent of the chain of authority in aircraft ('when you're a first officer you look to the left and see your captain. when you're a captain you look to the left and see your reflection...'). yet theresa and linda look not back at them, but up at each other. it's an interplay that had meaning and im not sure if anyone else picked it up but it was intentional.

June pt. 2: "Portugal, 1982"

oh hello motorsport fanart featuring ladies from the eighties that only me and like five other people on this webbed site care about. this year was the fortieth anniversary of michèle mouton and fabrizia pons's historic title campaign in the world rally championship, and i wanted to draw things for the three wins that helped them nearly clinch it. but of course (as is the refrain for basically everything art-related this year) since real life was a bitch about it, i was only able to draw something for portugal, which was inspired by actual footage. it's linked in the post if you're interested, CW for camera flashes.

this is a return to the "ghibli style" i tried out last year, and i still think it's adorable. i actually did most of it in procreate, which was less hellish than i remembered it being, and it was a good thing i got a little bit of practice in it, for reasons that will be clear in a few paragraphs.

July: Martin Crieff sheet, aka: if you can't remember how to draw him, redesign him!

look at this martin, then look at february's martin, then look at this martin again. doesn't he look so much better? an earnest young man, that is! he's not ginger but he dyes.

one of my favorite warm-ups/doodles to do is the good old ID picture (facing straight on, neutral expression. simple way to get things under my pencil before attempting something bigger), and this is supposed to be martin's fitton airfield ID card.

this was actually a warm-up for next month's piece...

August: "geyser"

i have a complex relationship with this work. i'd been plotting it and drafting it since at least 2020 and wanted to employ the lessons i had learned from march/april's experiment in foreshortening. i also wanted to draw something that connected martin and mitski's "geyser," the author's purpose and message of which is, i think, integral to understanding martin's character. because flying is like art and art is like flying and you will do anything for your passions even if it means losing you, but 'you' will never be lost because you work and try and fail and work and try and fail in the hopes that your passions will be 'you' and 'you' can be your passions and it's a wheel with no end, isn't it?

anyway i had to do most of this in procreate because for some reason, sketchbook started glitching and bugging on me and i couldn't figure out what was going on. i wanted to depict both martin's aspiration to the sky as well as martin's sheer smallness in comparison to his ambition, which is why i went for the whole foreshortening idea. it's not really that well depicted but the airplane casting a shadow over martin as he stands on tarmac is kind of a representation of his ambition's dominance over him...and then i went and overlaid lyrics to "geyser" over that as if i hadn't pushed the point enough.

i like this piece well enough (and it seems many people did, it's one of the ones that did best notes-wise) but i can't help but feel a lingering disappointment. this is something i’d like to try and re-draw in the future!

September: "before/after turbulence"

this was inspired by a norwegian air pilot's instagram post poking fun at herself for attempting to drink her coffee while they happened to be passing near thunderheads. it was just a funny little image that got more attention than i thought it would (effort vs attention inverse relationship lol) and possibly the most out-of-pocket reblog addition i've ever had on my work. anyways. woteva pt. 2. it was cute and fun to delve into the whole skrunkly style i had going on. i still don't fully understand procreate brush sizes tho.

October: "to take a photograph, and live inside"

sketchbook finally started cooperating with me at this point so i made a triumphant return to it for this piece.

this is so cute and i still love it! this came about after i thought about the characters' heights relative to each other, so more than anything this was a way for me to visualize the height comparison. also i wanted the soft-shoe-shuffle family together with their lesbian sidekick. and i think it's cute. i especially adore how i drew carolyn and i think this is where i permanently decided my herc shipwright is a glasses wearer.

November: "Donne, donne, eterni Dei"

aaauuuugh i love them waaahhh!

anyway i finally gave the mjn crew new uniforms (idk what i was on with that faded blue, nobody wears faded blue uniforms and it just looked washed-out). i am particularly proud of theresa's pose. i think i also posted a little bit about how i've gotten better with poses and anatomy since i started doing fanart seriously. and the secret? actually look back and reference your anatomy notes from high school. and lots of absurd selfies. and stock photos.

December: "the fruit left on my sheets"

after an admittedly up and down year, i finished it off super strong with this piece (which took so long to conceptualize but when i did…) neither of them look really off, which i'm proud of. sketch and lineart were both done in sketchbook, while the coloring and background were done in procreate. the coloring features some overlay work, but i think the star of this, more than the meaning i imbued into their poses and choice of attire, is the background. i might use that technique again because i really liked how it turned out.

Conclusion and 2023 Goals

i think my biggest goal moving into 2023 is to gain more confidence using procreate. one of my takeaways from this year was how powerful a program it is, and i think it is worth my time and energy getting to know and understand it, since i already have it. sketchbook will always be my first love in terms of drawing programs, since it was free, it was my first, and getting to understand it in early 2020 unlocked the door for me to not be shy to share my art online. but there are some things i turn to procreate for, like being able to blur in different ways! so i do want to balance what i use between those two programs.

additionally, i’m making an effort now to alt text all my art. i was lazy about it before, which is kind of dumb as i’m literally vision impaired myself so like. what was i waiting for lol. but better late than never!

last of all, my sincere thanks to all of you who've liked or reblogged a post i did, for engaging with my fanart, however unusual my subject matter (clears throat. the linda fairbairn extended universe, therlinda, the f1!au…shall i go on?) might be. cabin pressure really is an integral part of the person i've grown to become and am choosing to grow to be, and it genuinely brings me joy to explore its characters and relationships in all sorts of ways. this is one of my favorite hobbies and i appreciate all of you who are in it with me. when i’m down, i reread people’s tags because it genuinely means so much that other people like what i make. so, thank you.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Wolf Warriors - Big Hands Small Hands

This is one of the more unique fig sets I have, because they are posable!

This set was inspired, of course, by the Youku "fakecast" for Word of Honor. This not-really-a-livecast was pre-recorded by Zhang Zhehan and Gong Jun prior to airing on February 23, 2021. We've seen figs from this before here, and we'll see more of them in the future - this is absolutely a gold mine of fig inspiration.

You can watch this English subbed here:

And then part 2 is here:

Alright, I just lost several hours watching that again! Those two make me laugh so much. Zhehan is such a rascal, I swear!

I bought these figs from a seller on Xianyu - this was way before my direct purchasing time. These arrived in the warehouse, and all excited, I opened up the warehouse picture. And yelped!

I'll be honest, I don't know exactly what I was expecting, since I knew these figs were posable, but I didn't expect THAT. It's like my figs exploded into nice neat little bags!

If you've been reading my posts, you may or may not recall that I really don't care for disembodied figs. Too many ghost stories as an impressionable and perhaps easily freaked out kid, actually. I really, really prefer all body parts firmly where they belong!

Except...well, here we are.

And here they are! You may be able to see, both in the SuperBuy pic and in my pics, that Junjun's little chair is missing a limb too! This one, though, is by misadventure, not design. I carefully glued the chair leg back together, and it's as good as new.

Yeesh I don't care to look at these pics! This is them with the arms put into the, well, arm sockets, and before the heads go on. You can also see the little indents in the chairs for them to sit in.

And here's the bottoms-up view (literally!) before I put them in their chairs. You might notice there's some writing on the bottoms of the chairs...

I see I left some fluff on Zhehan's chair! Oops. Junjun's chair does in fact have the first "1" to reflect he was actually born in November, I just have the exact wrong angle to show it! It's there covered up by the cross bar of the chair.

The arms were very stiff for Zhehan, and too loose for Junjun. You can see how Zhehan's arms kinda don't quite fit all the way in the joint socket. Junjun's were so loose they were falling out when I turned him!

I love the name of this fig set…as you can see in the photo, it's quite literally named for the size difference in the hands between the two.

You can see Junjun's left arm kind of coming out of the socket a bit there. The heads are heavy and pretty wobbly too. A few times when I was moving the figs around for pics the head would come loose.

These figs actually balance incredibly well, considering the chairs are so light and the heads are so heavy. The figs legs kind of tuck up again the chairs, which I think helps to keep them on.

The fig maker designed Zhehan with quite the generous backside, as of course they should! In moving him around I see I kind of tilted him a bit too forward. He can actually sit back in the indentations just fine.

You can definitely tell who is who from this angle, with Zhehan's spiky hair and smaller overall body profile.

Speaking of hair, both of them had pretty short spiky hair! But we have just a few more spikes for Zhehan, and of course the different hairline.

Alright, since these can be posed, let's pose them!

Zhehan talking Junjun's ear off...

...and Junjun smiling at Zhehan, who is talking to the host!

And them looking at each other. I also put down Zhehan's right arm. You can see how it's kind of not fitting in the socket super well, and this was with both of them pushed in as much as I could.

Their little faces are really sweet, especially Junjun's with that little soft smile. I am not sure why Zhehan has the bumps at the outside bottom corners of his eyes? I don't think they're tears, unless they are tears because he was laughing so hard!

This is the fig maker's art for this set, and you can't see the eye detail here - but then again, the figs don't have cat and dog attributes either. Super cute art! I actually wouldn't have minded an alternate fig run with the cat and dog attributes, it looks great.

I didn't get a box card with this set, and the polystyrene box the figs came in was just in plain white boxes, so we'll just have to admire the cute art!

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 305

Scene Count: 23

Rating: Two big hearts!

[link back to Master Fig Index for more posts]

[institute-of-planar-shitposts]

I posted 2,901 times in 2022

That's 2,844 more posts than 2021!

166 posts created (6%)

2,735 posts reblogged (94%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@taakosleftshoe

@barry-j-blupjeans

@terezis

@umbraastaff

@liltaz-asatreat

I tagged 769 of my posts in 2022

#taz ethersea - 105 posts

#the adventure zone ethersea - 103 posts

#ethersea spoilers - 103 posts

#not taz - 37 posts

#taz balance - 24 posts

#ask game - 12 posts

#starry's skies - 11 posts

#sunshine - 10 posts

#yeah - 8 posts

#the misadventure zone - 8 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#everyone it can and that's probably the best way to do it! sure some may die but that's a necessary evil isn't it? some for the good of all?

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

5 and Davenport and Magnus for the fluff prompts? :3

5. "How many cats did you bring home?"

"Magnus."

The human freezes, having just passed Davenport. The gnome is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, not bothering to look up from his current report.

"Uh. Yes, Captain?"

"What do you have in your coat."

"My hands," Magnus says.

"What else."

"Uh... My keys?"

Davenport raises an eyebrow, pausing in what he's writing. He likes to keep the crew thinking he's a lot stricter than he actually is; based on the muffled meowing obviously coming from the human, Magnus has stumbled upon some cats. Bleeding heart; though Davenport isn't one to talk.

"I - you can't get mad at me," Magnus pleads.

Davenport sets down his coffee, finally looking at Magnus as he hides a smile. "How many cats did you bring home?"

"Just two," Magnus says immediately.

"Only two?"

"...and their little families," he admits.

Davenport holds his stern expression for a moment before he can't keep it up, dissolving into laughter. "Mag-Magnus, we can't - we can't keep that many cats on board," he manages.

"But Captain!" Magnus gives him the biggest puppy eyes he can muster, but Davenport shakes his head, still laughing.

"No, sorry Maggie. I'm sure they're adorable, but I don't think Taako could make enough food to properly feed them."

"He won't have to! I'll do it myself," Magnus says eagerly.

"You've burnt pasta, Magnus," Davenport chuckles. "Listen, we can't keep all of them. You'll have to take them back to their homes. Don't even think of keeping just one."

Magnus perks up at the wink that accompanies the gnome's words. "Hell yeah!"

"Don't make me regret it," Davenport adds, still smiling as he returns to his coffee and reports. Magnus dashes to his room, presumably to decide which cat he's going to keep around.

Taako doesn't need to know yet.

57 notes - Posted August 17, 2022

#4

Based on this post by Gab!

--

Listen, alright - listen. Barry isn't usually up in the middle of the night, and especially not in the Starblaster's kitchen. But tonight he couldn't sleep and he's hungry. So sue him, he wanted to make a sandwich! It's not his fault he couldn't really decide what kind of sandwich. He was able to narrow it down to at least two, he should get a gold star for that. That said, Barry can't choose between the two, so he's here in the kitchen making two sandwiches. And that's perfectly fine and normal.

Except Taako walks in as he's spreading the Nutella on the second sandwich, and Barry freezes. So does Taako, who looks at him, then his sandwiches, then back at him.

"Barold."

"Taako?" He can already feel himself turning red, but tries to keep cool about it.

Taako presses his hands together, inhaling and slowly exhaling. "Barold. Please, for the love of god, tell me you are not making a fucking chicken-Nutella sandwich. Like, I know you have shit taste but that's a crime, Barold, and I will have to call the food police."

"No! God, no, Jesus that sounds awful," Barry blurts. "They're separate sandwiches, I swear!"

"That's - somehow that's worse!" Taako cracks, breaking into guffaws. "What the hell, Barry!"

"I - I couldn't decide!" he says defensively.

"So you made both? Like a lunatic?" Taako cackles.

"Listen, I just - I'm - I'm hungry, okay," Barry says. "Please don't tell Lup?"

"Oh I'm absolutely telling Lup, homie," Taako laughs, holding his side and already halfway to the door.

Barry sighs, putting his face in his hands as he hears Taako dash to Lup's room. There's no way the crew is gonna let him live this down.

66 notes - Posted August 29, 2022

#3

Why is there a polar bear in the jungle Griffin. Griffin they're polar bears. Griffin please tell me this is just an in universe thing. Griffin please tell me you know where polar bears live. Griffin please. Griffin -

76 notes - Posted April 1, 2022

#2

OK now that I'm remembering again, my current theory:

Cambria made the sallow. Reasons I believe this:

The music is the exact same. Could be a coincidence but I doubt it. Griffin knows what he's doing

Balister Hermine said they were certain the sallow was made, specifically to change them. If I'm right, Cambria thinks that the sallow is the best way to save all of them.

The current with the bodies. I mean, come on - that with the fact there are so many twins and triplets etc. etc. etc? Reeks of experimentation! I'm 100% betting Cambria uses the community that's there to test the sallow.

In conclusion,

I don't fucking trust Cambria

91 notes - Posted February 7, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Magnus nearly crashes into the doorframe in his haste to catch Lup before his stone stops buzzing, holding it in the air with a grin as he makes eye contact with her. She grins back and gestures quickly for him to answer, which he does.

"Hello?"

"Oh, uh... I think I have the wrong number?" Lup hears a voice say. "I was uh. I was looking for Lup, but I guess -"

"He- hey!" Magnus interrupts, trying to sound angry and not like he's holding back laughter. "That's not funny, dude."

"It wasn't supposed to be? I'm sorry, man, I probably just put in a number wrong."

"It's not funny, dude, Lup died fifteen years ago today," Magnus insists. Lup has to use both of her hands to muffle her cackling as the line goes awkwardly silent.

"Uh - I'm sorry?" the guy finally stutters.

"You should be! I have half a mind to find out who you are and come show you t-"

"No! No, no need for that!" the guy says hurriedly. "I - uh, I'm sorry for your loss and I'mgonnagonowbye."

The line drops and Lup bursts into guffaws, followed quickly by Magnus. She holds up a hand for a high five and says, "Holy shit that's the best thing I've ever heard. Gods, I love you, Mags," she giggles.

"You're welcome," he grins. "That was fucking hilarious, deffo keep giving freaks my number."

"After that, you fucking bet."

(Based on Ise's Peri's tags in this post!)

262 notes - Posted July 6, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[lordprophet]

Marketplace Behavioral Choices as an Election Outcome Barometer & Informal Voter Poll Pertaining to and in Advance of the 11-05-2024 US Presidential Election

Marketplace Behavioral Choices as an Election Outcome Barometer & Informal Voter Poll as Relates to Donald Trump's Recent Major Business Ventures, Cryptocurrency & Truth/er Social, Bode Against His Electability as US President

(Click on the herewith hyperlink to read the above healdline-related news article: https://www.newser.com/story/357929/trump-crypto-launch-doesnt-live-up-to-hype.html )

If this bad news on Donald Trump's foray into the cryptocurrency market and the shockingly far-below-expectations, of market analysts, in the resultant actual low level of investment participation in it by the Trump-friendly investor market, as well as that of the recent sharp declines in both the value of the stock and company of his social media platform Truth/er Social ( https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-shares-donald-trump-truth-social-82d8839bb5f5a96e93e2404399ead072 ), is or are an election outcome behavioral barometer and informal political-voting trendline poll and thereof harbinger of the strength of support and unity of the GOP and plutocrat-class constituencies and their loyalty and enthusiasm for financially-and-morally-bankruptcy-legacy Donald Trump in actually voting for him (grandpa madman, bully, demagogue, misogynist, sexual-harasser, dirty-old-man-lecher Donald Trump) to be elected US president again (after a hiatus from the US presidency by rejection of him for reelection by a large majority of the votes of the electorate and Electoral College in the 11/2020 US presidential election) in the upcoming 11-05-2024 US presidential election, then I would not bet on his election to that office again or would bet a low-wager-to-high-returns ratio on him being elected or flat out bet against him. Election politics-related behavioral quasi-voting, such as the above referenced marketplace voting, or choosing, may be found to be competitive with traditional expert enterprise political election polling. We shall know soon.

Moreover, numbers of individual voter, as well as total amounts of, political support contributions of money to competing candidates or referendum/a initiatives are an informal poll and indicator of the electorate's voting choices and majority-choice outcomes in elections, a voting choice indicator that at this time strongly weights in favor of the US Vice President Kamala Harris for US president candidacy according to the following Forbes Magazine news article: Donald Trump V. Kamala Harris 2024: Which Campaign Raised More Money (forbes.com) .

Perhaps the metamessage of the bad news for these recent major business ventures, trending as misadventures, of Donald Trump is that the large majority of investors, including Republicans, and people in general, don't trust a modus-operandi double-talking unscrupulous and dishonest person with their money, girlfriends, wives and daughters, and votes, and their democracy.

Click on the following hyperlink to see and read two sample news articles of Trump’s recent gluttonous grifts, apart from his constant, and perceptibly unscrupulous fundraising schemes, offerings and investor business ventures, such as digital NFT trading cards for $99.00., with additional bundles respectively for $1,485.00 and $7,425.00, perfume and cologne at $199.00 per item, $59.99 for made-in-atheist-China bibles at a production and shipping cost per unit of less than $3.00 (Click on, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/11/trump-bibles-made-in-china/75625791007/ ), $499.00 gold-colored sneakers, $10,000 watches, IPO $70.00 shares in Trump social media platform Trump Truthless Social, having declined to $20.00 or less in value since IPO offering, current faltering cryptocurrency venture, $99.00 to $499.00 book choices on his presidency, since in 11/2020 he was voted out of and problematically, in 01/2021, left his expired US presidency, https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-products-for-sale-list .

[michael-eugene-cantrall-poetry]

May My Wish Be Denied

Yes, my queen, a mistake of great proportions not one small stumble into an unintended land we may need to come back and do this again when unworried by misadventures of attraction that result in such wondrous blundertakes

Reminds me of others where the mind comes together only late to some form of clarity of the unwound where the mind and what has happened unto now find each other in some new comprehend with thoughts not unfamiliar to those who understand

And yet I see these shadows in my night, why so is beyond my questions to be answered in light I roam the shadows cast by the withered oaks in mind that where I roam I stay hidden from all things kind and soon I do seal my weary being in rest rest borrowed, lent, it appears unending

Knowing, this cannot be, the one found and the one who found me what becomes of desire when desire hungers to be free this desire seeks me, has my name on its blade stay away, stay away, I say, as the sharp edge grins

May I not be slain by love, and may my wish be denied mistakes may I not unmake, but fate, please be kind

© May 2021, Michael Eugene Cantrall All images of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, and postcards are from the author's private collection.  Photographs appearing on this writer's pages on this site are licensed. 

[monriatitans]

Ta-Da! List: Monday, June 17th

The image was made in Canva; check it out at the [referral] link here!

I share my “Ta-Da! List” every day so everyone gets a daily update and I have a reminder of what I’ve accomplished.

To learn more about “Ta-Da! Lists”, and other ADHD life hacks, check out @adhdjesse’s book Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD.

Abbreviations

- O&T: Opinions & Truth Blog - KI: Kickstarter Item - WGS: The Weekend Game Show - ASO: Artist Shout-Out - IG: Instagram - BMAC: Buy Me a Coffee - TDL: Ta-Da! List

Ta-Da! List

✧ June 16th: - chores and miscellaneous: the AC stopped working, so helped partner set up portable AC units

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧ throughout the day: - kept emails manageable - loaded the dishwasher - filled out today’s TDL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧ on the mobile phone: - YouTube: watched Jim Sterling’s video “Phil Spencer’s Big Hard Decision” - Hive: shared today’s ASO - IG/Hive: shared the KI Fuck Up’s arrival

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧ on the bedroom setup: - O&T: shared yesterday’s and today’s TDL to the WGS Ko-fi - Movies: watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧ on the office setup: - WGS: gave a human artist, Tricia Pathy, a shout-out by sharing it on O&T, Tumblr, and other social media - O&T: shared yesterday’s TDL to IG; shared an image of the KI Fuck Up, due to AI shit being used not being noticed, that arrived today to O&T, IG, and other social media; shared today’s TDL to various social media - Kickstarter: submitted a ticket regarding their allowing AI on the platform: ID #1974087 - BMAC: did the forgotten KI post for “Our Divine Ruin” by Melissa Sweeney - Branding: in Canva, created a KI Fuck Up template and watermark; found a graphic to represent Crowdfunded Reward arrivals - Gaming: played “Final Fantasy XIV” to complete the Tribal Quests, “Super Lesbian Animal RPG” for most of the day

- YouTube: watched and/or listened to: 1. Jim Sterling’s videos “A Video About The Doom Eternal Controversy”, “Elden Ring And The Tiresome Dance Of Git Guddery”, “Don’t Even JOKE About Easy Modes In Dark Souls!”, “Some Whining W*nkboys Think Aloy Looks Like A Man”, “NFT Loot Boxes Are A Thing Because Everything Is Bad”, “The Delicious Failure Of NFTs In Gaming”, “The Misadventures Of Steam’s Most Unlikeable Developer”, “I Made Steam’s Most Unlikable Developer Really Really Mad”, “Kotaku Was Right To ‘RUIN’ Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom”, “Yes Resident Evil 4 Remake’s Microtransactions Are Bad”, “How To Refund Starfield Because The Pronouns Upset You”, “So, You’re Thinking About Dating Bobby Kotick”, “When Wizards Of The Coast Tried To Be A D&D Landlord”, “Cult Of The Lamb — A World Of Sh*t (Jimpressions)”, “Wow, The Ninendo Switch Got Mappy-Land!”, “Insights From A Terrible Galaga Game”, “The Videogames I Didn’t Completely Hate This Year Awards 2021”, “Did I Mention I Hate NFTs?”, “Obligatory Video About Microsoft Buying Activision”, “S… E… X”, “Activision’s “Diversity Tool” Is F*cking Awful”, “Game Journalism Of Thrones”, “Quiet Riot: A Cult Of Silence”, “Credit Where Credit’s Due”, and “It Gets Good After 30 Hours”

2. Morgan Foley’s video “Autistic day in the life + why so many autistics have PTSD” 3. Upper Echelon’s video “Matrix — A Pit of Abuse with Government Ties” 4. heatherstudio’s video “Best FREE Tools to Boost Your Etsy Traffic! (100K+ visits methods)”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧ chores and miscellaneous: Food: had coffee and water for breakfast; had a bowl of cereal for lunch; had leftover steak for dinner; had hot cocoa - Chores: checked the mail

—

Well, these are all the updates I had for today! Thank you for reading!

May every decision you make be *in the spirit of fairness* and may the rest of your day *NOT go to $#!7*!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Enjoy what I do? Please consider supporting via Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC)! Like what you see and want to know when there’s more? Click here to subscribe for updates and/or hit the Follow button! This post contains affiliate links.

Watch MonriaTitans on Twitch, YouTube, and Rumble! For more about MonriaTitans, click here!

[bekandrew]

"Gather 'Round the Trashfires," a Deviant: the Renegades horror/comedy fiction podcast Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:23:50 +0000

The cohort work on next steps toward their goals against their enemies and taking care of their loved ones. Even when sleeping, there's no true rest for a Renegade in hiding.

This is a shorter episode than normal, but something possessed my ST to allow us to do a lot more downtime than usual that week (including allowing Geri 4 Astral Travel dreams) so it was more than would reasonably fit with the next session.

--------

Episode Transcript:

Get your snack and beverage of choice ready.

It’s time to “Gather ‘Round the Trashfires” for a tabletop roleplaying story! I’m your host, Bek Andrew Evans.

My current and main running story for this podcast is the misadventures of the cohort from the Deviant: the Renegades chronicle I’ve been playing in since early 2021. And I play Geri.

For those of you unfamiliar with Deviant, it’s a TTRPG about people who were formerly human but were irreparably changed in traumatic ways to the point their very Souls broke and they became something Other. They seek vengeance on those who made them, those who hunt them, those who seek to exploit them for what they are and will never leave them be.

As such, this podcast will feature heavy themes and content throughout. There’s an overall content warning for language, violence, criminality, homelessness, substance use, human experimentation, cults and religious extremism, mentioned torture, kidnapping, implied incest and incest-related comments, and abusive relationships. On episodes where there is a new content warning or a particularly notable instance of one of these, I’ll call it out.

I hope y’all enjoy hearing about my cohort’s antics and stumbling headfirst into the mysteries of the world as much as I have.

[Music Intro: "_violence" by Avantist]

Green Country Calcination Episode 13: Interlude: Sweet Dreams

After the chat with Cassidy and incident with AJ, the cohort goes back to their daily routines for a week or so. They're primarily focused on tasks to gather information about their shared enemies to plan their next steps, though Geri, Grant, and Robert do significant amounts of household management as well.

The cohort doesn't have many significant interactions with each other in person over the following week - their schedules keep conflicting as they go about their individual tasks. They mostly meet up for shared meals with whoever's available.

That night, after the incident, Geri dreams again about Amanda. She's desperate for clues about her current status and location, though she's well aware she may not like what she finds.

She finds herself watching a scene play out in a cafeteria, a food court in a mall. The images are blurry at first. Amanda's sitting across from Jake. She keeps her hair fairly short and dresses in a butch style, with tank tops, an open over shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Amanda's got fluffy, curly dark-brown hair and light-mid-tone skin from being mixed race. Jake is a very young adult - about 18 - preppy jock that you can tell by looking at him he's got a "bad boy" streak and is probably up to something.

Amanda asks how he connected her to her. Jake says they have their ways, and he just borrowed from that. He continues, asking rhetorically if Geri reached out and weird things happened. He says that's their life now; it's a dangerous life.

Amanda frowns and reluctantly says she understands, but still worries.

Jake pats Amanda's shoulder comfortingly and tells her she can't help Geri, that they'll come for Amanda if they find out Geri reached out. He tells her she needs to keep herself safe.

Amanda nods, and that part of the dream fades to black, like a movie. When it fades back up, Amanda's stepping into the Oklahoma City Airport, staring at her phone. She's dialing a number. Geri's number. Over and over again.

She quietly pleads for Geri to pick up... but there's nothing.

As she finally boards the plane, she gives up. She curses Geri and sighs, whispering that she misses her, too.

That scene fades out and Geri wakes up. She's aware Amanda has close relatives out of state she would be able to stay with.

After the dream, Geri gets a different burner phone from the stash. She was afraid that somehow, her previous one had been compromised.

She again leaves the cabin to make the call, and this time at an odd hour she knows Amanda isn't likely to answer. As she hopes, Amanda doesn't, so she leaves a voicemail.

She doesn't introduce herself, just starts speaking.

"Hey, um, I know this is weird. Let me know if you're safe. Or don't, [stammers] I guess. I'm...

I'm not gonna use this number for anythin' else. Jus' don't trust Jake, or anyone else workin' with the church. I got a way to communicate privately for sure if you want, but I'm not gonna freak you out again. I'm sorry about the call, I just couldn't bear for you to not believe me. Even though this shit's pretty unbelievable [nervous laugh].

[Inhale] Otherwise, uh, I guess let me know if you need help. I'll try to stay far enough away you won't get caught up in anything, least until it's over.

[Stammer] I still love you. Bye."

She goes home and marks the phone with a red stripe of sharpie so she won't use it for anything but contacting Amanda.

And then cries alone.

AJ doesn't come to the group dinners. In fact, he's hardly present at all most of the week. He's gone most of the day and returns late in the night like a delinquent teen.

It's obvious he's still around, at least at odd hours, though, because there's plenty of frozen pizza and burrito wrappers in (and near) the trash can, and he's eating any leftover meals set aside for him.

And, as always, there's the strange garage noises.

At the next grocery run, Geri picks up some pool noodles, though the cohort doesn't have a pool. She sneaks into the garage to leave them anonymously among Zuse's things in the hopes he'll surely find a use for them and maybe AJ will lighten up a little.

Geri wants to help Madi but finds she doesn't know how to research the connections between Charismatic Virtues' inner circle and Cassica Hall. That way they'll know, during the meetup with Father Philip, if his information is good or if he's off base because he's either lying or also in the dark. She has a very weak educational background, to put it lightly, and can barely use computers.

She settles on using Astral Travel to cast a wide net for hints on the connections others with better research skills can follow up on.

Geri dreams of snippets of the memorial for the dead teenagers. The timeline's all garbled and unclear.

At some point - before, during, after? She can't tell where it's suppose to fit in the timeline of events, but she sees a still image of a donation check being handed over between the Church's inner circle and Cassica Hall. It's unclear which direction its being passed.

She also can't tell specifically which members are holding the check, only adding to her confusion.

She wakes up with more questions than answers.

The cohort notice a bizarre story in the news. It's running on the second page of the paper sold in the park's shopping center and throughout Pryor.

It talks about a teenage prank the locals believe is being perpetrated by some ballsy high-schooler who's been impersonating vending machine owners around town.

All the machines that get hit end up having all their skittles and M&Ms stolen as well as about $50 cash each. There's not usually anything else missing.

Another night, Geri decides to dream spy on Camille to see what she's up to and get some clues on her progress in her plans.

Geri finds herself floating in a dark meeting room, granting her a bird's eye view. A number of people Geri doesn't recognize sit silently around the meeting table, with most of their features obscured by the dark. However, Geri can make out there's an older woman with graying hair between an elderly gentleman and a very dour-looking Gabriel Werner.

Geri pays closer attention to Gabe's expression, and finds just a hint of smugness he's hiding very well, but mostly the dour annoyance.

The cause of his annoyance is giving the presentation up front - Camille Mason is smugly referencing still shots of the cohort's minivan speeding out of Robert's neighborhood.

She pauses what she was saying and glances up to the ceiling where dream Geri is observing. She tells Geri 'Bold, but not enough.' Her eyes flash.

Before she gets tossed out of the dream to wakefulness in the middle of the night, Geri catches the slightest smirk from Gabe.

Grant continues throughout the week his normal habit of making an extensive network of deadly traps through the cabin property. It's a whole lot of physical labor, but it keeps him occupied.

He also continues his normal habit of meditating in the morning with his coffee, reflecting about the circumstances, and thinking about Sophie.

On a whim, at some point during the week, Geri attempts to Reconnect with Telepathy to Beth to check on the status of the moved ward - but fails that time. She manages to get a sense that Beth is still alive, but no more than that.

Geri induces a fourth dream this week. This time, she's helping AJ like she promised she would. She's trying to uncover details of his conditioning she's unlikely to uncover other ways, especially with AJ's conditioning being a secret.

Her dream is simple, and for once: peaceful. She dreams of hearing a simple, hummed lullaby - soft, repetitive, and comforting.

There's nothing malicious here, no tests, no sense of training or commands. It's only a gentle lullaby to soothe a child.

Geri wakes up dazed and very groggy.

AJ makes a polite request to the others that their next outing should be checking on his mother. He needs to make sure she's okay given everything that's gone on. He's arranging an outing to a public place to meet her - the local planetarium.

He has a new gadget he's finishing up for the mission!

The others agree to help.

Geri writes in the dream journal reporting to assure that AJ's conditioning was really just a benign, loving lullaby. There was nothing malicious about it and no commands attached.

AJ thanks Geri and is very relieved.

Madison, having access to the journal as well and not being present for the entire debacle with conditioning before, innocently asks what Geri means about AJ's conditioning. She's very concerned.

Geri refuses to explain over the journal.

AJ agrees and says it's going to be a discussion that needs a lot of weed.

This does nothing to ease Madi's concerns. In fact, the opposite. She's kinda freaking out and the dream journal's become pretty derailed. 

Late in the week, among all the normal loud noises from the garage, there's a cackle and a loud AJ-shreik demanding to know 'WHY DID YOU PUT THEM THERE?!'

During the week, Madison receives an email while she's out of the cabin doing her computer stuff. She hand-writes it down in her cutesy, curly script and hangs it on the fridge for the cohort.

It says: Hey Madi- Tell your friend Geri that Amanda is safe, although she spooked her real good sending THOUGHTS into her head. Luckily for you all, I gave a number to people I was able to figure out the church knew were close to y'all. So I can get them out of their sight if YOU ALL endanger them by getting too close. I can't bargain for indefinite freedom for them all. Stay safe, Jake

Later in the week, AJ leaves a handwritten reply on the bottom of the page in marker that says "Douchie McDouchenozzle is SUS AF."

[Music Outro: "Time Will Fail Us" by Troigo]

Thanks for listening, This has been Gather ‘Round The Trashfires with Bek Andrew Evans. Please subscribe to this podcast for future updates and leave a review or comment, I’d love to hear what you think. You can follow me on a few different social platforms with the username "bekandrew." That's [spells username] on tumblr and bluesky, mainly.

If you'd like to support me, subscribe to my Patreon at Patreon.com/BekAndrewTTRPG and purchase my art prints and tabletop products, including my Deviant: the Renegades community content novella related to this chronicle via my linktree in the description.

AJ is played by Roen,

Geri is played by me,

Madison is played by Syn,

Robert is played by Pandito,

And our Storyteller is Casey Grant.

The intro theme is "_violence by Avantist" from the Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0.

The end theme is "Time Will Fail Us" by Troigo from the Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0.

If you like the songs, I encourage you to check out more of their work. I've linked their Bandcamps in the description.

Until next time.

Follow my Patreon at Patreon.com/BekAndrewTTRPG Check out my other work at linktr.ee/bekandrew Check out the Intro and Outro artists' Bandcamps! https://theavantist.bandcamp.com/music https://troigo.bandcamp.com/ Remember to subscribe and see y'all next week! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/gather-round-the-trashfires/donations Transcript:

[saviochristi]

Desventuras Aventuradas: livro completo, gratuito e na íntegra... podem ... Vídeo profissional, didático, sondado, dissertado e debatido sobre o escritor e a literatura / Professional, didactic, probed, lectured, and debated video about the writer and literature / Video profesional, didáctico, sondeado, disertado y debatido sobre el escritor y la literatura.Leiam a não ficção literária dramática Desventuras Aventuradas! / Reed the dramatic literary nonfiction Adventurous Misadventures! / ¡Lean la no ficción literaria dramática Desventuras aventuradas!Livro / Book / Libro (Blogger, Wattpad & PDF): http://saviochristi3.blogspot.com/2021/09/livro-desventuras-aventuradas.html, http://wattpad.com/story/286147124-desventuras-aventuradas & saviochristi@outlook.com.Facebook, Twitter & Instagram: http://www.facebook.com/saviochristi, http://www.twitter.com/saviochristi & http://www.instagram.com/saviochristi123.Canal parceiro / Partner channel / Canal parcero: http://www.youtube.com/@hsama.E e-mail para contato / And email for contact / Y correo electrónico para contacto: saviochristi@outlook.com.Canal da H-Sama Zuchelli / H-Sama Zuchelli channel / Canal de H-Sama Zuchelli: http://www.youtube.com/@hsama (o maior, melhor e mais completo canal sobre cosplay, moda, beleza, estilo de vida e artesanato / the greatest, best, and most complete channel about cosplay, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and crafts / el mayor, mejor y más completo canal sobre cosplay, moda, belleza, estilo de vida y artesanía).Blog e páginas da H-Sama Zuchelli / H-Sama Zuchelli blog and pages / Blog y páginas de H-Sama Zuchelli: http://h-sama.com, http://www.facebook.com/bloghsama, http://www.facebook.com/hsamaZuchelli & http://www.facebook.com/BrazilianBaroness.Colaboração e agradecimentos especiais a / Collaboration and special thanks / Colaboración y gracias especiales a: meus pais e meu irmão dois anos mais velho / my parents and my brother two years older, mis padres y mi hermano dos años mayor, Lourival Cristofoletti, Joan Morais de Figueredo & Gerô Gerou.Colaboração e agradecimentos especiais também a / Collaboration and special thanks also to / Colaboración y gracias especiales también a: minhas amigas e conterrâneas dos eventos de anime, daqui, de Vitória (Espírito Santo) [Brasil] / my female friends and countrywomen from anime events, from here, in Vitória (Espírito Santo) [Brazil] / mis amigas y conterráneas de los eventos de anime, de aquí, de Vitória (Espírito Santo) [Brasil], Marihá Barbosa e Castro, Hairan Zuchelli & Anne Barbosa e Castro.Colaboração e agradecimentos especiais ainda a / Collaboration and special thanks still to / Colaboración y gracias especiales aún a: meu amigo / my male friend / mi amigo, de lá, do Yahoo! Respostas Brasil, RedAsk e Quora em português / from there, in Yahoo! Answers Brazil, RedAsk, and Quora in Portuguese / de allá, de Yahoo! Respostas Brasil, RedAsk e Quora en portugués, Cacounger.Revisão de texto / Text revision / Revisión de texto: Iana Lima Cordeiro, Marihá Barbosa e Castro & Naira Souza.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Inside the Medical Examiner’s Office, Where Opioids Fuel Surge in Deaths (NYT) In the operations center of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on a recent Wednesday, a large dashboard showed that 39 people had died unexpectedly across New York City—at home, or accidentally, or violently—over the past 24 hours. That was more than on Sunday, but fewer than the 45 deaths on Monday, almost always the office’s busiest day of the week. Four years ago, numbers that high would have been a disturbing aberration in the city’s regular pulse of life and death. Today, they are the “new normal,” says Dr. Jason Graham, the city’s chief medical examiner. Since 2018, homicides are up. People are dying from health issues that went unaddressed in the pandemic, as well as from COVID-19, and, probably, the still uncertain long-term health effects of the disease. But by far the largest factor in the increased work at the medical examiner’s office—which investigates all the city’s sudden, unusual and suspicious deaths—is a sustained jump in accidental drug overdoses, mostly from the opioid fentanyl. There were nearly 2,700 drug overdose deaths in the city in 2021, the highest total in at least two decades, and 2022’s official toll is expected to be even higher. On average, the city has a fatal drug overdose death every three hours. While official numbers are pending, Graham said, December 2022 will most likely be the worst single month on record.

Biden rallies the West, but what about the rest? (Washington Post) For this week, the geopolitical West can pat itself on the back. As the one-year mark of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine nears, President Biden journeyed to Warsaw from Kyiv and delivered a speech exulting in Ukraine’s defiance and the transatlantic consensus that has sustained it. Putin “thought autocrats like himself were tough and leaders of democracies were soft,” Biden said. “And then he met the iron will of America and nations everywhere who refuse to accept a world governed by fear and force.” At the same time, a survey found a different set of attitudes in China, Turkey and India, where pluralities or majorities believe the war in Ukraine should end as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine must make concessions. In a mark of skepticism toward the lofty rhetoric of Biden and his European counterparts, less than a quarter of those surveyed in China and Turkey believe the West is supporting Ukraine because of the principle of defending its territory or democracy. There is, of course, a long historical track record of Western myopia, misadventure and meddling that drives such views. The report’s authors point to a broader reality not addressed by Biden in Warsaw—the prevalence of a more fragmented, fractured world that is hardly at sync with the geopolitical West. “The West may be more consolidated now, but it is not necessarily more influential in global politics,” they wrote. “The paradox is that this newfound unity is coinciding with the emergence of a post-Western world. The West has not disintegrated, but its consolidation has come at a moment when other powers will not simply do as it wishes.”

Former top Mexican official convicted of taking millions in bribes from cartel (Washington Post) A former top law enforcement official who oversaw Mexico’s efforts to combat narcotics trafficking was convicted Tuesday of taking millions in bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel. Genaro García Luna, who headed the equivalent of the FBI in Mexico, was charged in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn in 2019 with acting as an enabler for the cartel, which is notorious for engaging in rampant violence to keep its operation running. After a month-long trial that began in January, a jury found García Luna guilty on all five counts in an indictment that included his alleged involvement in an ongoing criminal enterprise, international cocaine distribution and drug-related conspiracies. He faces a minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 27.

London to offer free school meals to all primary pupils for a year (Guardian) Free school meals will be offered to all primary school pupils across London for a year under plans by Sadiq Khan to tackle what he said was a failure by ministers to step up support during the cost of living crisis. The move will come into force from September, saving families about £440 for every child and benefiting 270,000 children, City Hall estimates. The mayor, who himself received free school meals as a boy, said he hoped the move would help “reduce the stigma that can be associated with being singled out as low-income” and boost take-up among families who needed the help most. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren live in poverty but are not eligible for free school meals because of the government’s “restrictive” eligibility criteria, the mayor’s office said.

Dry canals (Reuters) Normally, stories about Venice discuss the city’s slow descent into the depths of the Laguna Veneta, or its streets flooding due to rising sea levels. However, this year has presented a different issue to the famous Italian island-city—dried-up canals. This winter, Italy has faced weeks of dry weather, cutting water supplies in the country’s lakes and rivers. This unseasonably dry weather has combined with a high-pressure system and ebbing sea currents due to a full moon to dry out Venice’s canals, making it difficult for the city’s famous gondolas and water taxis to operate. According to an Italian environmental group, the Po, Italy’s longest river, currently has 61% less water than normal at this time of year, meaning that the one-third of Italian agriculture that relies upon the river will see reduced yields. The areas around the Po have been in a state of emergency since last July, and are facing their worst drought in 70 years.

Nearly 1 million asylum requests in the EU in 2022 (AP) Nearly 1 million people applied for international protection in the European Union in 2022, according to data published Wednesday, bringing the number of asylum requests to a level not seen since the refugee crisis of 2015-2016. The EU agency for asylum said 966,000 asylum applications were made in the 27 EU countries as well as in Norway and Switzerland last year, up 50% from 2021. That doesn’t include more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees who were granted temporary protection in the EU, a special mechanism activated to avoid collapsing already backlogged asylum systems. The European agency linked the increase to continuing easing of COVID-19 travel restrictions, increasing food insecurity and conflicts in many parts of the world.

Poland is on a quest to have Europe’s strongest military—with U.S. arms (Washington Post) At Poland’s Rzeszow airport, where President Biden’s plane touched down this week on his way to Kyiv, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries point toward the skies. The first American M1A2 Abrams battle tanks are expected to arrive by train this spring with hundreds of U.S.-manufactured rocket artillery systems to follow. It is part of a mammoth military spending spree spurred by the war in neighboring Ukraine that Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak hopes will build “the largest land force in Europe” and sees Warsaw signing billions in weapons contracts with U.S. suppliers. The buying spree comes as Poland attempts to solidify a position as a leading pillar of European relations with the United States, with the war in Ukraine shifting the balance of political power in Europe farther to the east. That was hammered home this week as Biden—yet to visit Paris or Berlin during his term—made his second visit to Warsaw since the war began.

China’s economic recovery hinges on consumers. They’re not spending. (Washington Post) In Shanghai, the famed shopping streets have yet to return to their pre-pandemic hum. Though the harsh coronavirus restrictions that gripped the country finally ended in December, small businesses in the commercial heart of China are still struggling to find a pulse. Multiple owners of shops nestled between the glittering high-rises, elevated highways and leafy sidewalks surrounding the temple had anticipated a surge in “revenge spending” after the zero-covid policy was suddenly dropped in December in part because of Beijing’s concern over the mounting economic toll. After three years of rolling lockdowns, including a particularly tough one in Shanghai last spring, China is confronting its worst economic indicators in decades. The country’s GDP last year grew just 3 percent, a stark departure from growth of over 8 percent in 2021—and its lowest level since 1976, the year that Mao Zedong’s disastrous Cultural Revolution ended. Experts inside and outside of China say that its $6 trillion consumer market will be central to getting the world’s second-biggest economy back on track, not least because global demand for China’s products remains sluggish. But the pent-up wave of consumer spending that experts predicted would follow the policy’s end has yet to take shape.

10 Palestinians killed, scores hurt in Israel West Bank raid (AP) Israeli forces on Wednesday stormed into a major Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank for a rare daylight arrest raid, triggering a fierce gunbattle that killed at least 10 Palestinians and wounded scores of others. It was one of the bloodiest battles in nearly a year of fighting in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and raised the likelihood of further bloodshed. Israeli police said they were on heightened alert, while the Hamas militant group in Gaza said its patience was “running out.” Islamic Jihad, another militant group, vowed to retaliate. The four-hour operation left a broad swath of damage in a centuries-old marketplace in Nablus. In one emotional scene, an overwhelmed medic pronounced a man dead, only to notice the lifeless patient was his father. An amateur video showed two men, apparently unarmed, being shot as they ran in the street. Israel has been carrying out stepped-up arrest raids of wanted militants in the West Bank since a series of deadly Palestinian attacks in Israel last spring.

Saudi Arabia Expands Crackdown on Dissent (NYT) One day in November 2015, Saad Almadi typed out a 14-word post on Twitter about Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince. “Mohammed bin Salman has taken over the economy, defense and everything under the king,” he wrote, replying to a professor who is a fierce critic of the kingdom’s monarchy. A Saudi-American dual citizen living in Florida, Mr. Almadi had little reason to believe his post would attract attention. He was a retired project manager, not an activist, and his words were largely factual—Prince Mohammed had taken control of many of the levers of power since his father became king that year. By 2017, he would push aside a cousin to become heir to the throne. Yet the tweet resurfaced as evidence seven years later when Mr. Almadi, 72, was arrested during a visit to Saudi Arabia. Along with other Twitter posts he wrote that were critical of the Saudi government—and an “insulting picture” of Prince Mohammed saved on his phone—the tweet was cited as proof that he had “adopted a terrorist agenda by defaming symbols of the state” and “supported terrorist ideology,” according to court documents. In October, Mr. Almadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison, lengthened on Feb. 8 to 19 years after he appealed. Saudi Arabia has always been an authoritarian monarchy with limited freedom of speech. But 10 years ago, Mr. Almadi’s Twitter account, which has fewer than 2,000 followers, might have prompted a warning or an interrogation. Under Prince Mohammed, now prime minister, harsher punishments are being meted out to citizens who criticize their government, while the defendants on trial have become increasingly less prominent. “The scope of oppression really is unprecedented,” said Hala Aldosari, a women’s rights activist who left Saudi Arabia in 2014 for a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States and said she never felt safe enough to return.

What’s Over 600 Pounds, Hyper-Intelligent, And Pink All Over? (Guardian) While America’s wild pig problem has been an issue for years, a new challenger is approaching: a Canadian “super pig,” the result of breeding domesticated pigs with wild boars. The super pigs, created in the 1980s by farmers cross-breeding wild boars with domesticated pigs in the hopes of developing local hunting stock, are bigger and more intelligent than normal wild boars or pigs. Their size (one super pig weighed in at 661 lbs) makes them resistant to Canada’s cold winters, and their intelligence has led them to burrow underground to survive cold winter nights, keeping warm in temperatures as low as -30 C. The super pigs, much like normal wild pigs, outcompete native herbivores and carnivores, but do it even better. “Probably as late as maybe 2010 to 2012, there was probably a reasonable chance of finding and removing them,” said Canadian wild pig expert Ryan Brook. “But now, they’re so widespread, and so abundant, that certainly as late as 2018 or 19 I stopped saying that eradication was possible. They’re just so established.”

[scrumptious-finicky-illusion]

I posted 681 times in 2022

That's 185 more posts than 2021!

13 posts created (2%)

668 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@worstloki

@chronic-ghost

@stellophia

@livebloggingmydescentintomadness

@nildespirandum

I tagged 497 of my posts in 2022

Only 27% of my posts had no tags

#loki - 176 posts

#other people's art - 103 posts

#other people’s art - 63 posts

#other people’s stories - 42 posts

#other people's stories - 42 posts

#thor - 24 posts

#useful - 21 posts

#tom hiddleston - 13 posts

#good omens - 10 posts

#the sandman - 8 posts

Longest Tag: 76 characters

#i've had more than 12 different types of cheese in my fridge on a normal day

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I am not dead

I was given a copy of Horizon: Forbidden West and it's eaten my brain (and all of my time). I loved the original and I'm loving this one.

I had a job interview that I was totally qualified for and it had excellent compensation, but when the interviewer bagged on their current employee and then said "it takes about six months to learn to handle this job without crying," I began feeling uneasy.

It took me a night of sleeping on it for me to articulate what was wrong with this interview. One, don't bag on your current employees, ever. It shows you have no respect for the people in your employ and that you would rather talk about them behind their backs than teach them how to do their jobs better. Two, jobs should not make anyone cry. If that's the case, you're an awful boss who doesn't know how to teach people how to do the job the way they want it done (and if it's that much to do, you should hire more than one person to do everything).

Yadda yadda, capitalism sucks and I've already survived a job that was that traumatic (for 18 years, goddamn it) , so if I'm offered this job I'm going to give this one a pass. I recognize that I'm extraordinarily privileged that I can pass up this opportunity because my spouse has a decent job.

1 note - Posted March 19, 2022

#4

This pleases me

2 notes - Posted July 8, 2022

#3

More Misadventures with Merchandise

Me: *watches What If series episode with Jotun Loki* Oooh, neat!

Funko: *advertises their What If series Pop!s*

Me: Oooh, neat! *places pre-order on Amazon for Jotun Loki Pop!*

Amazon: *accepts order*

One week later

Amazon: (via email) Your pre-order is out of stock! Another seller has it for double triple the price, though!"

Me: *sees item is still available via target dot com* *places new order*

TWO MONTHS LATER

Me: *opens box*

Box: Have a Queen General Raimonda!

I called Target's customer service and managed to get a refund and I get to keep the queen. I went back to amazon, and Jotun Loki is suddenly available again, for the original price. He'll get here Tuesday.

2 notes - Posted May 15, 2022

#2

Turning Red is a Rorschach test where people see what traumatized them the most about changing from a kid to an adult

2 notes - Posted March 21, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

So I watched the first episode of The Boys Diabolical because it was short and boy howdy was it exactly what it said on the tin. The first ep, "Laser Baby's Day Out" had the main characters drawn in classic Chuck Jones style (think mid-[20th]century modern Bugs Bunny) which looks so familiar to animation fans. Dare I say it was a deliberate choice made to draw the audience in? That little girl could totally have been born in Who-ville. It's deeply cute from the get-go. But from there it goes off the rails. I won't spoil it for you, but it really really goes off the rails, and then some. The cognitive dissonance of watching what happens in the oh-so-familiar, family-friendly style is just chef's kiss.

I think the main character, Simon, looks a lot like Tom Hiddleston. It's all there for me, the expressive eyes, the lankiness, even the nose, which is a classic caricature style. Look at that face! That little smile!

See the full post

32 notes - Posted March 25, 2022

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