#peding

[pelagodes]

eating u and eating u and

[sparklode]

air jail

[glow-and-vamp]

Every January-February we come back to Hollow Knight and write very self-indulgent RPs

Here's old doodles PK from random scenes in unrelated threads.

[putting-kinger-in-places]

put him in school

Greendale Community College

[ask-the-pioneer]

good luck finding breakfast Marbles! hopefully it won't be too difficult for you

"Way ahead of you!"

[mrmeepsmadmind]

i think cyberverse soundwave should be like rlly buff. like all over. as shockwave's little treat

[cybertron-after-dark]

Being constantly surrounded by the presence of a loving God sounds great until you realize you never know when his freaky fuckin eyes are gonna show up to check on you.

And man. They do it a LOT.

[barksbog]

here take this

[jaylestial]

I saw his heels in the official concept art and,,,

[hilobiak]

[ur-local-neighborhood-scene-kid]

I found more creatures on my walk.

Witness them

And some bonus spiders in my bathroom that I released. That was the whole reason for the walk lol

Two of them….. roommates

[pelagodes]

I find scorpions and these little stone centipedes in my garage everywhere during summer but I’m not complaining at all, they’re too cute.

[ssomepersonn]

jumped on the rw oc train

quite fun

[guessimdumb]

Elza Soares - Amor Perfeito (1972)

Marvelously funky samba from Elza Soares, with Dom Salvador producing.

[jenfoundabug]

When disturbed, many millipedes release a chemical defense through tiny pores on the sides of their bodies. The chemicals vary by species, but they can have lots of fun properties like foul smell, toxicity, or causticity (no touchy). Some species even emit hydrogen cyanide. I found this small friend under some bark in a redwood forest. It immediately coiled up into a defensive posture and released its spicy danger sauce. Since species identification often needs a close examination of the genital area, I have no idea what these chemicals do and didn't want to find out. Genus Tylobolus Northern California

[cellarspider]

17/30 Inappropriate relations between hugger and face

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We return to the movie that is a menace to itself and society at large, Prometheus. 

Content warning for gore, death, orifice invasion, and, unsurprisingly,

Time to kill the sacrificial side characters! Well, at least, kill the ones that have names and distinct personalities, so that you are expected to feel somewhat bad for them. And I do. They didn’t do anything bad enough to deserve this movie.

I mean, they’re going to die because the movie turns them into morons to make this scene work, but hey. They’re still doing better than the guy who managed to insult his life partner’s father, faith, and infertility in the course of two minutes.

This part of the movie, in fact, leans fully into 80s-90s slasher tropes. The people who’re having sex are all going to have various bad things happen to them throughout the movie, with their severity and dignity depending on whether they display traits considered virtuous. But Fifield the geologist has committed the cardinal sin of hotboxing his suit’s air supply while they wait out the night in the creepy alien structure, so he shall be among the first to die. 

To make this work, they have decided to spend the night in the room right next to the decapitated alien body they refused to get near before. They do not seem to mind it now, nor do they find it worrying that the room on the other side of it is full of the black oil from the X-Files.

This is one of the other infamous scenes that everybody remembers about this movie. Millburn is not doing anything that a morally punitive slasher movie would declare worthy of death, but he is going to behave like a moron.

Remember I said ages ago that there was a cut scene where he apparently showed real reverence for the existence of non-humanoid, unintelligent alien life? That was meant to provide context for why he’d be so excited to see the world’s most genital-faced snake.

We, the audience, know that this is probably what’s become of some alien worms last seen being exposed to the Ominous Black Goo. Why didn’t it fully melt them like the Engineer at the start? Not explained! We, the audience weird enough to remember Prometheus twelve years after it came out, should also know that when a snake-like creature rears up, flares open a hood, and makes hissing noises, you should not try to get close to that critter. That is an angry critter, and it is going to do angry things to you.

Millburn is presented as the kind of herp-lover who finds a snakey critter cute, so he should know this too. He does not. That is impressively bad. The one impressively good thing about this scene is that the creature is largely a practical effect, save for in moments where it needs to move in ways a puppet can’t. At the same time, it’s unfortunately hard to tell that it’s real, due to its texture. This helps hide the transitions to CG, but it also leaves you less convinced that it’s there. Sometimes a more obvious puppet can still feel more threatening, because they are indisputably there.

Still, this scene is, despite the stupid context, effective at most of what it wants to do: creating a sudden, brutal spike of violence, with one small creature managing to act as an unstoppable force. Millburn’s arm is broken, Fifield is sprayed with acid blood as he tries to help and falls face-first into the black ooze, leaving Milburn to be killed by the creature as it breaks into his suit and crawls down his throat. It hits two of the usual beats of an Alien movie: acid blood, and overtones of sexual violation.

It made me feel squeamish, although that might have something to do with the fact that it has a weird parallel to a sci-fi comedy movie that had some unpleasant marketing back when I was a wee Spider: Evolution. Apparently, back in 2001, it was considered comedic to watch a giant mosquito crawl under the skin of a man’s thigh and imply that it bit him in the balls. Wee Spider did not agree with this assessment, and so now that’s burnt into my psyche.

The crew of the Prometheus is none the wiser, because nobody kept a watch on the two of them. The last interaction they had was Janek saying ‘hey, we detected movement in there with you, probably just a glitch tho, nbd’ before wandering off to have sex with Vickers.

I want to remind everyone that this is the movie that wants to deal with themes including but not limited to:

The creation and purpose of humanity

The ethical implications of creating human-level artificial intelligence

How religion intersects with science and crises of faith

Are we truly capable of grappling with any of the above

Genocide

This movie is an absolute mess. It is beautifully shot, and a competent shock-horror film when it feels like it, but that accounts for a fraction of its runtime, and basically none of the dialog.

It also fails at building tension for scenes like these, because it undercuts Alfred Hitchcock's principle of cinematic tension:

[Video description: An excerpt from a lecture by Alfred Hitchcock:

"Four people are sitting around a table, talking about baseball, whatever you like. Five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What do the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene, and tell the audience there's a bomb under that table, and will go off in five minutes. Well the whole emotion of the audience is totally different, because you've given them that information. That in five minutes time, that bomb will go off. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they're saying to you, "Don't be ridiculous, stop talking about baseball, there's a bomb under the table!" You've got the audience working. Now the only difference is--and I've been guilty of, in the picture Sabotage, of making this error, but I've never made it since--The bomb must never go off. Because if you do, you've worked that audience into a state, and then they'll get angry because you haven't provided them with any relief. That's almost a must. So a foot touches the bomb, somebody looks down, says "My god, there's a bomb." Out of the window, then it goes off, just in time."

]

Prometheus tells you, over and over again, that the characters are in danger. Why are they in danger? Because they deliberately put themselves there. It's like they're a bunch of ordinance disposal experts sitting around Hitchcock's table, one of them nudges the bomb with their foot, and they look down and say "Huh! That's neat. Hey, take a poke at this, guys!"

The last bit of Hitchcock's principle is moot in this type of horror film, because there are only some characters that are positioned as being worthy of real worry on the part of the audience, which Prometheus also undermines--but not entirely. We still have a ways to go before they take his advice on that, though.

Next time: 

Many posts ago, I responded to Holloway’s behavior with an invocation of Clue:

The tables shall soon turn!

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Citations for alt-text rambles

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-a-penis 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooms 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/something-terrible-has-happened-here-the-crazy-story-of-how