#so i can finally rent all the movies i've wanted to see from the library and watch them on my computer in the privacy of my room <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[brothersonahotelbed]

LISTEN UP, EVERYONE‼️‼️i bought myself a cd/dvd drive for my computer :)

[secretsofsbopl]

A lot of things all kinds of combined recently that made me finally, FINALLY figure out how to extract almost all my music library from my agéd and venerable Mac onto my phone that I deliberately got with a massive amount of internal storage so that I could do just that. And it's been awesome, I've been listening to music that I haven't heard or even thought about in years, music that reminds me of who I was 10 or 15 years ago, music that I literally own and can listen to at any time with or without an internet connection. It's amazing.

The writers' and actors' strikes combined with the reality that any media you "own" on a digital platform could disappear at any moment was the primary driver for me. I love buying and listening to an entire album, to all the songs in the order released, thinking about the artist who was thinking about the listener and what order they thought the songs should be in. I love owning and reading books, i love the feeling of popping in a movie and settling in. Streaming absolutely has a time and place and I don't think it should go away, but physical media is so much better in a lot of ways, more robust, more personal. Just like with "AI", streaming could and should be one option among many, a carefully cultivated tool that serves specific purposes but is not the be-all, end-all.

As a kind of corollary to that, public lending libraries are an essential resource for physical media. Not only books but CDs and DVDs, digital loans, computer access, community building, and more. So much more. Tool libraries are the same and I wish they were more common, along with readily accessible makerspaces. I love owning tools that I use all the time but there are so many tools that I'll use only once or only for a brief period and never need again that I don't want to buy or store. There are so many books and movies and songs that I might not want to consume much more than once or twice, or don't know that I will like it enough to own until I read/see/listen and decide actually, yeah, I need that in my life a lot. Or nope, I don't even want to finish it the first time, much less have it around for years and years. But the choice. The choice to have it or not is the point. The ability to use a thing without extracting an endless current of data from the cloud, the localization is strangely empowering. And I'm starting to get why people like records, there's this extra level of intentionality to listening to music that way.

The massive media corporations and their executives have become just as dependent on consumers using streaming to access everything, to constantly rent access instead of actually owning anything. And I think it's time to go back just a little bit in some ways, to actually pay for the things you'll want to have just once, so that you can use it over and over again, to take those into your home in whatever form makes the most sense and cherish them in a way that streaming doesn't even get close to.

[heartbreaker-johnny]

Doyoung (TATBILB)

(credit to the gif owner)

So this is the first addition to the To All The Boys I've Loved Before series! I'll be doing a oneshot on each boy and they will all reveal in the first sentence on who the boy is to you, so there won't really be a need for a summary. I hope you guys like it!

genre-fluff (it's not romantic just cute)

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

Doyoung and I have been friends since we were kids.

When I was 10, we lived in a smaller town for a few years. My dad was temporarily relocated for his job and we were only expected to live there for two years. We lived in a rental house that was paid for in full by my fathers company, part of their relocation package. Jisung was just starting kindergarten and we had yet to be in the same school building. My parents were often more concerned with him, their baby finally starting school, which is probably why he was picked up first that day. It was only two weeks after school started when it all happened.

School was out and I was waiting in the schools lobby area, waiting for the sight of my mothers car. It was always my mother who picked us up, considering while we were in that town she wouldn’t be working and my father was being picked up by a company car every day. The sky was grey, seemingly getting slightly darker by the second. The clouds were close together and there were a lot of them but I didn’t think much of it. It had been a bit of a windy day but the breeze felt nice so I didn’t mind.

There was another boy, sitting on a bench across the lobby, wearing headphones and reading a book. He was in the same place, every day. I had never seen him picked up before me but then again, I was picked up almost always on time, never having been waiting this long. I wasn’t too concerned, chalking it up to traffic or maybe Jisung giving my mother a hard time. Perhaps he had gotten sick at school and she had to talk to his teacher. I didn’t mind waiting, patience was something I was good at as a child.

By the time my mother was 10 minutes late, I began to worry. The wind was picking up and the clouds were coming together, it was almost as if they were starting to form a circle. I had tried calling my mothers cell phone with the emergency phone I had been given, but she never picked up. I knew my father would be in a meeting so I didn’t  bother calling him. This was very unlike her but I was sure she would have an explanation. I looked around for any teachers or school staff, but most people had left for the day, those who were still here were in their classrooms or offices. I decided to go use the restroom, hoping by the time I got back my mother would be there.

When I came back out to the lobby, the sky was now a blackish grey and the wind had picked up, a lot. A loud noise broke the air, sending my small heart into a panic. The tornado siren. I knew the way back to the rest of the school, where there were no windows, was blocked off as it usually was after school. Where should I go? Should I go outside and find a ditch?

“Come on stupid, don’t just stand there!” A arm tugged on mine. It was the boy with the headphones.

He led me to a small hallway that ended with a door. He opened the door and led us down some stairs, to a large room I had never been in before. There were shelves of hundreds of copies of the same few books. It was like a little library, if you just wanted to read a different copy of the same book. He set his stuff down and sat against a shelf.

“Where are we?” I asked, confused and scared.

“This is where the teachers keep all the books for us to read in class. You know, when we all read the same book and the teacher has a bunch of copies? This is where they keep them. There’s no windows down here so we’ll be fine.” He explained.

“But won’t all of this just fall and crush us?” I asked, looking at the shelves.

“Maybe. They could also fall on us and keep us safe from anything else.” He shrugged.

I looked around for a few more minutes, before accepting defeat and sat down next to him. He was still reading the same book as before, as if nothing was happening outside.

"What’s your name?” I asked, not caring if I interrupted his reading. “I’m Y/N.”

“I know. We were in the same orientation last year.” He said, not looking up from his book. “I’m Doyoung.”

I couldn’t seem to remember meeting him last year, but I never really was good at remembering things.

“How did you know about this place?”

“I helped my teacher bring up books from here once. She said it used to be a bomb shelter a long time ago.”

“Is it always unlocked?”

“I don’t know. You ask a lot of questions.”

“Well if we’re gonna die I at least wanna know where I’m gonna die in and who I’m gonna die with.”

He closed his book and looked up at me, obviously annoyed.

“We’re not gonna die. It’s a bomb shelter, it works for tornados too.”

He started reading again and I looked around for something to do. I wasn’t fond of books at the time and I was more anxious than anything, so I kept talking to him, which he eventually got over. We talked about our hobbies and who’s classes we were in and other silly things kids found important to talk about. Something I was most curious about, was why he was still at school.

“Is your mom late getting you too? My moms picking up my little brother first. She must have gotten stuck in the storm.” I said, twiddling my thumbs.

“My mom doesn’t pick me up. My nanny does. She can’t get here until 30 minutes after school is out because she has another job. My parents both work really late, I hardly see them during the day, just weekends.” Doyoung explained to me.

“Does that make you sad?” I asked.

"Not really. I have my nanny and my older brother to keep me company, but I like being by myself. I’m used to it. My brother has a lot of stuff to do on weekends so my parents are with him a lot.” He shrugged.

“Well…if you’re ever bored you could always come over to my house. My mom makes really good kimbap and on Fridays we get to go out for ice cream and fish cakes! We have games and coloring books and lots of movies.” I got excited at the thought of bringing a friend home. I had yet to bring anyone home since moving here.

“Don’t you have friends already?” He asked me.

I shrugged. “You can never have too many friends.”

He smiled a bit, then looked back at his hands.

“How long do you think we’ll be down here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Depends on how much damage the tornado has done. We may have to dig our way out of the rubble.” He said, looking up.

“How do you know what to do during stuff like this?”

“I’m by myself a lot. I taught myself how to handle these situations if I’m alone. Didn’t your parents teach you what to do?”

“They just said to find an adult and do what they told me.”

Doyoung then spent the next hour or so teaching me about all kinds of different way to protect yourself when you’re alone. He taught me about what to do during a fire or an earthquake or a home invasion. He even showed me a few karate moves he had learned from his older brother.

Eventually, we were found after the storm subsided. The tornado had passed right over us and no damage was done. No one knew where we were so it took them a while to find us, of course making my mother frantic. Once we were free, we took Doyoung home and my mother told him he was welcome at our house at any time.

We stayed close friends the whole time I lived in that town. He was over at my house every weekend and several times during the week. Teachers had even started having to separate us because he refused to go anywhere without each other. When it was time for us to move back, I was devastated. Doyoung had become my rock and my very best friend and here I was, abandoning him.

We vowed to stay in touch and still hang out on weekends, which we did. Once we got into high school, we saw each other less but Doyoung was excelling in school and was on the track to going to med school. We skyped and texted each other all the time, not letting anything keep us apart.

When Jaehyun moved, I spent a week in the summer at Doyoungs house, trying to keep myself together. His parents were gone on a business trip, his brother had moved out years before. Doyoung did his best to keep me distracted, he himself never being a very emotional person. When Yuta and I broke up, Doyoung took me on a weekend get away to the beach. He had rented a small beach house and brought all the games and movies we had watched together as children. He was doing his best to distract me at first but he quickly realized that it wasn’t going to help. So he let me cry. He let me lay in his lap and cry for hours, pouring my heart out over Yuta and how stupid I felt I was being. It was very unlike him and his actions confused me at first.

"I can’t believe you’re letting me fall apart like this. You always tell me I need to suck it up and get over it. You should be telling me I’m doing the right thing for myself.” I said, gripping his knee as I sobbed.

“You are. I really thing you’ll be okay and better off at some point. I never really cared for Yuta so I can’t tell you you’re making the wrong decision because I don’t think you are. But right now, you need someone to listen to you and let you cry it out. I know I tell you all the time we have to be independent for our good, but sometimes you need someone else there. I’m gonna be your someone else. I owe it to you for everything you’ve done for me.”

I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight, thankful that I had someone like Doyoung.

We’re still close, though we may not see each other as much as we want. With his med school  and my classes, we don’t have a lot of time to spare. We do make an effort to meet up for lunch twice a month, no matter what. We still talk almost every day, almost as if we didn’t we would disappear.

The love I have for Doyoung doesn’t seem to fade, no matter how busy we get. He’s too important for me to forget. He taught me how to do things for myself and how to pick myself up after I fall, and in return I taught him what it’s like to have someone who will never let you be alone. Those are some pretty important things if you ask me and the people who teach them to you are even more important.

[iamcinema]

IAC Reviews #19: Wishbone (2000)

Hey, is anyone still alive out there? I hope so.

Coming off of last year was a disaster, and well, we didn't enter 2021 on the highest of notes. I guess you could say I've been burned out and not having a ton of motivation to do a lot, even with how much I've been grinding on Letterboxd over the past few months. I think I'm ready to come back, and since there's a storm is brewing outside, let's make today a movie night...and boy, do I have a treat for you.

I think I've made it kind of apparent that I have a weakness for terrible, low-budget, trash fires. There's something oddly charming about them where they always find a way to lure me in, and given the scene on Letterboxd, there's a bunch of SOV masochists out there waiting to get their next fix. While digging around for material to cross off my lists on titles to find and add, I was reminded of a terrible, low-budget film that was shot in my hometown over 20 years ago. I'm full of fear for what's to come, and you should be too.

________________________________________

Wishbone is a 2000 horror film directed by Timothy Gaer and co-created by Michael Fasciana, centering on a woman named Laurie who receives an unusual artifact from her eccentric aunt she acquired from a pawn dealer that causes those around her to disappear when they make wishes on it. Hmm, seems simple enough. Let's what we're in for, and I'm absolutely not ready because the IMDb page says this shit is over two hours long, despite a version on Youtube having it just a bit over 90 minutes. Let us pray.

Wishbone in One Gif:

This acting is might be the death of me, but I'm not sure what's going to be the catalyst that causes me to fall down the stairs and break my neck: the sound quality, the weird editing, or the music...oh, god what the fuck is the music doing? So much noise, noise noise!

Okay, so let's dig into this before I take too long of a break and I don't come back to this. I've already had to pause the movie a few times to catch my breath or just rewind and go back because there's a good amount that I keep missing because, apparently, the star of the film is the score and not Laurie. This is so, so slow. I've seen a lot of long horror movies, but at least with those, it feels like things are happening. Even Blood Lake had filler that did something to some degree, and with that, it was consistently bad. This movie doesn't even know what it wants to do. So, as a disclaimer, there's a good chance I'm probably missing some key details that I didn't hear because it seems that characterization isn't important if the music insists on talking over everyone.

________________________________________

So, to date, this might be one of the worst horror movies (and movies in general) that I've ever seen and it might be one of the slowest things in the entire megaverse. This is over 90 minutes of, somehow, nothing and something happening simultaneously - if that makes any sense.

This takes its sweet ass time moving along and there's so little pay-off. The majority of the characters are either nameless or we aren't introduced to them in a way that matters enough for us to care about them. It's kind of like with Violent Shit and other low-budget slasher films where the majority of the characters serve no purpose but to be disposable. Next to the two main leads, Laurie and Joe, and maybe a few others, everyone is just forgettable and even then I couldn't honestly tell you anyone's name if it was explicitly brought up. IMDb isn't helpful either, and at this point it just makes me care even less. I'm not sure if my patience has been tested too much with this, but it's kind of sad that I'm more invested in seeing what the background characters are doing than Laurie and Joe - even though I can't really hear what the hell they're saying.

Yeah, I really can't move on without talking about the sound and the music. Why is it always the audio with these movies? This has an estimated budget of $100,000, or $154,779.43 today in August 2021. How do you have the ability to somehow not make this look like a potato for the most part, well for the day shots that is, but you don't have it in you to get a good mic and someone who knows how to mix and edit correctly? I would sort of understand if you spent the majority of the money on talent to cut corners, but this is just ridiculous. Did they use the cameras' built-in mics to catch the audio here?

I feel like I need to interrupt the movie constantly to tell them to speak up because if I turn up the volume, I'm just getting bombarded with this really weird soundtrack that doesn't fit. I shit you not, during one of the kill scenes, the music booming over it sounds like it was ripped from Kevin MacLeod's "lounge" library and then the reverse happens where ominous music is playing over a more touching scene - and that's not even a dig at Kevin as an artist. That's just how inappropriate and unfitting this editing is. The weird fucking thing about this specific kill scene is that it sounds like the audio is stacked, so there are two different instrumental tracks going on.

How do you fuck something as basic as tension up like that? The audio choices are so painfully inconsistent and it doesn't know what it wants to do. There are moments where you can hear the dialogue just fine, but then the music comes in out of nowhere to segway us into the next scene and it starts to muffle things out. If it isn't that, then the dialogue is just so soft that you'd think there was a pillow on the mic or we're hearing them from the opposite side of a sound-dampened room.

This is what I meant earlier when I said I apologize in advance if I miss anything crucial because I can't make out half of these conversations. So, I'm having to keep going back if I care enough or just having to pause and take breaks because there's only so much I can handle. This means that there's a good amount I'll blank on because I have to keep going back because I can't remember the majority of these no-named characters. Who the fuck are you people? Why am I supposed to care?

If I'm understanding the non-existent rules of the wishbone, you're connected to whoever dies in some way. So, why is any of this relevant to what's going on? If it's random, then it's another reason for me not to care just because some frat kids made a wish at some point. Again, who the hell are you and why am I supposed to lament over them? Why is there so much useless filler here? Did I mention that this is over 90 minutes long and there are *three* fucking party scenes? Party scenes are to Wishbone as ten-minute-long jetskiing and beer game scenes are to Blood Lake.

Oh, speaking of other shit that's annoying. Let's talk about general editing because the sound isn't the only thing that's a mess here.

I swear that almost every single scene in this ends with a fade-out/fade-in shot. Only one or two scenes come to mind where this doesn't happen, and the first time it did I thought my browser was freezing because it abruptly cut to black and then smash cuts to a party scene. I've never, ever seen a movie that abused this that much before and it's on par with something I would have seen made by a bunch of high school kids. So, when we have a moment where this doesn't happen and it plays out normally, it feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm sure this movie's run time could have been shaved down by at least a minute or two if this wasn't a problem, along with all the useless close-up shots that serve nothing to the plot.

It's such a waste of time. I'm so fucking tired. How was this movie's budget $100k? Did they spend most of it on renting the Scranton Police Department for a few shots or did it go towards their impromptu trip to Party City? I'm so tired and I don't care anymore.

Do you want to know what the real kicker is? With just barely twenty minutes left, the whole lore about the monkey's wishbone paw comes back and that's when Laurie and her friend Karen think something is weird. Isn't this whole realization trope that happens within the first or second act, not now with your Great Value brand version of the Dream Warriors?

Also, it's not specified how much time has gone by since the start, but it has to have been at least a week or two. It's incredibly weird how they paint the main characters and the unnamed background ones as such good friends that they don't think it's weird how almost all of them have disappeared - especially one girl who doesn't seem off-put that her boyfriend (or ex) disappeared after getting into an argument at one of the parties and none of his friends could reach him either at his own house.

The final showdown is an utter pain in the ass to get through because the conflict ends as abruptly as it starts and it's so unsatisfying. We get to see the face of our villain, I guess, and then more or less cut to our leads holding hands down the street set to the same looping lounge music we've been dealing with for over 90 damn minutes. Is everyone else who went with them dead? Did they live? Who cares! That's one thing the movie and I can agree on since we never see them again. We end on a shitty cliffhanger that's supposed to prepare us for a sequel, which thankfully never happened.

________________________________________

And that was Wishbone. Holy fucking shit, I've never been so thankful for a movie to be over in my life. It's 11:07 PM as of tinkering with some minor revisions and I've been in purgatory with this for over five hours, and yet, it feels like an entire lifetime has gone by.

I've raved about how bad Blood Lake was with its incredibly bad pacing, but this is next level awful and a testament to bad filmmaking if I've ever seen it. I expect a lot of the things I complained about from super amateur filmmakers who are shooting on an actual shoestring budget, not people who had that much money to fuck around with. How did they have that kind of a budget, and the most they can give us is bad audio, Windows Movie Maker levels of basic editing, three wrap parties, and a few crumbs of gore that we could see?

This was physically painful to see and I'm in much worse shape having endured it than I would have been if I sat through something liked Boardinghouse, and that has a two-and-a-half-hour-long version tied to it. This is just a marvel and I mean that in a so-bad-it's-bad way, not like how SOV enthusiasts who love this stuff pine over. If I had to give one thing going for it, one single granule of gold that I enjoyed from this, it's the limited shots we get of the area so I could make a game out of seeing what local spots I recognized. If playing I Spy is the only way for someone to endure your movie, then I don't know what else to say.

Wishbone is a hot mess where shit's happening, but also nothing is happening at the same time. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. In fact, I wish this movie never existed or would die in the ether and never return to our mortal realm ever again. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have a smoke and hope I don't get run over by a hearse tomorrow.

RATING: 0.5/10