#this one has gratuitous amounts of murder in it ^.^

[leslieiswriting]

I'm proud to annouce that my literary debut, SAILS OF BLACK AND BLOOD: THE REVENGE OF CAPTAIN VESSIA, will be releasing in print and ebook on Oct. 4th!

If you like vampires, pirates, tales of revenge and a queer romance on the seas, then you should add it to goodreads here:

Stay glued to this space for my cover reveal on the 12th of July, or you can follow me at any of my other socials here:

I can't wait to put this labour of love in your hands, so you can fall in love/hate my characters as much as I do. ^.^

[horizon-verizon]

Netty’s erasure is being justified by some with the excuse that it would be problematic to depict a young Black girl in a relationship with an older white man and then be used to create conflict between two white characters. But there was an easy and obvious solution to that problem which has been provided by the author himself in F&B: The theory of Daemon having a paternal relationship with Nettles, be it as her biological father or father figure. They could have shown her as a child from an affair he had long ago with whom he tries to connect. Or, had they been more creative, he could have been a mentor to her and grown to care for her because of her loyalty and because she reminded him of his own children with whom he had no conflict whatsoever in canon. Given how they lose Luke, Viserys, and Jace in quick succession, it would make sense for him to be protective of her. But Condal and Hess would never opt for those routes simply because it would amount to admitting that Daemon - for whom they harbour hatred so visceral as if he stole their girlfriends, left them penniless on the streets, and kicked their dogs – is a human being capable of emotion and reason. It would wound their ego. There was absolutely no need to make up drama between him and his daughters just to force a ‘redemption arc’ when he never needed one.

But it is rather concerning to see how they would rather mess with the canonical characterizations of more than one female character, sideline them and outright erase them, how they would rather subject them to gratuitous violence than accept that this one male character they’re unhealthily obsessed with vilifying, is not this one dimensional monster they have made him up to be in their minds. The little girls who played Baela and Rhaena as kids had their scenes deleted and the actress who played Rhaena had to make a post about it on Instagram. Baela had one significant scene and dialogue in S1 with Rhaenys which gave a glimpse to her character that was deleted. What all scenes had in common was that they portrayed a softer side to Daemon and proved that he cared for his daughters and was involved in their lives. Other deleted scenes include Daemon proposing a toast for Viserys because it was decided that one improvised scene where Daemon expressed his love for his brother by crowning him would be more than enough and the one where he mourns Visenya which got edited out. The pattern is evident. Most female characters in the story are disposable and interchangeable for C&H and not worth putting any effort or thought. They are treated as plot devices meant to be used to further the arcs of the male characters the writers love or to prove a point against the male characters they hate. They are seldom prioritized. Maybe that’s why Black Aly was robbed off her moment in the Battle Of the Burning Mill which happens offscreen. Her presence would have made the Blackwoods appear like the badasses they are in canon and defeated C&H’s plans to demonize them. Also because they can’t possibly have a woman have agency and engage in warfare out of her own freewill because wars are for men to wage while women need to preach peace :/

Now, if my predictions are correct, then Jeyne Arryn and the Vale subplot will be made all about Daemon too because of the made-up canon-defying murder of Rhea Royce that was birthed by Condal’s galaxy brain. What a way to miss the point of that subplot from the book. The Vale alliance was never about Daemon but about Rhaenyra and the empathy Jeyne had for her cousin as a fellow woman whose inheritance was threatened by her male relatives. Her dislike for Daemon was overshadowed by her feelings of solidarity for Rhaenyra.

This show is such a droll tragedy that at times I wish they just stop pretending and accept it for what it is: The Adventures Of Historian and Philosopher Almond ft. Hugh the Greatest Family Man to have ever Family Manned in Westeros Hammer.

The pattern is evident. Most female characters in the story are disposable and interchangeable for C&H and not worth putting any effort or thought. They are treated as plot devices meant to be used to further the arcs of the male characters the writers love or to prove a point against the male characters they hate. They are seldom prioritized.

@deus-sema

Reminds me--and it is definitely connected to & fueled by the same principle of male centeredness--when SA and rape against women is used more to define a male character than to elucidate anyone on why men rape in fiction. It's either to signify a man who rescues said woman as "good"; the man who does it as "bad". And that's it. How does the woman feel and develop into the future with this incident, how does the community deal or not deal with the event and not just the rapist/would be rapist, what does anyone do to try to prevent it, etc., nothing.

Which underplays rape and gender violence as "a thing that happens" as if innate to human nature and not malleable behavior for the sake of creating character for males.

They are treated as plot devices meant to be used to further the arcs of the male characters the writers love or to prove a point against the male characters they hate.

In a recent reaction post to Epi 5, I said that the writers trying to make their version of Rhaenyra seem suppressed by her own council by making the "monarchs can't go into battle" thing an excuse to not deal with a woman make war instead of a pretty valid reason that had real life male monarchs not actually go to war themselves MOST of the time (the one who is meant to be the opposite of the fiery and proud Rhaenyra GRRM described but also a Rhaenyra who is trying her damdnest to be taking seriously or approved by the men around her as if that was who bk!rhaenyra was).

@thevelaryons said this in their post about how HotD writes Rhaenys and Corlys' relationship:

Yet despite all that, their relationship onscreen is still a loving one. Like I said, it’s a writing issue. Corlys and Rhaenys are clearly meant to be viewed as a loving couple but the central theme of HOTD is apparently that women are always victims of the men in their lives. Corlys as a man must fall into this in some way. But like always, the writers go overboard in their heavy-handed attempts to depict misogyny onscreen. So Corlys’ actions towards Rhaenys are such that there is a lack of respect but somehow there is love.

And they are coming from how HotD rewrote Rhaenys to be way too accepting of the Hull boys in her awareness when book!Corlys actually kept them away from anywhere Rhaenys herself might go to see them or discover them...bc she too didn't take what she and most noblewomen would see as insults to them of their husband's not only cheating but bringing their bastards around in the same spaces as their wives. Rhaenys was a Targ princess and very proud to be one.

Though Marilda is impressive as a human being (leading her own trad eboats later on), in the social context of these people I don't think noblemen would not take exception to not only their wives cheat on them but also cheat on them with any lower classed man or a stable boy and male readers not identify & recognize that as bringing shame to that man. Yes, men are socially graced to cheat, but noblewomen in Westeros still are expected to not have to raise his by-blows or have those bastards "sully" their own status by having them around. that's just the way things go, as those men love to say.

Then there is Daemon-at-Harrenhal trying to display his great leadership that he wants to prove to both Viserys and Rhaenyra that he was as capable of being a monarch/leader as he thinks they don't think he should be. Based on incompetence. Which is compounded by his bungling the Blackwoods and Brackens thing and thus endangering Rhaenyra's ability to get more soldiers...when bookwise, he doesn't perform any such stupidity and never tried to prove anything about his being able to be a competent king/independent agent to anyone. In fact he, like Jace, manages to collect many supporters from Rhaenyra with little problem. not only that, bk!Rhaenyra had an almost a ubiquitous and eager base in the Riverlands. These are CRITICAL changes made for shallow & logically inconsistent drama. Inconsistent bc we see Daemon and Rhaenyra have more or less a pretty settled marriage where Rhaenyra shows she had trusted Daemon to at least not betray her...which is why her later despair at his death and "betrayal" with Nettles was as intense as it was.

It reveals a pattern HotD makes of trying to poke fingers at misogyny while still being very sexist in how they do it by simplifying their men like Daemon and Corlys, try to overpunish and vilify Daemon, as well as how they pacified their female characters. It's all a distorted, very overly literal and unnuanced rewrite of the original story. But what else is new?

This is the story people want, right?

[noir-fem]

daisy's thoughts on *that* scene

SPOILER WARNING!! I'M ABOUT TO YAP ABOUT HOTD SEASON TWO, SPECIFICALLY BLOOD AND CHEESE!!

DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS!!!

the scene itself

obviously, the show couldn't adapt B&C verbatim without traumatizing child actors in the process, so i'm happy that certain changes were made and that the actual murder happened off screen. i still think they could have kept small details that made it so horrific in the books without hurting child actors though.

the problem is mainly within the writing because there's really no build up. there's no scenes of Helaena being loving with her kids beforehand, no slaughtering of guards or bed maids to make Blood and Cheese look scarier, nothing that builds an impending sense of dread. also B&C being confused/low key cartoonish villains didn't help. these guys are supposed to know the Red Keep's secret pathways like the back of their hand; showing how intruders could get into the keep so easily definitely would have made the scene scarier.

also making B&C into a "misunderstanding " and having Aemond be the original target completely downplays the most evil thing the Blacks ever did and further shows that the writers are unashamedly biased towards the Blacks. the main message of the story is that both sides were war criminals who did awful things!! the senseless cruelty of targeting a toddler for something he had no role in was literally the point of B&C!!

i get that maelor doesn't exist yet, but they still could have done "a son for a son" and kept Helaena being forced to choose between her kids. one person on here suggested having her point to Jaehaera in order to spare Jaehaerys (the heir to the throne), but B&C killing Jaehaerys instead. i think something like that would have kept the psychological torture of having to choose and could still have been done without scaring child actors.

overall, if the writers were trying to out-do the Red Wedding in terms of horror, it didn't work. What made the Red Wedding so terrifying in the first place was the psychological aspects of it and all the tiny clues the audience was given beforehand, the small details telling the viewers that something bad is coming.

that being said, the show's adaptation of B&C still captured the horror of a child being murdered in front of his mother without showing it/being gratuitous. they did an amazing job with just letting you hear the sounds and leaving the rest to the imagination.

in conclusion: r.i.p. sweet baby jaehaerys. daemon targaryen, your days are numbered.

Helaena's reaction (or, rather, lack thereof)

i didn't properly understand/appreciate Helaena's reaction to B&C until i saw other people's takes and rewatched the scene for myself.

at first, i would have liked to see some sort of desperation like there was in the books (like Helaena begging and offering her life). HOWEVER, book!helaena and show!helaena are obviously gonna have some differences, especially with show!Helaena being a dreamer. and with her being coded as autistic/neurodivergent, her reaction makes total sense to something that i myself would do.

say it with me: there is no "right" or "wrong" way to react to trauma!! your brain is literally just doing whatever it has to do to get you out of that situation, and that looks different for everyone. a lot of people freeze or fawn! it doesn't mean that they're "emotionless" or unaffected by what's happening!!

now looking at it, Helaena's silent shock and horror were more gut wrenching to watch than any amount of screaming or begging imo. she's probably already seen this happen in her visions and knows that there's nothing she can do to stop it: all she can do is get herself and Jaehaera out of there. her resigned facial expression, her eyes, her quiet little pleas as she's carrying Jaehaera, her literally dissociating in order to get her and her daughter out of the situation and clinging onto her baby for dear life. Phia's acting was incredible and i believe she did her best with what the writers gave her.

now lastly....

the alicole scene

why???? just WHY????

look i'm all for alicent and criston being hypocrites and alicent finally getting to experience pleasure, but having helaena walk in on her and criston RIGHT after watching her son get brutally murdered.... i don't even need to say any more about this. nobody needs to explain why that is a bad writing choice.

my opinions on the show's take on B&C will likely change depending on how they handle helaena and alicent's reactions to it later on in the series. might even dabble in writing fics and drop my own take on this storyline sometimes hehe.

in conclusion, somebody PLEASE take Helaena's pain, quadruple it, and give it to daemon NOW.

[adultswim2021]

Aqua Teen Hunger Force #94: “Hands on a Hamburger” | March 22nd, 2010 - 12:00AM | S08E06

Hands on a Hamburger has the Aqua Teenagers doing a “hands on a Hardbody” style contest, a real thing where a group of people have to outlast keeping their hands on a Nissan Hardbody truck in order to win said truck. There’s a documentary about it. It’s supposed to be very good. I’ve made a point to find it a few times, only never to actually watch it. Maybe I actually should. 

The prize at the end of this contest is a giant hamburger, which is sitting on the ground of the Dazzleburger parking lot. Shake manages to use his Bugs Bunny-style wiles to dishonestly eliminate other contestants, who are all humans who I think are playing themselves. There’s a lot of “human” cameos in this, including Matt Maiellaro as a pizza delivery man, and Dave Willis as a contestant. One guy, a soldier wearing fatigues who gets tricked by Shake into doing push-ups, I suspect is the military man who sat in on the audio commentary for “Marines”. I was going to try and get his name for this write-up, but the disc containing that episode’s commentary track no longer plays. Whoops.

This one has a pretty fair amount of laughs, and the episode more-or-less stays as funny as it should. Frylock telling Meatwad to shut the fuck up (I like it). Shake gratuitously smashing the window of the automatic sliding door of the restaurant while on a bathroom break (he casually detaches his hand to perform this cheat) (I also like it). The gags where Shake outsmarts various contestants is maybe a little out of character; I like to think of Shake as a guy whose only capable of tricking Meatwad and maybe, sometimes, Carl. The humor there is a little uncharacteristic of the show in general, but it wound up working for me well enough. 

This one ends with a surprise reveal: the big hamburger is actually Dr. Wongburger, (first seen in Dickesode, later seen in the tooth one that's not as good) and his plan is to take the winner of the contest away to his home planet. Frylock gratuitously murders Phil, the guy overseeing the contest. He’s voiced and, I assume, is based on Phil Samson, an editor for the show. His bland delivery works well.

I wonder if this one was designed to fit as many promised cameos as they could stuff in there, anticipating an eventual cancellation. I wonder, but I don't know. I surely do not know.

[rafent]

[ 𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐦 ]

“ y'know, raffy-taffy, it's almost annoying how good you are at pretending to be useless. ”

fogado's faux-annoyed tone belies clear joy, face painted with freshly-spattered blood from some no-name he's pinned under his knife. he's not even bothering to watch where his knife is going---it's like a surprise, however he ends up killing this person. fogado can treat the body like meat if he pleases---it won't matter in the end.

this job is better than anything he had going for him before. he's right hand to an entity whose power he can't even begin to comprehend, and the amount of blood that spills is enough to keep the party going for years and years and years. fogado keeps up the stream by sort of throwing himself at whoever looks at rafal even a bit weirdly. sure, rafal could dust them with the flick of a finger, but fogado likes to show his devotion to the guy that lets him go wild beast on whatever.

such has happened to the newly-corrupted that still lies beneath fogado---in fact, fogado is simply so pleased with himself that he's considering sticking his winding blade back into the body. would it kill them again? probably. would rafal get mad at him? who knows!

but fogado thinks better of it. after all, they're trying to amass an army for a reason. even if this one life was more than worthless, it wouldn't do to start culling their numbers just because. it wasn't like they could even bleed anyways. so instead he hops off, giving the reanimation a rough kick in the head as it tries to stand up.

“ khaha~! stupid thing, stupid thing, ” sings fogado, jumping around with arms raised and bloody knife spinning between his fingers. “ thinkin' he had a shot... ”

but suddenly he's in rafal's face for no other reason other than he just fucking feels like it. “ but i'd ne~ver let anyone touch you, ” he hums now, almost grandstanding. “ not even with a little bitty fingernail---'cuz i'd cut the whole hand off~! ” he makes a show of almost hacking his own hand off. “ the whole right hand, 'cuz i'm your right-hand man and stuff~! hahahaha~!! ”

sweeping a foot out and upwards, fogado tumbles to the ground in a heap of laughter and blood. the ring of his mirth is a horrible sound, but it quiets soon---he simply has more he must say to the master whom he serves.

“ ahhh, what fun. you'll call on me whenever you need me, right? ” he rolls to a sitting position, looking up at rafal keenly. “ i'm your loyal murder doggy, so feel free to point me at whoever's throat you wanna see ripped out, o~kaaaay~? ”

— 𝐢. sender has killed someone who threatened the receiver

The undead Prince of Solm retained a crown in this only; being the cream of Rafal's rotten crop. His cold eyes watched the other's gratuitous display, a reanimated soldier squatted upon by the young man. Preferring to kill neatly in order to leave the body and brain intact, even Fell Dragons did not squander time or play with corpses afterward to such a degree. With his unique attitude, Fogado showed to the world another brand of cruelty entirely, even if to Rafal that cruelty mattered little. It mattered a thousand times more that he was efficient.

"Do not place the newly born Corrupted under duress. Also; if you will dare to utter my true name then you will say it right." He admonished the nickname, nostrils flaring and brows hauled low, but an '-or else' never came. Despite his insulted demeanor, there were no elaborated consequences to committing offenses against him, no caveats to undisciplined language.

Fogado was useful, after all. Fogado was dead, after all. Brandishing threats against his Corrupted was no different from jeopardizing a doll with strings he could cut at will. It was meaningless, venting frustrations upon lesser creatures dependent on his magic to stand, and to Rafal they were all mostly the same. Mostly, and not totally, if only because some were more advantageous than others. His gaze traveled to Fogado again, preparing to dispense an order, and stopped short at the distance, then the collapse onto the floor. Then the laughter.

". . . . . . ."

His silence was a vast blanket, amused and disgusted and tolerating all in one. Peering down the bevel of his nose, the Fell Heir pursed his mouth into a deeper frown at the metaphor. Dogs? Stinking and slobbering creatures far withdrawn from being his first choice. "I do not require your protection, Fogado, but I do require your talents. And if you are done larking around, then I will generously fulfill your wish. Let us get into the thick of your next assignment. There is work to be done."

Master and dog; lord and knight; no matter how, they played the farce. For the joyful Fogado who enjoyed it, or perhaps for lonely, lonely "Nil" who knew no other way - the tender dragon who had always possessed his Four Winds close at hand following the end of the war. On the flip side of his false identity - a double life of a double life - some semblance of normalcy yet remained. Even if he was bereft three knights, at least when he gazed upon Fogado there was still one.

[saltpixiefibercraft]

amy advice/resources for someone interested in learning to weave? i already knit but your gorgeous dishcloths make my fiber-loving self DROOLand i want more things to do with yarn

Knitting was how I got sucked into fiber craft so many years ago, and boy howdy what a vortex that was lol. I only started weaving around the middle of 2020 (I just got absolutely lost in the sauce and ended up with 2 floor looms and a table loom somehow up to now???), and I would love to share some of the stuff that definitely helped me as I guess worked my way through it all.

I started weaving on a 16" Ashford rigid heddle loom, and those are a great, somewhat cheaper option to start off with. I used a bunch of Kelly Casanova's courses to learn how to do it all, and a gratuitous amount of youtubing and googling. Another fun youtube resource Is Felicia Lo from SweetGeorgia who just has a lot of fun videos about weaving and weaving adjacent stuff.

For more floor loom related stuff, which is what I use to make my dishtowels, I cannot stress enough how much the Jane Stafford School Of Weaving means to me because oh my god. I was ready to scrap and sell my first floor loom simply due to tension issues but with those videos Saved That Loom (hint hint it was meeeee that was messing it up when I was putting my warp on the loom WHOOP) and her videos on color theory, how to plan warps, different forms of weave structure,,, it's all so amazing.

But yeah, as a yarn lover I have found weaving to be one of the most engaging, fun, enjoyable ways I've ever worked with yarn in. And there are soooo many ways to weave! Tapestry weaving, Inkle Looms, Tablet weaving.... I can't wait to dip my toes into working in those mediums, but my floor looms are my current babies.

[Also, hint from me about acquiring floor looms, I literally, in a fit of madness at 3am found myself on craigslist of all places and found my 4 shaft, 6 treadle Lilstina for 500$. I picked it up 2 days later in a stealth operation with my brother, whom was not told the nature of our mission. We got there and I just hear him look at the loom and groan. "You've made me an accomplice. Mom's gonna murder us BOTH" It was excellent. A solid sturdy loom to learn on.]

I will also link one of my favorite FB groups to look at for fiber equipment! The Weaver's Marketplace is a fantastic resource for finding used fiber equipment.

[adventures-in-asexuality]

End-of-year ramblings

Video games

Yeah, okay, let's start here. Obviously I played a truly inexplicable very explicable amount of FFXIV this year, and will continue to do so (can't believe Dawntrail will be dropping next year; we've stuck at it through all the waits between patches).

Baldur's Gate 3 was fun; I didn't expect to play it, but so many people I know loved it that I had to try, and I'm glad I did.

The same really goes for Cyberpunk 2077; honestly most of what I like about the game is the experience of it, rather than the stories. Whoosh! Zoom! Neon and doublejumping!

The other major new game this year for me was Mask of the Rose; I really loved it! I think the post-release patches helped it a lot as a game, but honestly I was hooked right from the beginning. (This was probably the start of the series of events that got a friend playing Sunless Skies/me replaying Sunless Skies/me returning to Fallen London and accidentally convincing some friends to also do so. No regrets.)

Music

Big album this year has to be Bury the Lede by Dessa. I was going to listen and enjoy it no matter what, but I really do like the way a lot of the songs resonate with growing older, still having all the same big feelings, but being way too tired to deal with them in any kind of high-octane way. What if I'm Not Ready in particular really tugs at something in me.

I'm not sure I have more new music this year; I've been a bit disconnected from everything, mostly listening to music when someone hurls links my way. Maybe next year!

Books

I read a lot of books this year, as ever, but the vast majority have been rereads; I've been quite low on book recs again. Here's a few of the new ones - I won't cover all of them because I don't have that kind of patience. (Counted - 33 new ones - which, compared to the sheer number of rereads, is low.)

She Who Became the Sun/He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan were a fun pair of books, about a girl who steals her brother's name and destiny when he dies so that she can shape the world/become the emperor. I liked some of the gender vibes you get in this - Zhu Yuanzheng's gender is never really defined, but also never at all fits in a binary mould. A lot of the second book, however, felt a bit extraneous and a bit gratuitous in various directions. Overall, I think this is a rec for reading the first one and skipping the second.

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle - everyone reading this probably already knows, but yeah, this is good. There's always something special to me about stories about queer kids in fundamentalist Christian churches - sure, it's usually American churches, but it's still a commonality that resonates powerfully with me. Read it.

Somewhere in summer I read all of Tana French's murder mysteries. I quite liked the Dublin Murder Squad books - nothing special but fun - but I honestly really disliked her two later standalones. The politics in them just set my teeth on edge a bit - The Wych Elm's protagonist is so dismissive about disability that, while I know it's part of his characterisation, it still left a bad taste in my mouth; The Searcher's protagonist has some views on politeness and morality that just make me sigh. (Rec for the murder squad books if you, like me, just really like murder mysteries.)

The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson: every year I'll read one more of her books, I guess. They're always good. They always haunt me.

Translation State by Ann Leckie was good; of course it was. I think it comes with my biggest overall caveat for an Ann Leckie book (I really wish Qven and Reet's subplot had ended differently; I know it was written as a metaphor for something else, but I read and resonated with it as a metaphor for aceness, which the ending doesn't leave space for) but it was still great. And we saw Sphene again!!

TV/film

Not much this year; my brain hasn't been in the right space for it.

Watched the Evangelion rebuild - I still haven't seen the original series so this was an interesting experience. I'm not really sure what my takeaway from it was, or what exactly I watched (apart from giant photorealistic Rei - we watched the fourth film in the cinema, so it was truly giant) but hey, I get more references now.

That same group of miscreants has been watching Lexx - seriously, do not watch this. It's rancid. It's so bad we have lost the ability to evaluate media, because everything else is good compared to it. Awful. Terrible. 15 more hours to go until we're free. I'm not going to describe it because the descriptions sound interesting and it is a terrible show. Never watch it. Strangle anyone who tries to make you.

Almost forgot, but I think this was the year I watched Yellowjackets - phenomenal even when your point of comparison isn't Lexx. I'm waiting for the third season with bated breath. It's so good. It's so awful. It's breaking my heart. Please watch this immediately and then come scream with me.

I'm also making my way through Young Pope, which - I don't know if I'd say that I'm enjoying it, but it is certainly doing things to my brain. It resonates with me in a similar way to Camp Damascus; even though they're on very different areas of the right-wing Christian spectrum, the fundamental beliefs and desires and angers and fears and reactions are the same.

Heaven's Official Blessing Season 2 finally happened!!! I'm still working my way through it - the friend I watch with has had no time this year, so we're using the holidays for it - but, oh, I love this book and these characters so much.

More personal stuff

Work has actually been quite bad this year; I've largely been on a project that's gotten worse and worse as the year goes on, in a way I fundamentally cannot fix but have to try to anyway. I've been circling between 'I hate this, I should job search' and 'I'm so bad at everything, only this job would put up with me' and 'at least wfh doesn't mean I'm in danger of losing it'. By Easter or so, I should be free from it at last, so I'll keep an eye out and hopefully things will even out again.

Home has, however, been a lot better. I moved towns at the end of last year to somewhere that has more friends and a more walkable town centre (and much cheaper rent) and it's been an excellent choice. Only having to walk five minutes or so to get to a shop or see a friend has meant that I've been able to practise walking five minutes or so (whereas in my last place, it was a walk then a twenty-minute bus ride just to the town centre) - and that in turn has meant that I've been able to build that up bit by bit, and occasionally run headlong into my limits in the process.

It's been a bit of a weird holiday season in particular for me this year, laced with grief and memories. Hosting a Christmas dinner and cooking with several other people felt right in a way it's hard to really put words to, and also reminded me very strongly of my grandmother. Her house was always a gathering place for all the family, as well as a refuge; it's eight or nine years since I last set foot inside it and yet I could still tell you the layout of her kitchen, the mnemonic for the bank of eight light switches in the hallway, the warmest place in winter and the coolest place in summer. Nowhere I've lived before has been nice enough for people to visit often, let alone to cook in or to know their way around; cooking and organising with people, seeing them remember locations and extend tables and understand the hob, soothes something it is difficult to explain.

Next year, then:

I hope to have somewhat more brain and less exhaustion (I've been so tired all year, which is tedious as fuck).

I hope for many of my friends to have considerably better years, and that the rest will continue to have good years. (I am threatening the years with a knife until they are kind to all of you.)

I hope to continue to shape this flat into somewhere pleasant to be, and persuade people to be there from time to time.

I hope to get a better idea of my work situation when I'm not on a horrible project.

I hope that the GIC might at least tell me that I'm on a waiting list!

I intend to find a tangible creative hobby one way or the other (taking suggestions as long as you can present a use case for the hobby; Queenie keeps suggesting knitting in the abstract).

And, as always, I hope to love more freely, be kinder and more helpful, and to try to build a future that has space for me.

[amourem]

a meta for fyodor on language and love language as well as one on immortality gogogo

FYODOR  (  on  language  )

given  his  age  and  apparently  prolific  presence  across  the  globe  -  fyodor  is  fluent  in...  a  staggering  amount  of  languages  and  intermediate  in  even  more.  obviously  -  russian  is  his  mother  tongue,  specifically  the  central  dialect,  though  he  can  occasionally  be  seen  slipping  into  the  southern  as  well.  he  is  fluent  in  all  prominent  slavic  languages,  though  spends  most  of  his  time  speaking  russian,  ukrainian,  polish,  and  czech.  on  occasion  -  he  will  slip  into  a  much  older  dialect/version  of  russian  (  referred  to  as  old  russian  /  old  east  slavic  ),  though  this  is  usually  when  he  doesn't  think  anyone  is  around,  etc.  

he  has  mastered  all  five  romance  languages  with  ease  (and  quite  enjoys  french  and  romanian  in  particular)  considering  he spent  a  good  chunk  of  his  life  reading  exclusively  latin.  english  is  another  widely  spoken  one,  alongside  farsi,  mandarin,  cantonese,  korean  and  finally:  japanese.  he  is,  however,  pretty  bad  at  writing  in  it.  his  knowledge  of  language  is  vast  -  but  he  is  by  no  means  an  expert  in  all,  and  still  speaks  most  of  them  with  a  bit  of  a  russian  lilt.  

FYODOR  (  on  love  language  )  -  aside  from  murder  and  manipulation.

i  spent  a  really  long  time  in  the  shower  thinking  about  this  one  and  i  have  decided  that  fyodor's  'love'  language  is  very  specific.  i  think  i  would  describe  it  as  a  combination  of  words  of  affirmation,  and  physical  touch.  HOWEVER  -  the  problem  is  with  a  man  like  fyodor,  he  simply  does  not  trust.  at  all.  anyone.  ever.  he  relies  solely  on  himself  and  has  thrived  that  way  for  quite  some  time.  you  say  a  kind  word  to  him,  and  his  nature  is  to  immediately  assume  an  ulterior  motive.  the  trick  is  to  get  him  to  listen  -  to  understand,  to  even  remotely  consider  the  words  being  said  to  him  are  not,  in  fact,  a  lie.  

the  biggest  one  though  is  physical  touch.  i  mean,  that's  if  he'll  even  LET  you  touch  him.  he's  killed  men  for  looking  wrong  or  brushing  against  him  in  a  grocery  store.  but  fyodor  is  gratuitously  touch  starved  and  he  has  no  idea  that  he  is  until  he  does.  while  not  particularly  tactile  -  i  do  think  that  even  he  can  find  that  literally  just  sitting  next  to  someone  he  likes  might  be  a  wild  experience.  

but  anytime  he  attempt  to  'engage'  one  of  fyodor's  love  languages  -  you  are  essentially  playing  roulette  on  whether  or  not  he  will  deign  to  accept  the  advance,  or  eat  you  alive.  

FYODOR  (  on  immortality  )

i  don't  want  to  go  TOO  in  depth  about  this  but  fyodor  has...  beef  with  his  immortality.  fyodor  is  driven  to  believe  that  ability  users  are  beings  of  sin  because  of  his  own  existence.  he  is  essentially  the  equivalent  of  having  lived  his  life  with  all  the  religious  dutifulness  of  a  saint,  looks  forward  to  going  to  heaven,  but  the  first  time  he  dies  he  just  discovers  that  god  spit  him  back  out  again  and  left  him  on  this  mortal  plane  to  rot.  each  death  warps  fyodor's  perception  a  little  further  -  until  he  comes  to  some  conclusions:

his  ability  makes  him  a  sinner,  as  he  cannot  commit  to  gods  natural  order  and  die.  it  is  also  possible  he  thinks  himself  a  sinner  due  to  some  events  in  his  past  (witch  burnings,  etc)  but  we  don't  know  yet.  additionally  -  because  god  keeps  spitting  him  back  out  again,  he  must  have  a  grand  plan  for  him.  very  well  then  -  he  will  use  his  immortality  for  good,  and  shepherd  the  people  to  a  sinless  existence  for  a  benevolent  god.  again  -  i  want  to  reiterate.  HUMAN  BEINGS  ARE  NOT  MEANT  TO  DIE  AND  COME  BACK  REPEATEDLY.  he  likely  has  not  always  been  this  warped  (but  he  is  now  evil  little  rat  man).  

anyways  -  'crime'  and  'punishment.'  the  crime?  killing  him.  the  punishment?  subsumed.  yet  fyodor's  immortality  has  brought  him  boundless  pain.  a  hundred  lifetimes  and  a  hundred  deaths  -  where  he  watched  humanity  be  it's  worst,  where  people  have  betrayed  him  ceaselessly  (how  could  he  trust  now),  where  he  has  been  miserable  but  fulfilling  his  duty  nonetheless,  no  matter  how  many  times  god  chooses  to  forsake  him.  

in  essence  -  fyodor  wishes  for  his  immortality  to  end,  but  he  has  work  to  finish  first.  

[zalrb]

Overall thoughts on KOTFM? Do you think it lived up to the hype?

OK well what I'll say first is I'm not ignoring what some Indigenous people, some Osage people have said about the movie, like Christopher Cote and how he left the premiere feeling conflicted

and the issues that have arisen around Ernest being too sympathetic and the film not really being from an Osage perspective and needing an Osage director to truly do that and finding the violence gratuitous and the Osage characters underwritten

and I'm not going to contradict that or devil's advocate that because their views are what matters here.

I'm just going to talk about my experience with KOTFM, which is what you asked but I would be remiss not to put the criticism of the movie by people who are actually Indigenous first.

So, I have been thinking about the movie since I watched it yesterday and I can't remember a movie in the last two, three years that has had that kind of impact on me except for maybe Across The Spider-Verse and EEAO.

I watched it like this is fucking cinema. I was geeking out in the theatre. Those shots,

those gorgeous shots

that are almost like portraits

had me in awe.

It's modern, there is clearly a lot of money behind this movie that also feels very intimate but it also feels like watching history, like watching the life of those black-and-white photos you see which from a technical perspective they did through the cinematographer using current technology/lenses to replicate the same kind of look and colour that would've been around in the 20s and then 30s and then using the Western genre to showcase how white people, the heroes of Westerns, systematically oppress through violence, murder, the law...so many layers.

I watched it with someone and we had very different perspectives on the movie and on Scorsese as a director because he thought Scorsese moved really quickly and I said you are the first person that I've met who has said Scorsese is quick. The criticism I get from people who can't get into his work is that he's incredibly slow. And he said, he couldn't keep up with certain things like when Lizzie Q dies and is taken to the afterlife because he said it was abrupt and it seems so unintentional. And I had to calm myself down lmao and was like OK, Scorsese is incredibly intentional. In that scene, he is aligning us with Lizzie Q's experience in the moment. She was alive and then she wasn't and she went to the afterlife and we experience that with her, when we go back to the let's say earthly realm, it's to confirm her death by see the living mourning her passing. And he was like, well when you say it like that, it makes sense.

And we talked for a while after the movie and it kept being the same conversation, where I was like if you pay attention to more than the dialogue, which quite frankly I found pretty heavy-handed, and to the way the scenes are set up, it says a lot about the themes of the movie. So he asked what I meant and we ended up talking about King because he didn't understand what was happening with King in like a very basic way. He was confounded that King had acted friendly with the Osage and was also responsible for so many of their murders and I was like, OK barring the fact that I really think you need to educate yourself more on how colonizers colonize, within the context of the movie, it is made very clear relatively quickly that King doesn't see the Osage as people. It's clear in the dialogue but also in the way things are shot, like when King and Ernest talk about Henry, it's almost as if they have Henry mounted on the fireplace like a prize

which in concert with the dialogue where King refers to Henry as a dollar amount -- a $25,000 insurance policy -- speaks to the overarching themes of settler colonialism, capitalism, genocide, racism in this one conversation, one shot with these characters and he was basically like

and having this conversation just really solidified how much the cinematic language of the movie spoke to me and how his choices as a director, like not just having a voiceover that intermittently let's us in on Mollie's thoughts while we watch her expression but actually seeing things from her point of view elevated the movie and of course, that brings us to the acting. I mean we've discussed this but Lily's performance was so powerful, she does so much with her physicality, with her expressions

her scream when she finds out that Rita was murdered was hauntingly good, she 100% made this movie.

Leo was good as well, I particularly liked the moments where he didn't feel reigned in -- I liked his subtle performance, I think it's the least ... Leo of his performances -- but when he gets to be emotional

it's like a dam bursting.

I thought De Niro was good as well, between him and Leo, his accent slipped the most, it was a little fun for me to watch him and Leo and see when I saw their signatures come out and their roles couldn't hide certain things so for Leo when Ernest and Mollie are flirting at her house and he does his smile, I'm like oh there's Jack Dawson and with De Niro when he'd do the frown and nod I'd be like oh, there you are.

I was also quite taken with Tatanka Means,

he's barely in the movie but I found he had such a presence.

This isn't to say that I thought the movie was flawless.

Despite appreciating the ending -- i.e. rather than doing a typical text on black screen at the end of the movie to educate the viewers on more facts about the real people and instead making a commentary on how the genocide and exploitation and marginalization of this community (and other communities) becomes entertainment to a white audience and then including himself in the show to acknowledge that aspect of KOTFM and then ending it with the Osage people --- the third act is definitely when I felt the fact that the movie was made for white audiences the most because that is when we get to Ernest grappling with whether or not to testify, with his epiphany after his daughter dies, when we get to King trying to keep control, when we get to the other people involved in the murders turning on each other and I didn't find any of that necessary. Scorsese said that when he spoke to the Osage about doing this movie, they said he had to remember that Mollie and Ernest loved each other,

"We realized that was really the heart of the film. And having met with the Osage so many times and heard from Margie Burkhart, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ernest, she knew them. She kept saying, “Don’t forget it isn’t as simple as villains and victims. You have to remember Mollie and Ernest were in love.” And that always stayed with me when we were still working on the other version of the script. I said, “Well, if they’re in love, we got to show that too.” And then that became difficult in terms of showing all the machinations of the Bureau investigation. Plus, this love story, it was getting unwieldy."

and he said in the transcripts he saw, the FBI questioned why Mollie stayed with him after learning about him conspiring to murder her family while also poisoning her since she only divorced him after the hearing and instead of trying to answer that question, instead of really digging into Mollie's perspective, Mollie's emotions about this, he aligned with Ernest and kind of reverted to the procedural that the entire movie was originally supposed to be but that they scrapped and it's a flinch, I found it to be a faltering of commitment. From what I remember, Mollie is the only Osage character with a voiceover but John gets one and while I understand why Scorsese would make that choice, it shows his limitations when it would've been more compelling to get one from Henry, and this is also to say that I know Scorsese hired Osage consultants, hired Osage actors, had an Osage costume designer etc.

All in all, I found it to be a flawed but powerful, technically masterful film and I think of what Lily said “Nobody is going to hand an Osage filmmaker $200 million,” Gladstone said. “There’s a level of allyship that’s absolutely necessary" and within that context, Scorsese did things that Nolan, for instance, in Oppenheimer didn't even try.

[whilereadingandwalking]

Manhunt is beautiful, raw, and cruel, finally a speculative fiction novel that treats chromosome-based biological catastrophe in a way that's actually compelling. Gretchen Felker-Martin's writing is excellent and awful in its excellence, because this book is terrifying, visceral, and violent. In it, a disease (dubbed "t.rex") transforms people with the right amount of testosterone (primarily cis men) into rabid, murderous, sex-crazed zombies. Gangs of TERFs, cis women tattooed with XX, police gender and seek out and murder any person who they decide is 'secretly a man' or a gender traitor. Meanwhile, a few queer people try to survive in an apocalyptic world, hunted by everyone. It's been a minute since a book made me cry, but this one did, more than once. Felker-Martin's characters are compelling: crossbow-welding Beth, always-longing Fern, fat doctor Indi who refines their estrogen, and Robbie, a trans man who joins their squad to try and find safety. It's an excellent book about zombies and the power dynamics in apocalyptic worlds in general—but more than that, it's a horror story about the arguments that TERFs and other transphobes use to insist that there are "real women," on the violence of that point of view, of the endless damage of turning on our most vulnerable while there is a (in this case, extremely literal) seething crowd of patriarchy that we'd be better off fighting together. It goes hard, poking at the kind of women or queer people who still think there's a way to blend, to survive within the TERFs' world, instead of resisting against it. Manhunt is bold, and it is at turns grotesque, funny, extremely sexy, graphic, horrifying, and devastating. Warning: I think anyone who does not want to encounter scenes of graphic rape or violence should stay far away from this book, and it is questionable whether the rape scene was gratuitous. I don't think it needed to have not happened, but I question how graphic that scene needed to be. It's possible that within the zombie-apocalypse genre of blood and gore and guts, Felker-Martin felt that scene should also be 'honest' to the violence of what's happening. But I thought it was excessive. Other complaints: the timeline of the narrative got pretty intensely mixed up several times, which was confusing. The logistics were often suspect. (I'm not mad at "coincidences"—one character shows up in the nick of time, etc—for me those are a classic part of the zombie apocalypse genre so they didn't bother me. I'm referring to like, timelines, distances, that kind of thing.) One of the main characters is a TERF. Some people think she has a redemption arc. I personally don't think it is one. She is not exactly forgiven at the end. I think she's there more to reveal the rot at the very core of the TERFs' own ideologies. This idea that none of them truly believe what they spew, most of them just want the power the divisions would give them, want others not to have what they've been told is theirs to have. I think it was effective, but I'm willing to debate it. All around, I really enjoyed this book, but the parts I didn't like really stick in the seams. I wouldn't recommend this one to everybody, but I do hope we get more fiction that does as good of a job talking about TERFs and why their rhetoric is so dangerous for people of all genders. Content warnings: Extreme: body horror & violence, transphobia, rape (graphic) Also: suicide, gender dysphoria, deadnaming, fatphobia, anti-Semitism, self-harm.

[semper-legens]

29. From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Owned: No, library Page count: Unknown/not numbered My summary: Jack the Ripper is stalking the streets of London. Five women turn up dead, mutilated in horrific fashions. But what connects the victims? Why were they murdered? Pull back the curtain, and you might find a conspiracy centuries deep, a world of pain and torment and coverups permeating society for all time... My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

Jack the Ripper. The most notorious murderer in English history. I have never really cared about the endless hypothesising over who Jack the Ripper really was. He's a murderer, he's long-dead, his crimes were horrendous but the mythologising of his memory is definitely a bad thing. As ever with any murderer, I believe that we should focus our energies on remembering the dead and working to ensure such things never happen again, moreso than glorifying the killer. But the Ripper legend began long before my birth, and no doubt will endure long after I am gone. This, then, is one fictionalised account in the form of a graphic novel of how the Ripper murders could have happened, and who might have been the perpetrator.

You know, I have a great deal more respect for Alan Moore now that I know he doesn't believe that this theory is credible. One of the thing that annoys me about the speculation around Ripper murders is the attempts to tie them into the nobility and royal family. Here, the culprit for the murders is Dr William Gull, the Queen's doctor and a Freemason, who has been ordered by the Queen to cover up the illegitimate child her grandson, Prince Albert Victor, had with a sex worker. The ritualistic manner of the killings and posthumous mutilations are explained as a Masonic rite performed by a man sinking into a deeply mentally unwell state. This...has always been a bit too fanciful of an explanation for me. Occam's Razor, people - Jack the Ripper was probably just someone who wanted to kill women seen as 'disposable' by society. I don't really see a reason to read deep conspiracy into it. Okay, so the actions of the police were a little sus, but the police can be corrupt without this widereaching Royal conspiracy.

Okay, let me get down from this soapbox. Thoughts about the Ripper aside, I just didn't find this graphic novel to be all that interesting? There are some very effective sequences, but the art style was such that I had a hard time telling most of the characters apart, and the writing meandered around this philosophical, occult narrative that wasn't all that interesting to read. One long chapter is dedicated to Gull driving around London explaining how every bit of architecture is a secret occult Masonic thing, and honestly? It was incredibly tedious. For just how long this thing is, many of the characters didn't seem that well fleshed-out. And there was a gratuitous amount of emphasis placed on naked women and the sexual aspects of the killings throughout. I think I actually enjoyed the appendices more - in the first, Moore goes over his research and which parts of the narrative are historically attested, and which are fabricated. The second is a shorter comic about the history of Ripperology, reaching the conclusion that perhaps this entire field is just a snipe hunt and casting doubt on anyone who claims to know the truth. This was more concise and engaging than anything that had gone before, at least for me.

Next, something a lot less murdery - autobiography time.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Death Wish II (1982)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

I’m fairly sure everyone involved in the making of Death Wish II knew they were making trash, which begs the question: why was this movie made? This is exploitative, cynical filmmaking that does little more than re-iterate everything that was said and done in the first but worse.

After Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) comes home to find his maid and daughter raped and murdered by the thugs who stole his wallet, he returns to his vigilante ways.

Woah, Woah! Slow down Death Wish 2! TWO of Kersey’s close ones get raped and murdered? Save some of them for Death Wish 3! I mean, otherwise what crime will the incompetent police force fail to solve, forcing Kersey to take the law into his own hands AGAIN? If you’ve seen Death Wish, you’ve seen Death Wish 2. There’s something particularly vile about this action film, and it isn’t only the excessive amount of female nudity as the hooting criminals gleefully lick their lips while ripping off the women’s clothes. Say what you will about the first but it was exactly that, THE FIRST. You needed to show those trauma-inducing moments to make you understand why Kersey would take the law into his own hands. This time, director Michael Winner's only objective is to exploit the audience. It's so manipulative you'll be tricked into wanting to see violent revenge fantasies brought to life by a man that’s way too old to play the role he’s playing. The criminals in this film do nothing BUT victimize women and torment innocent people. They're cartoons.

This picture has nothing to say, even if you haven’t seen Death Wish or its innumerable clones. We do not explore the toll this violence has upon Kersey beyond his lust for revenge. There are no moral dilemmas about the vengeance he rains down upon the thugs (which, if it interests you, includes a young Laurence Fishburne III). The topic of vigilante justice is never shown in a balanced manner. I can’t even say the action scenes are particularly exciting, or the deaths satisfying either.

Is there ANYTHING good in this film? Well, two I suppose. The first is that because the film is obviously lewd and lurid from the first few scenes, it’s never actually as impactful as it should be. It’s the most backwards compliment I’ve ever given but it’s true; by being crappy, the film manages avoid becoming offensive. This makes it “better”. Even so, it still contains gratuitous amounts of rape so maybe I’ve just become numb to it. Your mileage will probably vary on this issue. The second “good” aspect is a scene so bad it becomes comical AND checks off an item on my list of things I’ve always wanted to see in a movie. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when a character jumps out of a window when they have no idea what’s outside. In Death Wish II, someone jumps and lands on something that kills them instantly. I’ve wanted to see that ever since I sat through 2005’s A Sound of Thunder.

Trashy, lazily written, unimaginative, tired, cheap... there are many unflattering adjectives which would comfortably fit Death Wish II. It’s wretched and I can’t imagine the next in the series will be any better. (Full-screen version on DVD, November 4, 2018)

[ao3feed-brucewayne]

The Merits of Mithridatism

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/Z5fuyME by silver__butterflies Mithridatism, noun: the practice of protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts   Rather than attack the new Robin at Titan's Tower, Jason Todd becomes Tim Drake's personal cook in order to poison him, subtly but surely. Unfortunately for him, Tim is somehow immune to most poisons and displays no reaction to the very much lethal substances he's getting fed. Jason doesn't know if he should be impressed or horrified. Words: 3601, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: Gen Characters: Tim Drake (DCU), Jason Todd, Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne Relationships: Tim Drake & Jason Todd Additional Tags: Poison, Attempted Murder, Crack, Humor, Tim Drake Has Issues (DCU), like. so many issues, Jason Todd is So Done, Enemy to Caretaker, Tim Drake Being an Idiot, how can one be so smart and yet so dumb, Fluff and Crack, Good Sibling Jason Todd, after the murder attempts anyway, Bruce Wayne Tries to Be a Good Parent, he has no actual dialogue in this but it's important to me that you know that, Tim Drake & Jason Todd Friendship, One Shot, Resurrected Jason Todd, Feral Tim Drake, Gratuitous use of italics, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Not Canon Compliant read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/Z5fuyME

[whatyourusherthinks]

Terrifier 3 Review

The theater I work at had no trailers or poster for this PIECE OF HUMAN EXCREMENT DRIPPING FROM THE SCREEN INTO MY EYES AND EARS! Way to bury the lea- NO SHUT THE FUCK UP BUGGNUTZ I WANT NOTHING FROM YOU FOR THIS ONE. This movie already has 7.1 from IMBD and a 61% on Metacritic I don't need a two-bit devil's advocate for this cinematic equivalent of an actual mass murder! I never watched Terrifier or Terrifier 2. Reading the plot description on Wikipedia is like looking at the manifesto of someone who gets angry when women won't let him sniff them on public transportation. And yes, I read the part in the article where the writer/director promised to fix the "underdevelopment of the lead characters and the perceived lack of plot". But the read is less "I recognize my short-comings and plan to do better" and more "Oh shit, I got caught sneaking a wannabe snuff film into theaters and don't want to get blacklisted from releasing future movies". At least to me anyway. And my final prerelease experience is being told that this movie is "so gross that people have been running from the theater vomiting" and that made the movie "good". *Knock knock* Hey everyone who said that. THAT'S NOT A SELLING POINT! "This movie is so good it'll make you not want to watch it."

What's The Movie About?

Art the Clown, a slasher who is a fantasy of someone who regrets not going postal in high school, returns to stalk the final girl from the last movie BECAUSE... he's a demon. That's it. Art is a demon and Sienna is an Angel and they are prophesied to fight forever and ever and ever because the franchise will go on forever and ever and ever because clearly humanity has done something horrible to make God punish us forever and ever and ever...

What I Like.

The guy playing Art is a funny physical performer. When he wasn't killing people I had a laugh at some of his scenes. He kinda reminded me of the Mask, but not CGI and he doesn't talk, so he's better. I really want to reiterate that my issues with the Art character have nothing to do with David Howard Thornton. He was just hired to play the character that was written for him, and he did a good job. The effects, costuming, and setting were also well done and lend itself well to a horror Christmas atmosphere. And there's a couple scenes where characters interact that I thought was interesting.

What I Didn't Like.

Too bad those interactions don't MATTER FOR SHIT. The movie ends with everyone except for Sienna and Art dead. Nothing is resolved. No plot point in the movie finishes. Just the two characters surviving for the sequel because of literal Deus Ex Machina and Diabolus Ex Machina. It was all for nothing. Similar to Civil War, I noticed, but at least the BAD GUY died in that one. Hopefully you came over those overly gratuitous gore effects earlier, because Terrifier 3 has NOTHING ELSE. Why do any of the characters matter? They all just die. The story is stupid. For some fucking reason it's Christmas, five years after the last movie, and I think it's just because they wanted Art to run around in a Santa Suit. It makes less sense that people just tolerate Art for any amount of time instead of immediately throwing out or calling the police on the CREEPIEST LOOKING CLOWN EVER. There is literally a part where kids are running over to him excitedly. Like I know he's giving away toys, but fuck off movie. I GUARENTEE that any kid wouldn't go within ten feet of Pennywise but the pedophile dial is cranked from 6 to 9.

Every event in this movie is just obnoxious. The kills are way to pleased with themselves for how boring they are, and the only one that isn't boring is one of the grossest things I've ever seen. And almost all of them drag themselves out for as loooooong aaaaaaaas fuuuuuuuuucking pooooooooooooooooooosible. When tension is built it needs a quick release for the fear factor to work. To watch Art jump a guy, the guy start yelling in anger, then Art stabs a railroad spike through his hand, then the guy starts screaming in pain, then we have to see Art reach over and grab a hammer, then the victim is begging for mercy, then Art whacks the guy with the hammer, then the guy goes "NONONONONONO!", then Art tears his head off, and MY FUCKING GOD. I know what's gonna happen as soon as Art grabs his victim. Dragging out the kill is not scary. It's watching a trench coat mafioso jerk off over his switchblade collection. But hey, at least that preferable to seeing a disfigured woman jill herself off with a broken piece of glass. Which is something that happens in this godforsaken I-hesitate-to-call-it-a-film.

Maybe it's hedonistic enjoyment. Maybe I'm getting to high-minded about the serial killer movie. That's what you're thinking right now, right? Well you're wrong and I can prove it with two scenes. First is the sex scene. It's one of the blandest sex scenes ever, because there is no explicit nudity. This movie is Not Rated. They had no restrictions, and could have totally could have gone completely full X-Rated nudity if they wanted to. So the fact that there is none means they must not have wanted to. Actually, I lied. There's one shot of explicit nudity, when Art is using a chainsaw to carve up the guy's taint. So the movie is okay with showing nudity when it is being mutilated. But again, maybe that's the statement, the hedonism is just for violent imagery? Well, no. I keep harping on the kills being boring, because they are, but the gore is lame too. Much like the characters being too stupid to be realistic and too sensible for the movie to be a parody, the gore is too tame to be splat-stick and too unrealistic to give tragic catharsis. They throw around blood so vibrant it would make a Hammer Horror tell them to turn down the saturation, but everyone seems to bleed realistically, no excess spray or gallons fall from victims. A couple people get disemboweled, but all Art seems to pull out of them is large intestines. People get faces eaten and decapitated, or have their limbs chopped off with axes and chainsaws, but I am not positive if I saw a bone even once. It's all so bland and the various mauling scenes blend together. And I can't stress enough, they mean fucking nothing. No character who get's killed by Art has a satisfying story arc or contribute to a plot line. Maybe it's tragic catharsis? Like look at all these characters we built up, not say goodbye because we are gonna unceremoniously and graphically kill all of them! Except the brother from the last movie get's killed off screen. Yeah. No warning. No hint that it's coming. Off. Fucking. Screen.

I keep thinking back to that sentence I read on Wikipedia. "[The writer/director] has expressed regret for leaving the protagonists underdeveloped." Well whatever you think is developed is man, this ain't it. Sienna is where most of the character lies, and her whole thing is this stupid quasi-biblical prophecy thing along with being traumatized from the last movie. Fair, if I lived through that I'd be messed up too. But the PTSD writing is as subtle as a mortar bombing. Sienna literally sees the disgusting mangled corpse of her friend screaming at her. I was liking the flashbacks with her dad until it transitioned into this bizarre origin for her sword. A sword, which for all the build up of it's appearance and how much they bang on how cool and important it is, looks like a plastic prop you can buy at Walgreens for 10 bucks. Actually, it looks worse than that, because the plastic sword I got at Walgreens has a shiny blade and comes with a sheath. And the scene where we see it forged I swear to Beelzebub is 5 decibels louder than the rest of the movie. Because it'll be really scary if we make the audience's eardrums burst, right? The only other characters who gets a modicum of development are the brother, who once again is killed OFF SCREEN, and Sienna's cousin who looks up to her. And she falls into hell! It's for a promise of a sequel, but a) it's less of a promise and more a threat, and b) given the track record of these movies, I would bet when Sienna finds her cousin in hell she'll be completely broken from being barbed wire-skull fucked by Adolf Hitler and Henry Kissinger over the last 8 years or whatever.

All of this comes to my conclusion that Terrifier 3 was not made to be scary, or tell an actual story, or even for hedonistic enjoyment. And the smoking gun is the first thing I though when the movie itself started proper. Why did this movie release in October? Sure, the other two movies did (Kinda sorta if you squint.), but those movies take place on Halloween. Because of Halloween, October is the spooky month so that's when all the Horror movies come out, right? Except not only do horror movies come out all year, ESPECIALLY this year, but this is a holiday horror movie. The whole point of those is to take a ubiquitous cultural moment of fun and enjoyment and make it scary and taboo by breaching social norms. It's an honored tradition that goes back over 400 years if you want to count Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale as the first example. So when you release these movies matter. The cultural context matters. What cultural does Christmas in October bring? It brings the thought of Christmas overtaking all other holidays. The thought of corporations pushing the winter holidays earlier and earlier so they can sell their novelty goods earlier. The thought of retailers pushing seasonal product to sucker in consumers to spend even more money. The pressure of average people to start their gift shopping earlier. Christmas doesn't mean any high minded "peace on Earth" spiritual ideals until December itself. People HATE that Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier every year. (At least the ones who are self-aware enough to distinguish themselves as more that a consumer.) And I think the guy who both wrote and directed this celluloid massacre knows this.

Final Summation.

I am sorry The Substance. I did not enjoy sitting through you, but at least you had a reason. At least their was a message you were conveying to the audience. I am fully prepared to admit that you are a good movie that I just didn't like, although I still hang on to my criticisms about you. But it's true. The Substance is a good movie that just wasn't for me.

Terrifier 3 is edgelord bullshit. Anyone actually well served by this crock of feces would find greater enjoyment from a real snuff film because they are a goddamn psychopath. Everyone else just thinks they'll get big boy brave points for sticking it out, but it's not an endurance test to watch this movie. No, watching this movie is akin to getting cosmetic surgery with no anesthesia. Unnecessarily painful, completely optional, a waste of time, and at the end you're just worse off.

God. Let's talk about something good. Like Donald Trump.

[jcmarchi]

Children of the Sun Review - Spot On - Game Informer

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Children of the Sun Review - Spot On - Game Informer

Children of the Sun is hellbent on occupying your mind. During the six hours it took me to hit credits, I was engrossed in mastering its simple, yet wonderfully executed central mechanic. At first, taking down dozens of cultists with just one bullet was a fun gimmick to tinker with. As time passed, I became obsessed with pushing the tools at my disposal to their limits, repeatedly using people as target practice until I had concocted a satisfactory murder plan.

Introduced as a puzzle shooter, Children of the Sun has you incarnating a young woman who lost her family after getting involved with the eerie namesake cult. Using just one bullet of your sniper rifle, you plunge through over 20 levels by connecting kills until you take everybody down in one swift sequence. As you make progress, the foundation gains complexity with special foes that require different strategies, as well as a handful of abilities around the bullet itself.

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It’s easy to see the influences from the likes of Killer7, Sniper Elite, and the latter Hitman games. But there are echoes of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective as well, infusing inanimate objects with a paranormal force to interact with the environment, and people’s bodies, to your advantage.

At the start of a level, you only get a narrow view of the whole map, so to speak. Ideally, you want to tag every single cultist before pulling the trigger, so you can plan ahead of time – similar to scanning a room in Hotline Miami before kicking down the door. More often than not, you first need to kill a few of them just to tag others or get a better view at the far end of an area. It makes for a compelling exploratory phase that doesn’t frustrate but rather encourages you to fail until you’ve gathered all the visual information you need.

Time slows down when you’re moving the bullet. It also completely stops once you hit a target. This gives you some breathing room, and a chance to gain a different perspective. You can shoot birds to gain altitude or gas tanks to find an angle that allows you to continue chaining down targets, for example. Yet, you’re rewarded via a scoring system for executing a killing with style and aggressiveness. It works as the perfect contrast to the exploratory phase, forcing you to see whether your plan can be executed swiftly or if you need another strategy. There’s a leaderboard at the end of each level that incentivizes you to push for this cruel finesse, as well as vague clues for challenges to uncover.

The macabre tone of Children of the Sun pairs well with its human gamification. Shooting an arm gives you 25 points. Shooting a groin rewards 50 points instead. The over-the-top violence turns gratuitous after seeing the words “I Just Killed a Man, Now I’m Horny” before playing a Pac-Man-style minigame during a special level. The abrasive tone never comes off as mere window dressing for the sake of shock value but rather thrives in its repulsiveness.

Both the visual and sound design work make for a haunting sensorial stimulation. There were times when I felt underwater, zip-zapping from one corner of an ocean to the next as the bullet pierced head after head, like waves colliding against each other. The effect of a late-game ability, which allows you to increase the speed of a shot, sounds like an electric guitar distorted to the brim with effect pedals.

Children of the Sun is a prime example of an experience born from a straightforward premise and then iterated for the right amount of time before it loses its charm. On occasion, the central mechanic can’t keep up with itself – I missed more than a few finicky shots that should have landed, forcing a retry. But once you successfully execute a strategy and finish a level, the satisfaction is unmatched. You then seek to replicate the feeling during subsequent hunts, completely alienated from the messiness of your actions as you chase a higher score.

[pb-dot]

Film Friday: Hardcore Henry

In general, I'm fond of movies with a bit of thought behind them. It doesn't have to be high art based on deep philosophy, but generally a thematic idea or concept discussed through the medium of film is a good start. I generally also expect movies to happen from the perspective of some nondiegetic observer, but today's movie rasies the question of "hey what if we said bollocks to all of that and made a FPS Game movie?" Honestly, that's very bold of them.

Henry's day is off to a rough start as he wakes up with more robot parts than human parts, only to discover that his freshly augmented body has made him wanted in the worst way. Generic evil science man with magnetic powers, Akan, wants him for use in his super soldier program, and a conglomerate of identical individuals named Jimmy also has their design on him.

Henry, rendered mute by being interrupted before his voice program could be installed, finds himself living through a 2010-era first-person shooter, with lengthy sequences devoted to length parkour chases, very scripted-seeming stealth, turret shooting on rails, and of course, gratuitous nudity. A somewhat rarer partial song-and-dance number also occurs at one point, but I'm of the opinion that the shooters of the era should also feature those.

It's all very silly. There is a theme of sorts about memory and identity going on here, but it feels like an afterthought. This may be intentional, considering how Henry's enough of a blank slate that the plot has nothing to gain traction to, and it's the kind of unforced error that a shooter of the era may have made.

Now, I am cutting the movie a bit of slack here, because it is very fun in a very stupid way. Sharlto Coperley is having a lot of fun bouncing around in the various ludicrous avatars of Jimmy, although I would argue perhaps not enough to excuse the unfortunately very era-appropriate No Homo-jokes.

There is however no denying that it's in the action that the main appeal lies. The action scenes are often chaotic, but uses that chaos wisely, mostly to disguise cuts and give the movie's budget a helping hand by distracting from occasionally dodgy CGI and compositing. It feels like damning with faint praise, but Hardcore Henry has really perfected the look of the mid-budget game, and as a mid-budget action movie, that is honestly pretty cool, it's not an easy style to emulate.

There's, I would argue, no small amount of art in achieving that look and sense of internal consistency. Of course Akan turns up semi-randomly to beat you up some and you never get around to striking back. It's a cutscene and he has metal-manipulating powers to rob you of agency. Of course Akan folds like a cheap chair once you actually fight him, boss battles in shooters were often just uninspired quicktime-events in those days. Of course we're in Russia, in addition to being a cheaper location to shoot, it's the easiest way to ensure none of the people we murder are red-bIooded Americans, which was considered a bit faux-pas to shoot at in games of the era. I could go on, but many of the aesthetic or logic flaws in this movie fit in like that. Not all of them of course, but I'm mostly trying to stick with the positives here.

Hardcore Henry is a dumb movie, but it's dumb in a decently entertaining way. People not fond of gratuitous violence or (perhaps intentionally) bad plots need not apply, but if it's your bag, it's a very decent bag