#this is not as draining as manifesting fully to other but it's still not effortless like just showing themselves to OP

[peace-hunter]

Wouldn't it be funny if the primes can speak through the matrix in Optimus but only a few words. It would spook everyone and the high guards guilt increasing.

Basically this.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSj4YXJjp/

they can yeah! it's a weird feeling and it can be more than a bit invasive if they do it without warning, but sometimes a point needs to be made y'know?

eventually OP gets used enough to it that he's only mildly annoyed at being interrupted mid-sentence

everyone else still finds it a little freaky whenever he gets possessed in the middle of a conversation tho. no matter how useful it can be sometimes (´～｀)

haunted au

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2018, Part V

We’re finally here. Thank you for reading. Or at least scrolling around to the movies that you care about. GREAT MOVIES

12. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu)- In part because it's produced by Steve James, Minding the Gap's easy short-hand is "Hoop Dreams for skateboarding." Because most of the film's pleasures come from following the subjects over the course of five or six years, that makes sense. What differs is that director Bing Liu is so young, which makes this a promising film if a less definitive one than James's feature debut. It’s trying to do so much, but it never feels calculated or constructed as it expands. Boldly, Liu seems to suggest that people don't really change that much, that what drives them or gnaws at them just manifests itself in different ways. The cycle of abuse ends up being a common element for the three skaters, and, as Liu admits on camera, domestic violence is the reason he made the film. (The treatment of it is raw, a blunt object when a more delicate instrument might work better.) He got the hard part right though: delicately getting us to care about people who sometimes don't care about themselves. 11. A Quiet Place (John Kransinski)- Strong early Shyamalan vibes from this lean chiller. Krasinski's directing debut, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, didn't do much for me, and I skipped his obligatory man-comes-back-to-hometown-because-his-mom's-dying follow-up. But the filmmaking really impressed me here just by understanding how to set the table of this kind of movie. A close-up on an important nail sticking out of a floorboard here, an effortless explanation of a rule there. The hang-up for a film this high-concept is that you get distracted by all of the unanswered questions. (How did he get a printer quiet enough to print out all of those radio call signals?) But this world is fleshed out enough, especially an eerie dinner sequence, to bypass that kind of stuff for me. More than anything, there's a sort of elasticity of shot selection that serves the suspense. A tender early scene in which the central couple is dancing while wearing headphones goes on for maybe twice as long as one might expect. So later, the cross-cuts and smash-cuts have even more weight because the camera was allowed to linger earlier. Here's maybe the biggest reason for the movie's success: The characters are all slightly smarter than the audience, whereas the temptation might have been to go the other way with it. 10. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)- I don't know if I can add anything to the discourse on this meditative yet ambitious film. I do think one early scene points at what makes it special for the genre. When T'Challa is first named king, he has to be drained of the Black Panther powers to fight anyone who wishes to challenge the throne. A member of an outsider tribe challenges him and nearly beats him. It shows a) the world-building of this noble, fair culture, b) the existence of this fully developed clan that will be important later, c) just how human T'Challa is if his reign can come so perilously close to ending just as it has begun. Every scene like that has a logical purpose. Of course, once Killmonger, the best, most realistically motivated Marvel villain of all time, gets introduced, we return to that method of challenging the throne, and writers Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole aren't afraid to let the worst possible thing happen to T'Challa. What occurred forty-five minutes earlier makes this fight seem like a fait accompli. And it's in this sort of narrative detail that the film is able to work up to its thematic purpose. The first half is about, to quote T'Chaka, whether a good man can be a good king. But the second half is about the responsibility of goodness. Show me where Iron Man bit off that much. 9. Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski)- Although it takes place mostly in one location during one day, Support the Girls has a bigger world going on in its margins. We hear it on radios, or we see it in the people taking a pitstop in Double Whammies while they're on their way somewhere better. But the force that's really encroaching on the characters' insulated environment is Mancave, the national chain that threatens to put them out of business. "They have commercials and everything," one character complains, and we get snatches of those commercials that were presumably directed by Andrew Bujalski himself. It's ten seconds of content maybe, shot in a bigger, broader style than the modest approach of the rest of the film. But the key to understanding how far Bujalski has come is realizing that he is no longer making fun of the people in the commercial, even if they're jacked bros screaming for a boxing match. That portrayal is amplified, sure, but Bujalski is mature enough now to not ridicule those people. It's okay that they're just not the people he's interested in. He's supernaturally empathetic toward the rogue's gallery of people he is interested in, who spin the ordinary challenges of the working class into something extraordinary. The sunniest member of the team is played by Haley Lu Richardson, who deserves special recognition as the indefatigable Maci. I can't think of parts that are much different from her roles in this, Columbus, and Split, to the extent that people probably don't realize they're played by the same woman, but she rules in every single one. The sky is the limit for her. When a workplace is described as "a family," it's usually just a way for the boss to take advantage of workers when the "family" designation does nothing to help them: "I know I shouldn't ask you to work off the clock, but can you help me out as a FAMILY MEMBER?" Occasionally though, it does feel like a family when people work closely to one another for hours on end and depend upon one another for real life needs. This movie is about what happens when a work family is both control and support.

8. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)- The trailer for Children of Men advertises itself as "from the director of The Prisoner of Azkaban and Y Tu Mama Tambien," and I remember an audience giggling at that strange CV. For one thing, at the time people didn't understand yet why someone would brag about contributing to a Harry Potter movie. But to pair that children's picture with either a Spanish title they hadn't heard of or a movie that they knew was sexually explicit? Who was this guy? Roma is who he is. I like some of his other films more--I would argue that his approach hurts the performances here--but it seems impossible for him to make anything this personal again. The baldly emotional highs that it reaches come not only from the direct simplicity of the story but also from the sophisticated perspective with which it's being downloaded directly from Cuaron's memory. (It's also, accidentally or purposefully, quite a political film at this moment in time. It insists, sometimes in the dialect of Mixtec, that these people around us silently washing dishes or picking up dog poo are, in fact, part of our family.) There's a moment when one brother throws something at another's head, barely missing, and they both stop in their tracks with fear about how tragically things could have ended up. My dad experienced a similar moment in his childhood, and he would tell the same story about Uncle Steve throwing a shoe at him any time we passed the wooden door with a dent in it at my grandma's house. What a tiny moment to live on for decades, in tangible and intangible ways. Cuaron claims that all of these moments shape us, and taking us to the moon was only a warm-up for resurrecting them for us. 7. Happy As Lazzaro (Alice Rohrbacher)- Alice Rohrwacher won the screenplay award at Cannes, probably because her script for Happy As Lazzaro is fundamentally unpredictable. Games of checkers are unpredictable though. That word doesn't quite cover the way the viewer is forced to guess at something as elemental as "What year is this taking place?" And none of the twists and turns of the storytelling--I refuse to spoil--would gel if Rohrwacher as a director wasn't teaching you how to watch the film the whole time with a rich, warm, light touch. Considering the purity of this vision as a fable, buoyed by realistic labor concerns on the other hand, it's a pity that people are calling Birdbox "crazy" when something like this is just a few clicks down on that service. 6. The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)- When assessing The Favourite, the easy temptation is to say that because it isn't stuffy, because of its scabrous wit or its intimate filming techniques, that it "isn't your mother's chamber drama." It is invigorating, but in a lot of ways, the film isn't saying anything that the average Masterpiece Theater production doesn't. Instead it takes cultural touchstones about the emptiness of power and distorts them, much like the fish-eye lenses that Yorgos Lanthimos favors to photograph the palace. It says an easy thing in a hard way, with conviction to burn. Lanthimos seems freed by not having to write the screenplay, and every decision of his is rooted in making things more narrow. The barrel distortion of the fish-eye seems apt for this idea, but so do the secret passageways that Queen Anne gets wheeled through to avoid the lower rungs of the estate. Of course there's no outside world to intrude upon her majesty. But there's even an inner world to the inner world. (It's impossible to watch Olivia Colman's gonzo depiction of Anne's incurious indolence and not think of Trump.) I'm convinced that Emma Stone can do anything, and the final shot, an all-timer, only validates that suspicion. 5. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (Gus Van Sant)- You have to check out every Gus Van Sant movie, even after a few missteps, because you never know: He might take the emotional climax that you didn't even know you wanted and score it to inter-diegetic "Still Rock 'N Roll to Me," thus grounding real poignance with even realer goofiness.I'll admit that the bar is low, but this is probably the most authentic, least treacly movie ever made about addiction recovery. Van Sant, who wrote, directed, and edited, tells the story with patient command. We take Joaquin Phoenix for granted at this point, but everybody on the poster is exceptional. And Udo Kier gets to say, "Pop, pop. It's always about penises." INSTANT CLASSICS

4. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)- In one scene Cooper's Jackson Maine wears a black leather jacket under a brown leather vest, and the movie itself risks that kind of hat-on-a-hat silliness and redundancy. But instead it comes off as the best kind of big swing, a comforting and warm serving of Old Hollywood. Cooper's camera knows how to embrace silence and let the leads play off each other to craft raw, touching performances. Sometimes the close-ups are so intense and focused that, when he cuts back to a master, it's disorienting to be reminded that there are other people in that space, in the world at all.The movie's deficiencies come from "Wait, how much time has passed?" moments in the writing, problems that I always have had with Eric Roth projects. But it's easy to get swept up in a movie of moments that believes so much in itself.

3. Mission: Impossible- Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)- The pattern of Mission: Impossible- Fallout is: infodump that explains the stakes and the strategy of what we're about to see, followed by an action sequence that is somehow even more thrilling than the one that came before it. Imagine a really interesting day of grade school classes, in which you learned, like, multiplication, followed by recess every other period. As for T.C., what more could you possibly want out of a human being?

2. Wildlife (Paul Dano)- When Jerry, Jake Gyllenhaal's groundskeeper of pathetic pride, figures out that his boss is about to fire him in front of his son, he smiles and, through clenched teeth, asks if this talk can happen tomorrow. Part of him actually believes that postponing the meeting will help; maybe the boss's temper will cool overnight. But this is a man who is bound by the same desperate spirit as his wife Jeanette, who muses, "Tomorrow something will happen that will make us feel different." When people are living day-to-day, clinging to their dignity--he refers to himself as a "small person" at one point--tomorrow really does offer a regenerative power. Those characters are the same-pole magnets that inform this coming-of-age tale, and the subtext of the film is "Can you believe Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal have a fourteen-year-old son?" It works for the 1960 setting because these are people who defined themselves before they knew who they were, and they'll now do anything to re-define themselves as brave/sexy/valuable. But it works for the actors too. Gyllenhaal in particular is tender and heartbreaking in a true supporting role, allowing himself to look his age, framing himself with the dad akimbo arms. But Mulligan's fake confidence is great too, especially in a scene in which she nearly begs her husband to let her work. Something tells me that I should credit a director for coaxing two career best performances from two great actors. Some people just have it, and Paul Dano does.

1. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)- In 1998 I dragged my father to see Paul Schrader's Affliction, a movie that was kind of about my father's father. When the end credits rolled on that bleak, wrenching film, my dad turned to me and said, "I feel like I have to take a shower." We walked around a nearby hotel and talked for an hour, not that he was able to articulate why he was so shaken. We discussed the difference between entertainment and art and what makes a piece of either successful. Even though he hated the experience, he couldn't deny that it was an experience. He kept on saying, "That's not why I go to the movies." And no matter what I, fifteen at the time, told him, he couldn't understand that's exactly why I go to the movies. First Reformed had the same mesmerizing effect as the best of Schrader's work: When I exited the building, I stumbled into the sunlight because I had been trapped in someone else's mind for almost two hours.

Part of that effect comes from the narrative device of Reverend Toller's journal, which plants us in his headspace from the beginning. Part of it comes from the intimate scale of the film, which features only a handful of locations. But if what I'm explaining seems small, then I'm doing a bad job. The canvas expands. Schrader insists that our care for the environment is our most immediate responsibility; this film historian has no problem with planting the film at 2017 in dialogue. And that emphasis is matched only by his disdain for how big business encroaches on personal aspects of our lives. There's even a scene that tries to account for a recent rise in extremism among young people. As if to prove that he isn't being pedantic, he has one character communicate one of those ideas, letting you assume that role is his mouthpiece, then he has another character reply with something just as convincing. First Reformed weaves in those elements, but it's ultimately a character piece that humanizes the type of person we think we know but for which we have no frame of reference. In Ethan Hawke's piercing performance, we see a Reform minister who punishes himself actively and passively for what he thinks are sins. He uses faith as an armor and as an excuse, being so of the mind and--as another character puts it--"in the garden" that he denies himself medical care. No matter what anyone else tells him, he is convinced of one of the tenets that Schrader could never shake from his Calvinist upbringing: There's nothing you can do to save yourself.

[poorjamesbond]

The 9150, Part 2.

And she was right. As far as I could tell, it was the last time. The 9150 proved that, though I assume it would have proven itself eventually. That is not to say nothing would ever happen again, only that it would never be the same, quite obviously so. Still, I clung to something that wasn't there, wasting my days like cold coffee poured into the drain. All the time I had available was spent digging invisible objects between my fingers, attempting to undo the vice-grip of my clenched fist. I had made promises that had to be kept at all costs, regardless of whether they would ever be considered or remembered. Regardless of whether they mattered. The only way to make sure they held any kind of significance was to keep them myself, which would be no easy task. I had already begun to slip a hundred times a day, digging the heel of my boot into the back of my calf so often that a bruise had bloomed through my attempts to stop myself. The withdrawals had passed. They're never the hardest part. The real work was about to begin, and it was set to be more difficult than having a drink without a cigarette.

She did her best for the first two weeks. So did I, for that matter. I held nothing against either of us. The most important difference between our positions was that she had a life to maintain, and I didn't. She had something I did not have. Ambition. As the 9150 sank in and our conversations became fragmented and brief, even with nearly half the world between us, I could feel her struggling to sustain herself. To survive. The nature of our illnesses, each plaguing us from within, were in notable contrast. I knew exactly what it was like to struggle with self-destructive tendencies, pain and fear and isolation, depression so absolute that it could never be put into words that anyone would understand past the surface of sentimentality. Similar only in their intensity, our maladies were inherently separate beasts. I tried to relate as best I could, but far too much was in the way, the earth itself notwithstanding.

:::

I couldn't remember the last time I felt ambition for any more than a passing moment. It was so long ago that the person who felt it for more than a moment no longer resembled me in any way. Imagining that person was like reading a version of myself that someone else wrote into a book without even consulting me for character reference. All my dreams of fame or recognition had slowly died over the years through my harsh realizations of what such things really represented, to me at least. As a much younger man, I attempted to work the crowd alongside all the histrionic disorders made flesh, only to confuse them and disgust myself. I wanted to bestow some form of truth upon the world, but I had no truth to write with. I was a bullshit artist mimicking styles and forms that I did not understand. So, I withdrew. I stripped the ambition from myself like the robes of a steward, having realized it was something I did not earn. Recognition was not something I deserved. I ceased all reading to the crowd, and the act of writing transformed into a psychological defense, keeping my head above the surface of abject insanity. Writing only when I needed to, sometimes every day, sometimes as infrequently as several times a year, it ceased to be about proving a point and became an act of survival. I didn't fear the crowd, but I knew that to please it was a drug, and consciously or not, my act of writing would become an attempt to please it again, imprisoning me within its expectations, over which I had no control. What I sought above all else was freedom in some form, and every visible path before me seemed to lead into yet another form of enslavement. So, I let it all go.

I simplified the very nature of my life, stripping away everything but the bare minimum of what I needed to survive. All focus on the future slowly ceased entirely, as any vision of the future from my perspective felt completely delusional. The most powerful and inspiring people to ever cross my path, as well as the most powerful and transformational experiences I ever had, all emerged through totally random chance. Talking to a stranger on a bus only to have that stranger lead me into a group of people I would know until one of us died. A craigslist ad for a last minute roommate bringing an individual into my everyday life who would effortlessly transform my very perception of reality through the exploration of the psychedelic experience, something I had failed to manifest through my own will and personal interest over years of trying to do so. Writing a vignette about an attractive stranger in public only to have that very stranger walk through the door of my work a week later as an intern, throwing us into an explosive love affair in an instant as though the choice were nonexistent. And so on, and so forth. Time and again, always out of my control. These sorts of experiences were constant before and after my decision to let go of ambition, to create for my own peace of mind above all else, but part of me continued to hold on to a desire for control. It was a vestigial remnant of my psyche, an internal mechanism of human nature that could not be severed through any sort of conscious decision. Little did I know that in order to genuinely let go of expectations for the future, one must also transcend the need to know anything at all about the future. I may have created a state of floating free through reality in several distinct ways, but that brought upon me the crushing fear and anxiety of having no security, real or perceived. Understandably, that anxiety overtook me powerfully and constantly, before I even knew what it was. It ate away at me from within like a cancer, breeding desperation.

As much as I desired a state of true freedom, as much as I sought out synchronicity to allow its facilitation of my experience outside of my control, whenever I found it or it found me, I still refused to accept that such experiences were transient. I still attempted to create some form of permanence out of that which is definably impermanent, specifically through love, like a lunatic with an empty jar claiming to have caught the wind. However hard I tried to facilitate a life of freedom, working simple jobs that kept my head above water, never spending money I didn't already have to avoid direct enslavement to a financial system, making the time to explore my own subjective experience, writing only in an attempt to find some form of truth that might emerge through my perception, doing everything I could to allow reality to carry me, love was still the most vivid feeling of total free-fall I had ever come across. I desired it more than anything. It was the only thing that resembled the sense of freedom I had always desperately wanted to reach. In the throes of explosive love, letting go of control was an effortless action. The excitement reached through the feeling of falling was the most inspiring thing I had ever experienced. That was where I wanted to be. Thus, whenever found, I unconsciously attempted to hold on to the act of letting go.

My entire life, the identity I had built through years of struggling against personal and cultural expectations, norms, restrictions, and assumptions, had constantly been collapsing in upon itself. My actions were oil to the water of my desires. I had unknowingly built myself into a paradox.

:::

My slow realization of these facts had been gestating within me for several years, certain experiences and relationships allowing me to see individual facets of the truth, piecing together what I could, though never reaching a fully clear perspective. On the day the 440 began, her plane somewhere above Central California, every moment in time was its own epiphany. The day led me into such a state of awareness, still high on the experience we shared, that I sat down the moment I was home and wrote her a letter describing all that I could clearly see of myself in the past tense. The letter was the truth, though somewhat incomplete, as the expansion of my awareness was still running full throttle. It was written from the eye of the storm, a state of clarity centered between two entirely separate struggles: reaching an awareness of the truth, and the process of accepting that truth.

So often in the past, when people separated themselves from me, I did everything in my power to compartmentalize them. I grew a series false beliefs, things I could not know factually, leading myself into the sense that I understood them entirely. I gather that most people do this to each other. It is far easier to let go of someone when you believe your understanding of them to be complete, especially if that perceived understanding leads you to believe that you do not care about them. It is a way of avoiding emotional pain or guilt for which there is no remedy to relieve. It is a perfectly understandable psycho-emotional response. A way of simplifying a problem with no solution into something that can be faced, understood, and in turn, solved and left in your personal wake. For the first time in my life, I was completely aware of my own mind wandering into this exact process, cutting it off immediately like the tendrils of an invasive and poisonous plant creeping into my emotional self. I refused to manufacture an understanding I could not possibly have. I refused to avoid a form of pain which stood to serve an important function if I could somehow bring myself to face it entirely. Avoidance was never anything more than a powerful anesthetic, killing the pain, but not the problem. Trying to drink away a broken rib means waking up with a broken rib. And a hangover.

My defense mechanisms had all fallen apart. They looked like toy versions of power tools and kitchen appliances. Without that old sense of make-believe, they had been rendered completely useless. They were things I only ever imagined to be functional in the first place.

:::

The 9150 had been a reality for more than twenty years of my life, though it meant nothing before I knew its numeration, or the person to whom it led. It was simply there, just behind the veil of my own perception, waiting for an experience to breathe into it some form of life. A level of relevance. That brief experience was a state of zero, but it had come and gone, leaving only the thread between the two ends of the 9150. And what that relevance was remained up to us, both she and I, separately from one another. I could yank and pull on the thread all I wanted, I could do my worst to sever it, but it's tied into me. That would only bring on a pain far worse than that of distance. Worse than any depth of loneliness or isolation. Even worse than the brutal process of accepting rejection. Worse than a life of self-destruction.

Quite suddenly, the 9150 ceased to be a source of pain. The sense of loss, however permanent or temporary, was only a part of the process. If I could not relish the state of zero we reached through an incomprehensible string of synchronistic events occurring throughout our lives, brought to fruition in the only moment it was possible, the experience would have been a waste, and I had wasted far too many experiences already through my desire for them to continue long after they had ended. I was exactly where I was before she emerged from the world into my life, only now I possessed a concrete memory of an instance of beauty that might never have happened at all had I not at least attempted to allow synchronicity to lead me in its general direction. I may have failed time and again in the past, but had I not tried at all, we never would have met in the first place. Even if we had, we never would have reached any less than a fraction, certainly never the beautiful totality of the cipher we found. All I had to do was notice that in being nothing at all, it was more than enough.