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justinmoviereviews · 2 years ago

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The Class of 2022

Bringing this feature back out. Some pretty good films this year.

Dog - Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum

If a movie about a damaged guy getting saved during his darkest night by a dog doesn’t make you weep, you don’t have a dog.

Barbarian - Zach Cregger

This movie slaps so fucking hard.

Don’t Worry Darling - Olivia Wilde

Basically I think this one was killed by its press tour. I think the critic class decided liking this wasn’t worth the risk so collectively expelled it, but going in without any idea anything had even happened I thought it was the best movie so far in the nascent Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity genre that’s become one of the few acceptable avenues for mainstream films. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the twist is so much more interesting than the Stepford Wives aura that hangs over this suggests it will be. And it’s a pretty good looking flick.

Bros - Nicholas Stoller

A very sexually explicit, funnier than average romcom. Allison’s take: I can’t tell if he’s making fun of romcom tropes or just using them.

The Banshees of Inisherin - Martin McDonagh

More than any movie he’s ever made, this one invites interpretation. I’m still working on it, and I don’t imagine there’s a definitive explanation, but right now the one I like is that this is a movie about death. I’m not sure whose death. I look forward to watching this several more times.

Confess, Fletch - Greg Mottola

Has there ever been a talented actor worse at understanding his gifts than Jon Hamm? The dude is an unknowable phantom with the face of Adonis, not an Apatow comedian. This is not a bad movie, but the guy at the center of it doesn’t fit and never feels natural. They would have been better off with just about anyone else. Even an unknown would have worked better than our man.

Amsterdam - David O. Russell

For awhile this movie has a Thomas Pynchon quality to it, where a ragtag group of goofuses stumble into an evil global shadow conspiracy they’ll never defeat or understand or even directly encounter. Its so good for a minute that I wondered if Thomas Pynchon was somehow involved (maybe he is, I didn’t look into it). The end wraps everything up too neatly to really spin into anything great, and it ends up as an enjoyably forgettable ride, which I guess befits David O. Russell’s late career stage as a guy living in the purgatory of Netflix after missing a bunch of Oscars he still can’t believe he didn’t win.

Prey - Dan Trachtenberg

I don’t know. It’s solid, I guess.

Emily the Criminal - John Patton Ford

This is a B action movie that caught extra attention because it stars Aubrey Plaza. A lot of people liked it. I’m happy for them.

Nope - Jordan Peele

Let’s see here. My first take was that it was his weakest movie because it didn’t have any neat core conceit at its center. Get Out was a revelation, and Us was I thought basically a perfect movie, a really cool idea from a filmmaker very good at realizing his cool ideas. Nope is more of a regular old flick. But the more I thought about it the more I saw that as a strength. I think most movies are not as good as Us, but it’s ultimately kind of a very expensive Twilight Zone episode. This movie is doing something he hasn’t done yet, which implies he’s going to continue to grow and get more ambitious. I still think there’s something a little undercooked about this one, and the mystery at the center is a little less cool than I think he wanted, but its beginning to seem very clear that greatness awaits.

Men - Alex Garland

If this guy wants to spin conceits out for awhile and then have his movies devolve into lunatic madness, I’ll come out for it every single time. The title and current political moment made me think this would be more of an indictment of the gender, another in the series of aforementioned Deconstructing Toxic Masculinity movies, and it’s sort of that, but its much more elemental, personal, and bizarre. I fucking love this director.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Rian Johnson

Like most sequels, some of the plot points go over the top as the movie attempts to outdo the original, and the billionaires are actually dumb plotline feels ripped directly out of leftist Twitter, but as long as Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig are involved I’ll watch every Knives Out movie they make. This is what happens when you let talented people do their jobs. Also as far as I know this is the first movie that includes Covid as a central life event. I love that for some reason. It is a central life event, its like making a movie about World War II.

Bodies Bodies Bodies - Halina Reijn

I’ll be honest, I was pretty drunk when I watched this on a plane. So this will be an impressionistic review. I thought it was pretty fun. There’s one scene that feels like it was written by people outrightly mocking woke culture. Pete Davidson is in it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once - Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

For the first hour I thought this was the Matrix, and wished that, as a movie about the literally unlimited nature of the universe, it was a little more creative. The second hour changed that thought. It is basically the Matrix, but while that movie was drab and minor key (by design) this movie is colorful and kaleidoscopic and wild and never ever ever not fun. The moviest movie I’ve seen in a long time, by which I mean a piece of art that could only be a movie, and one that pushes into new places what a movie can and should do. It’s big and beautiful and weird and exciting, and at 139 minutes it whooshes by. We’re in a weird place with representation at the moment, but this movie doesn’t feel like its correcting an error about who gets to star in Kung Fu movies, instead the Chinese heritage of the family is a natural part of the plot and makes the movie more than it otherwise would be. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t the best film of the year.

The Northman - Robert Eggers

The verisimilitude alone is worth the price of admission. I can’t think of a movie that’s setting feels so real since the Revenant. This is, and I guess I mean this as a compliment, the most normal movie Robert Eggers will ever make. If the Lighthouse was pure uncut Eggers, just a gonzo madhouse of his shit, this is basically Gladiator with a couple of spirit visions, which come to think of it Gladiator also had. I looked into it and learned that his compromise with the studio to make a big budget picture was to sacrifice final cut, which makes a ton of sense in retrospect and which I’m guessing is responsible for the movie’s worst parts, like when the main character monologues to himself about his motivation and plans for no reason. This is my take: the whole time I watched it I wanted it to be weirder. But as a bloody Viking flick, it’s a good movie.

The Menu - Mark Mylod

A movie about a great chef who got so tired of cooking for shitheads that he went insane. Pitched at a tone that, for me, made any level of insanity make sense. The characters in this movie aren’t unlikeable so much as they are urgently deserving of death. And you’re never, for a minute, worried they aren’t going to receive it. It’s been a good year for fun horror flicks.

X - Ti West

Except for the obvious reason--they’re both primal feelings--it’s never been fully apparent to me why these movies are always structured to be one half sexual titillation then one half slasher-horror. But while in the 80s they just pumped them out cuz they made money, now we’re getting all sorts of deconstructions and meta commentaries and sex as terror merges. Anyway, this is the most cerebral sex ‘n’ death horror movie I’ve ever seen; the most knotty, the most intellectualized, the most constructed in its creators’ heads. I felt a sourness at first--Barbarian and The Menu are two brilliant horror movies that do something genuinely new rather than comment on the old method in increasingly myopic ways--but that’s gone now. The things this movie does are just too fun and smart. I guess every one of these flicks is in one way or another punishing you for enjoying the T&A it gave you in its first hour, but this is the first to make you watch its monsters actually fuck. The final line is both a compliment to the movie I’m not sure it deserves, and an objectively fantastic last line.

White Noise - Noah Baumbach

Nothing says Fuck It Netflix money quite like the existence of this movie, an admiring adaptation of a book that’s essentially a novelization of Jean Baudrillard’s ideas. I remember liking the novel a lot, and finding it, for a book about mass hysteria over everyday life, oddly soothing. This movie is mostly faithful to the book, but it isn’t soothing. Baumbach uses chaos and claustrophobia to convey the story’s existential anxiety rather than the artificial feeling of meek contentment that is DeLillo’s chosen mode. The movie is noisy and full of static and incredibly ugly, like watching an 80s sitcom through a fishbowl. Interesting choices, but not pleasant ones, which matters when you’re watching a movie. But Noah Baumbach is an obvious fan, and he understands the ideas he’s working with. He even gets in some pretty good Noah Baumbach jokes. It’s an amazingly timely story too, as we head into the fourth year of a global pandemic that has foregrounded our collective anxiety and shrunken our worlds to a degree that can’t not be causing long term damage. There’s a scene here where a guy in a quarantine camp riles the crowd by demanding his fear not only be recognized but made the center of the public’s attention, which if anything is quaint when put up against what the MAGA mutants in this country actually want. But here’s what I kept thinking about while I watched a movie that I liked but that never truly distinguished itself from its very good source material: in 1985 Don DeLillo wrote a book about the fear of death as a uniquely modern condition of our sad and shrinking reality. These days, that condition gets called anxiety and we validate it on social media. Our culture sucks now.

Father of the Bride - Gary Alazraki

Shit! I watched this right before I got married. I didn’t realize it was a 2022 release. It’s pretty good! Nice and warm. Andy Garcia is a boss. Recommended for right before you get married.

Elvis - Baz Luhrmann

- Here’s a movie I thought of when I was watching this one that I think would be good: young Elvis spends all his free time watching the black people in his town make the music he loves. Most of the movie takes place in churches and after-hours clubs. It’s musical performance heavy. It ends right as he’s being discovered.

- Here’s what I assumed this movie would be: A shy kid with a lot of talent gets discovered by a sleazy manager. He rises to the top, meets a girl, then money, fame, ego, and the influence of shady characters bring him down. A lot of musical performances.

Baz Luhrmann likes his spectacle, but I can’t believe how shoddy and lazy this movie actually is. There’s no structure, no real story, no actions of consequence. It's a three hour montage of events I don’t even believe really happened. Did Elvis really feel strongly about Bobby Kennedy’s death? I sort of doubt it. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman were trite, but here’s a director looking his audience in the eye and saying “I know you hogs like this shit.”

Tar - Todd Field

This movie is such a slow burn I didn’t even realize she kept two houses until it was almost over. It doesn’t tell anything and it takes its sweet time showing. Some of its early scenes feel largely pointless. I wasn’t sure why at first, other than the fact that it’s a type of storytelling, but upon consideration I get it: the movie is told in the first person. It doesn’t tell you anything for the same reason I don’t wake up every morning and tell myself the address of my house. This is the story of a monster told from her point of view, and as the movie progresses you start to see the cracks in her self-image. Its slow and controlled and quiet, with an intensity hovering offscreen that peaks its head in just enough to let you know its there. Because of the narrative style there’s a ton of stuff I missed, and more than any other movie I’ve seen this year I look forward to watching this again.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Edward Berger

It felt for awhile like we were done with old fashioned war flicks, and modern war movies would all have some kind of stylistic or thematic bent. But this is about as simplistic and plain a story as you can come up with. So maybe the lesson is you can do whatever you want as long as you do it really well. This is an incredibly effective movie. A battle scene where the French close in on the Germans like an unfeeling horde of aliens will stay with me for a long time. A scene at the end which exposes the brutal evil of men who control the lives of other men will as well. Maybe I’m getting softer, but this is the most haunting and disturbing war movie I’ve ever seen. We can do terrible, unspeakable things to each other, and we can do them for no reason. One way of understanding this movie is that it’s about the humanity of a nothing special enlisted man, and follows him until he finally loses it. It’s also about the machinations of power that control his life from afar without any humanity at all. Also, it looks and sounds incredible.

The Fabelmans - Steven Spielberg

At this point, you should know what you’re getting from Spielberg. His movies are impeccably made, stories told seamlessly with warmth and craftsmanship. He’s the ultimate major key filmmaker, with an intuitive understanding of how to compel audiences that the movie says he’s had since he was a kid. The Fabelmans is, for better or worse, a Spielberg movie. My sense is that how you feel about it will be determined by how you feel about him. If you think he’s the best to ever do it, you’ll probably appreciate this career retrospective about how he discovered the power and joy of cinema. If you’re cooler on him, maybe you’ll wonder why he gets to do it but Martin Scorsese or Federico Fellini, two guys who also probably grew up with cameras attached to their hands, don’t. I guess the obvious answer is that those guys never would, which is probably one of the reasons I like them more.

Black Adam - Jaume Collet-Serra

Jaume Collet-Serra is responsible for two of the best schlock masterpieces of the century, the Shallows and the Commuter, so I am hopeful he’s just paying his dues now before they’ll let him go back to cooking those up, and not that he’s been swallowed by the Comic Book Movie Industrial Complex, which really does gobble up everything cool or interesting or unique about filmmaking. That said, like most of them are, this is a perfectly fine beer watch. The Rock, who is straight up one of the most likeable people on the planet, has been a real life superhero ever since he didn’t care what your name was.

Triangle of Sadness - Ruben Ostlund

I got big The Lobster vibes from this one. Both from the structure--part 1 takes place in a hospitality center, part 2 takes place in the wilderness--and from the overt strangeness that keeps you on your toes the entire time; both movies could go anywhere. Ostlund makes so many choices that are so fun; one highlight being a drunken mock debate over economic policy between the ship’s raging alcoholic captain and a Russian oligarch who accidentally became incredibly rich and now lives with an acutely Russian nihilistic joie de vivre. The movie begins as a pretty open satire of wealth and grows increasingly hysterical until it suddenly transforms into something else--something smarter and more deft. A bunch of seemingly useless rich people are all forced to pivot into a society where none of their material gifts will benefit them at all, and do better than expected. What is Ostlund saying? I’m not sure. But another way he reminds me of my man Yorgos is that he sets up a wild premise and then explores it as he thinks it would go in real life. Its a fun way to make movies.

Bullet Train - David Leitch

So you’re an excellent filmmaker, just dripping with talent, but you’d rather make snappy action flicks than three hour Capital-F Films about classical music conductors (I loved Tar, just making a point). I can’t believe how good this movie is. Fast, witty, bouncing through timelines and stories with a throughline that keeps expanding and gets fuller and more fun as it chugs along. This is like if Guy Ritchie took better drugs, or if Tarantino didn’t have final cut. Brad Pitt is one of the best actors on the planet if you can find interesting things for him to do. Here he plays a reformed underworld professional who speaks almost entirely through New Age self-improvement jargon as he tries to find a new life path for himself. And that’s maybe the fifth best thing this movie does.

Argentina, 1985 - Santiago Mitre

This is a pretty downbeat movie. The dialogue is spoken at a low tone, the color palette is dark and brown, it never gets too loud. Knowledge of the country’s history would help--I needed Google for things every Argentinian already knows. Otherwise this is a very straight trial movie, all the way down to the verdict resting on the prosecutor’s ability to give a sufficiently inspiring speech. Most of the movie takes place in the courtroom or a law office. One of the protagonists comes from a comfortably fascist background and at one point has to attend the world’s worst family gathering, but otherwise there’s very little on the periphery.

Nanny - Nikyatu Jusu

The structure is fucked. This movie takes ages to get started and then rushes its ending. It feels very messy and less clear than it wants to be. I'll need to chew on it some more, but I think the idea here is the titular immigrant nanny is carried through a consuming anxiety about the family she left behind by an African spirit that is committed to her survival but isn’t necessarily benevolent. It’s really not a horror movie, and the beats it hits in service of the genre are largely unnecessary and fairly lame--I think we can go ahead and put a period on scary dream jump scares. But despite its flaws, which are all just novice direction shit, I really liked this. It looks great, and it has a control over its tone that makes it consistently engaging even if it doesn’t ever really cohere. I’m starting to think the reason why there are so many good horror movies now is because they’re cheap to make and aren’t beholden to existing IP--essentially they’re a bush league for promising young filmmakers. I suspect Jusu is more interested in exploring the African experience in America than she is in the genre. It will be interesting to see what she does next.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - Jane Schoenbrun

I should say that the Internet didn’t invent loneliness, and things like these online sinkholes are just a new outlet for an old problem. If more people are isolating and detaching from reality, that has more to do with our culture and our politics (which the movie knows. A shot of a boarded Toys ‘R’ Us is as grim and unsettling as any of the webcam freakout scenes.) This is an incredibly effective film about a culture I don’t understand and have anxieties about. It seems pretty documented that more people are in fact isolating and detaching, and if they’re leaning into the type of solipsism that creates this stuff, that’s a fertile topic for new filmmakers. Maybe too fertile. Jesus Christ, this movie.

To Leslie - Michael Morris

The thing is, she’s really good in this! She’s not a sympathetic character for most it, she’s a full on addict, using the people who care about her and taking advantage of the Samaritans dumb enough to feel empathy for her. She’s resentful of the help she needs and then livid when people stop helping her. This is a movie I would not have heard about were it not for the insurgent Oscar campaign, but am glad I saw it. Sometimes its nice to watch small, universal stories play out. The third act redemption maybe comes a little too easily, and I’m not sure I buy what inspired it (a Willie Nelson song, apparently), but I’m just noting that for my own memory’s sake. This is a good one.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths - Alejandro Inarritu

There’s a scene here where the main character climbs up a giant pile of dead bodies until he reaches the top, where Spanish conquistador and founder of Mexico Hernan Cortes is waiting for him, and they get into a conversation about heritage. It’s a ripe scene, and its been set up perfectly, but the conversation isn’t as profound or layered as it could be, or that the height the director is reaching for suggests it should be. Then after a few minutes, some ash from Cortes’s cigarette falls on one of the dead bodies, who sits up to complain about it, and it’s revealed the whole thing is a scene from a film someone is making. Its not the first time and not the last time you want to throttle Inarritu. You’re one of the best filmmakers currently working, why do you keep fucking up your own good ideas with this jokey shit?!

I want to take my time with this movie because it deserves to be carefully considered. It is, without hesitation, the most ambitious movie of the last few years. My theory on Alejandro is that his life’s goal is to be Fellini; both this and Birdman shoot for the same surreal modernism that the Italian legend mastered back in the ‘60s. This one doesn’t get there the same way Birdman didn’t, and one of the reasons, at least in this case, is that he keeps telling us what he’s thinking instead of showing us. This film looks incredible, and the camera moves with the same fluidity it did in Birdman, but he runs out of tricks sooner than he should. His ideas could be conveyed visually, but instead he just has his characters say them out loud.

All that being said, I loved it. I loved it more than I loved Birdman when I first saw it, before I decided it was a failed version of 8 1/2. This is also a failed version of 8 1/2, but it’s playing with a different set of ideas. Instead of being a satire of the industry, it’s considering Mexican identity, and its ultimately more interested in mortality than in the morass of being alive. It’s incredibly rare to get a director who swings this hard, who’s given the space to work out his ideas like this, or who even has the balls or vision to try. A lot of this movie doesn’t work. But the parts that do are incredibly good, and his visual sensibility is unparalleled. This should be a -10,000 lock for best cinematography, but it won’t win because no one saw it. Which is to the detriment of the discourse. This movie deserves to be debated and raged over. It deserves to have partisans and detractors who crucify each other online. The culture would be infinitely better if we got three of these a year.

Vengeance - B.J. Novak

Parts of this movie are so good I had trouble believing the bad parts could be as bad as they were. A New York journo douchebag goes to deep west Texas for the funeral of a hookup he barely remembers because she’s told her family that they’re in a serious relationship, then stays because he thinks he’s found a podcast. The parts about Texas are fantastic; his dialogue is sharp and interesting--down here we don’t have police, we have Mike and Dan--and incredibly well observed. During a scene at a rodeo somebody is eating a giant barbecue chicken leg, someone else is eating potato chips covered in queso. But B.J. is playing a guy so cartoonishly dopey it feels beamed in from a different, much worse movie (sample dialogue: “Have you ever been in a fight?” “Like a real fight, or like a Twitter fight?”) Scenes where he’s on the phone describing the story to his incredulous producer give off Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. It’s so much worse than the stuff around it that I figured it had to be intentional. Maybe he’s the villain or something. But no, he just learns to love these simple people and their small town. One other thing, Ashton Kutcher, playing a sort of deep Texas ghost, is legitimately amazing here. Easily the best thing in it. If people had seen this he’d have been nominated. It’s that kind of performance.

Babylon - Damien Chazelle

Damien’s learned how to direct. Watching the guy who’s floundered (in my opinion) ever since his his tiny little arthouse flick about ambition put him on the map get these giant scenes to work makes me legitimately happy for him. There’s a moment during the party scene at the beginning where he turns the bacchanalia into an organized dance sequence, which feels like a guy making a choice; we’re going to stick classic film elements in the middle of this chaos, because we like them and we can. As far as I can tell the idea here is simple--turn the end of the silent film era into the fall of Babylon, or the Weimar Republic, or Vichy France, or any other era of decadence that was always going to be on borrowed time. Was it really like that? Is this a story that needed to be told? Who knows? And who cares? Unlike with First Man, he’s justified his decision by doing it well. There’s a scene here where a cruel and careless death cuts to a giant party, and its more effective--drunk and sobering--than when Scorsese did it in the Wolf of Wall Street.

RRR - S.S. Rajamouli

Maybe I’d feel differently if I was better versed in Bollywood; as it stands this film represents the entirety of the industry to me. Maybe this is like showing a person who’s never seen an American movie before the Avengers, and an Indian friend who liked it tells me it is not representative of Bollywood. But it ultimately doesn’t matter. First of all, I think it’s genuinely awesome that this has become such a crossover sensation, and that more people are getting exposed to world cinema. Second of all, this movie whips so much ass. It took me a minute to get used to the style, but once I did I was all the way in. The first film ever to get me pumping my fists in my living room. And a thing I’ve always believed is that being good at dancing is incredibly manly.

KIMI - Steven Soderbergh

There are two ideas in this that I like a lot: 1. what would the kind of trauma most thrillers like this are about do to a person after the movie ends?, and 2. what does a corporation that has to pretend it cares about ethics after #MeToo and Believe Women even though it obviously doesn’t look like in the year of our lord 2022? More than any other top shelf filmmaker I can name, Steven Soderbergh doesn’t seem to have any throughline other than that his movies are all made with a certain level of quality. There’s no thematic cohesion that I can find, other than a healthy dislike for companies and governments, and not really any stylistic one either, other than that his movies are all really neat and tidy. And while he used to get nominated for Oscars, for the past few years he’s seemed to be content pumping out genre flicks like a gun-for-hire Woody Allen, which I wonder if is just him being prescient about the state of the industry now. This is a quick little film, something that comes out by the truckload in the era of Netflix, but if you watched it without knowing who Steven Soderbergh was you’d be surprised by how good it is.

Watcher - Chloe Okuno

Didn’t really respond to this one. The acting’s not great, the pacing is off--she gets pretty scared pretty quickly--and beats that should hit hard land harmlessly. High point: Bucharest seems like a cool city.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio - Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

Guillermo is very good at putting the things he likes in movies that are ostensibly pretty one-for-them--some of these images belong on his highlight reel. There’s also a sweetness here that’s got his name all over it. This was apparently a years in the making passion project, and I have no doubt the animation is a triumph, but its a status as a Kids Movie papers over some storytelling messiness that bothered me as a person who doesn’t care about kids movies. At its best this movie makes me wish he’d gone full tilt into del Toro creature madness. Fuck the kids, man.

Women Talking - Sarah Polley

My take on this movie was that it’s the first piece of art to explicitly lay out the tenets of modern feminist philosophy, like a No Exit for the 21st Century American leftist political moment. I have never felt less equipped to give my opinion on a film, but suffice to say I liked this and thought it was intellectually interesting. Here’s the best I can do: this is an interesting one. Less interested in anger or revenge than in compassion and the value of forgiveness, and by value I mean worth, as in what do we gain by forgiving and what is the toll that forgiving will take on us? It’s that kind of a movie, managing emotional states with a philosophical detachment. Deal with the problem first, figure out how we feel about it later. Every atrocity visited upon these women is described in a matter of fact way. Nothing is shown.

The Good Nurse - Tobias Lindholm

This is firmly in Movie of the Week territory, all the way up to a soundtrack and establishing shots straight out of Law and Order, elevated slightly by its inclusion of two of our better actors.

Top Gun: Maverick - Joseph Kosinski

Loses points with me because it sags in the middle; I don’t care about Maverick’s guilt over his friend’s death or his romantic life. It’s great when he’s in the air. This whole movie should take place in a plane. Late period Tom Cruise is beloved by many, but not by me. I feel like he should have more to say at this point in his career than lying about his age.

The Whale - Darren Aronofsky

A very strange film. I’m not sure what to say about it. I wouldn’t call it pleasant, exactly. The main character’s morbid obesity seems almost like body horror at times. The plot seems simple enough; a guy makes the decision to remove himself from life after he loses a loved one, but it’s never quite that movie. I’m not sure if he’s a good person or not, or if he’s meant to be. He left his wife and daughter for someone else and was never in their life afterwards, though if you listen to him, he tried to be. I wondered if he’s someone that seeks out the good in others and extends that to himself even if he doesn’t deserve it. But if that’s the case, why is he killing himself? There’s also a religious element that fits in somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I thought about this movie the whole car ride home. I’m still working on it.

Empire of Light - Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes makes almost comically beautiful movies. This one, about a ragtag group of theater employees in England in 1981, takes place mostly in a movie theater, which is lit up and shot to look like a museum exhibit. This is a perfectly decent flick. It’s well paced, a simple story told well, emotional in the right places without being manipulative. It’s pleasant when its over. Not gutting, but pleasant.

Spiderhead - Joseph Kosinski

Quick, self-contained, well made, not too expensive, fun and kinda trippy, with a neat little twist at the end. I remember watching The Discovery a few years ago and thinking it was going to be the ur-text of a new genre called the Netflix Movie, and buddy was I right. These things now are being assembly-lined out by the dozen, and most of them are largely decent if a little bloodless. Sooner or later they’ll feel so packaged AI will start writing them, but until we get there I’m fine recommending a movie like Spiderhead. It’s a little bloodless in a way the similar genre grind-out KIMI isn’t, but it’s eerie while still being fun, holds its tone almost the whole way through, and includes the best Chris Hemsworth acting I’ve ever seen as a jocky nerd charming sociopath.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Ryan Coogler

The first one isn’t perfect, but like a lot of people I walked away from it thinking I’d just seen Marvel’s highwater mark. This one is even better. While the original stood above the rest by looking at real racial politics through the lens of a comic book movie, this one doubles down by bringing in a second superhero-ized colonized civilization with its own ideas about how to respond to the world at large and has the two of them meet and discuss. It even throws in for good measure a complex political dynamic at the top of the Wakanda power structure where every argument makes sense and is defensible. And while my biggest issue with the first one was that it could have used more world-building, some of the scenes here look genuinely great. All the standard Marvel movie objections apply--the dorky jokes, the dumb action scenes, the weirdly dark color palette these things are apparently mandated to have--but Ryan Coogler is possibly the only director franchised into the MCU who seems interested in making or allowed to make real movies.

Pleasure - Ninja Thyberg

A thing I learned the other day is that the movie Deepthroat was one of the highest grossing films of 1975. It is amazing to imagine the families of America lining up en masse to watch a movie, the premise of which is that a woman was born with her clitoris inside of her throat. I wouldn’t call Pleasure a return to a more sex positive past, exactly, but it’s explicitly sexually graphic in a way I’ve never really seen before outside of an actual porno. Parts of it are about the dark side of the porn industry, but other parts are about the light side, or the harmless side, and most of the characters are basically decent people. In fact one case this movie is making, maybe unintentionally, is that the ugly parts of the porn star life aren’t really any different than the ugly parts of the Hollywood life, or the sports life, or the investment banking life. The cost of success in this economy is your humanity, whether that means getting double-raw dogged in the ass or outsourcing a factory to Pakistan.

Ambulance - Michael Bay

Worth watching. Pretty fun. Basically incoherent. I will use this space for two observations: 1. Michael Bay has a fully singular visual style that if I had to give name to I would call Saturday afternoon barbecue full of hopefully not racist white men getting weepy after the fifth round of Coors Light, but its his, and as far as I can tell he created it, which means he fits my definition of an auteur. 2. Jake Gyllenhaal might actually be my favorite actor. He is incredible in this movie. I want to call it my second favorite performance of the year after Cate Blanchett in Tar. He’s not the most naturally gifted actor, it will never come as naturally to him as it does to, for instance, Cate Blanchett, but he makes up for that by going completely in on every role. He slips into raw nerve-ending panic within the first five minutes of being on screen in this movie. I think he also might be one the smartest actors in Hollywood. He has one particular line reading in this about a collection of plush flamingos that is so good, and so indicative that he knows exactly what he’s doing and what makes what he’s doing good, it singlehandedly bumps the movie up a letter grade.

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almightyhamslice · 1 year ago

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I'm going to fucking SCREAM why did I post this on my reblogs account lmfao!! UGH I was so out of it last night ffs. No wonder it got no traction!!! (as if my funny bug posts dont get like 2 notes each) Any fucking ways lol.

HUGE headcanon post abt funny bug food since I have been thinking abt it for a while!!

So Krud food is weird because Krud City is barren and the only fresh food sources they have are aquatic vegetation and fish! It's also possible they might have a garden, but it's small and maintained by the commoners (The Insektors Annual 1997 book calls the commoners "common-or-garden Kruds" in Bakrakra's description) so it could be herbs or microgreens? They MIGHT benefit from growing potatoes and wild onions since they're easygoing, so I won't rule out that possibility! Similarly, they may also grow rice since they're surrounded by water, and rice grows well in very wet environments?

So aside from the aforementioned fish, sea greens, and potentially rice and potatoes, most krud food is imported from other places in Yukdom or occasionally Joyceland (they have a bitter grudge obviously but DAMMIT Joyceland fruit is tasty!!) OR Kruds can just go into Flowered City and steal... but thats pretty shitty lol. Krud hunters like Niff basically never kill the animals they hunt, because they are HUGE compared to the Insektors themselves! It'd be too much of a waste to kill them, so Niff and other hunters merely use blades to cut chunks of flesh from their prey, and it's actually a pretty scary/dangerous job! Similarly, Kruds do eat eggs, but I think that'd be RLLY difficult considering they're so tiny in comparison! I think it must be quail eggs or even hummingbird eggs. Hummingbird sounds ridiculous, but it'd be the same size as a full grown Krud so like, I think it's more reasonable. They'd be a pain to harvest though, maybe ants collect them since they're the strongest!

A lot of imported food is often dried so it can last longer-- Kruds are very against wasting food (funny considering their horrible carbon footprint LOL) so dried fruit and jerky is consumed more often than their fresh equivalents. This is actually kind of a problem for hemipterans like Makabris, however, since they don't have teeth and can only 'drink' their food. I imagine they are probably used to drinking things that have been powdered and blended. Which is gross, but sometimes being a Krud is less abt living and more abt surviving! Maybe all the time actually lol. They're kind of ascetic. OH YEAH also Kruds know how to pickle and process/grind foods! in the UK dub Wasabi knows what burgers and pickles are so they must exist on a funny bug scale. Which is good since I dont think there's an easier way for the Insektors to eat stuff like grains beyond them being processed into flour, cuz ONCE AGAIN, grains are HUGE compared to them! I was joking abt this on my server cuz even though the Kruds have the right ingredients to make sushi regularly (rice, seaweed, fish) it'd have to be RLLY WEIRD sushi because they're too small to eat individual grains of rice! So it'd have to be made of something more like rice cakes? Their bread may also be more often made of rice flour or potato starch cuz of the whole garden thing I mentioned before, idk if they'd be able to grow the other stuf.

I totally overthought this whole thing LOL. It rlly harkens back to my Crash phase where I'd overthink the CNK aliens! I kind of miss that ngl I'd totally do it again if any of them returned in Crash Team Rumble....... (please)

OH FUCK I FORGOT TO MENTION LUKANUS' DRINK! He is drinking honeydew! It's kind of like drinking cow's milk but weirder (and it has a 'specialness' to it thats kind of like... sparkling cider I guess? Not something you drink all the time.) because it's made by aphids. If you know you know. Its weird to hemipterans and relatives but not weird to most other bugs? Rook's pretty unaffected by it cuz hes a carnivore though so its like. who cares. (Makabris does!! He is SO grossed out rn)

insektober day 11: food

makabris n lukanus enjoy fresh apple slices at rrook's bar. its a special treat since kruds dont grow their own fruit.

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anonanimal · 2 years ago

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i’ve only ever cooked with onions (mostly yellow), green onions, and garlic. today i put chives in my baked mac and cheese. i want to be more adventurous in the onion family. i want to explore shallots, scallions, leeks, and any lesser-known relatives. i wonder if there would still be wild onions outside...

#i just really love onions i feel like shrek #i need to convince dad to let me stake off part of the yard and leave it unmowed so i can see what edible plants grow besides dandelions and #the aforementioned wild onions #i know there's some mint around here too

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mostly-mundane-atla · 2 years ago

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So what kinds of food would Aang and other Air Nomads be able to eat during visits to the Water Tribes? Assuming that their brand of vegetarianism allows for animal products like milk and eggs, but no fish or animal fat or anything that would involve killing a living creature.

Naturally, some of these will be seasonal, but this really depends on if you want only pre-contact circumpolar ingredients and cooking methods

If you want some inspiration from purely traditional foods, and can imagine a way they'd collect unfertilized fish eggs:

Wild bird (ptarmigan, grouse, corromant, etc) eggs, raw or boiled. Chicken broth could be replaced with a tea of birch bark, fireweed leaves, or tundra tea leaves to make something similar to an egg drop soup.

Roots like those of masru/eskimo potato and wooly lousewort, raw, boiled, or roasted. Could be fried in theory, but as the only fats available would be attached to animal flesh, this would violate vegetarian dietary restrictions.

Fish roe (eggs) on their own or ground up and whipped into akutaq.

Greens like sourdock, mountain sorrel, and wild celery, dressed in unsweetened syrups of fireweed blossoms or berries instead of the traditional seal oil.

Berries such as wild cranberries (lowbush and highbush), blueberries, cloudberries, wild raspberries, and crowberries, fresh or as jam (unsweetend and probably unpleasantly messy with nothing to eat it on) or akutaq.

Fireweed shoots, roasted and could be served with unsweetened syrups like the aforementioned fresh greens.

Young puffball mushrooms, eaten but not very commonly from what I can tell

And, of course, what the entire fandom was expecting: seaweed. With the lack of any proper substitutes for sessame oil or garlic, however, i'm not sure you could get something resembling a Korean style seaweed soup.

Now, if you want to include things that would have to be imported and cooking utensils and methods that aren't traditional, then you'll see foods that look a little more familiar.

Traditional foods can be stirfried in woks and served over rice or used for noodle dishes.

Here's where things like hotpot and congee are possible.

Flour can be used for doughs and batters or combined with butter to make pastry for frying in plant based oil or baking in ovens to get things like frybreads, cakes, and pies.

Milk can be added to foraged eggs to make custards which can be flavored with local berries and eddible flowers.

Mushrooms and tea can be used to replace meat broths for hearty soups.

Vegetables like cabage and onions can be added, as can protiens like beans and tofu.

And seasonings like ginger, pepper, garlic. And other ways to alter the flavor like soy sauce and vinegar (which also allows pickling). Sugar means syrups, jams, and akutaq can be sweetened, and now that bread is an option, can be eaten in combination with more foods.

This also has me wondering if other aspects than food would be given special attention to align with Air Nomand customs. Would they light lamps with plant-based oils instead of animal fat? Would they be sure to have utensils carved of wood rather than antler, bone, or ivory? Would it be seen to that sleeping mats be made of woved grass and stuffed with mosses and lichens instead of the typical skins?

Anyway, if you want to browse through common tundra plants and like two fungi and Inupiaq uses for them, check out this site

#response #eskimo on main #helpful hints for non-natives writing for avatar canon as well as fan writers #atla #avatar the last airbender #atla headcanons #let's get all those tags on there so this fandom can be a less stupid place #water tribe

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petermorwood · 3 years ago

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Food & Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms again.

Just some pretty pictures for now, since @dduane hasn’t done the write-up yet due to a deadline needing handled first.

The working title is “wild boar with rowanberry brandy sauce (two ways)”, one using dried fruit from the store-cupboard, the other with fresh fruit in its season.

We couldn’t conveniently source Real Wild Boar, so this is pork that’s spent several days in one of the marinades meant “to make X taste like Y” - in this instance red wine, red wine vinegar, onions and a bunch of herby things including crushed juniper berries. Comparing it on the palate of memory with wild boar eaten in Germany, this treatment is very effective.

*****

The sauce in both cases is based on the strained & reduced marinade to which is added the aforementioned rowanberry brandy, brandied rowanberries & some butter.

The light dumplings are made of flour, butter & kibbled fried bacon, then poached in salted water; the dark ones are flour & pumpkin flour, butter & a bit of lemon zest, then poached in water mixed with the lemon’s juice and its juiced halves.

This is the dried-fruit version:

This is the fresh-fruit version with plums added to the sauce, along with a chopped onion which went astonishingly pink...

More plums were included as a garnish, along with a couple of the left-over lemon dumplings, allowed to cool then sliced and fried crispy in butter.

Alternatively the bacon dumplings could have been treated the same way, fried in bacon fat alongside a slice or two of bacon that would be chopped and sprinkled over the top.

(Slice-and-fry in an appropriate fat is a tasty way to finish up any sort of dumpling or suet pudding. It’ll be happening to a lot of Christmas puddings in a few weeks; they’ll often be fried in the brandy butter that was their sauce on the day.)

*****

These would be just the sort of dishes to consider when boar are getting rambunctious and tearing up crops, which they do with great enthusiasm.

Which is why the wine-growing regions of Germany have so many variants of things like geschmortes Wildschwein in Rotweinsauce (wild boar braised in red wine) - popular, tasty and garnished with a certain Schadenfreude air of “who’s laughing now...?”

#food and drink #food and cooking of the middle kingdoms #food in fiction #food in fantasy #diane duane #The tale of the five

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protoindoeuropean · 4 years ago

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i don’t care for easter at all but i do have to concede that it’s pretty cool that through it, both of the proto-indo-european words for fire: *h₁n̥gu̯nis ‘(active, wild) fire’ and *peh₂u̯r̥ ‘(passive, tame) fire’, have left a trace in slovene: ôgenj [ə] ‘fire’ and pírh ‘easter egg’ (due to their fiery colour produced by the typical colouring method, cooking in onion water)

as a rule, only one of the words is preserved in indo-european languages with the meaning ‘fire’, but traces of the other word can be occasionally found with other (related) meanings. in slavic, the regular word for ‘fire’ goes back to *ogńь (with reflexes such as the aforementioned ôgenj [ə], russian огонь (ogon’), polish ogień etc.), but besides slovene pírh, there’s also czech pýř ‘ashes, embers’, upper sorbian pyrić ‘to burn’, polish perzyna ‘embers’. armenian, interestingly, reflects the opposite situation: հուր (hur) is ‘fire’, while ածուղ (acuł) is ‘coal, soot’. in italic, the words for ‘fire’ differ in origin across the languages, but not within the languages: latin ignis, but umbrian pir.

other languages only reflect one or the other word: beside slavic *ogńь and latin ignis there’s also sanskrit agní-, lithuanian ugni̇̀s, and besides armenian հուր and umbrian pir there’s also ancient greek πῦρ (pȗr), hittite paḫḫur, english fire, tocharian por (A) and puwar (B). i’m not aware of the corresponding pair leaving any traces in any of these languages (and the branches they represent)

#j #lang #pide #pop

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kindofsharethat · 5 years ago

Note

You should check out the satirical article by The Onion and then the genuine article by The Atlantic about TS’s song. They’re great and put into words why the whole thing is fucked.

“In the video, an unwashed-looking mob holds signs saying ‘Adam + Eve, not Adam + Steve.’ In real life, Pride counterprotests feature yet-uglier slogans, such as ‘God hates fags.’ In either case, referring to such speech as ‘shade’ is wild. The modern usage of throwing shade originated with queer folks of color in underground vogueing scenes, went popular through RuPaul’s Drag Race, and is now a ubiquitous term for petty insults. Throwing shade is a social act, a performance, and it can be done out of genuine spite or—as when on Drag Race it’s a reality-show challenge—in good fun. There are many ways to describe a parent who disowns a trans kid, or a lawmaker who tries to nullify same-sex marriages, or a church member who crashes a gay soldier’s funeral. Shady isn’t one.

“Writing off bigotry as negativity—the word Swift used to describe what her song is attacking—probably isn’t helpful either. Homophobia is a real ideology with a real history. Telling homophobes they’re boring downers probably won’t sway them, and it’s hard to imagine that such a message will comfort many of the people they target. Right here is the aforementioned meaning-drift, the dilution. ‘You Need to Calm Down’ has, between its muddled metaphors, only one clear through line: Swift’s struggles with criticism in the public eye are like those of gay people facing actual hate for being who they are. Huge social conflicts are boiled into a bland, unworkable battle between smiley rainbow people and ‘haters.’ And if you’re annoyed at that, you’ll be told you need to calm down.” — The Atlantic

#whatever the hell taylor just released found dead

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alaspoorwallace · 5 years ago

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1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD

[...] [DFW, Infinite jest, 3a]

'How did you know I was interested in Byzantine erotica?’ 'You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle with the word Conversationalist on it, and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff? Researchers at my beck? You think we don't delve full-bore into the psyches of those for whom we've made appointments to converse? You don't think this fully accredited limited partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and stimulates our con-versees?’ 'I know only one person who'd ever use full-bore in casual conversation.’ 'There is nothing casual about a professional conversationalist and staff. We delve. We obtain, and then some. Young sir.’ 'Okay, Alexandrian or Constantinian?’ 'You think we haven't thoroughly researched your own connection with the whole current intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec?’ 'What intra-Provincial crisis in southern Quebec? I thought you wanted to talk racy mosaics.’ 'This is an upscale district of a vital North American metropolis, Hal. Standards here are upscale, and high. A professional conversationalist flat-out full-bore delves. Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P---------?’ 'Listen, are you okay?’ 'Do you?’ 'I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 A.M. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out. I'm not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Quebec or malevolent Lurias.’ '. .. of the fact that photos of the aforementioned . . . liaison being leaked to Der Spiegel resulted in the bizarre deaths of both an Ottawan paparazzo and a Bavarian international-affairs editor, of an alpenstock through the abdomen and an ill-swallowed cocktail onion, respectively?’ 'I just finished jew's-ear. I'm just starting on jew's-harp and the general theory of oral lyres. I've never even skied.’ 'That you could dare to imagine we'd fail conversationally to countenance certain weekly shall we say maternal ... assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual bassoonist in the Albertan Secret Guard's tactical-bands unit?’ 'Gee, is that the exit over there I see?’ '. . . that your blithe inattention to your own dear grammatical mother's cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attaches . . . ?’ 'Would it be rude to tell you your mustache is askew?’ '. .. that her introduction of esoteric mnemonic steroids, stereo-chemically not dissimilar to your father's own daily hypodermic "mega-vitamin" supplement derived from a certain organic testosterone-regeneration compound distilled by the Jivaro shaman of the South-Central L.A. basin, into your innocent-looking bowl of morning Ralston...’ 'As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and tell you your whole face is kind of running, sort of, if you want to check. Your nose is pointing at your lap.’ 'That your quote-unquote "complimentary" Dunlop widebody tennis racquets' super-secret-formulaic composition materials of high-modulus-graphite-reinforced polycarbonate polybutylene resin are organochemically identical I say again identical to the gyroscopic balance sensor and mise-en-scène appropriation card and priapistic-entertainment cartridge implanted in your very own towering father's anaplastic cerebrum after his cruel series of detoxifications and convolution-smoothings and gastrectomy and prostatectomy and pancreatectomy and phalluctomy . . .’ Tap tap. 'SHULGSPAHH.’ '. .. could possibly escape the combined investigative attention of. .. ?’ 'And it strikes me I've definitely seen that argyle sweater-vest before. That's Himself's special Interdependence-Day-celebratory-dinner argyle sweater-vest, that he makes a point of never having cleaned. I know those stains. I was there for that clot of veal marsala right there. Is this whole appointment a date-connected thing? Is this April Fools, Dad, or do I need to call the Moms and C.T.?’ '... who requires only daily evidence that you speak? That you recognize the occasional vista beyond your own generous Mondragonoid nose's fleshy tip?’ 'You rented a whole office and face for this, but leave your old unmistakable sweater-vest on? And how'd you even get down here before me, with the Mercury up on blocks after you . . . did you fool C.T. into giving you the keys to a functional car?’ 'Who used to pray daily for the day his own dear late father would sit, cough, open that bloody issue of the Tucson Citizen, and not turn that newspaper into the room's fifth wall? And who after all this light and noise has apparently spawned the same silence?’ '...’ 'Who's lived his whole ruddy bloody cruddy life in five-walled rooms?' 'Dad, I've got a duly scheduled challenge match with Schacht in like twelve minutes, wind at my downhill back or no. I've got this oral-lyrologist who's going to be outside Brighton Best Savings wearing a predesignated necktie at straight-up five. I have to mow his lawn for a month for this interview. I can't just sit here watching you think I'm mute while your fake nose points at the floor. And are you hearing me talking, Dad? It speaks. It accepts soda and defines implore and converses with you.’ 'Praying for just one conversation, amateur or no, that does not end in terror? That does not end like all the others: you staring, me swallowing?’ ‘...’ ‘Son?’

[DFW, Infinite Jest, 3b] [end of the chapter 1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD] [next chapter’s incipit is labeled DFW, Infinite Jest, 4a]

(Billie Jean King)

#literature #contemporary literature #novel #DFW #david foster wallace #infinite jest #wallace #postmodernism #postmodern literature #foster wallace #davidfosterwallace #infinitejest #year of the tucks medicated pad #1 april #billie jean king #tennis

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mythicallore · 6 years ago

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Ancient Monster Rears Its Head?

For centuries, Scottish folklore and legend have both been filled with tales of a wild and deadly beast known as the Kelpie. The terrible beast, which has the ability to transform itself into numerous forms – even that of people – was greatly feared throughout the 1600s and 1700s, when reports of the Kelpie were at their height. As for its curious name, “Kelpie” is an ancient Scottish term meaning “water-horse.” There is a very good reason as to why that particular name was applied to the beast, as will soon become very clear. As its name strongly suggests, the water-horse spent much of its time lurking in the waters of Scottish lochs – specifically in the shallower, marshy areas of such locales. It would coldly and callously wait for an unwary passer-by to appear on the scene and then strike, mercilessly and without any hint of a warning. The beast’s mode of attack was, admittedly, ingenious, even if the end result for the victim was not a good one. In fact, it was almost always downright fatal.

Very much creatures of the night, Kelpies were said to dwell in the waters of literally dozens of Scottish lochs. As creature-seeker Roland Watson demonstrated in his book The Water Horses of Loch Ness, however, the vast majority of reports of such beasts emanate from none other than Loch Ness. We may never know, for sure, the real form of the Kelpie; only the guise that led to the creation of its name. But, what we can say for certain is that the small number of witnesses who encountered the beast, and who lived to tell the tale, described it as a large black or white horse. In most cases, the victim was a late-night traveler, walking along an old, well-known pathway near the water’s edge of the relevant loch. Suddenly, the huge horse would rise out of the water, dripping wet, and make its way to the shore, with its coat shining under the light of the Moon.

Under such strange circumstances, many might be inclined to make a run for it immediately. There is, however, a very strange aspect to many of the Kelpie stories. Namely, that the people who crossed its path felt as if their free will had been taken from them and that they were deliberately prevented from fleeing the scene. Today, we might justifiably suggest that the beast had the power to control the minds of those in its deadly sights. Perhaps, even by a form of supernatural hypnosis. Those fortunate enough to escape the icy clutches of the Kelpie described how they felt driven to climb on the back of the horse and grab its reins. Despite having a sense of dread and a fear of doing so, that’s exactly what so many did – and, in the process, failed to survive and tell their tale. It was at that point that the Kelpie made its move – an incredibly fast move.

With the entranced person now atop the monster, it would suddenly launch itself into the deep and cold waters of the loch, with the poor soul unable to let go of the reins. Death by drowning was all but inevitable, aside from that very lucky, aforementioned body of people who were fortunate enough to have survived and who related their stories – hence why we know of the creature and its terrible modus operandi. As for the reason behind these deadly attacks, it was said that the creatures sought one thing more than any other: the human soul.

Although the Kelpie was very much a monster of centuries long gone, there is a thought-provoking case which suggests a Kelpie may have been on the loose in England in the mid-1970s. In the summer of 1976, an encounter with the much-feared and legendary “Man-Monkey”of Bridge 39 on the Shropshire Union Canal occurred; a supernatural creature first reported in January 1879. It was a strange, spectral, ape-like beast. The 1976 witness was a man named Paul Bell, a keen fisherman and someone who, in July and August 1976, spent several Saturdays out at the canal with his rods, reels, bait, his cans of beer and his favorite beef and onion sandwiches,. Bell told me that, on one particular Saturday afternoon, he was sat near the water’s edge on a small wooden stool that he always carried with him, when he was “literally frozen solid” by the sight of “what at first I thought was a big log floating down the cut, about sixty or seventy feet away.” According to Bell, however, it was no log; it was something else entirely. As it got closer, Bell was both astonished and horrified to see a large “dark brown and black-colored’ eel or snake-like creature – possibly ten feet in length or a little bit more – moving slowly in the water, with its head – that “looked like a black sheep” – flicking rapidly from side to side.

Although he had an old Polaroid camera with him, said Bell, he never even thought to take a photograph. Instead, he merely stared in both awe and shock as the animal cruised leisurely and blissfully past him, before finally vanishing out of sight. Bell stressed that the creature apparently did not see him (“or, if it did, it never attacked me”), and did not appear to exhibit any outright hostile tendencies. What elevated Bell’s story to a far stranger level was the fact that he claimed, in quite matter of fact fashion, that the following Saturday he was fishing in practically the same spot when he had a sudden, out of the blue feeling of being watched. He was not wrong. Peering across the width of the canal, Bell was both horrified and petrified to see a dark, hairy face staring intently at him out of the thick, green bushes. It was the Man-Monkey. The head of the animal was unmistakably human-like, said Bell, who added that “as soon as it saw me looking at it, up it went and ran right into the trees and I lost it.” He further explained: “That was it; a second or two was all at the most. But as it got up and ran I knew it was a big monkey. There’s nothing else it could have been.”

The chances of two strange and unidentified creatures being seen in the same location, and only a week apart, are slim to absolute zero. In fact, we can forget the “slim” angle. The chances are 100 percent zero. My conclusion? That what Paul Bell saw was nothing less than a 1970s incarnation of an ancient Kelpie. Bell was lucky to leave the site alive.

#cryptid #paranormal #supernatural

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im-a-wix-ig · 5 years ago

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the sabbats

as a quick note, i am still learning so if there is any misinformation, please let me know!

imbolc (feb. 2nd): celebration for the upcoming spring where crops and animals would be blessed and the goddess of fertility, Bridgid, would be honored.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds, bread butter pudding, scones, muffins, garlic, onions)

☕️scents (vanilla, cinnamon)

💎stones/crystals (amythest, bloodstone, onyx)

🧙🏻‍♀️practices (light white candles, plant seeds, bless pets, clean and cleanse living space, bake with aforementioned foods)

ostara (march 19th-23rd): the spring equinox.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (roast ham & pineapple, eggs, milk, seeds & nuts, banana bread, chocolate milk, green vegetables)

💐flowers (jasmine, light florals, sweet garden, wild flowers)

💎stones/crystals (amethyst, rose quartz, moonstone)

🧙🏼‍♀️practices (light candles, plant seeds, share a roast ham w/ loved ones, bake banana bread, spring clean, take deep breaths, wear whites and pastels, collect and research flowers, take nature walks)

beltane (may 1st): the halfway point between spring and summer, beltane celebrates the festival of fire and mayday. beltane eve is celebrated with bonfires, flower crowns, and may poles. many believe the veil between worlds is very thin during beltane.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (breads, cakes, honey, leafy greens, fruits, vegetables, seafood, iced teas, lemonade, milk)

💐flowers (florals, sweet garden, honeysuckle, jasmine, rose)

💎stones/crystals (amber, citrine, moonstone, red jasper, rose quartz)

🧙🏽‍♀️practices (wear flower crowns or flowers in hair, dress in red or white, make a bonfire & roast marshmallows, garden, take a walk, spend time in nature, pick fresh flowers to decorate)

litha (june 20th-23rd): the summer solstice.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (fruit, vegetables, herbed bread, cheese, honey cakes, chicken, pork, sunflower seeds, lemonade, ice tea)

☕️scents (lemon, orange, cinnamon, rose)

💎stones/crystals (moonstone, tiger’s eye, amethyst, fluorite, agate, crystals w/ warm colors)

🧙🏾‍♀️practices (watch the sunrise/set, eat outdoors, make or buy a sun catcher, bake a sweet cake, let sunlight cleanse living spaces, clean, wear flower crowns, make honey/sugar scrub, wear warm tones)

lammas (august 1st): symbolizes the first harvest and midpoint between summer and autumn. a time for gratitude where many people often get married.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (multigrains, corn on the cob, bbq meats, fried chicken, potatoes, soup, rice, nuts, black current juice, beer, peppermint tea)

☕️scents (rose, chamomile, passion fruit, all spice)

💎stones/crystals (citrine, clear quartz, tigers eyes)

🧙🏿‍♀️practices (finish a project, make bread, enjoy nature, take care of plants, decorate or craft, acknowledge what one is greatful for, journal future hopes)

mabon (september 20th-23rd): the autumn equinox, a celebration of the harvest and preparation for the upcoming winter.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (pies, nuts, smokes or roast poultry, soup, corn, apples, plums, grapes, cinnamon donuts, caramel popcorn, peanut butter, butterscotch)

☕️scents (sage, pine, cinnamon)

🧙🏾‍♀️practices (make scented pine cones, spend time under the stars, donate food or goods, stop bad habits, visit deceased loved ones, take care of plants, spend time in nature, meditate)

samhain (october 31st): witch new year and one of the most important holidays. veil between worlds is the thin and it is a time to honor loved ones, friends, familiars, and pets who are deceased. time where one may focus on guidance, clearing negative energy, and beginning a positive new year.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (pumpkins, toffee apples, ginger bread, chai, nutmeg or cinnamon spiced foods, hazelnuts, sweets)

☕️scents (nutmeg, cinnamon)

💎stones/crystals (obsidian, onyx, bloodstone, amber, fossils)

🧙🏽‍♀️practices (cook a family recipe, light a fire, remember & honor the deceased)

yule (december 20th-23rd): the winter solstice, people will make preparations for the cold months and decorate trees with many cold weather foods to symbolize the continued life during winter.

ways to celebrate-

🍎foods (cookies, fruit cake, turkey, eggnog, ginger tea)

☕️scents (cedar, frankincense, myrrh)

💎stones/crystals (bloodstone, citrine, clear quartz)

🧙🏼‍♀️practices (give or volunteer, bake shortbread or sugar cookies, share a meal with loved ones)

#sabbats #new wix #new witch #baby witch

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phinnsyreads · 5 years ago

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Item #: SCP-025

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-025 is only to be opened during testing, as is the room in which SCP-025 is stored. Entry codes are to be given only to authorized research and security personnel. No other containment protocols required.

Description: SCP-025 is a wooden wardrobe measuring 0.97 m x 0.62 m x 1.95 m, full of clothing dating from a number of time periods. Articles contained within the chest, collectively named SCP-025-1, match with styles of decades from the 1920s to the present. The apparel from each time frame varies with regard to style; for example, a polyester striped shirt and pair of charcoal suit pants both correspond with general styles of the 1970s. The only unifying aspect of every article contained in SCP-025 is that each one is in poor condition; moths have eaten at much of the collection, and tears and runs are not uncommon.

When any item from SCP-025 is put on, the wearer is observed either to die or suffer an injury within 24 hours. The cause of death or injury in these instances is invariably linked to the aforementioned flaws in the clothing, but only ever appears to be an unrelated incident. Wearing a glove with a fingertip cut off may result in the loss of the fingertip through a simple kitchen accident like chopping onions; similarly, a subject wearing a poncho with a sleeve missing will somehow cause the loss of the uncovered arm, be it an attack by a wild animal or a vehicular accident that necessitates the amputation of the limb. If placed in a sealed, unfurnished enclosure while wearing an item from the chest, the wearer will either seemingly spontaneously contract a flesh-eating disease that begins in the areas not covered by the clothing, or suffer the failure of an organ located beneath an imperfection in the article. Diseases arising from such incidents may or may not be contagious; no study has been successfully undertaken due to the speed at which the strains observed run their course. Recommended that, if possible, samples of the disease be taken to lab for possible weaponization.

Following is an abridged testing log of SCP-025; more thorough testing will accompany the declassification of the document in its entirety.

TEST LOG SCP-025, SECTION 1

SUBJECT: D-778, a 42-year-old white male ARTICLE: 1940s-era white tuxedo IMPERFECTION(S): Torn seam in left shoulder TEST RESULTS: Subject was allowed free roam of the halls, under Agent ███████'s supervision. For approximately 45 minutes, nothing eventful occurred; however, at ██:██:██, security tapes and eyewitnesses indicate that D-778 appeared to make an attempt at attacking Agent ███████. He in turn overcame the subject with a knife, causing an inch-deep gash in D-778's left shoulder precisely at the point where the tuxedo's seam was ripped. Test halted; subject later terminated.

SUBJECT: D-690, a 26-year-old white male ARTICLE: 2004 Boston Red Sox baseball cap IMPERFECTION(S): Missing size adjuster in back of cap; logo in front partially removed TEST RESULTS: Placed in a sealed room with the subject was a table on which were a loaded Jericho "Baby Eagle" 9mm handgun, a grill lighter, and a hatchet. D-690 chose to wear the cap backward for the test; potential effects of this decision on the outcome of the test are unknown. Subject expressed reluctance to touch any of the objects on the table for several hours; food and water were provided as necessary. After four (4) hours of general inactivity, subject picked up the handgun and examined it; while holding it at roughly eye level, the weapon discharged into D-690's forehead, where the size adjustment band would have been. The round exited the subject near the part of the hat with the missing part of the logo.

SUBJECTS: D-736, a 22-year-old white male; D-771, a 23-year-old white male ARTICLE: Burgundy striped sweater vest, dating from 1973 IMPERFECTION(S): Article seemed to have been partially eaten by moths; several large holes in the front of the sweater TEST RESULTS: D-736 was asked by researching staff to wear the sweater vest, which he did under duress. D-771 was given a loaded handgun out of sight of the other test participant and instructed to, on a given signal, fire all six (6) shots in the direction of D-736. After doing so, it was noted that every shot fired passed through one of the holes in the sweater vest, leaving the clothing intact and killing D-736. Firearm retrieved; surviving subject transported back to quarters.

SUBJECT: D-771, a 23-year-old white male ARTICLE: Sweater vest from above trial IMPERFECTION(S): Same as mentioned TEST RESULTS: D-771 was this time placed in an empty room, dimensions 15 m x 15 m x 15 m; only objects in the enclosure were lights overhead. Subject initially complained of boredom, then lay on his back and went to sleep. After 2 hours and 14 minutes, two (2) of the fluorescent light tubes in the ceiling suddenly dislodged and fell. Both landed squarely on holes in the sweater, shattering upon impact; one (1) of the tubes broke into jagged pieces that impaled D-771 in several areas, but only again through gaps already present in the sweater vest. Subject's vitals persisted for another six (6) minutes, then ceased. Further testing locations will be selected to minimize possible damage to the surrounding area.

SUBJECT: Dr. ██████ [Unplanned experiment; an unidentified individual left an article from SCP-025 on Dr. ██████'s desk that looked similar to an item of his own clothing. Any information about this incident and/or the perpetrator of same should be reported immediately to senior staff.] ARTICLE: Lightweight scarf, dyed a number of colors IMPERFECTION(S): Heavily pulled seam caused scarf to be considerably shorter and tighter in the middle. TEST RESULTS: According to his itinerary, Dr. ██████, wearing the item from SCP-025, was en route to the enclosure of SCP-███ on ██/██/████ for routine testing. However, he diverged from his intended path and began in a direction towards an entirely separate wing of the facility. Subject then entered the enclosure of SCP-173 without gathering accompaniment or following safety procedures, and, upon hearing the door closing, blinked. Cause of death listed as strangulation resulting from a crushed windpipe.

SUBJECT: D-802, a 30-year-old Hispanic female ARTICLE: 1980s Flashdance-style white shirt IMPERFECTION(S): Right shoulder removed, left sleeve completely cut off, entire bottom hem shredded TEST RESULTS: [DATA EXPUNGED]. All present were presumed infected, then quarantined and [DATA EXPUNGED]. All further tests involving 1980s-era fashion have been postponed indefinitely due to the expenditures and safety hazards presented by the aforementioned experiment. Full cleanup estimated to take an additional ██ weeks.

Further testing authorized; results now awaiting declassification.

#phinnsy #scp foundation #scp 025 #reading #voiceover #horror #sci-fi #urban legend #fiction #storytelling #podcast #clothing #fashion

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chiseler · 6 years ago

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RICHARD SHAVER IN THE UNDERWORLD

In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.

Disturbed by this, understandably enough, Shaver soon left his job with Ford. Around this same time, his brother died, a loss which affected him deeply, and he got married and had a baby daughter. Then he vanished for much of the next decade. In that time his wife died and her relatives took custody of his daughter, telling her her father was also dead.

While Shaver would claim he had spent many of those missing years living among an underground civilization in tunnels deep beneath the earth’s surface, later researchers and colleagues determined much of that time was spent in mental institutions.

Shaver re-emerged in 1943, when he sent a long letter to the Chicago-based offices of popular science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. In the letter, he described an ancient lost language he called “Mantong” which, he claimed, was the true original source of all modern human languages. In Mantong, he explained, every letter carries with it a distinct idea or meaning, and the true meanings of words can be deduced by analyzing the interaction of the involved letters. The letter “D,” as just one example, connotes destruction and violence and evil. Words beginning with the letter “D” always carry with them a sinister subtext.

Upon first opening and reading the letter, which had been poorly typed on onion skin paper, the magazine’s managing editor muttered something about crackpots before dropping the letter in the trash. Curious after overhearing that “crackpot” comment, editor Ray Palmer retrieved the discarded onion skin pages and read it himself.

Finding it intriguing, Palmer ran the letter in the next issue, and was amazed when it generated such an overwhelming reader response.

After playing around with Mantong a bit and concluding Shaver might actually be onto something with this theory of his, Palmer wrote him a note asking how he’d come across such arcane knowledge. Some months later, Shaver responded.

In a ten-thousand word letter he entitled “A Warning to Future Man,” Shaver explained that he came to learn all he had through the time he’d spent in the aforementioned caverns and his direct dealings with the remnants of an ancient alien race who still live there to this day.

Tens of thousands of years ago, Shaver said, the earth was inhabited by wise immortal alien giants called Titans and Atlans who possessed advanced technologies we can’t begin to imagine. They had arrived on the planet (which they called Lemuria) aeons ago when the sun was newly formed. But over time the sun’s rays became radioactive, making the air and water poisonous for the Titans, who began to shrivel into deformed midgets. Worse, they Also began to age, which, being immortal, was something they had never done before. Packing up all their advanced machinery, they moved underground into a series of artificial tunnels which honeycombed the planet. There they built elaborate cities and carried on the best they could.

In terms of the radiation, however, things didn’t improve much, so a select few of the Titans and Atlans boarded flying saucers and returned to the stars, leaving their deformed brethren in the subterranean caverns.

Over time those left behind divided into two species. Using the beneficial healing rays of some of the machines, a small handful known as “Teros” remained wise and Kindly and human like, while the majority degenerated into monstrous and evil creatures known as “Deros.” (Which was short for “detrimental robots”). The Deros were in the habit of using their electronic rays to trigger natural disasters on the surface world and direct human thoughts down some very bad and dark paths. It could be argued that every destructive and malevolent thing that happens on the planet was caused by the Deros and their insidious rays. Beyond merely manipulating the surface world from a distance for their own entertainment, the Deros also regularly kidnapped large-breasted human women, who they tortured and ate. The Teros, meanwhile, while a decided minority, did what they could to interfere on the behalf of human kind.

It’s much, much more complicated than that. But you get the general idea.

Palmer was again intrigued, but the problem, from an editor’s point of view, was that it wasn’t a story. Not really, certainly not along the lines of what the magazine tended to run. It was more a lecture or a screed. So he took it upon himself to turn it into a story, while maintaining all of Shavers details and wild scientific theories. The result was the 31,000-word novella he entitled “I Remember Lemuria!,” which included characters and action sequences and sex set in Shaver’s hollow earth. The only alteration he made to Shaver’s original was one he later regretted. Instead of a narrator recounting actual events he had experienced directly in recent years, the narrator is recounting a distant memory of a previous life.

To be honest, what Shaver ended up producing was a pretty generic space opera complete with four-armed Martian girls, beautiful, translucent Venusian maidens and the standard array of pulp sci-fi hardware, though Shaver’s theories still lay at the heart of it.

Sensing he had a story with real potential, especially after coming up with a sure-fire attention-grabbing tagline for the cover (“The Most Amazing True Story ever told!”), Palmer wanted to increase the print run in anticipation. The war was still raging, however, and paper was hard to come by, making an increased print run out of the question. Palmer later claimed that at the time he mentioned this to Shaver. In response, Shaver asked for the name of the magazine’s production manager, and said he’d ask some of his Tero friends in the underworld if they might be able to help.

Two days later, as the story goes, Palmer’s production manager came into his office and announced an idea had come to him out of nowhere the night before. He’d just steal some paper from a detective magazine put out by the same publisher, and they’d have enough for an extra fifty thousand copies.

Whether the idea was in fact inspired by the Teros is unknown, but certainly worked into the mythology Palmer would come to call The Shaver Mystery.

The March 1945 issue, with Shaver’s story and that tagline on the cover, sold out completely. Shortly afterward, the letters started arriving. While normally any random issue of Amazing Stories might generate fifty letters in response, over ten thousand letters came in response to “I Remember Lemuria!”

Although most of the letters seemed to come from the magazine’s paranoid schizophrenic subscribers, Shaver had clearly tapped into something. A vast majority of the letters came from people telling the same story, that they, too had had dealings, both direct and psychic, with the ancient subterranean aliens.

Shortly after the publication of that first story, Palmer, hoping to get a better sense of how sincere Shaver was about all this, paid a visit to Pennsylvania, where Shaver was living with his second wife. When Palmer went to bed that first night in a room adjacent to Shaver’s, he said he began hearing voices coming from Shaver’s bedroom. There were five in total, some male, some female, of varying ages. They were discussing a human who had been tortured to death on the rack earlier that day, a mere four miles from Shaver’s home, and four miles straight down. Given many of the voices were talking at the same time, he concluded it couldn’t have been a bit of ventriloquism on Shaver’s part, and after covertly searching the home the next day he could find no hidden wires or microphones, so had to conclude he’d heard the voices of an alien race.

Whether or not Palmer’s story was true or simply part of an elaborate marketing stunt is irrelevant. Palmer put his faith in Shaver and the cave dwelling aliens, running at least one new Shaver story in each new issue, sometimes devoting entire issues to The Shaver Mystery.

The difference was, in stories like “Cave City of Hell,” “Invasion of the Micro Men,” “Earth Slaves to Space” and “The Return of Sathanas,” Palmer took a lighter hand when it came to the editing, and dropped the race memory angle. Instead of spinning yarns about things that happened twelve thousand years ago, Shaver was writing about things that had happened last year, or last week, while Palmer kept pushing the “true story” claim. It only made readers more obsessive.

In one later piece Shaver even took on his critics directly, claiming that despite prevailing geological theory, the inner earth was indeed honeycombed with thousands of miles of tunnels and caves larger than New York. He further claimed that Tomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, given their inventions, likely had direct (or at least psychic) contact with the Teros themselves, and that furthermore, the science he learned from the ancients allowed him to lay out the fundamentals of the Unified Field Theory before Einstein thought of it.

Sales continued to run at roughly fifty thousand copies per month more than they had pre-Shaver, and the letters continued to pour in from believers and skeptics alike.

By 1948, however, Shaver’s run at Amazing Stories came to an end. Palmer claimed they stopped because sinister forces had forced him to stop running the stories, while old guard fans of the magazine who pined for those earlier, Shaverless issues of Amazing Stories claimed a growing backlash, a letter-writing campaign and falling sales were the real reason.

Palmer was fired soon thereafter, but moved on to edit a string of other science fiction pulps through the Fifties, where Shaver stories continued to appear, if more sporadically.

When skeptical readers pointed out the eerie similarities between Shaver’s stories and earlier works, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, Palmer liked to respond that it was simply possible these other writers had had their own encounters with the Deros and Teros. So there.

By the late Fifties, Palmer, still touting the Shaver Mystery to anyone who would listen, even began releasing an all-Shaver magazine he called The Hidden World. It lasted nine issues.

Through the Sixties and into the Seventies, Shaver abandoned writing in favor of a new quest for the truth. While hunting for physical evidence of the ancient civilization, he began to notice that, if looked at in the right way, in the right light and at the right angle, some rocks—many he found on his own property—contained writings and drawings, clearly inscribed there by our alien ancestors, He took to photographing and painting pictures based on what he saw on the surface of the rocks, and annotating them in detail for those who lacked a keen enough eye to see the truth. He even created rock libraries, and would mail out slices of rock with explanatory notes to those who requested them.

While the photos and paintings obviously didn’t have the kind of reach the pulp magazines did, they did garner a good deal of interest in the outsider art community, and were exhibited in a number of respectable galleries.

Shaver died in 1975, and his memoir The Secret World (co-written with Palmer) was published posthumously. To this day most of his stories remain in print and readily available in assorted collections, and The Shaver Mystery is still debated among science fiction and conspiracy fans.

Although possible earlier influences on Shaver’s vision, like Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine, are plentiful, The Shaver Mystery itself has had a clear influence of its own, and can be seen and felt in the shadows behind Jack Arnold’s 1956 The Mole People, the elaborate and confounding Montauk Project conspiracy, Douglas Cheek’s splendid 1984 monster picture C.H.U.D., The Residents’ 1982 concept album Mark of the Mole, and Craig Baldwin’s conspiratorial documentary about US foreign policy in Latin America, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. Those diehard adherents to the hollow earth theory continue to cite Shaver as gospel, and then of course there are all those clinical paranoid schizophrenics who blame their crazy, crazy visions on the use of a Shaver invention, the Thought Augmentor.

by Jim Knipfel

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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HBO Max New Releases: January 2021

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

It’s a new year and everyone wants to put the vile cesspool that was 2020 behind them. Thankfully, HBO Max is coming out swinging to make the transition out of the hellyear even easier. HBO Max’s list of new releases for January 2021 is positively packed with notable film releases and even a fun HBO Max Original or two.

For starters, Search Party season 4 will arrive to HBO Max on Jan. 14. This season of the show with a now-surprising lifespan finds Dory Sief in the thrall of a deranged stalker…right after getting off on murder charges. These Brooklynites lead such fascinating lives! The other major original or note is the HBO documentary Tiger, that premieres on Jan. 10 and will delve into the complicated history of golfing legend Tiger Woods.

The real story this month, however, are the movies. Perhaps emboldened by its success with Wonder Woman 1984, HBO Max is filling up its servers with as many Warner properties that it can find. The Dark Knight trilogy, Blade, Chinatown, The Exorcist, Mad Max: Fury Road, No Country for Old Men, and Pulp Fiction all arrive on Jan. 1. Poltergeist and Stephen King’s It (1990) make things spooky on Jan. 15. Then the month closes out with, quite simply, the greatest movie of all time: The Mummy (1999). The downside here is that some of these are limited engagements, with the aforementioned WW1984, Blade, Ocean’s Eleven, and more all leaving at month’s end.

Still, January 2021 will provide plenty of filmic fun on HBO Max. Here is the full list for your perusal.

HBO Max New Releases – January 2021

January 1 12 oz. Mouse, Seasons 1-2 42nd Street, 1933 All the President’s Men, 1976 Apple & Onion, Season 1B The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman, 1974 (HBO) Batman Begins, 2005 Batman Beyond Batman Beyond: The Return of the Joker, 2000 Batman: Bad Blood, 2016 Batman: Death in the Family, 2020 Batman: Hush, 2019 Batman: The Animated Series Blade, 1998 A Better Life, 2011 (HBO) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005 Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 Check It Out! with Steve Brule Chinatown, 1974 Codename: Kids Next Door The Color Purple, 1985 The Conjuring, 2013 Courage the Cowardly Dog Craig of the Creek, Season 2 The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, 2002 (HBO) The Dark Knight, 2008 The Dark Knight Rises, 2012 Dim Sum Funeral, 2009 (HBO) Ed, Edd n Eddy El Amor No Puede Esperar (Aka Love Can’t Wait), 2021 (HBO) Happy Feet, 2006 The Electric Horseman, 1979 (HBO) Escape from New York, 1981 The Exorcist, 1973 Flashpoint, 1984 (HBO) The General’s Daughter, 1999 (HBO) Gossip Girl Green Lantern, 2011 Green Lantern: The Animated Series Gremlins, 1984 Gremlins 2: The New Batch, 1990 The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Happily N’Ever After, 2007 (HBO) Happily N’Ever After 2: Snow White, 2009 (HBO) Happy-Go-Lucky, 2008 (HBO) He Said She Said, 1991 (HBO) Heaven Help Us, 1985 (HBO) The Infamous Future, 2018 Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, 2001 (HBO) The Jellies Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, 2020 Kong: Skull Island, 2017 Little Con Lili, 2021 (HBO) Loiter Squad Ma, 2019 (HBO) Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, 1983 Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015 Magic Mike, 2012 Mao Mao, Heroes of Pure Heart March of the Penguins, 2005 Margaret, 2011 (Extended Version) (HBO) Miracle On 34th Street, 1994 (HBO) Miss Firecracker, 1989 (HBO) Mulholland Dr., 2001 Mystic River, 2003 Nitro Circus: The Movie 3D, 2012 (HBO) No Country for Old Men, 2007 The Notebook, 2004 Ocean’s 8, 2018 Ocean’s Eleven, 2001 Ocean’s Thirteen, 2007 Ocean’s Twelve, 2004 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, 1985 Piter, 2021 (HBO) The Producers, 1968 Pulp Fiction, 1994 Purple Rain, 1984 Ready Player One, 2018 Revenge Of The Nerds, 1984 (HBO) Revenge Of The Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise, 1987 (HBO) Revenge Of The Nerds IV: Nerds In Love, 2005 (HBO) Rollerball, 2002 (HBO) Se7en, 1995 Shallow Hal, 2001 (HBO) Snowpiercer, Season 1 A Star is Born, 2018 Superman: Doomsday, 2007 Superman: Man of Tomorrow, 2020 Superman Returns, 2006 Swimfan, 2002 (HBO) This Is Spinal Tap, 1984 The Three Stooges, 2012 (HBO) TMNT, 2007 Tom Goes to the Mayor The Trouble With Spies, 1987 (HBO) Underclassman, 2005 (HBO) V for Vendetta, 2005 Van Wilder: Freshman Year (Extended Version), 2009 (HBO) Walk Of Shame, 2014 (HBO) Warrior, Seasons 1-2 (HBO) Willard, 1971 (HBO) Worth Winning, 1989 (HBO) You Can Count On Me, 2000 (HBO)

January 2 The High Note, 2020 (HBO)

January 4 30 Coins, Series Premiere (HBO)

January 8 Patriot’s Day, 2016 Scream, 1996 Squish, Season 1

January 9 The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, Season 2 Ben 10, Season 4A The King Of Staten Island, 2020 (HBO)

January 10 Miracle Workers, Season 2 Tiger, Two-Part Documentary Premiere (HBO)

January 12 Against The Wild, 2014 Against the Wild 2: Survive the Serengeti, 2016 Alpha and Omega 5: Family Vacation, 2015 Alpha and Omega 6: Dino Digs, 2016 Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World, 2015 Blue Valentine, 2010 Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, 2000 Earth Girls Are Easy, 1989 An Elephant’s Journey, 2018 The Escape Artist, 1982 Get Carter, 1971 Hecho En Mexico, 2012 Hellboy: Blood and Iron, 2007 Hellboy: Sword of Storms, 2006 Hellboy: The Dark Below, 2010 Jennifer Lopez: Dance Again, 2016 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976 The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, 2013 La Mujer de Mi Hermano, 2005 Leapfrog Letter Factory Adventures: Amazing Word Explorers, 2015 Leapfrog Letter Factory Adventures: Counting on Lemonade, 2014 Leapfrog Letter Factory Adventures: The Letter Machine Rescue Team, 2014 Leapfrog: Numberland, 2012 Lost and Delirious, 2001 Love and Sex, 2000 Lovely & Amazing, 2002 The Man Who Would Be King, 1975 Meatballs, 1979 The Men Who Stare at Goats, 2009 A Mermaid’s Tale, 2017 Mistress, 1992 Mother’s Day, 2012 Mud, 2013 Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, 2016 Night is Short, Walk on Girl, 2017 No Eres Tu Soy Yo, 2011 Norm of the North: King Sized Adventure, 2019 Ollie & Moon, Seasons 1-2 Other Parents, Seasons 1-2 Pinocchio, 2012 Promare, 2019 Reservoir Dogs, 1992 Ride Your Wave, 2019 Righteous Kill, 2008 Sprung, 1997 The Spy Next Door, 2010 Tender Mercies, 1983 Thanks for Sharing, 2013 Turtle Tale, 2018 The Visitor, 2008 Vixen, 2015

January 14 Search Party, Max Original Season 4 Premiere

January 15 Stephen King’s It, 1990 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975 Poltergeist, 1982 Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Director’s Cut, Season 1 dubbed (Crunchyroll Collection) Real Time With Bill Maher, Season 19 Premiere (HBO) Roots (Mini Series), 1977 Si Yo Fuera Rico (Aka If I Were Rich), 2021 (HBO) The Wayans Bros

January 16 Eve Kill Bill: Vol. 1, 2003 (HBO) Kill Bill: Vol. 2, 2004 (HBO)

January 19 Everwood

January 20 At Home with Amy Sedaris, Season 3 C.B. Strike, Season 1 (HBO) C.B. Strike: Lethal White, Limited Series Premiere (HBO)

January 21 Gomorrah, Max Original Season 3 Premiere Looney Tunes Cartoons, Season 1C

January 22 The New Adventures of Old Christine Painting with John, Series Premiere (HBO)

January 23 Don’t Let Go, 2019 (HBO) Person of Interest

January 24 Euphoria Special Episode Part 2: F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob, Special Episode Premiere (HBO)

January 26 Babylon 5 Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO)

January 29 ¡Animo Juventud! (Aka Go Youth!), 2021 (HBO) The Little Things What I Like About You

January 30 The Mummy, 1999 (HBO) The Mummy Returns, 2001 (HBO) Pushing Daisies The Scorpion King, 2002 (HBO)

January 31 Axios, Season 4 Premiere (HBO)

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Leaving HBO Max – January 2021

January 7 War Dogs, 2016

January 24 Wonder Woman 1984, 2020

January 31 Ad Astra, 2019 After Hours, 1985 Akeelah And The Bee, 2006 All Is Bright, 2013 America, America, 1964 Anchors Aweigh, 1945 The Arrangement, 1969 Bee Season, 2005 Before Sunrise, 1995 Before Sunset, 2004 Best Laid Plans, 1999 Bigger Than The Sky, 2005 Blade II, 2002 Blade, 1998 Blood Simple, 1984 Bridge To Terabithia, 2007 Bright Lights, Big City, 1988 The Change-Up, 2011 The Children, 2009 A Christmas Carol, 1938 Crash, 2005 (Director’s Cut) David Copperfield, 1935 Days After Your Departure, 2019 Enemy Of The State, 1998 Everybody’s All-American, 1988 Father’s Day, 1997 Friday Night Lights, 2004 Get On Up, 2014 Guys And Dolls, 1955 High Society, 1956 Jeepers Creepers 2, 2003 Jeepers Creepers, 2001 Leprechaun 2, 1994 Leprechaun, 1993 Magnolia, 1999 The Man With The Golden Arm, 1955 Mars Attacks!, 1996 Martha Marcy May Marlene, 2011 Martin Lawrence You So Crazy, 1994 New Year’s Eve, 2011 (HBO) Ocean’s Eleven, 2001 Ocean’s Thirteen, 2007 Ocean’s Twelve, 2004 On The Town, 1949 The Pelican Brief, 1993 Planet Of The Apes, 2001 Risky Business, 1983 Semi-Pro, 2008 Some Came Running, 1958 Something Borrowed, 2011 Splendor In The Grass, 1961 Walk The Line, 2005 (Extended Version) When Harry Met Sally, 1989

The post HBO Max New Releases: January 2021 appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3oepkCv

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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protoindoeuropean · 3 years ago

Text

I posted 2,473 times in 2021

215 posts created (9%)

2258 posts reblogged (91%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 10.5 posts.

I added 3,159 tags in 2021

#g - 1025 posts

#art - 742 posts

#j - 307 posts

#important - 239 posts

#vid - 185 posts

#zoa - 155 posts

#mhm - 139 posts

#arch - 130 posts

#gif - 129 posts

#iconic - 108 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#also i know online i sometimes get very focused on the subject and the matter–of–fact slash ~neutral tone doesn't translate that well onlin

My Top Posts in 2021

idk i always understood "with all due respect" as the amount of respect that is owed to a particular person based on social hierarchy or w/e, regardless of how much respect you think they deserve. as in "i may not respect you, but i'm saying this to fulfill societal expectations"

so posts that go like "with all due respect" which is none are very confusing to me...

51 notes • Posted 2021-05-11 23:53:46 GMT

57 notes • Posted 2021-04-04 20:55:39 GMT

TIL that both Burma and Myanmar were written down that way with non-rhotic British English in mind, which is why ur was used to approximate the sound [ə] in the original language (= [bəmà]) and ar to approximate [a] (= [mjəmà]).

The languages that adopted that name from the British promptly reproduced the written r, which is then also pronounced (e.g. Burma and Mjanmar in Slovene, which are, you might’ve guessed it, pronounced [ˈbuɾma] and [mjanˈmaɾ]).

71 notes • Posted 2021-02-08 22:17:18 GMT

some thoughts on borrowings and foreign words:

if you're pronouncing a foreign word the way it is pronounced in the original language* and maintain its orthography as well, that word is not truly part of your language, it is a citation word † *if you are not a native speaker, it is unlikely you are pronouncing it entirely as it is supposed to be pronounced, anyway (e. g. English t and d are not produced at the same place of articulation as t and d in most other languages in Europe and most people aren't aware of the difference, so when they pronounce isolated English words in non-English contexts, that difference isn't taken into account)

it is unreasonable to expect ppl to be able to pronounce every sound there is, therefore it is unreasonable to expect them to pronounce every foreign word the way it is pronounced in the original language

if the word is not adapted in pronunciation (and orthography) and is thus not truly part of the language, it is more awkward to use it in natural speech production (depending on the language, it might be impossible to use it without adapting/changing it in some way). adaptation helps it become an actual word belonging to the language; in the case of written languages, the more pronounced the phonetic principle is in their orthography, the more important it is that the borrowings be adapted to that orthography for them to become words actually belonging to that language

borrowed words becoming an integrated part of a language's vocabulary is important, because it helps preserve the language – instead of displacing it (first saying words in another language, then collocations, phrases, entire sentences ...)

it is understandable to want to see personal names pronounced as they are supposed to be pronounced, but as mentioned, not all ppl are able to do it and it would still be unreasonable to expect the impossible from them** **names are sometimes treated differently as compared to other words even within the language itself and, similarly, borrowed names can be treated differently than other borrowings as well (e. g. show > sln. šov [ˈʃou̯], gen.sg. šova [ˈʃɔʋa], but Joe > sln. Joe [ˈd͡ʒou̯], gen.sg. Joeja [ˈd͡ʒou̯a])

one and the same place will often have different names (more or less so) in different languages. that means that the place was important enough for those language communities to have its own word in those languages. that is not a bad thing – unless you *want* those speakers to treat it as something unfamiliar and unknown

†idk the specific terminology in english and it is expected that terminology differs from language to language, especially because of the different orthographic principles in different languages. in slovene, for example, there is a difference between: izposojenka/sposojenka 'a loanword': a borrowing completely adapted in pronunciation and orthography, conforming to sln. flexional patterns (e. g. pica 'pizza', vavčer 'a voucher'); tujka 'a foreignism': a borrowing completely adapted in pronunciation but not in orthography, conforming to sln. flexional patterns (e. g. renault [ɾɛˈno], gen. sg. renaulta [ɾɛˈnoja]); citatna beseda 'a citation word': a ~borrowing not adapted in either pronunciation or orthography, invariable (e. g. first lady); usually "loanwords" start out as "foreignisms", in which the orthography is later also adapted

72 notes • Posted 2021-03-30 18:23:51 GMT

people often talk about how language is vague and imprecise and how it can never accurately reflect the inner workings of our minds, and that's all well and true, but i find the same is also true of my own (non-verbalized) understanding of the things i'm trying to convey... our perceptions and feelings are themselves vague and imprecise and not really well defined by our own minds

so it makes sense that the ~contradictory nature of linguistic description (definite form with approximate meaning) actually reflects the ~contradictory nature of internal experience (definite experience with approximate meaning)

and i mean, this equivalence is not a coincidence. an "atomic" (non-ambiguous, precise) language is impossible bc we don't experience things in an "atomic" way

119 notes • Posted 2021-09-29 11:12:52 GMT

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#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #ok #tbh 1:10 is a pretty good ratio #j

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