#than i was at sixteen lost in a film scene { photos }

[theminiversexx]

@251098s

Lee Know and Seungmin's 2 cut for DICON.

[wendip-week]

Prompt: Time-Travel

Prompt – Time Travel

It was another fine day in Gravity Falls. Squirrels were chasing each other, baby birds were chirping for food, and the local citizens went about their business, blissfully unaware of the rumored-weirdness that surrounded the valley.

In the town’s tourist-trap, the Mystery Shack, two young workers were sitting behind the register, looking bored. One was a short, scrawny pre-teen with shaggy, brown hair covered by a cap featuring a pine-tree. The other was a tall, lanky redheaded girl in flannel and sporting a trapper-hat. They were the best of friends (or partners-in-crime, depending on who you ask); and at that moment, they’d rather have been anywhere else.

“Ugh! Dipper! Why’s your uncle making us sit here? This place is half-dead! We’ve had, what? Sixteen customers all day, and maybe three of them wanted to buy something?” the girl said, laying across the counter.

“Yeah. Well, it’s Stan, Wendy. ‘Any potential sucker is basically a customer, and customers have money, so don’t miss an opportunity to get some!’”

“Nice one. But seriously, dude, I wish we could go on some adventure. Heck, I’ll take anything: scary or cheesy,” the girl said confidently.

“Really?” Dipper replied, looking at her. “You’d stoop to something out of our B-movie collection?”

Wendy paused, clearly giving this some thought. “Well…”

“The Crawling Deer-Demon-Duck is hiding in that condemned-house, Cassandara!” Dipper said in a low-baritone, his face pouting with mock-bravery. “What kind of brave seventeen-year-old slight bad-boy would I be if I didn’t go in there alone to try and stop it?”

Accepting his challenge, Wendy stood up. “Oh, Drewson! You can’t! It’s too dangerous!” she replied, adopting a terrible accent of a Southern-belle. She put the back-end of her hand on her forehead dramatically, while using her other to grab his sleeve. “I won’t let you go into that condemned house where the Deer-Demon-Duck is hiding!”

Dipper gently moved her hand away and faced her more directly. “But you have to let me!”

“Oh, Drewson!!!” Wendy lamented, now looking Dipper in the eyes.

“Cassandara…” Dipper did the same…

The two’s faces came closer and closer…

  Meanwhile, from two different ends of the Shack, a couple of thirteen-year-olds watched with interest. One, a fit-looking, freckle-faced girl with brown hair, stared with wide-eyes; she had her hands over her mouth as she barely suppressed a squeal. It was just too cute and hilarious! The other was a bulky young-man with copper hair. He just rolled his eyes and shook his head, chuckling.

  Wendy and Dipper’s faces were now inches from one another; neither breaking the act. Just as it seemed they were about make contact…

*FLASH!*

“Bwaaaahhh!!!” cried out a voice of pure-chaos.

…A white flash of light and a subsequent familiar-sounding snap caught them off-guard (and momentarily blinded the duo).

“Hey!” Dipper shouted.

“What the heck?!” Wendy replied, blinking to get her sight back.

“You guys! That was adorable!” Mabel, Dipper’s twin who sported braces, a homemade sweater, and thick, long brown cried out.

“Mabel?” said Wendy. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to hear all that!” the energetic girl told her friend while holding a photo-camera.

“W-We were imitating a scene from one of our movies!” Dipper replied quickly, his face suddenly a deep-red.

“Tomato-Potato! A smooch-scene’s a smooch-scene! Look!” Mabel told them, holding up an instant-photo. Looking closer, it featured Dipper and Wendy, inches apart and puckered up. “And I thought your only chest-hair was scrapbook-material, Dip!”

“Mabel, you better throw that away!” Dipper told his sister, while Wendy just shook her head, a hand covering her eyes.

“Nope! Scrapbook-ortunity!” Mabel opened her scrapbook and, finding a spot that was (relatively) empty, put the photo in. “Boom! Now, I just need some glue! Be right back!”

Mabel ran into the house to look around, leaving her brother and friend alone and little embarrassed.

Dipper looked at his redheaded crush. “Sorry, Wendy. She didn’t need to do that.”

“It’s whatever, dork. I mean, we were kind of cutting it close. That’s what happens when you play chicken.”

“Yeah… I’m gonna destroy it before she gets back,” Dipper said, reaching out for the scrapbook.

“No, don’t!” Wendy replied, putting her hand on his shoulder.

“Wendy, you know she’ll show people. What’ll our friends think? I don’t want you to get embarrassed,” the younger Mystery-Twin said to the redhead.

“Thanks, but if everyone starts laughing, we can just say we’re great actors. After all, I’d pick you over the lead in that cheesy-film any day,” Wendy reassured Dipper, a gentle smile on her face.

Not knowing what to say, the blushing twelve-year-old just awkwardly chuckled.

“Hey!” shouted a gravelly-voice from inside the house. “Can somebody help me with this pimple on my back! I don’t need it bothering me on my next tour!”

Wendy turned to look at her dork, looking a little nonplussed. “…We should probably run before Stan singles us out.”

“To the roof, you think?” Dipper asked.

“Nah, I’m starved. Let’s hit Greasy’s. There’s a great lunch-special if we hurry.”

The nigh-inseparable duo quietly rushed off, leaving the gift-shop completely unattended. With that, the two customers slowly approached the counter, awkwardly looking around.

“Well, that was adorable and weird,” the girl told the boy around her age.

The large boy shrugged. “Definitely right on the latter.” He turned to face the girl. “How has your day been progressing?”

“Uh, fine I guess?” she replied, not used to hearing a greeting in such context. “How about yours?”

“Can’t complain. So… the gift-shop’s abandoned, it looks like,” the boy said, looking around.

“I guess so. Someone could steal something from here and no one would notice.”

“True. Looks like the rumors of this place sparing every expense were true,” the boy said with a chuckle. “Are you planning on stealing something?”

“No! Of course not!” the girl replied with a huff. As the boy looked away, she discreetly took a glance at the scrapbook left behind.

“Well, that’s good. Lots of punk-teens wouldn’t think twice about robbing this place blind,” he told her.

“Fair point,” The girl replied. She reached a small hand out. “I’m May, by the way.”

The other teen answered by clasping it with a meaty-looking hand of his own. “Cool. That’s my sister’s name. I’m Danny.”

For a second, the girl called May’s eyes widened, before narrowing suspiciously. Danny suddenly realized she wasn’t letting go of his hand.

“No, it isn’t,” she replied curtly. “My brother’s Danny!”

As she said that, the other teen frowned before his eyes mirrored the girl. They stared momentarily before pouncing. May attempted to pull “Danny” toward her. Danny, however, was ready. He spun and pulled the hand still clasping his behind the girl’s back. With her momentarily caught off-guard, he pushed her into one of the aisles. He quickly snatched the scrapbook from the counter before racing out the door. May, after stopping herself from hitting a wall, turned to see no scrapbook near the register. She immediately rushed outside to find the boy.

Behind the Mystery Shack, Danny was going rummaging the somewhat sticky-pages of the book he snatched, careful not let anything besides some glitter fall out from between. Finally, his eyes settled on his objective. He was just about to take it when-

“Hey, you!” Danny turned towards an angry-looking May, her fist punching her other palm. “That’s stealing! I don’t know who you are, but I’m not letting you have that!” she shouted.

“Please!” he replied. “As if you weren’t planning on it. I’m smarter than I look, you know!” he accused the girl, who gritted her teeth at his comeback. “And for your information, I’m me! And you’re not you!”

With that, the two of them raced towards each other. This time, however, May slid between the large boy’s legs and got behind him. Before he could react, she grabbed him underneath his shoulders. With him successfully in a headlock, May reached for the book in the redheaded boy’s hand. Realizing what she was trying to do, Danny swung back-and-forth, trying to make May let go of him.

Caught off-guard, the strong girl actually lost her grip on one of his arms for a minute, though she quickly regained it by getting her arm around his neck. However, this wasn’t enough. He reached behind, and this time, he got ahold of May’s shirt, enabling him to throw her off, despite her attempts to hold onto his head. (She even grabbed and stretched his mouth in the process).

She landed with a thud but was quick to get back on her feet. And May was immediately shocked by the sight before her. Next to this guy’s feet was the scrapbook of Mabel, apparently dropped when she made him throw her off. But on the other side of “Danny” laid what looked like a rubber-mask of his face. The head on his body now sported something else: a head that she could only describe as resembling an oversized pistachio, but with red-eyes and sharp teeth.

The creature posing as a human, realizing he was exposed, quickly grabbed his mask and slipped it back on with a growl. Now indiscernible from a human, he wagged what May assumed was a false finger, clearly ticked by that. He charged at her, only for her to roll out of the way. She tried a roundhouse-kick, only for the disguised teen to catch her foot. When May tried to break out, she lost her balance, enabling Danny to catch her from behind the same way she had him.

However, May was ready this time. As this guy grabbed her underneath her shoulders, May somersaulted backwards and caught Danny’s neck with her shoes. With all of her might, she used her legs to throw Danny forward, headfirst! He landed with a loud thud, giving May time to grab the book and escape.

Danny, checking to make sure his mask was straight, raced to catch up to May. He went around the side and rushing in the general direction she ran, saw her carefully moving around a large hole not too far from the Mystery Shack. Taking off a hand-shaped glove, he launched a vine-like appendage and grabbed May’s leg, tripping her and pulling her back. At the same time, she dropped the book near the edge of the long drop. Danny rushed forward and picked it up.

Of course, by this time, May was back on her feet. She charged with all he had and slammed her shoulder into the creature’s costumed-midsection, making him drop the book again. “OW!” They both shouted after May made contact.

Danny rubbed the spot where he got rammed with one hand and pushed her back with his other. He then looked at the pained girl strangely. “That was… You tackle just like May does; only weaker. Who are-? Hey, you okay?”

“Do I look okay?” May was clutching her shoulder, and as the boy could see more plainly, it didn’t look quite right.

“You’re hurt.” Before Danny could say more, the edge of the hole he was standing by gave way. He fell and, because he was still holding onto May, ended up pulling her in, too.

They both fell, screaming all the way down, only realize that they didn’t seem to be getting there anytime soon.

“Wait… I know what this is! We’re in the Bottomless Pit!” May said in realization.

“Oh, yeah! Haven’t seen the inside of this I was five…” Danny thought out loud.

“So you say!” May snapped. “Stop pretending already and tell me what the heck you are! Running into you is like crashing into a tree-trunk! What the heck?!”

Danny paused. “Okay, seeing as you look like you’re hurting, and I’m not, I’m going to call a truce. I’m willing to talk if you are, but I’d rather check your arm first. Is that cool with you?”

“Fine,” May grumbled, seeing no options at the moment. She was at a disadvantage, and if this monster could reach her, she’d be in trouble.

“Alright. Now, stay calm and try not to freak out.” Danny took a hand-shaped glove off and from where it was, slowly extended a vine in May’s direction. It gently went around the teenager’s midriff and pulled her towards him. It was plain to see she was suspicious. “Let me see…” Using his other hand, he poked May’s shoulder.

“Augh!” she grunted.

“Yeah… Looks like you dislocated your shoulder,” Danny assessed with a shudder. “You meatbags and your weird bodies.”

“MEATBAGS?! Look who’s talking!”

“Hey, it is basically what you are. You’re like, mostly water, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah…” May admitted awkwardly. “But that’s still rude.”

“Right. Sorry,” he apologized sheepishly. “Look, we can’t do anything until we come back up, so we might well as chat and find what the heck is going on here; maybe why you want that scrapbook so much.”

“You took it first,” May replied. “What about you? Also, would you mind letting go of me?”

“Can do.” Danny retracted his vine, allowing May to freefall on her own, then slipped his glove back on over his branch-like hand.

“Okay, so… who the heck are you? I’ve lived in Gravity Falls all of my life; I know that names being alike isn’t some coincidence.” May said.

“Agreed. I’m Danny Pines,” said the strange-teen. “And I’m assuming you’re May Pines.”

“Yeah. May Pines: daughter of Mason and Wendy Pines,” May stated proudly.

“Those are my parents’ names,” Danny replied, an eyebrow raised.

“Weird. My brother’s human, and he doesn’t look much like whatever that costume is you’re wearing. Are you being honest that you’re who you say you are?”

“Yes, I am,” Danny replied, starting to sound annoyed. “Look, I’m a plant-person, okay? So is most of the family, along with the half-the-town where I’m from. We wear disguises to blend in with humans… And what’s wrong with the way I look?”

“Well, for starters, my Danny’s not built like you. He’s muscular, but like the lean-kind. And he’s tall. You kind of have a build like my uncles on Mom’s side of the family. Plus, your face kind of looks like Aunt Mabel’s. He’s got more of one that looks kind of like Grandpa Dan,” May said thoughtfully.

“Huh. Go figure. I never actually wondered if my disguise was accurate… As for my height, I can safely tell you I’m taller than I look. I basically slouch in this costume,” Danny told her. “And my May’s costume doesn’t have you so good, either.”

“Really? Why?” May asked.

“Well, her mask has red-hair and no freckles. And your nose definitely isn’t Mom’s.”

“Oh. I always wondered how I’d look with red hair…” May thought out loud. “Uh, so… why the heck were you trying to take that book?”

“Why do you need it?”

May sighed in resignation. “Look, I’m looking for an anniversary-present for Mom and Dad. I remember Aunt Mabel told me about some cute picture in her scrapbook that went missing. It was that little scene with Mom and Dad from a little earlier. Apparently, it disappeared. It’d be a good gift, and I thought maybe it was me taking it after Blendin Blandin loaned me his Time-Tape that caused it disappear. Now, I’m wondering if it vanishes because you steal it.”

“What a coincidence. I was planning on getting that as an anniversary present for them, too. Well, my version of Mom and Dad.”

“Yeah… How’s that work again? I’m already assuming this is probably one of those Other-Dimension/Universe deals. Or maybe even another timeline,” asked May

“Really? How would that last one work? New timelines always replace old ones, right?” Danny replied.

“I don’t know. I don’t do this for a liv-Oh! We’re coming back up!”

About a minute later, the two thirteen-year-olds found themselves back outside the Bottomless Pit, not a minute gone by since they fell in. Immediately, they stepped away, quick to attend to more important matters. Well, besides the picture in Mabel’s scrapbook, anyway. (Danny quickly picked that up).

“Alright,” Danny said after making sure no one was around. “I’m not an expert, but I’ve been taught the basics of human-skeletons. We’ve gotta fix that arm.”

“Right. Uh, one sec.” May used her good arm to pull a coin-purse out of her pocket. From there, she pulled out a piece of wood with some bite-marks and stuck it in her mouth. “Do your worst.”

Danny put one hand on her forearm; the other on her shoulder. “This is gonna hurt. I’m going to count to five. Got it?” May nodded, and Danny counted. “One… Two… Five.”

A shrill, girly scream echoed through the valley. A scream rivaled only by those who were unfortunate enough to stick an appendage into the infamous “Pain Hole”.

“You okay?” Danny asked, concerned.

“Yeah,” May grunted, rolling her shoulder a couple of times. “This actually happens more often than you think. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.

“Well, I guess that’s one thing you humans have over us,” the boy said, shaking his head. “Your broken limbs don’t have to stay broken. We need to regrow ours. It’s pretty rough.”

“I guess… So, is your time like that lizard-people timeline or something? Dad and Aunt Mabel said something like that happened or was talked about when they were hunting for treasure one time.”

“I don’t remember either of them talking about that,” Danny said, shrugging. “All I know is that my version of Mom and Dad were turned into plants outside of Gravity Falls, and that there was time-travel involved. Come to think of it, I wonder if maybe Time-Wishes have something to do with this.”

May raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”

“They’re paradox-free, but what if they don’t line up with the future. And they can’t be part of a time-loop, either. That’s another paradox. But splitting timelines might make for a good technicality, especially if they lead to the same futures or something.”

“…You read a lot of science-fiction, don’t you?” May deadpanned.

Danny shrugged. “When I’m camping. Yeah.”

“So… you think maybe we come from different branches and that this is a shared-moment in the past?”

“In a nutshell. No pun intended.”

May shrugged. “Anything’s possible. So, how are things in your timeline? Is the Shack still standing?”

“Yeah. Uncle Soos is doing a great job with it.”

“Nice! Does Arctica exist in in that time? Do you like-like her?” May asked in a sly voice.

“N-No! I mean, uh, yes… and no!” Danny replied quickly.

“Oh my gosh! I knew it!” May said, almost squealing. “Everyone knows! Me, our parents, our friends! Aunt Pacifica sure approves! So does-!”

“Wait! Pacifica… She’s alive in your time?” Danny asked, looking a bit shocked.

“Yeah. Is she not…? Oh, man! What happened?” May replied, looking very concerned.

“She just got sick. Last year, I think. That kind of thing’s one drawback to being human, I guess. Still, everyone was there, so I think she was comfortable, at least,” Danny told his sister from what might be an alternate-timeline.

“Shoot…” May thought out loud.

“Sorry to bring the mood down. So, does Chaz still try to keep his distance from you and your cooties?”

“As if! He’s just intimidated by my tackle!”

“Sure… No doubt that’s why he and Drake Jr. tried to discover a vaccine for them,” Danny said with a chuckle. “Dad thinks they might be onto rediscovering the Philosopher’s Stone instead.”

“So, Aunt Mabel married Uncle Drake in your timeline, too?”

“Yep.”

“Great… Two versions of our uncle to pass on his terrible driving skills two different versions of our cousin,” May said in exasperation.

“Don’t forget our siblings…” Danny added.

“Siblings? What siblings?” May asked.

“…You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Seriously, we have them? What are they like?” May said with interest. “Younger? Older?”

“All of the above. Dang. I wish I had my special phone-glove so I could show you pics. Too bad I didn’t want to accidentally leave it.”

“Shoot! Lucky!”

Danny laughed. “Keep telling yourself that.”

May smiled, then looked at her aunt’s scrapbook. “That photo’s still in there.”

Danny rummaged through it and found the page with said photo. The siblings from different timelines both stared, admiring the young versions of their parents doing that corny, mock-romance scene.

“What do you wanna do?” Danny asked her.

“I don’t know… I want it, but you’ve got as much right to snatch it as I do,” May replied. “I wish we both could take it with us.”

“You know, maybe we can,” Danny said after a minute.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Doesn’t the Shack have a magic photocopy-machine in this time?”

“…And Mom and Dad are gone, so we might be able to pull this off!”

//

Meanwhile, Mabel was in her and Dipper’s room in the attic, which had basically been torn apart in a futile-search.

“Come on, Mabel!” The sweater-loving preteen said to herself. “Where’d you put that extra glue?”

//

The Mystery Twins of different timelines slipped through the currently-unguarded gift-shop of the Mystery Shack with ease, only to run into an elderly, bespectacled man in a fez, faded-white tee-shirt, and boxers in the living room, who was sitting on the couch, watching tv. The man turned to face them.

“Hey!” he said gruffly. “No exploring the house unless I’m leading a tour! Back to the gift-shop with you.”

Danny approached him, a hand behind his back. “No. Back to sleep with you.” Danny brought his concealed hand out from behind him, a large flower blooming from his wooden hand. He blew what looked like pollen into the old man’s face. The man was out in an instant, drooling all over himself.

May took the tv remote and flipped through a couple of channels. When she was satisfied, she abandoned the remote and joined Danny, though not before laying a soft kiss on the scary-looking man’s temple.

“Love you, Great-Grunkle Stan,” May whispered. She turned back to rubber-suited variation of her brother. “Let’s go.”

The two kids wandered down the hall towards the back, where they found a beaten, worn-out copy machine with words like “Danger” and other warnings on and around it.

“So… if I remember correctly, Dad said this’ll clone whatever you put into it,” May said. “It’s how Great Grunkle Stan made copies of the Journals that triangle-dude ruined.”

“Right,” Danny replied. “Seems straightforward. I think I’ll make two. This way, we don’t have to steal anything.”

“Sounds good. Let’s just remember not to get either wet.” May stepped out to check the living room.

//

Meanwhile, a heavy-set young man in a cap and a shirt with a big question-mark stepped into the living-room. “Hey, Mr. Pines. I just finished fixing-Oh, cool! You’ve got anime on!”

Soos Ramirez sat down on the couch, his gaze focused entirely on the tv-screen. He didn’t notice the teenage-girl peering around the corner, nor the bright and completely-noticeable flash from down the hall. He also didn’t notice two teens step back into the gift-shop, the boy holding three identical-copies of what looked like Mabel’s scrapbook.

//

In the Mystery Shack’s gift shop, May sat the scrapbook back down on the counter where she and Danny found it.

“Alright! Are we good to go?” May asked Danny.

“I think so. I made whole scrapbooks that we can maybe use for Aunt Mabel sometime. I bet she’d like to see her old pet-project again,” Danny replied.

“Great idea. You know, if it’s not us that steal the photo, I wonder what happens to this one.”

“Beats me. But no time to find out. Someone’s bound to come back any time now.” Danny said, handing one of the copies to May.

“You’re right… Hey, I’m sorry I kind of jumped you when we ran into each other. I thought maybe I violated some time-bureau thing and you were an agent or something,” May replied with sincerity as the two of them walked out of the entrance.

“That’s alright. No harm done. I’m sorry you hurt yourself trying to hurt me,” Danny replied to the girl.

“It’s fine,” May told her… sibling. “You know, it would be cool if we could hang, but with whatever this is, I don’t see how that’s possible any time soon.”

“You’re right,” Danny agreed, almost regretfully. “I don’t know how time-travel works, and I don’t Blendin’s inclined to tell someone who got the drop on him.”

“Huh?!”

“Nothing!”

The two stared at each other, not knowing what else to say. Finally, May broke the ice: “Awkward sibling-hug?”

The Mystery Twins embraced, awkwardly patting each other’s backs before separating.

“So, before we go our separate ways, can I ask you a weird question?” Danny asked sheepishly.

“Sure. What is it?” May responded.

“What’s like having a nose? A real one, I mean…”

//

Meanwhile, Mabel Pines had just come back downstairs. “I can’t believe I forgot I have one in my sweater’s inner pocket. What a silly-Mabel I am!” she said to herself, chuckling.

She stood by her scrapbook on the counter and tried to work the cap to the new glue-bottle off.

At the same time, a customer, who had come into the empty gift-shop just before the girl came down, went to approach Mabel and ask about getting rung up. Unfortunately, there was a snowglobe left on the floor by some child earlier that day. The man suddenly tripped on it and fell forward, only to stop himself by catching a fan. Said fan immediately started blowing on high, blasting Mabel’s hair all over her face and blowing a certain photograph into the yard, where an odd-looking goat caught in his mouth and ate it.

That was a dark day for Mabel Pines… who immediately planned to try to convince Dipper and Wendy to reenact that scene again.

//

The Pines twins from alternate futures faced each other, holding out their respective Time-Tapes (with the tape pulled out appropriately) and holding tightly onto their respective scrapbooks. The two got one last look at each other.

“Bye, Danny,” May said to her secret monster of a brother. “I love you, and I hope Mom and Dad like your gift.”

“Likewise, May,” Danny said, looking a bit sad. I wish you could see the others… I’d have liked to see their reactions meeting you.”

May gave him a soft smile. “Hey, I got to meet you, at least.” Danny smiled in response.

The Mystery Twins let the tape on their devices retract. There was a flash of light, and it was like they had never been there.

[nickgerlich]

Good And Bad

I bought my first digital camera in late-1996. It was a very simple Casio point-and-shoot, with an astounding 320X240 pixel format. It was the best available on the market, and cost about $600. At that point, I was free from the ball and chain of film, and able to shoot with reckless abandon.

It completely changed the way that I not only do photography, but also live. I carried that camera everywhere I went, because it fit into a shirt pocket, much like a modern smartphone. I photographed everything, because memory was becoming cheap, and I could just download my photos to a computer when I needed to.

Apparently a lot of other people bought into the idea as well, and, coupled with a growing ubiquity of internet, launched a completely unexpected phenomenon: citizen journalism. It was easy to find yourself suddenly “in place,” long before TV or newspaper could send out a reporter to cover something happening. Run home and post it to the internet, and suddenly you have scooped the New York Times, CNN, and The Weather Channel.

Of course, that was before social media as we know it, but it was the beginning of the battle between good and evil in the field of technology. Put technology in the hands of the many, and both will happen in alarming quantities.

It caused all news reporting outlets to completely re-imagine themselves. If they were smart, they learned to embrace their new competitor as a source of content. Those who shunned it suffered.

Skip forward to August 2021, and we find that citizens, armed with the latest  technology, headed out into the eye of Hurricane Ida yesterday in Louisiana. For better or worse, we had live footage when the hurricane made landfall.

Webcams and intrepid “reporters” ventured into the storm to provide real-time coverage, which broadcast media ate up. It was cheaper than them having to send their own reporters into the maelstrom, not to mention safer.

Not lost in all of this is the fact that yesterday’s landfall was sixteen years to the day that Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and surrounding areas. It will take a day or two to assess the damages incurred yesterday and overnight. I’m sure we’ll see footage of scenes similar to what I photographed in the Lower 9th Ward in April 2006, eight months after the tragedy.

In the aftermath of Ida, we are left to digest the reality of our modern state. It’s not just citizen journalism anymore. It’s sending people into the jaws of danger.

I see it every year here in the Texas Panhandle, with storm chasers eagerly driving hundreds of miles to try to anticipate where afternoon storms will pop. Their vehicles are loaded with the latest everything, from dash cams to rolling wifi and internet connections. They are able to give the television stations live coverage from the field, and they are willing to do it for the price of gasoline and maybe a few extra bucks for the photos.

Technology is a great thing, but it has also wreaked havoc on an otherwise happy society. Don’t believe me? Just look back on the last 18 months, through a pandemic and election. People used social media as if they were experts in their own right, qualified to render opinion because they had seen a meme, watched a YouTube video, or Googled until they found what confirmed their bias. Along the way, people dismissed experts by putting quotes around the word, as if having a PhD in something were not good enough compared to their feeble, naive armchair analyses.

Yeah. Insert one whopping big eye roll here.

And yet we roll on. If it bleeds, it leads, and many media outlets have come to embrace the new normal. They are more than happy to use your video, your still photos, your first-person narrative, because we viewers actually kind of like it. Sensationalism sells. We are consumer; others are the producers. And the media are just the middlemen.

Consider that the next time you pull out your phone at the scene of a tragedy and assume the role of roadside journalist on Facebook or Twitter. Welcome to the dark side of technology. Just because you have it at your fingertips does not mean you should use it. It’s not 1996 anymore.

Dr “Put The Phone Away“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[blursed-ninjago-ideas]

Warning: Prior character death  (Both human and animal), illness-induced violence from a wild animal, consumption of human flesh by said wild animal and a lot of rotting bodies.

-

The ninja found out about MourningCryptid!Jay's backstory when they headed into Ed n Edna's scrapyard looking for the cryptid

They went to ask if the couple had seen anything, but when they entered the trailer it was

Dead.

Silent.

It looked like some animal had torn through the inside of the building, broken glass, shredded fabric, photos scattered all over the floor.

Nya picked up one of the photos. It showed three people, a kindly-looking couple and a small child, proudly holding up a strange, hodge-podge little device, Jay's first invention written on the back, alongside a date from about eleven years ago.

Kai found an old book of fairytales. "The Gate to Heaven...?"

"I've heard of that one, Supposedly there was this guy who lost his wife and he asked a wizard to let him see her again. The wizard used his magic to bring him up to the edge of the Departed Realm. The guy sees her but then the wizard has to take him down because their magic is running out and if they don't they'll both be stuck there... It's really sad."

Cole then decides to open a large door towards the back. The scent is what hits him first, his eyes watering as he sees what's in there. The room is a mess, even more so than the previous one. There's a gift-wrapped present lying on it's side at the foot of the bed, a patched-up video camera dropped on the floor and a massive dog's corpse rotting into the carpet.

But that wasn't what caught his eye.

No, it was the torn up corpses of Ed and Edna Walker, decaying limbs and organs spread over the bed and across the walls. He-he needed to go hurl-!

They took the camera, but not much else. They decided to take a look at the video, to see if they could figure out what happened. (And hopefully, something to defeat the cryptid)

The video started, but they weren't expecting the youthful face that popped on the screen.

"-s this thing on? Good! Hi Ma! Hi Pa! So I know you like having all those old videos of me opening up presents for my birthday, but you never have any of yourselves, so I'm gonna surprise ya!"

The young man rambled for a bit before about how he'd been looking for certain parts for weeks and that he had just gotten back from a school field trip before finally entering.

The state of the trailer was the same as it was when they found it. The rambler's voice began to shake

"Mum? Dad? Haha, v-very funny. D-did dad mess with the vaccuum again?"

A shuffle came from what they now knew to be the master bedroom. The camera shook as the frightened teenager inched his hand towards the door, before flinging it open.

For sixteen, stretched out seconds the camera froze on the scene before it, as though it too was horrified at what it was witnessing.

A massive dog the size of a foal stood on the bed, chewing away at a dismembered arm, blood staining around it's lips as it ate at it's prey.

It looked up, eyes glazed over with a sickly film, before rushing towards the cameraman, teeth bared and ready to kill.

Then there was a flash of bright blue light, a load squeal and a sound akin to a insect throwing itself on a bugzapper, then the camcorder went dead.

It took a while for them to process everything. Most of them had to vacate their stomachs before they could even try to do so.

That dog killed an entire family, Kai thought, but when he spoke this aloud, Zane countered.

"No. The dog did not kill everyone. We did not find the son's body, but the dog's body was inside the room."

"Jay. I think his name is Jay." said Nya, as she pulled out the photo.

"Wait, if this guy survived, then where is he now?" Questioned Lloyd.

"This event was most certainly highly traumatic. He most likely fled the scene." stated Zane

"What I wanna know, is what that flash was." Cole chimed in

"It almost sounded like someone was getting electrocuted."

"So what, this guy had a taser with him?"

"Perhaps."

While Cole and Zane discussed the bright flash something lurked in the back of Kai's mind.

"What if he's like us?"

"What?"

"I mean, Cole's got Earth powers, Zane's got Ice powers, maybe this guy has Electric powers?"

Now that was a thought. Electric powers would explain the end of the video.

"Wait, Didn't the towers have lightning rocks in them?"

"Technically they are called Fulgurites, but yes."

"You think that Jay has something to do with the towers?"

"I don't know, but the only way to find out is to find him."

Holy shit Anon.

-[R]

[seasonsgredence]

Colin Farrell on life and parenting in a time of COVID

How much has fatherhood changed you?

It changed me. I mean it changes me every day. I don’t know what I am doing most of the time, slash all of the time. But I adore my boys, I love them very much. And I just hope I am not f****** them up too much to be honest with you.

I think if all of us can be a little, can f*** our children up a little less than maybe we were f***** up by our parents, if that can be the bar for success, when then eventually we will continue to move in the right direction, the direction of healing and the ability to self-govern with kindness and decency and consideration.

But yeah, my kids are masters. With the love I have for them and the concerns that I have for them and the hopes that I am treating them decently, they bring up a lot of stuff, a lot of fear and a lot of self-judgment, because it’s by far the most important thing of course that I have in my life.

This whole acting and stuff and movies, don’t get me wrong, I get meaning. I am one of the fortunate people on this earth who gets a certain amount of meaning from my work and self-indulgently I get off on what I do sometimes and even when I am uncomfortable in it, it has meaning for me.

But being a dad to those two boys is by a long shot the most difficult and the most rewarding and the most meaningful and the most consequential thing that I will ever do. And time is going fast. It’s moving quickly. I don’t know about you, do you find yourself going back into old photos and videos through your phone at this time? Do you find yourself being nostalgic, I would imagine a lot of us are. Yeah, I have done that a lot in my bed, like three o’clock last night and this morning in bed I was looking over videos of both of my boys when they were four and eight and now they are ten and sixteen and it’s just all going so quickly.

So as I said, in the vacuum that I have been fortunate enough to live in — which is the vacuum that involves a home, a fridge and freezer full of food, and a few dollars in the bank and everyone in my life that is very close to me healthy — I have found this an incredibly rewarding time because it has allowed me and family to spend time together that we wouldn’t have had if I was still in London shooting “Batman.”

Having said that, of course I would give that up readily, the time I have had, that gift, I would give it up for all the lives that had been lost to be back on the planet and for people not to have experienced the degree of pain. But we have been dealing with what we have been dealt.  And it’s an incredibly difficult time and an incredibly complicated time with struggle and pain and loss, but I would hope those of us who can really just move forward with a greater degree of patience and a greater degree of consideration for each other.

What do you most about normal life these days?

One thing I noticed in the first, because I came back from London, I was doing something there, and I came back and went straight into two weeks here. And I was two weeks alone in this house. I don’t have a partner, my two children were with their moms.  And so I was alone here for two weeks.

And I just remember after about nine or 10 days, feeling the absence of touch in my life. And that was the most significant moment I had in relation to the awareness of something that was lacking that I was very used to having, just touch.

And I literally mean handshake with the barista in the coffee shop down the road, a hug with a friend, a high five, knuckle bump, whatever it may be, I had had, and it’s only 10 days. But because of the degree of enforcement or the degree of imposition, like this has been imposed upon everyone and none of us have had a choice, solitude is not as chosen for those who are living in solitude now as it may be. It’s something that is an affliction.

So because of that, my point being, I have probably gone a week before in my life without touching anyone, perhaps, maybe not, but because of what was happening in the world and because of my awareness of why I was living without touch. It became something very extreme and something that I felt that I was really missing and really lacking.  And just, what does touch represent? It just represents tenderness, it represents human interaction and it represents a sense of community.

And so that was the thing that I missed and I just realized how grateful I am and I would like to hold onto it as much as I can and how grateful I am to be able to go down to the shop and get a coffee. And the idea of going to a cinema, and I know there are bigger things at play with the world, but the idea of actually going to a movie theater, standing in line at the concessions and getting popcorn and a soft drink with my kids or a friend or on my own — It’s like another world that I can’t even, just the idea of it, there are so many simple banal things that we get to experience in our lives every day that we don’t, as often happens, the lack of having them exposes the magic or the worth that they provide us.

But touch definitely is something that I miss; being able to shake a hand or give a friend a hug, just that. And that is why I imagine, I have friends who are older than me that have mothers and fathers who are way up in years who haven’t been able to see their mothers or fathers and haven’t been able to touch them and have waved through windows and that’s been heartbreaking to see.  And we’ve seen those images all over the internet and it’s been a very tricky time for so many.

What did you learn about yourself during this period of reflection?

Yeah, that I can be, I don’t think I learned this, I think I probably knew this, but I can be grumpy blech, but I probably maybe possibly, one hundred percent, identify my worth with external things in my life more than I would like to.

I find that because the routine or the work that I had done or was doing, all that has been taken from my life, has allowed me to identify how much I see my worth with acting or with doing, with being active. And now, you see it online. Everyone is trying to figure out what to do. Somebody is learning a new language. Somebody is picking up an instrument. Some people are doing this, that or the other. Some people can’t get out of bed. Some people are eating too much. Some people are exercising loads.

I find myself having to lean into just my thoughts, my imaginations, my fears again, hopes, all these things that I have used life to distract myself at times, not all the time. But the busyness of life that I have used at time, understandably as we all do, to distract myself from other kind of internal agitations, those internal agitations have had a chance to come rearing to the fore.

And yeah, like many people, if I am not doing, doing, doing, I find it hard to sit in the consideration that my life has worth. And of course it does and I believe everyone’s life, just by virtue of having breath in the body, everyone’s life has worth, human life has worth, animal life has worth, planet life has worth, life has worth.

But sometimes with this kind of at times toxic awareness that we have, toxic consciousness that at times we have, that is so kind of imbued with an ability to judge the self harshly, sometimes we do and sometimes I lean into the “external forces” as markers for my own self-worth.

And these are things that can be taken away from you anytime, so my worth is reliant on those things. My worth is reliant on delusion or those which can be removed from my existence at any moment. So by not getting work again and say that it all goes away tomorrow, then I am going to be like shit, I have no worth, and that’s not, I don’t even believe that and a relationship with myself feels like that might be true.

Can you talk about how it felt getting into the Penguin costume in “The Batman” movie?

It’s all exciting. To be a part of that universe and just there are certain words that are part of my internal lexicon: Gotham City, Penguin, Joker, Batman, Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent, all these things.

Tim Burton’s Batman was kind of my, no, I watched the Adam West TV show growing up actually as well. So Batman as a kid, yes very much, not in comic book form but the TV show I watched ardently when I was a child.  And then in my teens I saw Burton’s version and loved it.

And then obviously I was a huge fan of what Chris Nolan did with that world and how he brought it back to life and gave it an immediacy and a contemporary significance.  So just to be part of, again that folklore, that mythology, is again really cool.

I had only started it and I can’t wait to get back. The creation of it, the aesthetic of the character, has been fun and I really am so excited to get back and explore it. And I haven’t got that much to do. I have a certain amount in the film. I am not all over it by any means. But there are a couple of some tasty scenes I have in it and my creation and I can’t wait to get back. Yeah, I totally feel like it is something that I have not had the opportunity to explore before. It feels original and fun. But I am only at the start of the journey so I can’t wait to get back and really get into it.

[x]

[ohjaimelannister]

Do you think Hoppers actually dead though?

O K A Y.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to pull all of this together so here we go! NO Anon, I do not think that Chief James Hopper has gone and died on us. There’s no REAL evidence (there are easter eggs though) however and the Duffer Brothers could still pull the rug out from under us but hey.

No I do not believe that Hopper is dead. Although some things can be interpreted as pretty final and if the Duffers really kill him off I will never watch this show again, because it’s horrifically SHITTY writing and im already super tired of that this year lmao.

One - There is no body? We were never showed a body or what’s left of one? We have seen bodies for Benny, Barb, Bob and Billy (and even people who were in it for like 5 minutes). THEY EVEN PRODUCED A FAKE WILL WHEN THEY WANTED US TO THINK HE WAS DEAD. THEY AREN’T AGAINST SHOWING US BODIES!!! Which brings me to my next point!

Two - They also aren’t against to showing us death. Lots of gory detailing death, WHOEVER it is. Billy died horrifically but you saw it even though hes a kid. Bob got ripped to shreds.  And even those dudes at the beginning of S3 died horribly? They still showed it. Hopper’s death??? It cuts away. You see NOTHING. AT. ALL. There aren’t even any remnants OF a body where he was standing, and Joyce goes down there and LOOKS. Surely shed find something? Gooey grossness like the bodies at the beginning? Nope. You could argue that they’d be against showing us the death of a beloved hero and a main character but. Again. Bob was beloved and arguably one of the sweetest characters in the show and he was ripped to bits in front of us and Joyce. Billy was a kid for all intents and purposes, still he died a horrible death. Not one bit of that was cut away.

Three - If you look in the shots hes not on the platform when the thing explodes????? like at all? Either that’s badly shot or its done deliberately because he’s just not there anymore? There’s the portal to the Upside Down and you can see a ladder in the shot too, so maybe he either went into the Upside Down or down the ladder and got caught by the russians?? We just don’t know.

Four - We see the devastated Eleven and the aftermath of what happened at Star Court. Then it jumps to three months later? Okay, odd that were not shown anymore of the grieving or the funeral. Then of course Eleven read the SPEECH. Think about the end of it specifically and about LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN 3 INCHES!! You can see from one of the final shots of Star Court that the gates not CLOSED. It was healing but it never fully closes. So Hopper could be in the Upside Down, or travelled through it to Russia on the other end?? Who knows. Point is, they included this line at the end for a reason. Whether the reason is that hes actually dead and they’re just being profound or that its a hint about his fate, its meaningful.

Five - During the ending the song HEROES by Peter Gabriel plays, this is the same song that was placed over them finding Wills fake body, and after all the goodbyes and the ‘speech’ where it ends with “keep the door open three inches” well. Come on.

Six - Then it cuts to Russia and you hear the “not the american” line, and Hopper was called “the American” throughout the series by that Russian baddie. Should I start waving Red Flags here or???? Then again, a lot of people are saying this could be Brenner. Okay I 100% get your logic Im with ya, and for a few days I’ve also thought it could be Brenner. But here’s the thing. Elevens powers. Brenner makes her use them to spy on a russian man in Season 1. Hinting that there’s more going on here than just super powers, kids and other dimensions. Don’t forget that in the 80s the world was in the grip of the Cold War, and things would have started reaching a boiling point for this long before 1985 when it ‘officially’ began. We were never given any answers about why Brenner was spying on this man, or even Russia. Or even if he WAS spying for the US. Nothing, it’s a throwaway scene. Or IS IT? Russians show up in Season Three somehow knowing about the Upside Down, having failed at their own attempts to open a gate in Russia. They somehow know that its Hawkins they need to be in to successfully open their gate and potentially get monsters to use, oh I don’t know, in a WAR???? How would they have known any of this information to begin with?? Oh I wonder. We were told all about Brenner being alive and out there in season two (and we were never told WHERE and this is not referenced again), but as far as I can remember Eleven has never shared this with anyone else, even though it’s completely RELEVANT information. And as far as I can remember (its been a hell of an emotional few days) I dont think were given any explanation about how the Russians knew about the Upside Down, Hawkins or anything. So maybe the reason they knew is BECAUSE BRENNER is the one giving them their directives? Because hes worked for THEM this whole time???

Seven -  Interestingly also Eleven lost her powers? JEEZ ISN’T THAT CONVENIENT!!! Because the first thing shed use them for is to look for Hopper even if she was told he was dead. Shed look, 100% for the man who saved her, gave her a home, loved her, worried for her, cared for her like she was his goddamn OWN. Conveniently though now SHE CANT??? Interesting.

Eight -  And now. There’s the voicemail message. In one of the episodes (my brains so fried I cant remember which one sorry) Murrays gives out his landline number, and when you call it you can hear him give a message to Joyce. You can listen to it here.  You can tell this is after season three, because why would he talk to Joyce Byers? Surely if he was trying to reach someone for information it would be Hopper?  “I have an update, its best if we speak in person" an update??? About what??? Why is he coercing with joyce???  Notice how he says “it’s not good or bad but its SOMETHING” and then says “we’ll talk about it in person” (or something like that) why would he be calling joyce with an ‘update’?????????? AND ON WHAT EXACTLY?? INTERESTING!!

Nine - Theres this interview with the cast specifically ABOUT Hopper, the death and the post credits scene. And I love David Harbour but, you cannot lie for shit my angel.

Ten - Millie has said in an interview “ Her dads gone, or so she thinks” COME ON.

Eleven - Again WE KNOW DAVID HARBOUR IS LIKE THE MARK RUFFALO OF STRANGER THINGS. And hes bad at keeping shit to himself. Hes already told us at the end of last YEAR, literally a month after they finished filming season three that the Duffers have told him the ending to the series as a whole. Why would any creator do this for a man they have effectively just fired, because his character died? Why would they tell him? They wouldn’t.

Tweleve - Again. David Harbour, bless his heart, I think its trying to give us HINTS and bread crumbs to follow. Last week he changed his instagram photo from Hopper in S1 to the number 6. Odd. Today he changed it to the number one :

Twelve continued - Basically if he changed it to an 8 next, we know hes trying to hint at Murrays voicemail message and this is a clue for Hopper. Because why else would he bother?

Thirteen - Theres also this screenshot from Cara Buonos instagram where she literally SAYS about him being in Kamchatka, and uses the Russian word for PRISON. (Of course this could just be a joke between the actors

Fourteen - Theres also the fact, which is not evidence mind you, that its incredibly shitty writing to have both the men that Joyce Byers loved/loves to die in front of her? And actually having her put the action in motion that kills the man she loves? No. I wont accept that. And weve been shown her non willingness to believe in peoples death, everyone and their mothers told her Will was dead and she was being crazy. Did she listen? No. And she got her boy back. Will she think once she has a clear head that Hoppers dead? Maybe. Which is why she asks Murray to investigate. Hence the Voicemail Message.

Fifteen - Its also incredibly shitty and hard to swallow, for Elevens sake too. I mentioned already how much she loves Hopper and finally got a true parent in him. Do you honestly think they’d put her through all of that just to lose him NOW? Like i said, its convienent how shes lost her powers at this very crucial moment.

Sixteen - DAVID. HARBOURS. BEARD. RIGHT. NOW.

And SEVENTEEN -Just in case y’all are having trouble with any of that it looks like David Harbour has let sorta slip (my god I fucking ADORE THIS MAN LET ME TELL YOU). I dont know how reliable this is mind you because its not coming from a BIG source, but HERE he hints at knowing who the American is, after telling everyone else (see the interview above ^^) that he doesnt know and he cant say anything. 

‘During an interview with David Harbour, I attempted to delicately get around the fate of Jim Hopper. Harbour, however, came right out and gave it to me straight. “This is the question I’m going to have to dance around–” I began, only for Harbour to interrupt me and ask, “The ending?” “Right,” I said. “Is there a way you can talk about the future of Hopper without…” I trailed off here, only for Harbour to ask: “Well, did you see the post-credits scene?”I had, of course. And so I straight-up asked: is that Hopper behind the door? According to Harbour, that’s the most likely scenario. Throughout the season, the main Russian baddie refers to Hopper as “the American”, and having another Russian refer to the mysterious prisoner in the same way was the big giveaway.Of course, knowing that Hopper is alive, and knowing how he survived and ended up in Russia, are two different things. We’ll have to wait for season 4 to get that answer. And we’ll have to wait to see how things unfold from there. Will a big chunk of season 4 involve Hopper escaping that Russian base, and trying to get back to America? Time will tell. One thing is clear: Hopper still has a long journey ahead of him; not just physically, but emotionally.’

SO, basically Jim Hopper has not left us, Joyce or Eleven.  And if the Duffer Brothers have done all this to screw with us, well. Im not gonna be responsible for what I do.

I FEEL JIM HOPPER IN THIS RUSSIAN PRISON TONIGHT!!!

THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK!!!!!!!!

[exkernal]

My Only Peace: 3/?

William insists he stay the night, and after a token protest, Nelson agrees. To his surprise, William leads him to his old bedroom.

"But it's the master," he says, confused. "It should be yours."

"Didn't feel right," Will mutters, and that's all the explanation he'll give.

It's exactly as Nelson left it two years ago, with one notable addition on the mantelpiece: a framed photograph of the original Minutemen at the height of their glory.

Nelson stares at the youthful faces of his comrades. They're all old or dead or disgraced now. He sees his younger self, brimming with confidence that bordered on the absurd, standing close to Hooded Justice, who looked like a god among men. Even in the black and white photograph, his desire for closeness is obvious. How he couldn't resist the back pats and shoulder clasps, or any of the other myriad of socially acceptable touches that always lingered a little too long.

Little wonder that their relationship became an open secret among the Minutemen.

Nelson sinks into the old familiar bed, but he already knows he'll have trouble sleeping that night. After all, this was the very place where he and Will made love for the first time.

"Making love" was probably not the right term for it. He'd lusted after William from the moment he first appeared in the New York Gazette. At first he told himself that it was simply admiration, but it was the beginnings of a school boy crush, the kind that used to keep him awake at night in the boarding school dormitory, intrigued and disturbed at the same time.

After his brief meeting at the Reeves' home, he reached two conclusions: that young Officer Reeves was not a simple courier but Hooded Justice himself, and that there was a spark between them.

He cautioned himself. He'd become quite adept at recognizing the subtle cues that men put out, but he'd been wrong before. One of those wrongs resulted in a black eye and cracked rib, which he passed off to his fellow Marines as the result of a drunken fall after a night partying. Luckily, the other officer was too embarrassed to tell their superior, or else Nelson would've lost more than his pride.

It goes without saying that Will wasn't what he expected--and truthfully, Nelson's only experiences with black people were as servants--but it didn't take long for him to fall head over heels.

To stave off the early morning awkwardness, Will suggests they go out to brunch. The diner is similar to their old meeting place, though slightly more upscale. IT reminded him, bitterly, of their last conversation together.

Don't think about that now, he tells himself. Not when William is actually speaking to him.

"Don't worry," Will mutters, opening up a newspaper. "If anyone asks, we're two retired cops catching up."

Nelson bristles a little. "I'm not worried."

And he's not. There was a time when that's all he'd be thinking about, but those days are long gone.

"Isn't that your friend?" Will says, jabbing at a black and white photo of Adrian Veidt. "Ozy-man-mouthful-of-a-name?"

He snorts. "I wouldn't call him a friend exactly. We've barely spoken since my, uh, bout of foolishness in '66."

The waitress brings them their coffee. Nelson doesn't wait for the scalding beverage to cool off. He's too eager to do something with his hands.

"Speaking of Veidt," he says, "he told me an interesting theory about you."

"Oh yeah?" Will raises an eyebrow.

"He investigated Hooded Justice's disappearance before I ever formed the Crimebusters. Apparently, it led him straight to Eddie Blake. Eddie mistook him for a criminal, and beat him up."

William chuckles. "You don't say."

A smile twists at Nelson's lips. "Adrian concluded, based on your documented feud, that Eddie killed you back in '55."

His expression darkens. "As if that sniveling little pissant  could ever get the drop on me. I should've snapped his worthless neck after he attacked Sally."

"That probably would've been for the best," Nelson agrees. "I thought it best to let Adrian believe his theory--after all, you don't want the worlds smartest man on your case. "

"More like the world's best PR man," Will mutters.

Nelson clears his throat. "Have you read Hollis's book?"

"Might've skimmed it in an airport," he says breezily. "Why?"

"According to Hollis, you were an East German strong man with, um, strange proclivities whose body was found in Boston Harbor in 1955."

Will's whole body shook when he laughed. Making Will genuinely laugh-- not a wry chuckle or sardonic snort, but a real honest to God laugh-- was so rare that Nelson always savored the sound like it was the New York orchestra. He joins in.

The waitress brings them their plates of bacon and eggs, and their laughter dies down.

"It's funny how they all thought my costume was some sex thing," William says, voice light, but there's a slight menace to his words. "Think that says more about them than me."

He's dying to ask William the meaning behind his costume. That was one thing they never discussed during their relationship. Yet he hesitates. Maybe they didn't discuss it for a reason.

"Nothing against Hollis," Will goes on, "but he never knew when to keep his mouth shut."

"I had to call him on the verge of tears to stop him from publishing more details about...about us," Nelson says. It hadn't been the verge of tears, but William doesn't need to know that.

He and Will rarely broached the topic of "us," never defining the relationship that consumed Nelson's life for sixteen years. They had to keep it secret, for one. For another, Will was a married father for most of it. Friendship is what he called it in his will. "He was a very good friend," is how he explained it whenever anyone questioned him about Hooded Justice. He always hated it, just a little bit, but that hatred paled in comparison to the terror of being found out.

Will frowns. "Yeah. Sally wasn't too happy with some of the stuff he said."

"Mm," Nelson goes. "That's a bit of a pot-kettle situation. Sally basically outed me in her latest interview, without naming any names. It's was still abundantly clear who she meant, though."

"She probably didn't think it mattered, since we all thought you were dead." Will says that last part with an edge to his voice.

"I don't really blame Sally," he says, eager to avoid that conversation again. Keep it light, Nelly. "Did I use that term correctly? Outed?"

"How should I know?" Will says through a mouthful of eggs.

"You're the one who lived in San Francisco."

"Yeah, but I wasn't hanging around that scene. Not that much, anyway. I know as much about the counterculture as you do."

Nelson feels warm, and it has nothing to do with his coffee (which is lukewarm now, anyway). He has no claim on Will's heart, and it certainly isn't his business if he's had any dalliances (Lord knows Nelson hasn't refrained). Still. He's glad all the same.

Will glances at the window. "You know, it's a good thing for the young ones coming up. That they have a community that's putting up a fight. Maybe it won't be as hard for them as it was for us."

He's surprised that Will's bringing it up. This is the closest he's ever heard his former lover come to acknowledging that he was a man involved with men. Not that he ever expected him to; after all, Nelson rarely verbalized it either, thanks to his years of keeping it secret. Even now, as an old nameless man with nothing left to lose, he couldn't completely let go of his fear.

"Yes," he mumbles, "it is."

Will insists on paying. "Technically it's your money," Will says when Nelson resists. Now that brunch is over, he's not sure what to do with himself. At the diner, they had a good report going. But now what happens when there's nothing to do? Will William come to his senses and get sick of the tag-along?

"Wanna see how I spent your money?" Will asks. They journey through New York's mobbed streets, as much an adventure as his days soldiering through the jungle.

Will explains that he auctioned off the Minutemen memorabilia  for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "That was a good idea that you had," he comments, "so I did it. Altogether, it came too nearly a million."

William doesn't mention the one piece of memorabilia he's kept, so Nelson doesn't either.

They stop at a grand old movie theater, the kind that was popular when Nelson was a boy. It looks as if it's been recently touched up, casting an impressive figure. William looks at him expectantly.

"You bought a theater?" Nelson says. Well, it makes sense; Will was always a cinephile.

"And fixed it up," he says proudly. "When I first started working here, it was a dump. Now it's the most profitable historical theater in the borough."

William gives him the tour.

"We play all kinds of films here. The modern stuff, but we also show classics. There's theme nights, too. Some of the kids get all dressed up for some of the showings, but I don't know much about that. If we hurry, there's a showing I want you to see."

William takes him to a projector room. There's a smattering of people in the theater below, maybe a dozen scattered along the wide rows. A young white man with wiry long black hair sits by the projector, loading up a reel.

"Mr. Reeves?" he says, more politely than his appearance would suggest. He looks curiously at Nelson.

"You can take an early lunch break, Don," Will says. "I've got it from here."

"Thank you, Mr. Reeves!" the youth says. He doesn't hesitate to take him up on the offer.

The movie starts. It's a black and white, silent picture that takes Nelson back to his childhood. A man chases another on horseback, his face obscured by a hood.

"This is that film you always talked about," Nelson says. "Trust in the Law, was it?"

"I'm surprised you remember," Wilal says. Nelson's a little offended by that. But only a little, seeing what an ass he'd been before.

He also remembers that a young Will was watching this movie when a race riot broke out in Tulsa. William mentioned it once, early in their relationship. At the time, Nelson privately assumed that Will was exaggerating; he was only a child when it happened, so surely it couldn't have been as bad as he said. Or perhaps, if it was bad, than it was somehow...justified. Now, the memory sickens him. He wishes he could go back in time and knock some sense into his younger self.

"Didn't it inspire you to become Hooded Justice?" he asks. The flicking black and white light casts shadows on their faces.

"Partly," Will says. He looks directly at Nelson. "I never did tell you what made me put on the mask that first time."

Nelson feels cold. There's a shift in Will's tone that seems to change the very air around them. It feels ominous.

"It started with Cyclops," he says with a faraway look in his eyes. "Though I didn't know it at the time. I arrested a white man for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Jewish deli. When I brought him in, some other officers took him off my hands, saying they'd book him. Days later, I saw the same man walking free.

"I was told not to question it. But I couldn't let it go. So one night, when I was walking home, three of my fellow officers jumped me in an alley. They beat me, forced me into their car, and drove to a secluded area. They tied my hands together, put a bag over my head and a noose around my neck, and strung me up from a tree."

"What?!" Nelson gasps. His hands ball into fists, clenching his pants leg. How is this the first time he's hearing about it?

"I struggled and kicked. I felt myself chocking to death. I was so sure I was going to die. But they cut me down. I was a crumpled mess on the ground, sputtering and coughing, when the officer yanked the bag off. He got right up in my face like this," William leans so close that his breath's in Nelson's ear.

He whispers what the officer told him that night, directly into his ear. Nelson feels sick to his stomach. He wants this to stop now. But willful ignorance won't change what's been done to Will.

Will leans back. "I walked home in a trance, with the noose around my neck and the bag in my hands. Couldn't tell you what I was thinking, even if I wanted to. Guess you could call it being on autopilot. As I got close to home, I heard a lady screaming in an alleyway. A couple was being robbed. I didn't think. I ripped eye holes in the bag and put it back on. Then I beat the robbers to a bloody pulp. They weren't the ones who wronged me, but it felt so good to act. To have power. To bring justice, even if it was justice for something as small as a mugging.

"The next day, I saw it in the newspaper. They called me a hero. And well, you know the rest."

William looks off at the screen, where the townsfolk cheer for Bass Reeves.

"William..." Nelson says weakly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Without looking, he says, "Would it have made a difference back then?"

He wants to say yes. Yes, of course it would have. If Will had told Nelson about being lynched, for God's sake, then Nelson would've cared. Even when he was at his most racist, he still would've believed the man he loved. Wouldn't he?

But then...he'd had doubts about Tulsa. He hadn't believed Will then. William tried to tell him many things over the years, tried to open his eyes, yet Nelson remained willfully blind until it was too late. Until Will's absence finally caused him to reevaluate those beliefs. So if William had told him about being lynched in 1939, would it have been enough to finally make Nelson change? Or would it have been another Tulsa?

"I don't know," he croaks, mouth dry.

"Yeah, well, this way we never have to know the answer," Will mutters.

The words resonate with Nelson. If they knew the answer, then well, maybe they wouldn't be having this conversation right now. There were some things that William could never forgive. Perhaps they both needed the deniability.

Hesitantly, Nelson puts his hand on William's knee. William lets him. "I'm so sorry, Will. I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry that you couldn't tell me. I should have been there for you. I should've...God, I wish I could change so much. And I want to kill those officers."

William finally looks at him.

"Don't worry," he grunts, "I killed most of them, the night of the warehouse fire. When I called you about Cyclops mind control."

"Oh," Nelson mumbles. Regret hits him all over again. Why hadn't he listened to William back then? To think how different there lives might have been if he had. "I should've listened to you. I should've helped you get the bastards. I'm--I'm sorry I was such a racist little prick."

"I always know you're serious when you start cussing," Will says wryly.

Nelson snorts. It comes out more like a sniffle.

"Don't tell me you're crying again," Will says, but he can't help it. The nicer William is to him, the worse he feels. We wishes Will would scream at him or strike him, anything that would make them even. The house doesn't feel like enough. The money isn't enough.

"I'm sorry," he says, again, rubbing at his tear-stained cheeks. "I didn't--I'm not--"

"You're not making any sense," he says. "Nelson, calm down."

"I just want you know," he says shakily, "that it wasn't the mask."

"What?"

"It wasn't the mask I fell in love with. That's not true. Maybe I didn't show it the right way, maybe I was too selfish and blind to treat you the way you deserved, but it was never the mask. I really did love you, Will. Please believe me."

"Nelly," Will says softly.There's no anger in his beautiful brown eyes, no hatred. They're softer than usual, showing something that Nelson won't dare read.

Will's hand cups the back of his head, fingers gripping his hair in a way that's a little rough and a little tender, just like he remembers. For a moment, they stay like that, faces bent towards each other, eyes locked on one another.

He's not sure who initiates it, but when their lips meet it's surprisingly gentle. Their first time was all raw passion; their last, bittersweet. This is something new entirely. William pulls him closer, deepening the kiss, as the movie plays in the background.

Nelson can't bring himself to care about anything else.

[mythicalsecretsanta]

35mm Memories (T)

This gift is for: Jody (AKA @nectarine-migraine) Jody, I hope I succeed in making you cry! This was a real challenge for me to write, fluff peddler that I am, but I really enjoyed it and am glad I got a chance to dip a toe outside of my comfort zone.  From your Secret Santa, Archie (AKA @archionblu)

Link to AO3, or read below:

He doesn’t know why he still has the stupid thing, really.

Rhett’s had so many opportunities to throw it out: every time he’s moved, every time he’s gone digging through mementos to find something specific, whenever he’d gotten in one of those Link-like moods where he just had to get his clean on. 

He has a ritual with it now. Whenever he found it, he’d pick it up, run his thumb along the underside of the worn edge of the cap, unseating it slightly. Then he’d slide his index finger over the top of the grey plastic, the ridges of his fingerprints catching on the tiny dot of imperfect plastic hidden in the center divot as he pushes it back down, sealing it again without ever actually opening it. He thinks about how he should really toss this, but he always comes up with an excuse not to. 

Aren’t you supposed to recycle these things nowadays? Not that he knows how to do that, it probably has to go to some special facility. It’s not like it’s taking up that much room anyway. He’s held onto it for so long, it feels almost sacrilegious to toss it out. He’s not ready to let go.

This time, he rolls it around in his palm a little, musing about how something so tiny can feel so big. This single canister of 35mm film holds some of his happiest memories…and one of his greatest regrets. How can this thumb-sized lump of plastic – ‘cause that’s what film was made of, he’d looked it up once – contain such a multitude?

He snorts a little at how cheesy that sounds, even in his head, closing his fingers around it. He goes to stick it in his pocket but then has the paranoid thought: could his body heat somehow damage the film inside? So he keeps it in his hand, even though his sweaty-ass hands are probably warmer than his pocket anyway. He’s keeping it in his hand instead of putting it back because, after twenty-six years of sitting in that canister, he’s finally going to try and develop the film inside. He’d even found a place that still did that and everything. 

See, it was true that when they were sixteen, he and Link thought it’d be great to do an art shoot with a bright yellow plastic flower and the remaining photos on one of Link’s disposable cameras. They’d already shown those pictures to the Beasts, way back in season one of their show, before they’d even broken a hundred episodes. 

They’d made a big joke out of it, spent an entire ten freaking minutes cringing over their sixteen-year-old selves’ attempt at art. They had made a particularly big deal out of two shirtless photos, ‘no homo’ing so hard he was surprised looking back that they hadn’t felt the need to bring up their marriages. To women. Two separate women. 

What they hadn’t revealed to the Beasts, and what Link refused to even acknowledge, was that there was a second roll of film.

The one clutched in Rhett’s hand right now. 

It makes steering a little awkward, but he’s unwilling to let it go as he drives himself to the CVS – not the one closest to his house or the studio, but one a little farther away from both. A CVS he doesn’t frequent. There’s always a risk of him being recognized in LA, but he could at least make sure that it was more likely to be a stranger who wouldn’t ask questions about why he was getting decades-old film developed.

The thing was that when they had gotten to the end of Link’s camera, they’d been on a roll (hah.), still brimming with ideas for the perfect artistic shot. So they’d gone back to Rhett’s house and gotten his mom’s camera, spent actual money to buy a roll of film, and kept going. But the photos ended up not being the kind you could laugh at and make a mocking over-dramatized slideshow out of.

A car behind him honks and Rhett shakes himself free of Buies Creek,1994, to focus on L.A., 2019 traffic. He can get lost down memory lane when he’s back home, with the developed photos in hand.

-----

Rhett’s usually a pretty steady man, but his hands shake a little as he carefully unsticks the temporary adhesive of the envelope that holds his developed photographs. He’s scared, he can admit that. Real, physical evidence makes it real, makes it into something that actually happened that he can’t sweep back under the rug or ignore anymore.

The first few photos in the stack aren’t that incriminating. They’re shirtless, yes, but the scenes aren’t any worse than the two from Link’s disposable camera. Rhett, standing in the spot they’d found those dirty magazines, the flower laying flat in his hand. Link, holding the flower in his teeth, looking broodily off into the distance. 

They’d had a lot of botched, blurry shots as well, obviously unfamiliar with the more complicated settings on his mom’s fancy camera compared to the simple point-and-shoots that seemed to spawn in Link’s house. There’s about ten shitty photographs of them just attempting to get a shot of Rhett on his bicycle, riding down the empty road, flower tucked in his back pocket.

Every single one of them is too blurry for anyone who hadn’t been there when they were taken to be able to discern what they were supposed to depict.  They’d tried to do it with Link following behind Rhett on his own bike, but Link had never been the most coordinated of people, and they’d been worried about breaking Diane’s camera. They never did get the clear shot they wanted of that. 

The photographs that follow those are the ones that make his heart squeeze painfully in his chest. These are the photos he doesn’t dare show his wife, let alone the public. 

Link, standing in the river, the waistband of his underwear just visible above the waterline, slung low on his hips. They’d discovered that the plastic flower could float, so they’d left Link’s jeans on the shore and set up the shot with Link reaching out towards but not quite able to reach the bright yellow petals on top of the water. How Link had managed to convey so much yearning despite not looking at the camera, Rhett still doesn’t know. He’d have thought that level of acting to be beyond sixteen-year-old Link. You couldn’t even tell that he’d complained for a whole ten minutes before that about how freaking cold the water was.

Rhett knows what’s coming next, and he almost doesn’t want to continue, thinks about stuffing the rest of the stack back in its little envelope and being done with this. But he’s come this far and he feels like he has to finish this, so he shuffles the top photo to the bottom of the stack revealing the next image. 

There was no denying the intimacy of this pair of photos, or the implications behind the poses they’d chosen. He can’t remember what their teenage selves had been thinking, if they had still been striving to create art or if they’d moved on to just being silly. As Rhett stares down into Link’s earnest blue eyes, looking right at the camera, it doesn’t feel silly. 

It feels very, very real, to see Link in wet boxers and his sneakers, down on one knee, holding the flower up to the camera like an offering. As real as the sense memory that overtakes Rhett with the next photo, the sensation of cloth petals brushing against his nose and cheeks as he holds the flower to his face, as if taking in the aroma of the gift the Link of the previous shot had given him. His eyes are closed in the picture, and unlike the photos before this, there’s a smile on his face, turning up the corners of his mouth. 

The next photo is blurry, but that doesn’t stop it from being the most arresting photograph so far. Rhett had tucked the flower behind his ear and had been trying to arrange an artsy three-quarter angle shot of his face, and just as the shutter was clicking open and closed, there had suddenly been lips pressing against his own. Link had ended up a blurry streak in the photo, but the memory of that moment is still very clear to Rhett. 

When he’d felt those lips against his, he’d taken a sharp breath in through his nose and almost stepped back, startled, but Link’s hands had found their way to his shoulders and kept him in place. Rhett’s hands had moved almost against his will, curling around the warm skin of his best friend’s waist and coming to rest on his hip and the small of his back, the camera hanging forgotten by its strap on his wrist. Link’s lips had been slightly dry, and Rhett had licked his own lips without thinking about it, causing Link to gasp and open his mouth, inviting Rhett’s tongue inside. 

Rhett had french-kissed girls before, but it’d been so unlike all those times that it might as well have been the first time. Even now, staring at the photo in his hands, Rhett feels the echo of what had felt like grabbing an electrified cow fence, when his tongue and Link’s had met in the middle, shy and exploring. 

He wishes he could remember what Link tasted like. 

-----

It was clear that a lot of time had passed between that blurry photo and the next one, as it was almost too dark to show up, grainy and grey. This was the last photo on the roll – he knows without even checking the rest of the stack, because he’d taken it on their way back home, twilight falling around them. 

It was an action shot, spur-of-the-moment rather than carefully posed like most of the others had been. Link, waist deep in the river again, his clothes and shoes bundled up in his arms as they waded back to the other side. The flower, somehow still obnoxiously bright in the fading light, was tucked behind his ear like an afterthought. 

The photograph did a really lackluster job of capturing the smile on Link’s face, at least compared to Rhett’s memory of it. It had been so wide it had practically split his face, and it’d shone brighter than the fading sun, or the stupid flower behind his ear. The joy and laughter lit up his whole face when he’d looked back at Rhett over his shoulder, the secret of what happened during those unrecorded hours caught in the crinkles around his eyes, present even at that age after years of laughing together.

Rhett doesn’t remember where they’d been, what they were wearing, anything specific about the setting of the next memory, but it honestly didn’t matter. All that really matters is the way the words rang in his ears as if Link had screamed them rather than muttering them quietly whilst not looking at him. 

It had probably been a few days after they’d done that photo shoot, and he knows for sure that he’d asked Link when he wanted to go get their film developed. He doesn’t remember actually asking, but he knows he did, because he’s pretty sure that Link wouldn’t have even acknowledged it if he hadn’t brought it up. But because he had, Link had forced out a gruff “Don’t bother.”

“What?”

“You should throw it out. The roll from your mom’s camera.”

“Why? I spent like a whole four dollars on–”

“Because it was stupid. Those photos were stupid, they ain’t worth developing. It’d be a waste of money.”

“Oh.” Rhett had paused, trying to swallow around the sudden knot in his throat. “…Okay.”

He still remembers how small his voice had been, when he’d agreed after that painful silence, trying to catch Link’s eyes even though his friend refused to look at him. He remembers it feeling like someone sticking a pin in a balloon inside his chest, all the joy trapped there leaking out until all that was left was limp latex. He doesn’t remember if he cried later that night, but he knows he’d definitely wanted to, back

Because one of the best days of his life up to that point was apparently not worth the five dollars it’d take to remember it. Not to Link. And the implication was that if it didn’t matter to Link, well, it shouldn’t matter to Rhett, either. 

Whether or not he’d let those tears fall back in 1994, they’re flowing freely now, and he puts the stack of photos carefully to the side, not wanting to ruin them by accidentally crying on them. Despite it being nearly thirty years ago, he still remembers how much it hurt. He wonders if Link knew at the time just how badly he’d hurt Rhett. If Link remembered how quickly Rhett had gone out and got a girlfriend after that; needing an excuse to not spend time with Link for a while, needing someone to remind him of what he was supposed to want. 

Like all things, the hurt and the memories had faded with time. But he hadn’t thrown the roll out. He’d shoved it into the backs of junk drawers, closets, and cardboard boxes, but he’d never been able to toss it away, disown it the way Link obviously had. It followed him from place to place for twenty-six years, until Rhett had found the courage to face it head on. 

Vision still a bit blurry, Rhett takes his phone out of his pocket and types up a quick message.

“Hey, can we talk?”

He sits and waits, watching the ellipses that appear a few minutes later as Link types his reply.

Because Link had been wrong. It had been worth it. Those memories were absolutely worth keeping, and whatever it meant for them afterward, Rhett needed Link to know that.

It had been worth everything.

[sulietsexual]

What are your thoughts on the cast for the upcoming Little Women film adaptation? Are you apprehensive about how the film will adapt the novel? I'm a bit worried, to me nothing beats the 1994 adaptation, and I have mixed feelings about the 2017 mini series. The book is just so important to me, and I would love to see a recent film adaptation do it justice, but I don't have super high hopes for the new film.

I am extremely apprehensive about this adaptation, in terms of story, tone and casting. 

Little Women is my favourite novel of all time, and the only adaptation I’ve seen which has managed to capture the tone and characterisation of the novel is the 1994 version (which itself is not without its flaws but is definitely the best adaptation out there). I didn’t mind the 2017 mini series, I thought that Maya Hawke was a good choice for Jo (and she physically resembled her more than Winona did, although Winona captured Jo’s spirit better), I liked that they included more events from the book than the 1994 movie did, I loved Julian Morris as John Brook especially considering Eric Stolz’s abysmal performance, and I think that the mini series did a much better job handling the Jo/Laurie relationship and showing how Jo never had any romantic interest in Laurie. 

The new adaptation has me worried, though. I’m really worried that it’s going to be full of 2019 feminist sensibilities and SJW bullshit, which the story just does not need. Little Women isn’t some big, brash feminist manifesto, it’s a simple but beautiful story about four sisters and their journeys, as a family and individually, and it does not need today’s obnoxious brand of feminism stamped all over it. 

As for the casting, well, Emma Watson as Meg has me worried, I honestly don’t think that she’s the strongest actress in general and I’ve already read reports that they’ve had to cut some of Meg’s scenes due to Emma’s lackluster acting, which is a shame, because Meg as a character tends to get a bit lost in adaptations. Saoirse Ronan is physically better for the role of Jo than Winona was (but why is she a blonde though?) but I haven’t seen her in enough roles to judge how well she’ll act. At first I thought that Eliza Scanlan was cast as Amy, and after seeing her in Sharp Objects I was pretty pleased with that bit of casting, but then I discovered that she’s actually playing Beth, so now I’m not so sure. And this adaptation is making the same mistake that the 2017 mini series made and only casting one actress as Amy, when she really should be played by two actresses, because the jump in her age (from twelve to sixteen) is quite large, and if she’s played by the one actress she ends up coming across as too old when she’s supposed to be twelve and too young when she’s supposed to be sixteen through to twenty (this was a big issue with the mini series).

I also read that this movie doesn’t actually have a narrative story but is told through a series of vignettes as Jo looks back on her life as an adult and I’m not sure how I feel about that, as it feels like it could make the story less cohesive. I also have to admit that from what I’ve seen of the costumes, I’m not impressed, they look a little low-budget and some of the hemlines seem too high (for example, I saw a photo where Jo’s hemline is higher than Amy’s, which is just not time-accurate).

So yeah, I’m not really excited for this adaptation. I’m worried about tone and themes, the casting doesn’t impress me and I don’t think that any adaptation can live up to the beauty and brilliance of the 1994 film.

[theminiversexx]

tag drop: miss americana & the heartbreak prince - taylor swift

than i was at sixteen lost in a film scene { photos }

i'm lost in the lights { ask }

running through rose thorns i saw the scoreboard { memes }

it's you and me that's my whole world { convos }

the whole school is rolling fake dice { text }

we're so sad we paint the town blue { tweets }

miss americana and the heartbreak prince { musings }

you play stupid games you win stupid prizes { music}

It's you and me, there's nothing like this { tiktok }

[just-adashi-thots]

[celebrities au]:

adam and shiro are actors !

they started out in very different places, but somehow their paths led them both to hollywood (and each other)

shiro grew up in san diego where his parents both worked as teachers

his father would take him to see a movie once a week, and shiro loved each and every second of his trips to the theater

he'd then come home and spend the rest of the week reciting his favorite lines, reenacting the coolest scenes, and coming up with his own little side stories for the characters in the film he'd seen

he's constantly change his answer to the question about what he wanted to be when he grew up; with just about every movie he'd see, he'd want to be whatever his favorite character in that film was

it was only until he was in his teens that he realized he could be all of those people and more wrapped up in one by becoming an actor

his parents were very supportive, and they were his captive audience with whom he'd share his little made up worlds and talk endlessly about his favorite films

when shiro was sixteen, his parents decided to pack up and move to los angeles to hopefully give shiro a better environment and chance at breaking into the film industry

shiro was able to pursue his studies in acting, and he even landed some really small roles early on

his parents became really ill with a nasty case of pneumonia and passed away when shiro was twenty

before they passed, they both had him promise to continue chasing his dream, and shiro, already feeling lost and alone, swore that he wouldn't give up

so he continues his studies and works odd jobs wherever he can manage to stay afloat until he starts getting more and more acting parts

(he knew his name was rather hard to pronounce, so he chose to just continue using his childhood nickname Shiro when acting, too)

adam started his acting career in back in his native brazil

as a child, he learned very quickly that he enjoyed the spotlight

he would audition for every school play and musical he possibly could, and he even ended up with the lead role on several occasions

he thrived off of the drama and was thrilled by all of the colorful and loud emotions on display by all of the performers on stage

his real life was boring as an only child uninterested with school subjects and with parents who were constantly busy at work and who hired nannies that never bothered to do more than make sure that he was still breathing

when acting, though, he could escape to an exciting new world each time where life was actually fun and worth exploring, and all of the characters had dreams, passions, struggles, all these things that made them feel real and alive

once he graduated high school, he put all of his time and energy into trying to break into the industry and brush up on his acting skills at workshops and classes

the vast majority of his roles while he was in brazil were on novelas, and he had relative success and even a small following for the few years he stayed

he then decided that he wanted to make it big in hollywood, so he left brazil behind and headed to the states

(his parents made the big bucks as lawyers, so they had him studying in a well respected international school system where he learned english starting at age 5, so fluency wasn't an issue)

(though adam did think it would be a bitch and a half to get people to remember a name like Adam Fernando Almeida da Costa, so he decided to act professionally under the very bland but hollywood sounding Adam Winters)

adam and shiro meet for the first time on the set of an action movie in their early twenties when both of their hollywood careers were just getting started

they were cast in relatively minor roles as two conmen trying to swindle money from the main characters

the movie did very well in the box office, and their performances, though limited in screentime, did not go unnoticed by critics nor casting directors

(one review even ventured to say that they had good on screen chemistry 👀)

they both start to land bigger parts in other movies, which then leads to them being called left and right to do interviews, magazine covers, photo shoots, and more

they even vie for the newcomer awards at various festivals and awards ceremonies, both receiving recognitions

(much to the other's chagrin because both of these idiots have inflated egos that can't fit in the same room, and they don't exactly want anyone blocking their paths to the top or stealing their thunder)

they continue to cross paths at places like afterparties and auditions, each time exchanging pleasantries with smiles that don't reach their eyes

they end up viewing one another as rivals

(or it's just unresolved sexual tension i mean look it's really a fine line between the two for them)

(because they wouldn't ever admit it out loud, but they each think that the other is a very talented actor who was actually kind of maybe nice to act alongside that one time)

(.......and, you know, maddeningly attractive, too)

[allwordsarewind]

We’re all we’ve got

This line spoken by Roy McBride, portrayed in by Brad Pitt in the 2019 film Ad Astra, goes with me as I leave the movie theater on a Tuesday night.  The film depicts the previously mentioned as an accomplished astronaut chosen for a classified mission to deep space.  However, Roy,  not chosen for his skill, but his relation to H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), his father.

The movie opens with Roy making repairs to a, what I can only call now, a space ladder, during which a solar surge causes malfunctions on the unit and Roy falls to the earth.  The movie continues to guide us through Roy’s introduction to his mission assignment (contact his father) while giving us a good look at his character.  He’s an effective astronaut, but as it usually happens with career characters in films, this has put a strain on his personal relationship, namely with his wife.

As the movie continues, we learn that while he admires his father, Roy never had a close relationship, as the senior left Earth when Roy was only sixteen.  We also learn that his father, the captain of a mission to Neptune’s orbit has possibly gone rogue, and whose vessel appears to be the cause of the electrical surges.

Roy, along with the audience, comes to learn that during his father’s mission, Clifford McBride’s crew mutinied after being in space for too long and Clifford felt compelled to sacrifice his crew for the sake of the mission, much to McBride’s horror.

He then learns that orders have been given to destroy the vessel, and with it, Clifford McBride.  Roy attempts to board the ship routed for his father’s last known location peacefully, but there is a struggle and the rest of the crew are killed as a result.  It’s here where the viewer is presented with the similarity of what Clifford and Roy both do when the crew opposes their goals.

On the 79 day journey to Neptune’s orbit, Roy experiences isolation like never before, which causes him to reflect on the way he has lived his life on Earth, and causes the viewer to think about the isolation Cliffod’s crew must have felt to want to abandon their mission.

When Roy finally makes contact with his father, the reunion is less than joyous as Clifford tells Roy that he’s never cared for him, and that he hasn’t missed him while in space.  Clifford tells Roy that his work (finding extra terrestrial life) is everything to him.  It’s not until Roy responds later that the view is really hit with, what I think is, the movie’s most powerful message.

“We’re all we’ve got.”

Roy tells his father that “We’re all we’ve got.”  Maybe the we refers to the father and son pair, but I think the we also refers to we as a species.  All there is, is humanity, and you can see it play on Tommy Lee Jones that he’s turned his back on all the people in his life to find something that isn’t there.  Through all his time in space, looking for life, he truly believed he would find life.  But when Roy, his son, tells him that he’s wrong.  That his mission will forever be unaccomplished, the viewer sees this haunt on his face.

Clifford, realizing that even with his son there is no home for him on Earth, decides to submit himself to the vastness of space and drifts away.  Roy, distraught at having found and lost his father in such a short span, contemplates the purpose of continuing on.  As he spins in the vacuum of space, he sees a light in the distance.  Now, I don’t know if this light was his ship or earth, or what.  But like in the Great Gatsby, this light seems to give him a hope, and Roy returns to his space ship and then to earth.

The movie wraps up with Roy reflecting on his life, and seemingly deciding to value his relationships more with the scene ending with him meeting his estranged wife in a cafe.  

I really liked this movie.  It portrayed a complex father-son relationship against an exciting space adventure background.�� Another appearance in this movie, although never overtly addressed, was the realistic look at what space exploration would be like in our future.  Commercial trips to the moon with tourist-trap-like commodities (a model of an alien for memorable photos), and turf wars over the moon’s resources (including space pirates!).

The sound cut beautifully from stark silence to startling sound.  Pitt and Jones both portray their characters wonderfully and the cinematography is beautiful.  The pacing was good and there was nothing annoying that stood out and distracted from the movie.  If you wanted to be nit-picky, you could ask how Clifford’s mission could possibly have enough food to last some 27+ years (especially if you’ve seen The Martian), but the movie didn’t want to waste time and bog down the viewer with every scientific detail because that wasn’t the point of the movie.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  I left the theater feeling good about humanity’s oneness which I think is important these days.

[hmntxrch]

chase the wind and touch the sky a star’s light shines on long after it dies 

(jake t austin. gnc transman) It looks like JOHNNY STORM has been transported to New York City. HE/THEY is a SIXTEEN year old CANON and the aesthetic associated with them is STARRY SKIES, VIDEO-GAMES, SLEEPING BY THE FIREPLACE, COMIC BOOKS, THE SMELL OF WARM SPICES && GREASE STAINED HANDS.

Johnny was born in Long Island, New York, roughly four years after his older sister. He’s recently been thrust into the spotlight on both the celebrity and super-hero scene as the Human Torch, as a contribute to the android of the same name from WWII, and feels more like he’s a fish out of water than someone living a Hollywood-esque dream. The Fantastic Four as a whole are new to the crime-fighting scene, and they seem more invested towards interstellar affairs, but they’re nonetheless proving to become a quickly adored public image.

But life wasn’t always so fantastic for the Storm siblings. Despite the legacy of their family name, they’ve grown up in a broken home and used to always struggle just to make end’s meat. Their parents, Franklin and Mary Storm, were two renown voices in the science community who left impressions on a vast number of fields. The family had the briefest of idyllic lives. Johnny was little, when their mother tragically died in a car accident. Too young to remember her at all. What he does remember is his father, and how the man quickly grew despondent; burying his grief with alcohol while he gambled away the family’s money. 

He remembers how Sue was also so, so young yet she already had to take on the role of raising her younger sibling. How she started working when she was probably too young, still, to do so. He remembers the times his father would remember they were there, always forgetting because he was too busy drowning. The yelling. The broken apologies. Cutting his tiny hands on glass as he tried to clean up the photo of Mary that he dropped and broke, before dad woke up and saw. Sometimes, Franklin would get mad at him, or something else, and it’d be terrible; especially if after a period of relative normalcy. Don’t tell your sister.

Johnny still found himself waiting for dad to come home, when he seemed to just vanish one day; even though they quickly lost their old home, shoved into a corner of their Aunt Jewel’s boarding house, never quite actually having a home there. Jewel didn’t like Johnny very much, he always thought, with how she was always complaining about how he could never sit still, never talk properly, always getting under foot. While Sue was at work or school, Johnny often found himself alone. He was never good at making friends with other kids. But the old mechanics from a near by car shop didn’t mind having Johnny around– they’d even let him fiddle around, teach him things. Johnny quickly grew to love cars, building things, taking something apart and putting it back together again; their garage quickly became his favorite place to hide after the kids at school were particularly mean, or when he was trying to avoid Aunt Jewel.

Sue was just starting college, moving out of the boarding house to live in some dorm with the plan of coming back during the summers for Johnny, when old Aunt Jewel finally grew tired of him. He’s not sure what it was, exactly, that was the last straw for her– maybe it was how the days he came home from school without bruises were becoming less and less, or how he was in his clumsy preteen years and kept knocking over her vases or dropping dishes. He only remembers her yelling, being forced to pack his few belongings, and having to ride the train over to Sue’s all by himself. Being that poor scrawny little kid crying his eyes out, lost and confused when he came to his stop; because Sue wasn’t there, Aunt Jewel forgot to actually tell her that Johnny was being sent over, and no one could understand a kid who couldn’t stop sobbing and stuttering and whose hands were too shaky to sign.

That’s when he met Reed, the kindest guy Johnny had ever met, who happened to be on his way to campus and had decided to check out what was causing such a commotion. Apparently, Sue and Reed were fast friends, sharing classes together, so of course the genius recognized who the bawling kid was and contacted her. The guy certainly made a great first impression on Johnny.

Then it really was just him and Sue. Sue, who was barely an adult; who couldn’t catch a break from being his caregiver on top of everything else she had to do. They ended up living in a tiny apartment for a bit, and with even more struggle Sue was recognized as his only legal guardian– they didn’t have any other family. None that actually cared or mattered. Johnny was… he always thought he’d be okay, so long as he at least had Sue. School never got easier for Johnny, with the bullying that persisted even into high-school and how he could never quite perform well in a traditional classroom, but he had Sue, and then Reed and Ben, and it helped.

Then the Snap happened, claiming Johnny as one of its victims, and he returned to an older sister who was now a whole decade older than him. Reed’s hair had started to gray prematurely, and Ben was– was still Ben, but Johnny couldn’t help but feel as if he missed more than five years of his life. Something had shifted, while he was gone, something he still can’t quite place. Of course, no one’s told him anything about what they’ve been up to; which is why he ended up skulking around to eavesdrop on their private talks when they thought he was asleep.

He found out about their plans to go into space, about Reed wanting to go ahead and test the ship they’ve been working on together, even though administration hadn’t authorized it for flight yet. It was technically stealing.

So, they stole the friggin’ space ship. Johnny begged to join, because who wouldn’t want to go to space? Also, he didn’t want to risk being separated from Sue again; not that he actually said anything about that, but Ben groused to Reed: “Dammit, Stetch, if it’s as safe as ya think it is, just let the brat come along–” and that was that.

He doesn’t remember much about the brief time spent actually among the stars; but he does recall the crash. Of burning up, inside and out, veins feeling like molten lava as his irradiated body instinctively absorbed the explosion. It’s disorienting and terrifying; he thought he was dying and alone, partially buried under some debris. He went Nova, then, as his vision swam. He blacked out after that. He knows the four of them somehow came to some kind of testing facility, probably a branch operating under SHIELD, and spent a good portion of the following year trying to understand what happened to them, planning what to do next.

Johnny never expected to go from Long Island’s most miserable loser who still mostly wore hand-me-downs from his sis, to practically overnight teen idol and public hero. But it’s his reality now.

Currently, he’s still struggling to get used to all the attention this kind of fame brings; and it’s a herculean effort to not erupt in flames from public anxiety alone. He’s spending this second year mostly still trying to get used to his powers, going back to school, etc.

TRIVIA

In regards to what point of 616 canon he’s up to, he’s roughly post the Mike Snow Incident and Moleman’s introduction.

I depict Johnny as mixed Filipinx like myself, but finding a faceclaim that met the age requirements without being too old was hard as hell; so I settled for someone who was at least mixed Latinx.

Johnny had a terrible stutter growing up, and is still taking speech therapy for it (although it’s no longer as severe as it used to be); he learned basic ASL to help his communication skills.

Johnny has gad, autism, and adhd.

He’s been able to completely overhaul a car engine’s transmission since he was roughly 15 yrs old.

Originally a student at Glenville High; the incident with his former long-time bully Mike Snow has caused him to transfer to Midtown High at the beginning of this school year.

Some of his special interests are Star Trek, cars, astronomy, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Buffy, and film history.

Johnny has persistent nightmares/terrors of the crash; this often results in him burning even the most fireproof bed-sheets as he nearly goes Nova in the middle of the night.

[dweemeister]

2018 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (final round)

TAGGING: @cokwong, @dansmonarbre, @dog-of-ulthar, @emilylime5, @fredsbarandgrill, @halfwaythruthedark, @ideallaedi, @introspectivemeltdown, @itsjustangc, @loveless422, @maximiliani, @memetoilet, @mindo80, @monkeysmadeofcheese, @myluckyerror, @nazur, @phendranaedge, @plus-low-overthrow, @saucy-witch, @shadesofhappy, @somequeerdistortion, @stephdgray, @themusicmoviesportsguy, @umgeschrieben, @underblackwings, @yellanimal

Also TAGGING older followers/friends/supporters who I really haven’t been in touch with lately, have done the final before, or are on the inactive side. And also some newcomers who have been supporting the blog a lot: @astorytellertothestars, @babeltwo, @celibatemachine, @classwarhooligan​, @dakotarosie, @emergencyhugs​, @haveyoubeentobahia​, @ineedanumbrella​, @jayb3​, @justtheguest​, @mundi41, @nudehearth, @sadisticsunglasses​, @shootingstarvenator​, @thenarddog, @thethirdman8, @thewolfofelectricavenue​, and @voicetalentbrendan​!

And now the grand finale. For those of you who have never seen this before, I have an Oscar-like ceremony on my blog celebrating all the movies of that year’s Movie Odyssey (all the movies I saw for the first time in their entirety) at the year’s end. For the last four years, I have asked family and friends to help out with the Best Original Song category - because in all other categories, you'd be forced to watch entire movies to decide it. This is a musical thank-you to all of you, who have contributed, in your ways, to support the Movie Odyssey and me. Please do not feel like you have to do this; there are no hard feelings if you do not participate, and you have my thanks either way. But if you are, I hope you enjoy this 2018 edition!

This final round has the largest chronological spread we have ever covered: eighty-eight years. Songs in English, German (making its debut), Hindi, Japanese are all involved. A Vietnamese-language song made its debut for MOABOS, but was eliminated in the preliminary.

INSTRUCTIONS Please rank (#1-16) your choices in order. The top ten songs will receive nominations. Be warned, there is a new tabulation method for this year's final (described in the "read more" at the bottom). There is no minimum or maximum amount of songs you can rank, but because of the nature of this new tabulation system, it is highly recommended to rank as many songs as possible, rather than only one or two. Those who rank fewer songs run a greater risk of their ballots being discarded as I am counting the ballots. Again, this is all described in the "read more". Why not implement at a minimum number of songs to rank? Well, I believe in giving you folks as much freedom as possible.

Please consider to the best of your ability: how musically interesting the song is, its lyrics, context within the film (if you've seen it - this factor also includes integration into the film's score), choreography/dance direction (if applicable; not many song-and-dance numbers this year), and the song's cultural impact/life outside the film (if applicable, and by far the least important factor). Imperfect audio and video quality may not be used against any song, as this disadvantages older and non-English language songs. You may absolutely send in comments and reactions with your rankings - it’s always fun to read reactions to individual songs, and it usually makes the process (for everyone) more enjoyable!

The submission deadline is Sunday, December 31 at 6 PM Pacific Time / 4 PM Hawai'i / 5 PM Alaska / 8 PM Central / 10 PM Eastern. If you're across the Atlantic, that's New Year's Day at 2 AM GMT / 3 AM CET / 4 AM EET / 7:30 AM IST. There will be no deadline extensions.

And now the sixteen finalists in this category, for your listening pleasure (contextual blurbs are provided, and I hope they are informative; if links do not work there are most likely alternatives across the Internet but please inform me if that does not apply to you):

“Bless Your Beautiful Hide”, music by Gene de Paul, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Performed by Howard Keel

The opener to Seven Brides; its melody is used as the main orchestral theme throughout (most memorably in the barn dance scene). Oregonian backwoodsman Adam Pontipee (Keel) has little experience with society (let alone women), as he looks for a bride to take care of him and his six brothers in this satirical musical of gendered misbehavior - which pokes fun of, never endorses, said misbehavior.

“'Bout Time”, music and lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968)

Performed by John Davidson and Lesley Ann Warren

In this Disney musical, Joe Carder (Davidson) has convinced the Bower family to move to Dakota Territory. Joe is suitor to Alice Bower (Warren), their relationship complicated by her grandfather's politics. This song takes place on the first day in their new hometown, and before her first day at work at the schoolhouse.

“Candle on the Water”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, Pete's Dragon (1977)

Performed by Helen Reddy

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Nora (Reddy) has just tucked Pete in, not before describing the story of her long-lost fiancé (missing sea for over a year) to him. After being scolded by her father for clinging onto the past, Nora goes up to the lighthouse balcony to sing this.

“Chaar Kadam”, music by Shantanu Moitra, lyrics by Swanand Kirkire, PK (2014, India)

Performed by Sushant Singh Rajput (dubbed by Shaan) and Anushka Sharma (dubbed by Shreya Ghoshal)

Lyrics in Hindi (song ends at 16:20)

In Bruges in Belgium, an Indian Hindu woman named Jaggu (Sharma) has met a Pakistani Muslim, Sarfaraz (Rajput) - both are students. This is their love duet before her family objects due to nationalistic and (especially) religious reasons. Don't worry about the dude at the end - he's the one who got them together.

“Charade”, music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Charade (1963)

Performed by orchestra and chorus; conducted by Mancini

Used as main theme throughout this romantic comedy/mystery/suspense film. This song is more famous for its instrumental version without lyrics.

“Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)”, music and German lyrics by Friedrich Hollaender, English lyrics by Sammy Lerner, The Blue Angel (1930, Germany)

Performed by Marlene Dietrich

(English-language version... excuse the badly-edited video) / (German original)

A college prep school professor is angry at his students for passing around photos of cabaret singer, Lola Lola (Dietrich), in class. In hopes to catch the boys at the club, he goes to the cabaret and is overcome with lust for Lola after seeing her perform this song. Their relationship will become toxic, based on his groveling and humiliations.

“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, lyrics by Ned Washington, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

Performed by Frankie Laine (the above was re-recorded in the 1980s when Laine was in his mid-70s, so those familiar with Laine's voice will notice it sounds weaker)

Played in the opening credits, with additional verses sung during montage scenes across the film. Used as main orchestral theme in the film's score. This version of the song contains additional lyrics that can't be found online.

“Hooray for Hollywood”, music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Hollywood Hotel (1937)

Performed by Johnnie Davis, Frances Langford, and Benny Goodman and His Orchestra

Considered an unofficial anthem of Hollywood. Usually played at least once in every Oscars ceremony and other movie awards ceremonies worldwide.

Small town saxophonist Ronnie Bowers (Dick Powell) has just won a contract with a major Hollywood studio. His friends and former employer, Benny Goodman, arrive at the airport to send him off. The lyrics are meant to satirize what people do to become famous as actors.

“Hum Aapki Aankhon Mein”, music by Sachin Dev Burman, lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi, Pyaasa (1957, India)

Performed by Guru Dutt (dubbed by Mohammad Rafi) and Mala Sinha (dubbed by Geeta Dutt)

Lyrics in Hindi

Broke poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) encounters his university ex, Meena (Sinha), who is now married to a hotshot publisher who won't publish Vijay's work. Vijay then has a flashback, and within that flashback is this foggy fantasy song-and-dance sequence. Flashback-ception?

“It's Not Easy”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, Pete's Dragon (1977)

Performed by Sean Marshall and Helen Reddy

Pete (Marshall) and his dragon, Elliott, are on the run from his abusive foster family. The lighthouse keeper and his daughter, Nora (Reddy), take Pete in. Nora has not met Elliott yet, and believes that he is Pete's imaginary friend.

"Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing", music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

Non-film version performed by Nat King Cole; film version performed by chorus (and is unavailable)

Used as main orchestral theme throughout this romantic drama's score; version with lyrics sung by chorus first appear at the end of the film.

"Mystery of Love", music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens, Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Performed by Stevens

(single version) / (use in film; song isn't played in its entirety)

This song appears as the film's main characters, Elio and Oliver, take one of their many day trips in this Italian summer.

“Rain”, music by Shin'ichi Nakajima, Saori Fujisaki, and Satoshi Fukase, lyrics by Saori Fujisaki and Satoshi Fukase, Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017, Japan)

Performed by Sekai no Owari

Lyrics in Japanese (rough translations)

Appears in the end credits; this song is not referenced in this anime fantasy's score (but like the score, there's a prominent and unusual use of a dulcimer).

“Shallow”, music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt, A Star Is Born (2018)

Performed by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper

Aspiring singer-songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga) has fallen for declining artist Jackson Maine (Cooper). At one of his concerts, he begins to put music to a song she sung to him in a parking lot, inviting her onstage.

“This Is Me”, music and lyrics by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, The Greatest Showman (2017)

Performed by Keala Settle and company

After being shunned from a dinner including P.T. Barnum’s wealthy sponsors for his circus, the circus "freaks" sing this ballad which eventually becomes a montage, refusing to put up with those harass and put them down.

“You're the One That I Want”, music and lyrics by John Farrar, Grease (1978)

Performed by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

At the post-graduation high school carnival, greaser and bad boy Danny Zuko (Travolta) is stunned to see his relatively restrained, somewhat prudish, girlfriend, Sandy (Newton-John), committing to change herself for him to win him over.

Well, have at it! And thanks for your time and consideration! You may submit your responses in any way, as long as they come in before the deadline. I am free to answer any questions about anything you have about the process. The 2018 Movie Odyssey has been a rewarding one, and I have been glad to share it with you.

TABULATION Like the preliminary... a respondent’s first choice receives 10 points, the second choice receives 9, the third choice receives 8, etc. HOWEVER, the points system is used only for tiebreaker purposes.

The way the winner will be decided is through a process called instant-runoff voting (IRV; the Academy Awards uses this method to choose a Best Picture winner, visually represented here - you should really watch this video if the below doesn't make sense... which it probably won't):

All #1 picks from all voters are tabulated. A song needs more than half of all aggregate votes to win (50% of all votes plus one... i.e. if there are thirty respondents, sixteen #1 votes are needed to win on the first count).

If there is no winner after the first count (as is most likely), the song(s) with the fewest #1 votes or points is/are eliminated. Then, we look at the ballots of those who voted for the last-placed song(s). Their votes then go to the highest-remaining (non-eliminated) song on their ballot.

This process (in #2) repeats until one song has secured 50% plus one of all votes. We keep eliminating nominees and transfer votes to the highest-ranked, non-eliminated song on each ballot. NOTE: It is possible after several rounds of counting that respondents who did not entirely fill in their ballots will have wasted their votes at the end of the process. For example, if a person voted the second-to-last place song as their #1, ranked no other songs, and the count has exceeded two rounds, their ballot is discarded (lowering the vote threshold needed to win), and they have no say in which song ultimately is the winner.

A song wins when it reaches more than fifty percent of all #1 and re-distributed votes.

Tiebreakers: 1) first song to receive 50% plus one of all #1 and transferred votes; 2) total points earned; 3) total #1 votes; 4) placement on my ballot; 5) placement on my sister’s ballot; 6) tie declared

Previous years’ results for reference: 2013 final 2014 final (input from family and friends began this year) 2015 final 2016 prelim / final 2017 prelim / final

[tvandfilmconfessions]

Imagine walking into a Hollywood boardroom in 2018 in hopes of selling a big summer comedy. It’s a classic David versus Goliath story — a crew of nebbish geeks outwits a gang of maniacal, grunting bullies. Your pitch goes well at first until one of the execs wonders what sort of delightful hijinks ensue when the nerds and jocks face off.

You explain how the underdogs secretly film women naked, adding that they eventually sell “pies” (really just whipped cream) hiding an illegally taken photo of one of these women. The room goes silent and you pull another idea from the script.

“Also, one of the nerds has sex with a woman by wearing her boyfriend’s Halloween costume.”

The execs shift awkwardly in their seats.

“But it’s okay,” you assure everyone, “because it turns out the girl likes it.”

Is that sexual assault-filled movie getting made in 2018? I hope to god not. But thirty-five years ago that exact comedy was greenlit. In fact, it did well enough after its July 20, 1984 release to spawn sequels, a TV show, and plenty of revival talk.

* *

Watch the movie in question — Revenge of the Nerds — today and you’re likely to cringe so hard you miss all the jokes. Having just seen it for this piece, I can say: It feels dated. That’s no surprise, it is dated. It was released the year LeBron James, Prince Harry, and Katy Perry were born. But does that mean you can’t think it’s funny? Should we push aside all the movies, books, and TV that fail to fit with our current societal norms? Do we burn Gone with the Wind and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

“I don’t necessarily think we need to dump our problematic past,” says Justina Ireland, a New York Times bestselling author who often speaks, writes, and Tweets about matters of race and gender in America. “I think a lot of times when we sanitize the past we overlook the bad parts and it becomes like ‘the good ol’ days’ ideology. But I do think we need to engage with the past in a way that’s realistic.”

For Ireland, that means thinking critically about art and placing it in a historical context. Though she (like many people starting conversations about creative work that fails our current cultural litmus tests) has been treated like some sort of neo-liberal killjoy, her take on what to do about our “problematic faves” is literally just a call for thoughtfulness.

“You can enjoy something and recognize that it has problems,” she explains. “Like I love buffalo chicken wings. They are not good for me. Buffalo wings are not good for anybody. No one should be eating those. But they’re so delicious, and I wanna eat them. And I wanna recognize when I eat them that they’re not good for me.”

Based on this scale, Revenge of the Nerds is a seriously over-sauced pile of wings. Of all the screwball 80s comedies, the problems are too problematic and the comedy not enduring enough for me to get over. Sometimes things fall by the wayside and for me, this movie has. Especially because I don’t remember loving it as a kid. I watched it, but it wasn’t something I quoted.

That’s not to say that I’m ready to ditch every movie with a cringey moment. There are comedies from the same era, some with similar problems, that I do want to continue enjoying — keeping in mind, as Ireland says, that “movies, they are so much a function of their day, time, year, etcetera. You can’t separate that from the movie itself.”

I was well into my thirties before I stopped considering verbally abusive men more interesting than the nice ones. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took even longer for me to fully comprehend the scene late in “Sixteen Candles,” when the dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear. The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she “enjoyed it.” (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did.” She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.

This comes from Molly Ringwald’s recent essay in The New Yorker about the legacy of John Hughes and the filmmaker’s blind spots concerning race, gender, and consent. The piece applies the sort of context that Ireland advocates for to a few of Hughes’s creepy-feeling on-screen decisions — setting them in a certain time in history, focusing on the people they affected, and asking tough questions about how a male director portrayed female agency. The actress never bemoans working with Hughes (who died in 2009). In fact, she clearly carries fond memories of him. But that doesn’t preclude her from seeing his work through a critical lens.

This is an important point when it comes to dealing with outdated art: Are we being intellectually rigorous? Are we thinking critically? Are we examining our own biases and how they were influenced by the societal norms of the time?

“The problem is, is for a long time, the people defining what was canon were a bunch of straight white guys,” Ireland says. “They tended to favor things that privileged their perspective. Because even though Sixteen Candles is about a girl, it’s really not. It’s really about the men around this girl. There’s the nerd, who wants her underpants. There’s the hot boy who’s unachievable. There’s even the racist foreign exchange student. I would love for someone to go through and look at the number of speaking roles and how many times men get to speak as opposed to women in that movie. Because if you look at every other female character besides Molly Ringwald, they’re all a mess.”

The fact that straight white men defined the canon for so long explains why — as our culture wrestles with these issues — it’s straight white men who are in a panic. When you’ve enjoyed unchecked power for centuries, even questioning decades-old art seems to smack of censorship. This is a shame for a zillion reasons, but two of the big ones are the most obvious: 1) New, diverse voices and a deeper thoughtfulness about culture, gender, and sexuality clearly makes for better, more nuanced art and 2) considering that white men controlled the conversation for so long, it would be nice if we were introspective enough to help open it back up.

What’s lost when white men pretend that criticism equals censorship is the chance for genuine artistic growth. How quickly we forget that artists have always been forward thinkers and that the stories the creative community produces would surely become more potent if we allowed them to evolve. That’s what comedian Hari Kondabolu wanted when he made the documentary The Problem with Apu.

“I don’t want The Simpsons to just disappear,” he says. “I think it could be better, but I don’t think that’s a unique thing that Simpsons fans have said. Even predating this documentary, Simpsons fans were like, ‘It’s not as good as it used to be.’ And they’ve said that for years.”

Though The Problem with Apu was treated by people who didn’t see it (and onetime social justice warrior Lisa Simpson) as more fodder for the “the PC culture can’t take jokes”-brigade, it was actually the exact opposite. Kondabolu grew up loving The Simpsons and watching him wrestle with the issues that Apu’s character presents is the same as anyone else trying to put something they love in proper context. The big difference is that with the show in question still on TV, changes could feasibly be made.

“There’s a reason why I did The Simpsons,” Kondabolu explains. “It’s still alive, actively making episodes. So, it’s both a snapshot of 30 years ago and our thinking back then as well as an active participant in culture, right now. But you don’t get rid of it. You hope for something better, and if not, you create things that are more contemporary and relevant. That’s the way it’s always been.”

Here again, we see a creator from a marginalized group handling the matter with a deft touch and a propensity to give dated work the benefit of the doubt. Which makes The Simpson’s creator Matt Groening’s flippant “people love to pretend they’re offended” comments seem all the more wrong-headed, as yet another white male seems to conflate being questioned with suppression.

“As much as I hate the word ‘problematic,'” Kondabolu says, “if we were to read into it — it’s saying something has a problem. It doesn’t mean it’s awful, it doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still good; it just means there’s a problem.”

In my experience, the boilerplate response from white men when concerns about outdated pieces of pop culture surface is an eye roll paired with some riff on the classic line: “I guess people can’t take a joke anymore.” It’s that dismissal that I can’t abide. My white/male/straightness has bestowed me with a certain degree of privilege and part of the responsibility of that privilege is a willingness to wade into tricky conversations. Besides, it’s fun to think about this stuff. Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an 80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.

So that’s what I’ll be doing the next time my own “problematic fave” — The Goonies — comes on screen. Discussing it, fitting the piece into its historical moment in time, wondering what the hell One-Eyed Willy’s master plan was, and asking questions about the movie’s continued relevance in my life. If my final answer is, “Yes, I love this and feel like their treatment of Data — though clearly based in stereotypes — is affectionate enough for me to still have fun watching” then I’ll watch. It’s not exactly rocket science.

“Nothing is pure,” Ireland concludes. “It’s also really indicative of what we considered acceptable in the early 80s compared to what we consider acceptable now. I don’t think it’s fair to judge something from a hundred years ago by a modern standard, because you have to understand the place in which the art was created to understand the art.”

When I bring up my enduring love for The Goonies, Kondabolu echoes Ireland’s sentiment. “Just because something has an issue doesn’t mean it’s ruined. Data is a loved character. But there’s still an element that you have to acknowledge. This isn’t shocking for those of us who aren’t white.”

And it shouldn’t be shocking for those of us who are white, either. Because at some point, if you’re railing against even the littlest bit of critique over a movie, book, or show you love, the person it ultimately says the most about is you.

by STEVE BRAMUCCI  

@nerdsagainstfandomracism @oldfilmsflicker @profeminist

[starwarsconnectionarchive-blog]

Pablo Hidalgo’s Many Revelations About The Last Jedi at Comic Con Chile

Pablo Hidalgo, he of the witty Tweets wrecking Reywalker (exhibit 1), cat lover and Lucasfilm Story Group top banana, was recently at Comic Con Chile for a panel called “Mysteries of Star Wars”. One of our Spanish-speaking members from Reylo Skyforum has made a recap/translation of the panel. Behold the wisdom gleaned from this video.

Pablo (PH) opened by revealing that he wrote the captions that appear under the Annie Leibovitz photos in the Vanity Fair spotlight of The Last Jedi. He went on to scroll through the photos and added commentary about the characters and filming process as follows:

About Kylo Ren:

“Here are the bad guys in The Last Jedi -  Kylo of course, carrying the scar that he got from Rey. Kylo has a lot to prove. Even though the First Order was successful in a lot of what it did in TFA, you can't forget that Kylo was defeated by a newcomer. The Last Jedi starts off right where TFA ended, and he has to go visit his boss. We can all imagine how that's gonna turn out."

Audience member question: “Does Kylo Ren know that Darth Vader turned good in the end?” PH: “I think Luke would have told him. He may only have heard a certain side of the story from someone else, and he decided to choose what he chose to believe.”

About Luke/Mark Hamill:

Luke's gloved hand is touching "an ancient Jedi book" in the trailer.

Ahch-To is the site of the first Jedi temple, but the stone hut featured behind Rey and Luke in the VF picture is not a temple. PH: "The island is home to caretakers, and these aliens live in those huts - so Luke hasn't been entirely alone."

“The space siblings (Luke and Leia) have moments (in The Last Jedi) as well.”

Audience member question: “What can you say about Mark Hamill's displeasure with the creative direction of Lucasfilm? He has talked about this in a lot of articles.” PH: “Mark has been quoted out of context. He said he had disagreements with how his character was shown because he didn't think it was going to work out, but then he said ‘I was happy to be proven wrong.’ I think that Mark gives an amazing performance in TLJ and he has nothing but incredible things to say about Rian Johnson. I think any reports about him being unhappy are probably being framed that way for some reason.”

About Rey:

Rey has inherited Anakin's saber and the pilot's seat in the Millennium Falcon, and Chewbacca is a loyal co-pilot. 

     That’s it, wop wop :(

About Carrie Fisher/Princess Leia

"Carrie Fisher's role is much bigger in TLJ than in TFA. We didn’t intend for it to be that way at the time, but TLJ will be an amazing tribute to Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia.”

“Even though we lost Carrie Fisher it doesn't mean we're done telling stories about Princess Leia. There's chapters of her life that haven't been told yet. We have a book coming out by Claudia Grey which follows sixteen-year-old Leia. I think we have opportunity to tell more stories about her.

About Snoke: 

Audience member question: “Was Snoke's first appearance in TFA, or have we seen him before? Is he related to Darth Plagueis?” PH: “Snoke was first seen in TFA. He is a new character we have never seen before.

About the new characters:

“Kelly Marie Tran’s character Rose Tico is a mechanic in the Resistance, her sister Paige is a gunner on a bombing ship.”

Laura Dern’s character: “You had best not underestimate Vice-Admiral Holdo."

"Here is Benicio del Toro as DJ. There are all sorts of rumors about DJ on the internet; he is so shady that there's probably all sorts of rumors about him in the galaxy as well. If you shouldn't judge Holdo by her looks, you can probably judge DJ by his looks."

About Phasma:

"We'll learn a lot more about Phasma this year": there is a new comic about how she arrived on Star Killer Base. There is also a forthcoming novel from DelRey which “talks about how the First Order came to find her in the first place, her past, her home world.”

The picture of Phasma in Vanity Fair “is Gwendolyn behind the scenes, not what Phasma looks like without the helmet.”

About the filming process of The Last Jedi and episode 9:

Rian Johnson went to Skellig Michael to film the continuation of Luke and Rey’s meeting scene for start of The Last Jedi about 2 weeks after JJ wrapped up filming the end of TFA - so before TFA was released.

Audience member question: “Did Carrie's death affect The Last Jedi?” PH answer: “No, because she had already completed her part in its entirety. It did create a challenge for Colin in episode 9, because we all wanted her to feature quite prominently in it, but that can't happen anymore. We are evolving the story from the loss of that, to tell us where it should go.”

About the Force:

“If the Jedi have existed for thousands of years, they would have explored all aspects of how the Force works, from the spiritual to the biological. Only thinking of one side of the equation is an incomplete understanding.”

General Star Wars questions from the audience:

“Was Anakin Skywalker created by Darth Plagueis? PH: “All clues point to yes. This is just a theory, everyone can believe what they want; I think Sidious and Plagueis tried to provoke the creation of The Chosen One so that they could control it, and it didn't work out.

“Did Palpatine have any involvement in Padme's death?” PH: “You can theorize about it; I doubt we're ever going to get any more detail as to exactly how she died. That is a story George presented and we'll leave it as is in the movie.

“Did Palpatine influence Anakin's dreams?” PH doesn't think so. “He is a fearful person, and Palpatine took advantage of it.”

“How did you guys get over the criticism of the PT?” (lol) PH: “Lots of kids love the PT. That generation will get a chance to get out of the shadow of the previous generation. Then they also have to deal with the next generation, who have staked out episode 7, 8 and whatever comes next as THEIR Star Wars. That's healthy.”

“Is Return of the Jedi plural or singular? PH: “People should figure it out for themselves, it's magical that we're still arguing about what it means 30 years later. This is like our religion and we are not done studying it; it doesn't matter what I think about that, it matters what you believe."

“Is Jango Fett Mandalorian or just a mercenary wearing Mandalorian armor?” PH: “All we have to go by is Prime Minister Almec's word. if Jango is Mandalorian he has to be of such shaky standing that someone like Almec can say "No he's not," but there's more to come about this.”

“Are you going to make movies about the survivors from Order 66?” PH: “The era of the early Empire while Jedi were being hunted is an area of storytelling we're interested in. We just launched a new Darth Vader comic series that takes place right during that era. We're not done telling those stories, so it's always a possibility.”

“We saw Mace Windu fly out the window but we never saw his corpse. Is he alive or dead?” PH: “Depends on who you ask. Sam Jackson says he's alive and well, and I don't want to argue with Sam Jackson.”

PH: “Dave Filoni wants to do something special with stories he didn't get a chance to tell. I'll leave that for him to describe.”

“Is Disney interested in doing films about the Old Republic era?” PH: Creative direction for Star Wars is under Lucasfilm - we are always looking along the timeline to see what stories to develop, if we find a filmmaker passionate about that era we may consider it but for now the story is told through the video games.”

“There's a rumor that the First Order will fight against an external galactic threat like the Yuuzhan Vong; will there be something like the YV in the Sequel Trilogy?” PH: The First Order has its hands full trying to take over the known galaxy... The Yuuzhan Vong where going to appear in Clone Wars, they were going to be different than what we read in the books, and it was going to be mysterious aliens encountered by the Jedi - but it was never produced. In our mind there is a version out there where the Jedi encounter Yuuzhan Vong.”

“What do you think about the "Jar Jar is evil" theory?” PH: “Poor guy, he's been through so much but still has  a heart of gold.”

If you made it this far, we regale you with our quick-fire impressions:

As discussed in our podcast analyzing the The Last Jedi teaser trailer, we believe events shown in the teaser will be occurring in the first 1/3 of The Last Jedi. Pablo’s comments about continuity and Kylo having something to prove after just being defeated support that. Don’t expect to see Kylo Ren appeased at the start of TLJ, he will probably be a hot mess. (Hot because he’s attractive, get it? u_u)

The picture of Rey and Chewbacca in Vanity Fair + Pablo’s brief comment about Rey inheriting the Millennium Falcon and a loyal co-pilot in Chewie point to her eventually leaving Ahch-To in The Last Jedi. Some have speculated she will probably spend the entirety of the film on the island, but we disagree.

We are relieved and thanking the Maker after hearing Pablo say “WE are evolving the story (episode 9)” - it’s not just riding on Colin Trevorrow’s shoulders (sorry, Colin). This should also be reassuring in light of PlotGATE: the filmmaker has freedom, but Lucasfilm is always a part of the process. 

They have more Princess Leia stories to tell! And Claudia Grey is involved, huzzah!

Barely any questions about Kylo Ren and zero questions about Rey - but y’all ask about Darth Jar Jar? Get it together, my dudes. -___-