#theres this one lady her name is alice shes so great

[desire-mona]

monanaaaaaa

how was the first day of (paper)work. :000

HAHAHA it was fine, boring as i didnt do anything beyond the afformentioned paperwork. we DID go to walmart tho but nothing of interest happened in there beyond me getting a new bag for work. met my moms coworkers + superintendent tho!! my boss boss.......

HOWEVER!! getting my fingerprints done we realised that i just? barelt have any? like we held up two prints side by side, mine and someone elses, and u couldn't actually See mine its nuts. meant to be unidentifiable

[sneakyscarab]

its that time again! my touhou posting continues. this is the most important one though, so you definitely wanna read this one. trust me :P

nina's thoughts on Touhou 8 - Imperishable Night

Imperishable Night is the best game ever made it has Wriggle Nightbug in it and she's the coolest touhou so this game is the bestest of all of them 100% perfect game!!!

jk. kinda. 

Imperishable Night takes a big step forward in a lot of places, expanding on what worked well in PCB and making changes to what didn't, with a handful of really cool features unique to this game. 

for starters, the playable character roster has exploded from three characters to EIGHT characters, split into four teams of two each with a human and a youkai. unfortunately none of the teams have any alternate movesets so theres technically only 4 choices, but the characters in each pair have different enough shots that you basically have 8 different weapon types to utilize. Reimu returns partnered with Yukari, Marisa is joined by Alice, Sakuya is back again with her mistress Remilia, and Youmu and Yuyuko join in as a duo of newbies. i tried out all four pairs and cleared stage 6A with each (although i admit to using continues for most of those runs) but MariAli was my fav so i went with them to get the true clear with a 1cc-6B. i love how theres a technique for Marisa and Alice where you can make use of Alice's laser taking a half second to disappear and instantly reappearing on swap, swapping with a good rhythm to keep full uptime on Alice's laser while also shooting out bullets as Marisa to get really high damage output. not only is it a fun maneuver to pull off, but it has an amazing name given by the fandom: the MALICE BEAM! 

on the topic of swapping, what you do when playing as either human or youkai affects certain mechanics in IN, most notably the Time system. when you first start a run off IN the time starts at 11pm and if you reach 5am your run ends. using a continue takes a half hour, and clearing a stage typically takes an hour off of your total, but you can make a stage only take half an hour instead if you collect enough time points. the main source of time points comes from the human/youkai meter. when you do things as your human or youkai partner the meter moves in their respective direction; when its maxed on humanity you gain time points through shooting enemies, and when its maxed on youkai-ness you gain time points for grazing bullets. a couple other mechanics also work based on your human/youkai status, like enemy summons that dont damage youkai but also can't be hurt by their bullets. the time system is a bit tough to understand, but its theoretically optional since if you 1cc you won't really run out of time anyways, and it allows for wiggle room later in runs if you managed to clear earlier stages within the half-hour, and the game doesn't punish you with a bad end for continuing like others do.

for new characaters, all i have to say is WRIGGLE NIGHTBUG!! LETS GO BABY!! WRIGGLE SWEEP!!!! Wriggle is probably my fav character in touhou just in general, let alone from this game. is she just a first stage boss with very little to do? yes. does she basically never show up again outside this game? also yes. do i care? no! Wriggle is an adorable firefly lady and the self-titled queen of insects, she can talk to and command bugs to do her bidding, and she frequently hangs out with other characters i like such as Rumia and Cirno and the next character i talk about from this game. this is absolutely a biased take because i love bugs but i dont care, Wriggle is the best. (plus shes totally trans-coded, definitely not me projecting :P) Nightbug aside, the other characters in IN are pretty solid too! Mystia is great, although that one is also probably a bit biased because her izakaya fangame is incredibly good and does a great job endearing you to her. gotta respect the grind of a bird youkai opening a fried food stand but selling eels instead of the expected chicken cause she doesn't wanna feed birds to people. also the fact that she scams people by afflicting them with night-blindness without their knowledge and then selling her fried eels as a cure is so funny. Mokou is an all around solid character, i love the concept of this immortal phoenix lady who hates the immortal moon princess so much, and neither one can die so they just beat the shit out of each other all the time (and maybe kiss? classic enemies to lovers) and her design is really sick, the detail of having a bunch of fire-warding charms plastered all over so she doesn't light her outfit on fire is hilarious lol.

does Imperishable Night have flaws? yeah for sure. needing to unlock stage 6b is kinda lame, and stuff like the last spells are weird mechanics that don't really do anything. however, WRIGGLE NIGHTBUG IS IN THE GAME LETS GO BABY WRIGGLE NIGHTBUG BEST TOUHOU EVER WOOOOOOOOOOO-

[angel-archivist]

Ok I’ll bit what’s the Argo incident

heeherheguehuidgigdfhg ALRIGHT so Like i said its kind of a mix of Science Crew and Space Horror two stories :]]] The basic premise is a group of astronauts were sent into space as a part of this private program run by a company who wanted to do the hotels in space, but wanted to make sure they wouldnt get like. fucking sued or whatever because of negative long term affects, they send a group of 10 people and none survived most died grisly deaths on the station, and only 3 bodies were recovered who had died when trying to force themselves into a deep enough sleep. The bodies are recovered by a recon team with Kai, Chelle and a few others, and their brought down with a few strange artifacts that were found in the station back down for Lethe to examine.

N while One of the bodies located on the station is being examined it jerks awake and scares the shit out of the mortician, he's shocked to be back on earth and is immediately brought back to the facility to be examined, n it turns out his body is beginning to heal itself, with a new potential money maker on their hands the boss decides to task Lethe and the others on figuring out wtf is going on. Basically there are like several layers to the story we have the space portion, the facility sections, and the outside the facility scenes. Lethe kind of operates as a field researcher who proposes the idea that the radiation that caused the ex astronauts new condition form and the side affects hes now dealing with, may have originally originated in the town and being thrust into a high pressure situation on the station plus the contained situation resulted in some of those on it to change.

So basically its Lethe trying to figure out the mystery of what happened on the station as the only survivor has no memory, recovering video logs from the station, researching the ppl of the town trying to figure out if anyone else had been experiencing these things, investigating artifacts and doing so so fucking much w/o any recognition from the facility </3 while with the help of the scientists uncovering the shitty human experimentation going on and figuring out that what happened on the space station was SUPPOSED to happen (not exactly but u know. they mostly planned it)

[kingfrumpkin]

kingfrumpkin’s New and Improved map of auradon!

aka i hated the other one and well...

there’s obviously more cities but i got lazy  and didn’t want to include them. i tried to make everything as accurate as i Could but its kind of hard when i shaved down 85% of italy, split the UK into england and scotland, turned belgium and holland into denmark, etc etc

read below the cut for all my changes and explanations for things!!

starting off with New France:

i tried to keep auradon city + area the same, put it in southern france bc thats what beauty and the beast is based off of in location

changed cinderellasburg to cinderstead bc i hate the name cinderellasburg with a passion

her castle is there it looked too ugly making it a separate landmark

cinderella’s manor is the one where she grew up and inherited after lady tremaine was kicked out; it’s their like summer/country home

auroria is the same bc its an ok name tbh

not technically france but briar cottage is the one she grew up in with the fairies

and paris is there for the aristocats and the hunchback and esmerelda, etc

I ALMOST FORGOT THE ENCHANTED LAKE

i regret making france so big but its too late now

New Germany:

i decided to use grimms brothers german ver of snow white bc yeah sure okay even though disney likes to make everything french

i changed charmington to snowblaen bc thats so much cooler are you kidding me

her castle is there too

the dwarf’s cottage and the mines are to the south and they’re in the woods too i just didn’t feel like putting geographical markers

i kept corona the same tbh. realized the castles on an island. fucked up

also realized that tangled’s rapunzel was probably more mediterranean but it was TOO LATE

there’s a forest probably separating snowblaen and corona

grimmsville is there somewhere

ENGLAND:

ok so london is there for rodger & anita & the dalmations, then the peter pan kids, and whoever else is in london idk

oxford for alice in wonderland

sherwood forest, yknow, robin hood

SFU is there too

camelot was theorizes to be in great brit? idk i read sources that said that so. yes

Liberated Scotland:

merida is there

yep

Partial Louisiana:

they only had the bayou in the original map? fucked up. tiana worked for that restaurant

i had a whole plan for an America Island that was louisiana, misourri (lady and the tramp) and floria (dumbo) but it looked ugly and so i scrapped it

back up to New Denmark

i just kinda. repurposed holland and belgium to make New Denmark

i started to see that ariel mightve been french and started crying

anyway i made port ariel for the city bc thats SICK

her castle is nearby and then theres atlantica in the water yay

Reduced Norway:

man disney has no idea how they want arendelle to look like huh

i honestly just kinda slapped everything there

southern isles off the coast. the label is too far way but IDC

i repurposed iceland for it

atahala is somewhere

The Forest(tm):

the wooland creatures gotta go somewhere

its where bambi lives

Italy but 15%:

did i have to include pinocchio? probably not. nevertheless its there

Greece:

the gods are there. yep

i just put mt olympus wherever i wanted to

Polynesian Islands:

i didn’t want to fuck with these too much. not all of them are there tho sorry

.052% of Africa:

i really needed only 2 countries for africa its so small i

disney make more african stories challenge

anyway .. pride rock. yep. i was too lazy to map out the other locations for the lion king

tarzans home in the congos...............................i should have swapped those two countries in their positions huh. oh well

back around to Small China:

i really just took inner mongolia and made do bc i didnt want to take All Of China

and its, like, supposed to be ancient china anyway?

anyway i tried to make the locations of the few landmarks i put accurate but its probably not. better than what disney had

Arabia?:

disney PLEASE pick where the fuck aladdin takes place i beg of you

i took saudi arabia and went with it tbh

tried to keep it the same

i was going to map out all of the cities but the lore around them was?? weird??

ill probably map out more of it later when i do a 2.0 ver

also “”quirkistan”” sounded racist???? but its like some store based in india so

Neverland..........aka ireland

ireland had the resources to become neverland

its north of england bc, yeah. its north of england in the story???

it made NO SENSE!!!! WHERE IT WAS!!!!!!

also skull island is there

last but not least...Isle of the Lost:

i just took part of new zealand and shaped it until it was unrecognizable

i drew the magic bridge and how it would appear bc sure

WATER!!!!

i tried to keep most of the waterways the same and just named the ones that were on the OG map

ursula’s strait is now a bay im sorry

hooks bay is now a channel bc it wasnt a bay but idk what else to call it. i think its too wide to be a channel but whatever i guess

[viralhottopics]

Breaking bad: Hollywood wakes up to the power of dark, dangerous women

Forget the sobbing suffering beauty. From Rebecca Halls unlikable newsreader to Jessica Chastains ruthless lobbyist, this is the year of the unsympathetic, deeply flawed femme. Thank goodness for that

The good news is that there are some great female characters coming up in the cinema in 2017. The bad news, if youre looking for inspirational feminist role models, is that you wont always find them in the movies. Lurking behind such obvious audience-pleasing instances of fine upstanding womanhood as Taraji P Henson plotting a course through the cosmos in Hidden Figures, or Rachel Weisz taking antisemitism to court in Denial, lies a monstrous army of deeply flawed femmes perverse, prickly, deluded, depressed, obsessive, venal, scary. Well, I say hurrah for that.

First up, though, is the unfeasibly perfect Natalie Portman in Pablo Larrans Jackie, not so much a biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy as a tone poem evoking its subjects transformation from trophy wife via weeping widow into American icon, a makeover forged by grief. In recreating a historical event made to seem ever more removed from reality by more than half a century of Zapruder, Warhol and conspiracy theorising, the film-maker and his leading lady transport us back to basics: the barely imaginable horror of witnessing your husbands brains being blown out. Portman knocks it out of the park, giving a masterclass in suffering beautifully.

And I mean beautifully. Whereas the likes of Claire Danes and Laura Dern convey excoriating emotional pain by snivelling like you and me, cry-faces scrunched up and shoulders heaving, Portman weeps like a lady, trying to blink back her tears, elegant eyebrows rearing up like rival caterpillars to greet each other across her lightly furrowed brow. She cries cute, a fan comments beneath one of the supercuts of Portmans comely blubbing in everything from Lon to V for Vendetta to the Star Wars prequels to Black Swan. And Larrans camera loves her, whether shes crying in the shower or chaperoning her husbands coffin on Air Force One.

Tippi Hedren in Hitchcocks The Birds. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Universal

There is something exquisitely cinematic in the suffering of women, and depicting their torment in big closeup has long been a favourite pursuit of male auteurs. How often do their cameras linger on womens pleasure? Try to think of great actressy moments in the cinema and the memory veers towards heartbreak more than happiness or fulfilment. Greta Garbo may have laughed in Ninotchka, but this was already so atypical that the publicity department bragged about it on the poster.

No wonder there have been so many films about Joan of Arc – all that in-your-face spiritual agony, with the religious element providing a righteous front for the voyeuristic revelling in pain. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer dwells on Falconettis sublime anguish so relentlessly his camera is practically lapping up her tears. One thinks of the womens pictures of Douglas Sirk or Max Ophls, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Margit Carstensen in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), or Meryl Streep tortured by Sophies Choice, or, more recently, Nicole Kidman in Birth, or Marion Cotillard howling the roof down in La Vie en Rose or Rust and Bone.

Alfred Hitchcock pretty much dedicated his career to putting his leading ladies through the wringer, and duly subjected Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman and Kim Novak to the sort of carefully calibrated mistreatment guaranteed to make them look more alluring than ever. This tendency reached its apex in The Birds, where Tippi Hedren starts off as the epitome of cool blonde chic (impeccable coiffure, spotless suit and pearls) and ends up decoiffed, streaked with blood, her nylons laddered a traumatised victim of assault. Hitchcock is clearly getting off on it. Male directors, few of them attractive physical specimens themselves, like nothing better than to knock perfect leading actresses off their pedestals.

The most Hitchcockian heroine of 2016 was Amy Adams in Tom Fords Nocturnal Animals. Adams plays Susan, a super-soigne Los Angeles art gallery owner who lives in a concrete and glass Bel Air mansion and sports impeccable maquillage, preternaturally straight hair, high-tone couture (as youd expect in a film from the former creative director of Gucci), statement jewellery so pronounced you half expect it to start talking and a fabulously good-looking husband who keeps her in the style to which she is accustomed.

Perfectly flawed Amy Adams as Susan Morrow in Nocturnal Animals. Photograph: Merrick Morton/Universal

But, this being a revenge thriller (albeit not necessarily the sort that youre expecting) the delivery of the manuscript of a novel by her first husband throws a spanner into the perfection. Unlike Hitchcock, Ford is a prime physical specimen, and one can safely assume his interest in her downfall isnt so much sexual as conjuring classic Hollywood by expressing emotion via screen style. But many filmgoers have felt alienated by Susan not being sympathetic, and condemnations of the film as misogynistic are not hard to find. A love letter to sexist movies (Bitch Flicks); epitomises salacious, exploitative misogyny (Ruthfully Yours); an ugly, mean-spirited story from start to finish, with a deep misogyny at its core (Bouquets & Brickbats).

I suppose if you like your films to be purveyors of Old Testament-style justice, in which anything unpleasant that may happen to, say, a career woman must be de facto punishment for sins she has committed, then Fords treatment of her is as cruel as that of her ex-husband. But Nocturnal Animals is a cautionary tale, not a moral one. I prefer to think of Susan as a tragically flawed human being, wrestling with lifes complexities and suffering the consequences of her own misguided decisions, yet in control of her own destiny, just like all the best male movie characters. Im not interested in watching the hackneyed rise and fall and rise again of a one-dimensional paragon who learns from her mistakes, triumphs over sexist opposition and emerges in the third act as a shining feminist role model. I want compelling drama and dark nights of the feminine soul. I want Shakespearean, and if that means a character suffering, so be it.

And it looks as if 2017 might be stepping up to bat. Brace yourself for a coven of female characters who are no more sympathetic than Susan. Prepare to see them make awful decisions and do bad things, with results that are sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, sometimes both simultaneously. In Christine, Rebecca Hall gives a fearlessly unlikable performance as an ambitious Florida newscaster whose refusal to play the game leads her into some very dark places. In Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain is bracingly uningratiating as a ruthless Washington DC lobbyist. In Elle, Isabelle Huppert plays a chilly businesswoman who reacts to being raped by refusing to embrace the traditional movie roles of victim, survivor or avenger, instead striking out into unexpected and distinctly uncomfortable territory.

Elle trailer: Isabelle Huppert stars in Paul Verhoevens noir thriller exclusive video

All these are hints that the next few months could be one of the most promising seasons for choice female roles in years, and what is especially exciting is that female film-makers visions are at last entering the picture. In the three chapters of Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt presents the non-glamorous lives of Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Lily Gladstone in a precisely observed manner that is the opposite of melodramatic, though one of the segments will still break your heart. Maren Ades Toni Erdmann may be named after the grotesque alter ego of its leading male character, but its chiefly about the strained relationship with his daughter (Sandra Hller), a workaholic businesswoman leading a bleak life in Bucharest. Like Reichardt, Ade isnt in a hurry and prefers slice of life to glamour, but the film packs at least two audience-pleasing highlights to rank with any by commercial Hollywood.

But you dont have to settle for realism, because the more we see movies by female film-makers, the more its evident that the female point of view, like the male one, is not some homogeneous, touchy feely Mama Mia!-type hoedown. Alice Lowe stars in her own directing debut, the deliciously mean-spirited Prevenge, as a pregnant woman whose foetus urges her to kill, and kill again. Lowes Arnold Bennett-ish ear for one-liners, insight into hormonal chaos, and gleeful splatter combine to present a female POV youve never seen before. From the other side of the Atlantic, Anna Biller pays visual homage to the colourful style of 1970s occult thrillers in The Love Witch, the tale of a Californian femme fatale (Samantha Robinson) whose love spells have bloody consequences, but gives the story a modern feminist twist.

Alice Lowe as a woman whose foetus urges her to kill in horror flick Prevenge. Photograph: Western Edge Pictures

And while there is no UK release date for it yet, keep your eyes peeled for Julia Ducournaus Raw, the best and bloodiest slice of body horror since David Cronenberg in his prime. Its about a naive French veterinary student (Garance Marillier) whose hair-raising rite of passage includes brutal hazing, eating raw liver, cannibalism and the funniest, most gruesome bikini waxing ever filmed.

Theres more than enough room for all these films. Some you may love, others you might loathe, but there is no longer any excuse to pin feminist hopes and dreams on to a single film or female character. We contain multitudes.

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from Breaking bad: Hollywood wakes up to the power of dark, dangerous women