#optimistic take on a dystopian story

[spacetimeacetime]

Another thing I really like about the Murderbot Diaries is that it doesn't strike me as coming from a pessimistic world view. There are many certifiably horrific things that happen in this universe, but alongside that, you see good things as well.

The story spends a lot of time focusing on genuinely decent people like Dr. Mensa, and showing Preservation as a hopeful example of what living in a non-corporate society might look like.

I just appreciate the optimism there, like there's a goal to move towards instead of just something to be against. It's relevant in how we deal with life with corporations now, but it also actually reminds me of environmentalism like @hope-for-the-planet . I dunno, this one is harder for me to articulate quite what I mean.

[lord-squiggletits]

"Rodimus is a better Prime because it didn't hurt for him to bond with the Matrix while for Optimus it did" headcanon/theory my beloathed.

One day I'm literally gonna snap and make a whole post addressing why what's wrong bc I'm tired of the inaccuracy and tired of ppl not understanding the Point TM of IDW and its version of the Matrix/Primacy and even more tired of people putting down Optimus in favor of Rodimus by essentially arguing that being unworthy means you deserve to be punished/put in pain bc you just weren't good enough to hold the Symbol of Ultimate Authority

[southernsolarpunk]

I am once again posting the solarpunk manifesto because I keep seeing people saying that solarpunk is just an aesthetic

Inspired by Solarpunk: A Reference Guide and Solarpunk: Notes Towards a Manifesto

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.

The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.

Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.

Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.

Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.

Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.

Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

Appropriate technology

Art Nouveau

Hayao Miyazaki

Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world

High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.

Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.

Solarpunk:

is diverse

has room for spirituality and science to coexist

is beautiful

can happen. Now

-The Solarpunk Community

[inklings-challenge]

Genre Thoughts: Adventure

Chesterton famously said, "An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered," which suggests that adventure as a genre is less about the story elements and more about the attitude one takes toward them. Lots of genres can incorporate adventure, because adventure is largely defined by the tone. An adventure puts the characters in danger, but it gives the characters a chance to go exciting places and do exciting things, and generally takes an optimistic tone--this adventure is a good, exciting thing, and the characters are privileged to experience it.

Not that every adventure has enthusiastic and optimistic characters. Reluctant heroes are a staple of the adventure genre--someone who is pulled out of their comfortable life and into a realm of intrigue and danger. But the audience knows that the adventure, as inconvenient as it is, is a welcome escape from the safe routine of daily life, and will give the main character a chance to prove their mettle and become a hero.

Which makes adventure an ideal genre for promoting courage. Adventure lets the audience see that staying in their safe routine isn't always the best way to find happiness, that the problems in life can be opportunities, rather than inconveniences, if we take the right view of them, and have courage in facing them. As Christians, our life is an adventure that offers a lot of dangers and pitfalls, but also lots of opportunities for heroism.

As I said, almost any genre can incorporate adventure, but for Inklings Challenge purposes, we need to incorporate some type of fantasy or science fiction element. To differentiate it from the adventures that could be written by other teams--with their alternate universes or other planets--it could be best to try to keep the action largely focused on past, present, future, or an alternate Earth. Which still offers lots of opportunities for imagination. This is where writers can play with alternate history, steampunk, cyberpunk, dieselpunk (all sorts of -punks), fascinating future Earths, or even just someone in our ordinary world getting caught up, say, in a mad scientist's plot or involved in the political intrigues of elves. Your characters can go on Indiana-Jones-style quests, or Jules-Verne travel adventures, or anything else your imagination can think of!

Some types of adventure stories:

Mysteries

Spy stories

Thrillers

Quests

Treasure hunts

Superhero stories

Alternate history

Steampunk, cyberpunk, other "-punk" type universes

Dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction

Writing Prompts

A person living in an underwater colony on a future Earth goes on a quest to find lost technology that could save their home from destruction.

Someone gets a package with a invisibility cloak and uses it to go on the run from nefarious criminals who'd do anything to get their hands on it.

On a post-apocalyptic Earth, the leader of a peaceful settlement must decide whether to trust the stranger and accompany him on a quest to find a food cache that could get the village through the winter.

In a steampunk world, a dead inventor's notebook leads his son on a quest to find a rare element that could revolutionize airship technology.

A woman is mistaken for a lost elven princess and must evade those who would assassinate her.

[the-far-bright-center]

Dystopian themes in the Prequels

“Looking back is helpful in understanding his work. Lucas started out in the 1960’s as an experimental filmmaker heavily influenced by the avant-garde films of the San Francisco art scene. Initially interested in painting, he became an editor and visualist who made abstract tone poems. His first feature, THX 1138 (1971) was an experimental science fiction film that presented a surreal, underground world where a dictatorial state controls a docile population using drugs. Love and sex are outlawed, procreation is controlled through machines, and human beings shuffle meaninglessly around the system.”

—Anthony Parisi, 'Revisiting the Star Wars Prequels'

The bolded parts in this description correspond with the Coruscant Underworld, the Jedi Order’s code, and the creation of the clone troopers, respectively.

Notably, in THX 1138's setting, emotions such as love and the concept of family are taboo:

I’ve always found it so interesting that Lucas incorporated the dystopian elements of his earlier sci-fi into the Prequels, taking place as they do in the context of the final years of the Repubic, with all its colourful and sumptuous visual spendour. In comparison, the post-apocalyptic ‘Dark Times’ of the Original Trilogy would seem on the surface to be the more outwardly ‘dystopian’ setting of the two—however, the actual story of the OT is a mythic hero's journey and fairytale, complete with an uplifting and transcendent happy ending. The OT's setting may be drained of colour, and its characters may be living under the shadow of the Empire, but as a story it is far from bleak or dystopian in tone. Rather, fascinatingly, it is the pre-apocalyptic era of the Prequels that is presented as the more dystopian storyline:

“On the surface, [The Phantom Menace] is an optimistic, colorful fantasy of a couple of swashbuckling samurai rescuing a child Queen and meeting a gifted slave boy who can help save the galaxy from the slimy Trade Federation and its Sith leaders. But beneath that cheerful facade is a sweatshop of horrors.” —Michael O'Connor, 'Moral Ambiguity: Beyond Good and Evil in the Prequels'

This is referring to the state of the galaxy during the Prequels era, including the fact that slavery is known to exist, but is largely ignored by the Republic and the Jedi alike due to being too economically inconvenient to combat. It also refers to how the Jedi of the Old Order come across as cold and distant atop their ivory tower on the artificial world of Coruscant, far removed not only from the natural world but also from the true realities of the people they claim to serve. And then there is the additional revelation in Attack of the Clones that love and family are 'outlawed' within the Jedi Order, creating an environment in which their own 'Chosen One' is unable to flourish, leaving him vulnerable to the Dark Side. Finally, there's the fact that the characters end up so distracted by fighting a civil war (something that goes against their own principles and involves the use of a slave clone army in the process), that they are blinded to the entity of pure evil that is guiding their every move...until it is too late.

“Without a clear enemy, the Jedi Order, the Galactic Senate, the whole of the Star Wars galaxy bickers and backstabs and slides around the moral scales. But there is one benefit to Palpatine’s pure evil crashing down upon the galaxy; against its oppressive darkness, only the purest light can shine through.” —Michael O'Connor, 'Moral Ambiguity: Beyond Good and Evil in the Prequels'

If anything, the Dark Times allows for the OT generation's acts of courage and heroism to flourish and succeed, because they are not hampered by the Old Jedi Order's restrictive rules, nor by its servitude to the whims of an increasingly corrupt Republic—so corrupt, in fact, that by the time of RotS, it is practically the Empire in all but name. Indeed, one of the key features of the Prequels, and what makes them so tragic, is that the characters are already living in a dystopia...they just don't know it.

There is, paradoxically, a level of freedom to be found in the midst of the Dark Times which had not been possible during the Twilight era, which allows Original Trio to rise above the tragedy that befell their predecessors. They are able to act as free agents (not as slaves of a corrupt government), serving only the fight for the liberation of all the peoples of the galaxy (not just citizens of the Republic), and are likewise free to live (and love!) on their own terms. Free to act on their positive attachments to one another, without having to hide the truth of their feelings. It's particularly telling that *this* is, above all, what makes the Prequels era so dystopian—the characters' inability to freely and openly participate in normal familial human relationships.

[rmd-writes]

nine books

fine, you win @cha-melodius, @tintagel-or-cockleshells, @kiwiana-writes, @clottedcreamfudge, @cricketnationrise, @liminalmemories21 @sherryvalli I will share nine favourites books/authors I will read no questions asked (aka Lims' variation), despite the fact that every time I get tagged I forget every book I’ve ever read.

with the somewhat shameful admission that I have read only one actual book in the last 12ish months 🙈 (but many hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic), in no particular order:

Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston: no explanation necessary, right? This book is everything to me for so many reasons, not least that it brought me some of the best people I know 💖

Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen: I read this for school in year 9 and fell in love with romance as a genre. I reread it at least once a year for a very long time.

Song of the Lioness Quartet - Tamora Pierce (and all of the books set in Tortall tbh): yes, this is a series. Alanna and her adventures are very dear to my heart, and I love that in recent years, the author has said that if she was writing the books now, she’d probably describe Alanna as non-binary but she didn’t have that language when she wrote the books in the 80s. I’m very excited to introduce this quartet to my eldest soon.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins: for a while, I devoured pretty much YA dystopian fiction book out there and this is the best of them. I’ve read them many times, and they hold a special place in my heart because they were a familiar, comforting reread at a very difficult time in my life.

The Snail & the Whale - Julia Donaldson: a children’s picture book, yes. But I’ve read it aloud hundreds of times to my kids and it’s just such a beautiful story about seeing the wonders of the world from a new perspective. It’s got such a lovely cadence and rhythm to it too, when read aloud.

Something Wild & Wonderful - Anita Kelly: aka the one (1) book I’ve read recently. I preordered this because I really enjoyed her other book, Love & Other Disasters, but it sat unread on my kindle for months until a friend mentioned that they’d started it. A quick look at the blurb gave me similar vibes to Fifteen Hundred Miles, one of my all time favourite Schitt’s Creek fics, so I started it and I could barely put it down! I sobbed for the last 60 pages or so - sad and then happy tears and it was wonderful.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid: I loved everything about this. Compelling storytelling, with an imperfect protagonist who you hope succeeds despite her flaws.

and two authors who I’d read anything they published, without question:

Casey McQuiston - they haven’t failed me yet. I didn’t like I Kissed Shara Wheeler as much as RWRB and One Last Stop, but it was a good read and had characters who I love (Smith, my beloved). For a while there, I was convinced that it was going to take CMQ4 to break my book drought.

Alexis Hall - Boyfriend Material was the first book of his that I read, and I quickly read a lot of his back catalogue along with everything he’s published since and there’s nothing I’ve read that I haven’t enjoyed immensely. Plus, when I was on Twitter, I soon learned that Alexis loves to have a conversation almost entirely in Schitt’s Creek gifs and anyone who does that immediately endears themselves to me 😅

no pressure tagging: @pragmatic-optimist @nelsonnicholas @indomitable-love @welcometololaland @celeritas2997 @danieljradcliffe @howtosingit @swearphil @stereopticons (have another tag 😂) @reasonandfaithinharmony @guardian-angle22 @never-blooms

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

pre-post-mortem propaganda for Lalli Hotakainen since he's losing bad! (good!!!) Lalli is from Stand Still Stay SIlent, a webcomic that takes place in a "zombie" post-apocalypse story. he's part of a party that goes into The Silent World to find lost books! there are several awesome things that set SSSS apart:

society still exists in a very optimistic way, this is not your everyone-backstabbing-everyone competing-for-safe-spaces type of zombie horror. there are new cultural norms and technology that allow people to live comfortably. it's implied that there may be other outcroppings of civilization outside where the story takes place (Scandinavia).

magic! specifically magic based on Finnish, Icelandic, and Norwegian folklore (although there's probably some Danish stuff that I missed?), and we get to see characters from different countries rely upon their own respective magic (and weird out people from other cultures lol). Lalli himself is a Finnish mage and man is it fun to watch him do his thing :D

characters who are good people with believable flaws and great chemistry. the cast of this comic is so sweet and funny, it really makes you feel for them when the world itself is Terrifying.

ridiculously cool monster designs! big on body horror and just... Good. SSSS has some of the best zombie-monster designs I've ever seen and executes them with incredible artistic skill.

in general this comic absolutely nails tonal shifts from silly character banter and deadpan humor to genuinely disturbing visuals and implications and frankly I think horror as a genre needs to take some notes on how to balance lighthearted moments with awful shit because it really makes the bad stuff hit harder.

Finally, SSSS is finished, with two adventures spanning about 1500 pages altogether! the longer and more serious first adventure is about 2/3 of that, and you can absolutely just read that one. content warnings for death (animal and human), trauma, gore, body horror, and suicide, among some others. the author also ended the comic because she converted to Christianity and she becomes very vocal about it toward the end. nonetheless I think SSSS is amazing and can still be enjoyed, but exercise caution checking out her later work if you have trauma associated with organized religion.

god i tried not to make this long because I can only bear to skim most anti-propaganda myself but tl;dr if you like post-apocalypse/dystopian future stories, SSSS is one you shouldn't miss!

^

[hirazuki]

Okay, see, the thing about your story ending on a negative/dystopian/'despite everything that's happened nothing has changed in society' note and doing so successfully? It needs to have been set up for that in the first place, and it needs to be done in an intentional manner.

I have nothing against works that reinforce how cruel/meaningless/pointless/etc. the world is -- I enjoy a fair few! -- but the works themselves need to be some sort of commentary about it; the plot might be demonstrative of the futility of everything, but the story never should. It should take that and build on it and use it to make a statement, underscore a point, etc. to its readers. Having everything carry on business-as-usual without acknowledging it, especially in a genre that's generally meant to conclude on optimistic, uplifting, and hopeful notes, comes off as callous and in direct opposition with the values it extols.

Plus, the story itself should never be futile because, then, well, it never mattered as a work and it makes no difference if you've read it or not. Which... that's just a badly written story lmao.

[mattnben-bennmatt]

Matt Damon: 'You're a better actor the less people know about you'

The Guardian (27 September 2015)

By Elizabeth Day

He is Hollywood’s ultimate everyman. Matt Damon talks about The Martian, missing Robin Williams – and the theory that he and Ben Affleck were gay

I am sitting opposite Matt Damon and he is saying he’s sorry for being a bad movie star. He can’t help it, he says. He’s simply too dull.

“I think people just leave a room I’m in and they’re like: Well that guy wasn’t a movie star,” he explains. “Jesus! Anybody could do that.”

We are sitting in a gloomy hotel room, at a large round conference table which is too big for the two of us. Damon is dressed like a father on the school run: sensible navy blue polo shirt, trousers with practical pockets down the side. He has a smattering of facial hair. The most film-starry thing about him is his muscle tone: he has arms that look like they’ve been drawn by a Popeye animator.

Other than this, Damon insists he’s entirely normal. He has a wife, Luciana, whom he met while filming in Miami in 2003 when she was working behind a bar, and the couple have four daughters ranging in age from four to 16 – Alexia, from Luciana’s previous relationship, Isabella, Gia and Stella. Damon is a self-confessed family man. He has a rule that they will never be apart for more than two weeks while he’s filming. His daily life is so average even the paparazzi have decamped from outside his home in Los Angeles because he never does anything that merits a photograph.

“You know, a guy who’s married happily with four kids is not quite a story,” Damon says with a sorry-but-what-can-you-do smile. “And so they’ll come back and they’ll take an occasional picture… but it’s kind of just updating the file.”

I’m not entirely buying this. At 44, Damon is smart enough to know that his supposed “normality” is his stock in trade. His approachability on-screen, combined with a sense of nuance and depth, has lent his performances a likeable, everyman-ish quality that has proved to be box-office catnip.

In 2007, Forbes magazine named Damon as Hollywood’s most bankable actor, averaging $29 in takings for every dollar he earned in a movie. From Good Will Hunting (which Damon co-wrote with Ben Affleck, winning the 1997 Oscar for best screenplay) and Saving Private Ryan to the big-budget Bourne movie franchise or the dystopian sci-fi fantasy Elysium, he has a capacity to hint at a character’s inner complexity without ever veering into pretension. According to Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, Damon’s power lies in his ability “to recede into a film while also being fully present”.

His latest project is no exception. In The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and co-starring Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristen Wiig, Damon plays Mark Watney, a Nasa astronaut who finds himself stranded on Mars after he is injured in a fierce storm and presumed dead by his crew.

Admittedly, an astronaut is hardly your average kind of Joe, but Damon manages to imbue the role with his classic down-to-earth sensibility. When Watney is confronted with a problem, he solves it through the power of science and logical thinking. Despite forever teetering on the verge of an existential crisis, Watney remains quick-witted and optimistic. When he runs out of food, he simply starts growing potatoes in his own vacuum-packed faecal matter. That kind of thing.

I wonder if filming The Martian made Damon contemplate his own resourcefulness. Would he be good in a similar situation?

“Probably not, no. I have too many connections that matter to me. It might be fun for a day, you know, but no. I’d probably go a little bonkers.”

Even as a small boy, he never wanted to be an astronaut, preferring instead the world of superheroes. When he was growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his older brother Kyle, his mother would put out a dressing-up box and he would choose either a red or blue floral towel, safety-pinning it round his neck like a cape. The red towel was for Superman. Blue was for Shazam, the teenage hero of a 70s TV series who could transform into Captain Marvel.

“That was how I broke my ankle,” Damon recalls. “When I was three, I climbed to the top of the jungle gym in my Shazam cape and I shouted ‘Shazam!’ And I tried to fly and I fell.”

He remembers his stockbroker father, Kent, running across from the other side of the playground to come to his aid and what stuck in Damon’s mind was not the pain in his ankle but the way his father was running – like an athlete, with pumping arms and a long, fluid pace.

“I remember afterwards, when I healed, months later, trying to jog [like him]. So I would jog pumping my fists to the ground. I was trying to ape the movement, but I wasn’t quite pulling it off.” He shakes his head, laughs.

He was three, he’d just broken his ankle, but Damon’s focus was already on how another person was behaving and how he could best mimic it.

His parents later divorced and the boys lived with their mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a university professor specialising in early education. Apparently, she always knew he was going to be an actor because of his love of costume and role-playing, and his ability to entertain himself for long stretches of time.

But Damon found fame as one-half of a long-term collaboration. Ben Affleck was his childhood best friend – the two of them met when they were eight and attended the same high school. Damon went to Harvard, Affleck to the University of Vermont, but both dropped out before getting their degrees and worked together on the script for Good Will Hunting, which drew on their own experiences growing up in Cambridge. The script was bought by Castle Rock in 1994. Three years later it became a huge critical and commercial success starring Damon as undiscovered genius Will Hunting, with Affleck as his childhood friend, and Robin Williams as the psychologist who helps Hunting come to terms with his talent.

“I laughed the entire time we wrote,” Damon says now. “It was a really joyful experience.” He was less enamoured of his sudden celebrity. “You wake up one morning and the world is entirely the same and you know, actually, all the things that mattered yesterday are the same today, except the world is forever going to be a totally different place for you,” he says.

“That’s the mind-fuck and it takes a few years to even get your head around what’s happening… I remember my brother said: ‘How are you doing?’ And I was, like, ‘I’m the fucking same, but everyone else is different.’”

He credits his “really solid childhood” with getting him through. But for people who lack a support network, or whose fame reaches absurdly overblown levels, it is a different story. We are meeting almost exactly a year after his Good Will Hunting co-star, Robin Williams, took his own life. Williams suffered from severe depression. I ask Damon if he worries about the pressures fame can put on an individual’s mental health.

“Of course,” he says quietly. “Peter Farrelly, who is a friend of mine, the director, he was talking about suicide and he said something really lovely, which was: ‘Whenever that happens to a friend of mine [suicide], I feel like they’re just in a house on fire and they have to get out.’ I hoped that it [Williams’s death] could lead to a wider discussion about mental health because if somebody that incredible and wonderful – just such a light – could be living with that, hopefully it could give other people permission to talk about this to people around them. So that at least something positive came out of something so horrible.”

It’s nice, talking to Damon. Unlike many actors, he answers questions with a reflective openness. There is a feeling that nothing is out of bounds. He is politically engaged – a Democrat, but also a critic of Barack Obama (he has spoken out about Obama’s education policies and questioned the legality of drone strikes) and says he’s deeply worried about the chasm between rich and poor in America in the aftermath of the economic crisis.

“That anger did not go away because none of these guys [the bankers] got prosecuted and they all have our money, and these houses in the Hamptons they live in – that they claim to have earned – are paid for with our money. I mean, that’s what happened! And so, I don’t know what the consequences for that kind of thing are.”

He maintains a steady eye contact and has a dry sense of humour. When I ask, in the middle of a discussion about directors, whether he would ever consider being directed by Affleck, he replies deadpan: “Sure, if the right thing came along.” Pause. “I mean, he usually gives himself the main role in the thing he’s directing, so it would need to probably be a two-hander.”

He says that when picking projects, he is entirely guided by the quality of the director: “That’s all that matters in film. The rest of it is utter bullshit. A mediocre director will ruin a great piece of material.” Has he worked with mediocre directors in the past? “Yes.”

He won’t name names. But for every big-budget blockbuster he has been attached to, Damon has put in a quieter, more complex performance in films like Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley or The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert de Niro, or Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. In 2013, he starred as Liberace’s lover, Scott Thorson, in the Steven Soderbergh television drama film Behind the Candelabra.

Damon was a straight man playing gay. Is it harder for actors to be openly gay in Hollywood? “I’m sure. When Ben and I first came on the scene there were rumours that we were gay because it was two guys who wrote a script together.”

Really?

“I know. It’s just like any piece of gossip… and it put us in a weird position of having to answer, you know what I mean? Which was then really deeply offensive. I don’t want to, like [imply] it’s some sort of disease – then it’s like I’m throwing my friends under the bus. But at the time, I remember thinking and saying, Rupert Everett was openly gay and this guy – more handsome than anybody, a classically trained actor – it’s tough to make the argument that he didn’t take a hit for being out.”

He thinks attitudes are changing, and welcomes the introduction of same-sex marriage in California in 2008. “I think it must be really hard for actors to be out publicly,” he continues. “But in terms of actors, I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you period. And sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality because that’s one of the mysteries that you should be able to play.”

So is Matt Damon just a normal guy, adept at pretending to be mysterious? I don’t think so. He’s cleverer than that: he’s worked out that the appearance of averageness affords the greatest opportunity for privacy and creative space.

How would he describe himself as an actor? There is a long pause. “I don’t know,” he says. “Subtle, hopefully.”

The arms though. The arms give him away.

[elizanikol]

[ nicole maines | she/her] A new face takes refuge under Dark Skies. ELIZA NIKOL MIKAELSON, a 21 year old HUMAN, is one of those from the FUTURE learning to navigate this changed world. People say behind their back that they’re FLIGHTY but the truth is that they’re really OPTIMISTIC. Their style can best be described as COMIC BOOKS, WIND CHIMES AND SMILES, and we’ll see how that helps them fit in. *Rebekah and Maveric's daughter

There were many advantages to being born to a mother who had quite literally seen it all. For Eliza, one of those was that when she tearfully came out to Rebekah there wasn't a moment of hesitation in helping her embrace her true self. Even in the dystopian future she was born into, her parents made sure she had everything she ever needed.

As she grew up under the constant threat of Triad she was still encouraged to adopt new hobbies and embrace new talents, and more often than not she did so at her father's side. Maveric enthusiastically went along with every new interest that caught her attention, and she was grateful for all the time that he would spend with her. Her greatest interest, though, was comics. Whether her parents brought them home or whether she found them in old stores, Eliza devoured the stories - to her, the superheroes depicted within could easily be her own family.

And as much love as she had for her parents, an equal measure went to her siblings. Gracie's chaos, Artemis' tendency toward grand theft auto, Eliza was a willing partner or an accomplice to help cover things up, whichever was asked of her. She couldn't imagine a life without her siblings, and was glad she'd never have to.

Being pulled back to the past was terrifying, but for someone with such a love of comics and their grand stories it almost felt fitting. This was a Crisis, like the one in the best stories, and it was the Mikaelsons who would play the heroes in the tale. Because of course it was.

"El mayarah - Stronger Together."

[archaickobold]

First worldbuilding post! It's a long one, so I put it under a read more:

Basic worldbuilding:

The setting of all of this is a place just called The City, which is a massive, continent sized city consisting of interlocking skyscrapers, that has been standing for the past 5,000 years. There are some sci-fi, futuristic, cyberpunk elements, along with some dystopian elements, too. 

Notably, there is also a very firm class system, literally built upon the structure of the City itself. Most people in the City will never set foot on the ground in their lifetime, instead living in the upper floors of the skyscrapers. The people living at the very top, or the Upper, are called Uppers, the ones in the Middle are called Middleites, and the ones at the bottom, or the Lower, are called Lowers. Their wealth corresponds with their location– the wealthier a person is, generally, the higher up they live, even within the sections.

Along with the class system is a large amount of classism, as well. Uppers generally regard Lowers as being filthy and violent, and Lowers tend to regard Uppers as pretentious jackasses. The Middle tends to be less polarizing, but Uppers still look down on them for not being as rich as they are, and the Lowers see them as thinking that they’re better than them, or as Upper wannabes. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn’t.

The City is also split horizontally, not just vertically, into 21 different sectors and districts. Some of these are more worldbuilt than others, with some having fully fledged politics, while others are still essentially just names. It’s a work in progress! 

Additionally, another very important element of this is that everyone in the City also has some superpower, of some type. It first activates around 10-12, depending on how powerful the power is. The stronger, the younger it kicks in. For my existing main characters, this power can range from telepathy, to astral projection, to sound deadening, to aerokinesis, to teleportation, and many, many more. I could make an entire post just about how powers work, and I might just do that, later. 

Map:

Small, additional worldbuilding notes: 

Sol is the god of this world, though generally isn’t very relevant. Mostly used as an exclamation to replace “oh god” with “oh sol,” because I felt like it damaged the immersion.

The Head of the State is the person in charge of a sector or district, and their Keys are their advisors.

Dating between an Upper and Lower is seen as taboo and could get both the Upper and Lower socially ostracized if their relationship was found out. 

Lowers and sometimes Middleites will introduce themselves to strangers with a nickname, rather than their actual name, because unless you are willing to pay to have your private information kept private, it is very easy for someone to find it with just a name and appearance. Uppers can afford this privacy, Lowers and Middleites, not so much. 

Transphobia, homophobia, etc, are very, very much less of a problem in the City than irl. I don’t want to have it in my story too much, and so I don’t. 

Very basic description of some characters (Honestly, will probably be elaborated on more in a later post/through the writings):

Lucas: he/him, cis guy. Currently a Middleite, but was raised in the Upper. Dating Miro and Slate. Power is lesser astral projection, so while he can astral project, he can’t move anything around. Has made bad relationship decisions in the past, but is generally optimistic and upbeat. Lives with his dad, and has slowly started to adapt to the Middle. He tends to end up as more of a mediator, but he’s trying to stand up for himself more.

Miro: he/him, trans guy. Lower. Dating Lucas and Slate. Power is greater astral projection, so he can astral project and move things around some, like a poltergeist. Tends to be more mischievous and generally a little shit, but also fiercely protective of the people he cares about. Takes great pride in being a Lower, and while he isn’t the happiest about having to hide his class while in the Upper in order to date Slate, he’s willing to do it for him.

Slate: he/him, cis guy. Upper. Dating Lucas and Miro. Power is sound deadening, so when he focuses, he is able to make himself and anything he focuses on perfectly silent. He is the heir to Key, or an advisor for the Head of State. He’s apparently a little oblivious, but he’s smarter than he lets on, especially when it comes to politics. When it comes to street smarts, he is less knowledgeable, but he’s learning more from just being around Miro. He also has to hide his class when he’s in the Lower with Miro, but he doesn’t mind quite as much. It’s refreshing to him, really, to not be seen as anyone special. 

[frankendykes-monster]

But the question of one's favorite version of the Legion of Super-Heroes is a deceptively complex one. It's not just a matter of team line-ups or creative teams, but the actual directions and themes explored by the franchise. The Legion has been relaunched and repackaged more than anything else in the DC Universe -- a universe where the line-wide reboot has become the go-to move -- and each time it's based on different ideas of what these characters mean, and what the future looks like. As much as they might be in the same continuity, the original Legion has a completely different set of ideals that it's exploring than the Dystopian "Five Years Later" Legion of the '80s, and when Mark Waid and Barry Kitson "threebooted" the Legion in 2004, their stories were a reaction to a completely different environment in comics than when they rebooted it the first time ten years earlier.

And because each version of the Legion is so thematically different than the others, the question of which one's your favorite has a lot to do with which of those themes you find appealing. For me, there's no question, and I'm sure this won't surprise anyone: I love the original Silver Age Legion.

Part of that comes from the same reason that I love a lot of Silver Age books, in that it's just full of bizarre kookiness, with a sci-fi setting that allowed the creators to ratchet the weirdness up even higher than they did in the regular line back in those days. There's one story in the '60s where someone's spying on the Legion and they can't figure out who until they realize that there's a tiny little man living in Sun Boy's ankle who was surgically implanted there by one of their enemies when Sun Boy went to the dentist, and it's hard to say if that was actually the craziest thing they ever did in those stories.

But more than that, there's an optimism to it.

When I talked to him about writing the Star Trek / Legion crossover, Chris Roberson told me that one of the things that attracted him to both franchises was that they both showed an optimistic future, and he's right. When you think about the time when the Legion was created in 1958 and those years in the '60s when they grew in popularity, that was the same time when people were building fallout shelters in the back yard and teaching school kids to duck and cover under a school desk in the event of an atom bomb. Nuclear war wasn't just a possibility, it was seen as something that was pretty much inevitable, and that was reflected in the fiction of the time. This was the dawn of the post-apocalyptic story, with increasingly grim visions of the future based on the destruction that we'd already seen.

But with Silver Age comics in general, and the Legion in particular, it was different. I imagine that the Comics Code and a desire to not get any irate letters from parents about terrifying their children with visions of nuclear holocaust were as much a motivating factor as any bright-eyed hope for the future when creators like Otto Binder and Jerry Siegel approached it, but the fact remains that they showed us a future that was thriving.

The Legion's 30th Century wasn't quite a utopia, but it wasn't a wasteland either. It was a glimpse of a future where everything worked out okay, with a galaxy of strange aliens from even stranger worlds united behind Earth. Well, okay, admittedly, they were less strange aliens and more "a bunch of white people and one green dude," but the sentiment was there. The very existence of that art deco skyline of the 30th century was a sign that we as a civilization had made it through, even when it was under attack by computer robots.

There's actually a story from 1964 -- the first appearance of Dream Girl, if you want to look it up -- where a few Legionnaires take a one-panel field trip to a world that actually has been destroyed in an atomic war, but for them, it's a strange historical curiosity that they're viewing from the outside. It's a "might have been" and not a "definitely will."

Of course, the fact that things worked out okay was to be expected. Even though we were in danger here in the real world, the Legion's future was descended from an Earth that had Superman protecting it, which points to another great element of the team. They have that same aspirational element to them that I love about characters like Robin and Jimmy Olsen, but it's applied to an entire universe. The existence of the Legion is predicated on two different ideas about Superman. The first is just that Superman is there to make sure that their future exists, and as simple as that might sound, the fact that we see the end result of what he does makes his struggle in that Never-Ending Battle against evil mean something. A dystopian future means that he failed somewhere along the line and that in the end, all of his good works didn't matter. A future that's bright and united, however, means that all of those times he saved the world from Luthor or Brainaic actually counted for something, that there was something out there to make it worthwhile.

And the second is that it's those battles, and Superman specifically, that inspire the Legion to form and use their powers to do the same thing he did. It's a pretty strong recommendation for his character that his legend and his accomplishments last for the next thousand years, and it lends a power to the mythology of Superman. It immediately puts him in the ranks of Hercules and Robin Hood, these figures that we still talk about a thousand years (or more) after they first entered culture. It just does it in a way that we don't have to wait around to see if it actually works out that way once 2958 rolls around.

Just as important as that, though, it casts the Legionnaires themselves as fans. Just like Jimmy Olsen, it brings the idea that the readers themselves could be part of the story to the forefront, with the added wish fulfillment of granting them super-powers and sending them off on their own adventures. It's something that Waid and Kitson touched on in their "Threeboot" Legion, going as far as to have the characters actually sitting around reading Silver Age comics and drawing inspiration from the adventures there to escape from the boring repetition of their world. Which, incidentally, may be a metaphor for what was going on in the rest of the DC Universe at the time. Who knows.

Anyway, that ties in with yet another element that I find really appealing, that springs right from the fact that they're so readily identifiable to the readers: The Legion are a bunch of kids. There are later versions where the same characters have grown up, but for me, that doesn't work as well at all. It breaks one of the best metaphors of the entire franchise, that they're children, a group that symbolizes the future, who also literally represent the future. They're the ones looking around at their world with fresh eyes and going "Hey, we should all just be like Superman." Adults -- with the exception of those who sit around thinking about funnybooks all day -- don't think like that, but kids do, and the Legion are a bunch of kids who actually have the power to make that work.

Incidentally, I feel the same way about the X-Men -- not that there should never be grown-up X-Men, but that there should always be some kind of emphasis on young characters and the school. The metaphor of evolution and the newer, younger species arriving to possibly replace the old is just too good to pass up.

Speaking of the X-Men, I think it's fair to say that that's a franchise that owes a lot to the Legion, and not just because Dave Cockrum originally designed Nightcrawler and Colossus as Legionnaires before they were rejected and sent packing across town to Marvel. Because it was set in the future and not bound to the rest of the DC Universe, the Legion was free to build its own continuity, and it took a path of change and dynamism that you didn't usually see in the Silver Age. Things didn't always end with a return to the Status Quo. Lightning Lad died, came back, lost an arm, and had it replaced. New members joined. Prospective members were rejected and formed their own teams. A third of Triplicate Girl was killed off "permanently" and she returned as Duo Damsel. Things changed.

But the most important thing that the X-Men and most other comics about teenage superheroes lifted from the Legion is that for the first time, kids with super-powers acted like actual kids. And by that, I mean that they were massive jerks to each other.

And I love that about them.

I wrote about this once for a book of essays on the Legion called Teenagers From The Future (available now in finer bookstores everywhere, tell your friends), but it really just boils down to this: When adults are jerks to each other, they're just jerks, but when kids are jerks it's because they're kids. Kids make up weird rules about things and get unreasonably angry when someone breaks them. They form clubs with bizarre secret rules that they take too seriously until they forget about them and never bring them up again. They're dicks to each other for no discernible reason.

And that is exactly how the Legion conducts itself.

Maybe the best example of this is the occasional recruitment drives, which are literally just stories where characters like Matter Eater Lad and Light Lass (she makes things less heavy!) sit around and tell other super-powered youths how much they suck:

I spent a good chunk of my youth attending public school, so I can go ahead and confirm that this is exactly what it would be like if teenagers actually had super-powers. He can avert nuclear war, but even Superman can't make kids stop being jerks to each other.

And they were jerks. Their very first appearance is based around going back in time to play a prank on this guy that they idolize, and it just builds from there. At least one out of every three stories is some variation on that theme, and they get weird with it. The first time Supergirl meets the Legion, they don't let her join because exposure to Red Kryptonite has made her "over 18" for like an hour. Keep in mind: this is a temporary condition and they are time travelers. And occasionally, they just turn on each other, living out a kid's idea of gender relationships:

There's a lot of Legion runs that I love, but that original has never been topped for how much it appeals to me, which might seem a little weird when you consider that I got into it around 2006 at the age of 24 after never reading a Legion story in my life and not when I was the age where I actually should've been identifying with these characters. But there's something there that I can't deny the appeal of, that combination of hopeful optimism and kids being jerks, of Silver Age weirdness and emotional authenticity, and the past's idea of what the future could be if we all made it through.

Chris Sim, writing for Comics Alliance, 2012

[is-solarpunk]

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Many people have written about Solarpunk during the last 10+ years. Mostly after 2014. 

The genre is not yet clearly defined.

This Solarpunk Manifesto is a creative re-adaptation of ideas about solarpunk written by many people. These ideas can be mainly found in Solarpunk: a reference guide which can be found here and in Solarpunk: Notes towards a Manifesto by Adam Flynn, which can be found here.

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” 

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. 

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.

The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.

Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.

Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk��s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.

Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.

Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.

Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

Appropriate technology

Art Nouveau

Hayao Miyazaki

Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world

High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.

Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.

Solarpunk:

is diverse

has room for spirituality and science to coexist

is beautiful

can happen. Now

[themosleyreview]

The Mosley Review: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

There is a reason why video game developers don't license out their product or games to film studios. If the early 90's taught us anything, they haven't gotten it right at all. Back in 1993, the most guiltiest pleasure of a film was released and it caused Nintendo to never trust the film industry to adapt their legendary catalog to screen. Super Mario Bros. was absolutely an abomination of a film that didn't even try to get the world or design of the beloved game correct. What my generation got was a comedic and yet dark dystopian creature feature that even the cast hated making. I still enjoy the ridiculous and fun charm despite its massive sins committed against the property. It sparked my crush for Samantha Mathis so that was always a plus. Nintendo has taken the chance again and trusted another film studio to try and respect the source material, but did it work? Absolutely! From the opening credits to the final shot of the film, this was 100 percent a Super Mario Bros. game come to life in everyway possible. The choice to do it animated was the only way to get it right and the filmmakers nailed it. From the vast amount of classic references, Easter eggs, recreations of the original game levels of Donkey Kong and Mario Kart, I was in heaven. The universe of Mario Bros. was on complete display and handled with such respect. There are some updated story elements that alter the original stories of the games, but it didn't actually matter in this instance because the amount of fun I was having with the breakneck pace of the film. I had my reservation about certain casting choices and I was pleasantly surprised by how well the cast pulled it off.

Chris Pratt takes the lead as Mario and I had my thoughts on the choice of a big name actor to play him. I wanted the voice actor that has voiced the character for 100 games and I was afraid that all I was gonna hear was Pratt. Well Chris absolutely blew my expectations out of the water and nailed the characters heart and optimistic spirit. Charlie Day was fantastic as his skiddish, faithful and sometimes hilariously tortured brother Liuigi. He seriously gets put through the ringer in this film and I sometimes felt sorry for him as he is sidelined for the majority of the film. His chemistry with Mario was truly a highlight when they were together and they had an amazing action scene together toward last portion of the film. The bathroom sequence was awesome as well with the dog.  The original voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, is in the film and I loved that he played the father of both Mario and Luigi. It was a wonderful touch for him to be the one that propels their story to earn the respect of their father. Anya Taylor-Joy was excellent as Princess Peach and I liked that they updated her character. Historically, she was the damsel in distress that Mario would always have to save and now she is more of a stronger person. It wasn't a politically overbearing choice that somehow made her the hero of the film. She was a great ally to Mario and you grow to love her by the end. Keegan-Michael Key was outstanding as Toad and nearly stole the film with all of the cute and heroic moments. He wasn't a bumbling character that was just there to sell toys and I loved that he was very creative and brave. Seth Rogen blew me away with his performance as Donkey Kong. He was as funny, arrogant and tough as Kong should be. He was so much fun to watch and the rivalry between him and Mario was so reminiscent of their original arcade game debut. Jack Black is always a delight and as King Bowser, he was hilarious and unexpectedly menacing in so many great ways. He is a villain with a big heart, but he will burn all that cross him. I loved his many musical numbers and a particular scene with a piano where he plays a well placed theme we all know to add tension. Kevin Michael Richardson was awesome as the sorcerer and right hand of Bowser, Kamek. Kevin has always been one of my favorite voice actors and I always enjoy hearing his talented and distinct voice in anything. He was awesome and great in his scenes with Bowser. Khary Payton was great as the Penguin King and even though his major scene was in the trailer, he still had more fun moments in the film to witness. Juliet Jelenic was adorable and hilariously dark humored as Lumalee. Every line that kid spoke was comedy gold and I loved every second of it.

The score was brilliant and recreated all the iconic music of the franchise in epic and creative forms. Brian Tyler truly created a masterpiece of a score that had me smiling from the ear to ear as the themes that Koji Kondo created came back to life in the right moments at the right time. The underground tube theme from the first game was used perfectly to build tension in one specific moment. Even though the film has a attention span of 2 year old, the story still held even if it was a bit basic. I wasn't looking for something Oscar worthy, but what we got was serviceable and you've seen it done before. Other than that, there's really nothing bad I can say about this delightful and fun family film that will be enjoyed by adults as well. If you're a hardcore fan of the Mario universe, then you will have your mind blown. For the casuals like me that grew up with it but never continued with the franchise after Mario 64, I still found myself having so much fun and smiling at all the recreations of classic levels and references to other Nintendo classics. Do stick around to the end of the film for an end credit that'll make you smile even harder. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in the comments below. Thanks for reading!    

[cyarskj1899]

The north remembers

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Drake Introduces First Woman OVO Artist As The World Waits For Him To Apologize To Megan Thee Stallion

No, Aubrey, we haven't forgotten the error of your ways.

By

Candace McDuffie

Published6 hours ago

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Drake has finally acquired the first woman artist to grace his OVO Sound label. Even though he went to social media to champion singer Naomi Sharon, the world is still eagerly waiting for him to apologize to another woman music artist who goes by the name Megan Thee Stallion.

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Sharon, who is of Caribbean/Dutch descent, released two new songs on Friday (January 20):“Celestial” and “Another Life.” Noah “40" Shebib, who’s worked with Drake for a number of years but still showed support for Meg, helped produce both singles. After both tracks dropped, Drake went to Instagram to celebrate.

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He wrote:

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Sharon replied to Drake by gushing on Instagram: “Words cannot express how happy I am I can finally share this news with the world. And I cannot thank you enough for this insane opportunity.”

This is all well and nice or whatever, but if Drake really wanted to show how he stands in solidarity with women in the music industry he would acknowledge the cheap shots he took at Megan Thee Stallion last year. On “Circo Loco,” a song on the joint project with 21 Savage entitled Her Loss, Drake rapped:

“This bi**h lie ’bout getting shots, but she still a stallion/ She don’t even get the joke/ But she still smiling.” This controversy lit the internet on fire, with Megan taking to Twitter to address the disrespect. 

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“Stop using my shooting for clout bi**h ass N****s! Since when tf is it cool to joke abt women getting shot !” she wrote. “People attack me y’all go up for it , i defend myself now I’m doing too much … every time it never ends and this did NOT happen until I came out and said I got shot … y’all don’t fwm okay cool f–k it bye.” 

Drizzy, it’s time for you to atone—we haven’t forgotten what you did. 

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[whatyourusherthinks]

AFRAID Review

Well I hate that title. It's a horror movie about AI, what's wrong with it? I dunno Buggnutz, it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because of the way the pun is formatted. Looks dumb. Otherwise, I only got the trailer once, and my opinions was, "It's a horror movie Blumhouse is making a movie about the dangers of AI... Huh." Trailer looked alright. I like that the director is also the writer. I heard it was stupid from my coworkers and the reviews were bad, but this wouldn't time I've disagreed with both of those group of people about Blumhouse specifically in the past, so maybe this movie will be another Imaginary. I'm not exactly optimistic, but it could be something.

What's The Movie About?

A family gets chosen to host an AI called AIA (No way. Yep. Look at the poster.) and it slowly forces it's way into every aspect of their lives. But is it for the better? (No way. Yep. As in you are correct to say it isn't.)

What I Like.

I dig the premise, actually. To risk a spoiler, the story heads in a very Mommie Dearest direction with AIA's motivation and how she manipulates the family. I think it's a whole lot more realistic than the "Robot decides humans a weak/detrimental to their development/the real problem for the earth and so they will kill all humans" angle, anyway. I also like how AIA manipulates the kids, it was incredibly creepy and would absolutely work. They don't, like, try to stab their parents or anything so it's not ridiculous, AIA just bribes them and gaslights them into putting themselves in danger. The ending is pretty damn dark and I was there for it. There's actually a pretty interesting mystery about what AIA is specifically and I kinda dug where it ended up, it seemed like a pretty cool bit of satire. Speaking of which, the way that AIA takes over the main characters' lives was just the extreme of what AI is doing now, which was incredibly smart. I felt like the writer was doing the classic dystopian focus-on-one-aspect-of-society-and-make-it-absurd this which was pretty cool and scary. There were some pretty tense moments over all, especially when AIA is able to convince the younger kids into basically walking into danger. All the acting was good too (except the younger kids, which I will not hold against them or the movie), as well as the cinematography. Nothing too crazy cool, but there's some fun focus shots and I liked the actors who played the parents.

What I Don't Like.

The characters are kinda dumb. Almost all of them seem to flip flop on a dime on whether or not AIA is cool or totally evil, and none of them give a second thought to the AI taking over their phones until like, the end of the movie. The younger kid was fine, but the two other kids' plotlines my eyes were glazing over during. The older daughter's would have been fine as it's own separate movie, because it is weirdly horny! It's not just the teen's plotline, there's a couple other moments that I felt had out of place sex jokes. Prude. I mean, I guess, but the jokes weren't particularly gross or anything. They just felt out of place when the main plot is this very sterile, tech-corporate futurist atheistic. Also, while I liked the ending, it does feel like it jumped the shark a little bit. There's like five twists back to back and while none of them are particularly outlandish, it did make some parts of the climax seem absurd until I thought about it a little bit. And as tense as some scenes where, there was an equal amount that were trying to be scary and were either bland or silly.

My final point is that I can't figure out of this movie uses AI art or not. It seems like they do, but it's purposefully bad and uncanny because it's supposed to part of the message of the movie. They credit a company for the digital images, and when I looked it up all the articles where about how the story of the movie talks about the dangers of AI images. (Which, I don't need to say this, but the images aren't strictly speaking the problem. Most sensible people can tell they are fake. The problem is that people will use an AI generated images instead of hiring an artist, thus giving money to a big tech company than a flesh and blood human being.) But isn't it on theme to use AI art in this movie? It's all about how dangerous AI is. Read my aside closer. Can you guess what I'm about say? *Sigh* To pay an artist to fak- PAY AN ARTIST TO FAKE IT, YES. Give no quarter everyone. Read my Late Night With Devil review or listen to the Video Brews podcast about the Borderlands to see what I mean about this. Man you've really sold out Roan. I'M SELF PROMOTING. Also I don't get paid for any of this shit.

Final Summation.

This movie's aight. It's biggest failing is that it tried to bridge the gap between a sterile horror sci-fi dystopia, and a some-what grimy slasher modern 'splotation movie that creates tonal dissonance. I'm annoyed it's not better to be perfectly frank. The movie is a great idea, but tries to spread itself too thin. Still, worth a watch. But not worth a "How I'd Fix It'? Nah. I'd have to rewrite the whole movie, not just a few parts. And if I'm gonna do that I need to get a writer's credit, got it?