#this was made in november but that’s old by my standards

[icantbotherwithusernames]

another (relatively) old gf comic i did.

[musings-from-mars]

Just thinking about how Biden stepped down due to pressure from his party in what he viewed as the right choice for the good of the country. I'm not at all A Fan of his but just, when you compare that to the other option, someone who refused to peacefully step aside even when an entire election stipulated he do so, it makes this whole election into what I think is a very simple choice.

Biden did not have to stand down from his reelection campaign, but did so for the greater good. Long before presidents had term limits, the peaceful surrender of power by one president to the next has been a tradition as old as the union itself. Time after time presidents would not seek reelection if they had served two terms because Washington set that unofficial standard and everyone up until FDR followed it, even though they weren't required to. It's because there was this understanding that there was no good to come from relentlessly trying to hold onto power forever, that being president was a massive undertaking, a responsibility, that no one person should take on for too long, lest the country risk falling into a pit of authoritarian strong-arming.

Biden stepped aside, gave up the the chance to retain the single most powerful political office in his country, and arguably the world, because he believed it was the right thing to do. If she is elected, Kamala Harris will also eventually surrender the office peacefully when the time comes. The same can't be said for Donald Trump, who has made it abundantly clear that he wants power and he wants to keep it.

I'm voting for whoever the Democratic nominee is in November because, unlike the other option, I know they would not try to take and keep power through any means necessary. It's just one out of many issues I care about that informs my vote. I don't want the country I live in to become an authoritarian dictatorship. Therefore, I will vote blue. If you also don't want the US to become an authoritarian dictatorship, you will vote blue. You will vote.

[literarischee]

'It's not all tails and masks!'

Tiktok has tarnished the true meaning of therianthropy and pushed the community back. Let's get a definition up first.

According to the therian Fandom.com page,

"Therianthropy is a genuine intrinsic experience of having a non-human animal identity. A Therianthrope or therian for short, is someone who identifies as the animal. This identity may be experienced through physical sensations (such as phantom limbs or movement patterns), psychological aspects (such as thought patterns or instincts), and spiritual understanding of one's nature."

Currently, most tiktok videos seem to state therianthropy as a non-physical or more spiritual based ideology. This is not true. Therianthropy is an identity it is not completely voluntary. Watering it down to a simple idea or funny trend absolutely erases the huge amounts of history Therianthropy as a culture has created. Therianthropy dates back to the 1960s, that's over 60 years of change, acceptance and pride in identity.

If we really want to be generous, we could use the mythological definition, defined by wikipedia. (Shitty source I know).

Therianthropes are any mythical shapeshifters that are known to (in)voluntarily transform between the forms of a human being, a non-human animal, or a human-animal hybrid. They may be humans who transform into animals, animals who transform into humans, or some other type of entity with shapeshifting powers.

According to a quick google search, this would set therians to be around since the beginning of humanity. The oldest depictions of therianthropy originate in an ancient cave, dated around 43,900 years old. The cave paintings depict humanoid beings with animalistic heads.

-

Tiktok is definitely tarnishing the community, creating new definitions which are either different 'kin' terms; (i.e. Alterhuman, Otherkin, Otherhearted, Animalhearted, ETC). Humanity is not ready to accept therianthropy yet, and that is clear from how odd our community is. Creating new definitions and concepts could muddy the waters even more.

It's not all masks and gear, it's personal struggle as well. As a physical therian I feel major dysphoria, even to the points where I break down and have to sleep or shower it off. Hell, last week when I was under the influence of CBD, I got a huge species dysphoria hit, causing me to not even be able to walk right and have weak legs, only being able to walk on all fours. Thankfully it was late at night and I was just in my room, but still, therianthropy isn't just a fun little trend, it's an identity that can cause severe body dysphoria and even pain with rough mental shifts.

Dysphoria is the next and final topic I will be speaking on. It affects the whole body, head, limbs, torso, genitals and mind. With the whole therian packer discourse that went on back in November, it's very clear that tiktok doesn't understand how therianthropy truly works. If you are a therian without species dysphoria, the least you can do is sympathize with those who do suffer from it, not exclude them or push them away. The creator got doxxed, harassed and even school calls over how unaccepting tiktok therians can be.

There was also a heavy double standard on there, with 'popufurs' calling him out and then praising or even buying from companies that sculpt actual erect animal genitalia for sexual pleasure. The whole controversy really ruined how physical and dysphoric therians are viewed on tiktok. To this day I still receive DMs containing mindless accusations and even mild ableism towards my system over the packer I made and only showed off to farm views. Hell, my entire ex friend group views me as a zoophile and some WERE therians.

The second you discriminate against another therian in this community for being physical or having species dysphoria, I do not view you as a therian. We are a small group, family even, and we should not be excluding others from our worldwide pack for how they want to identify, with what they want to put in their pants, with what they want to do. It's not issue! As long as they have no intention to harm others, there is no issue or reason to shun.

[salvadorbonaparte]

2024 in Films - Part III

I watched a lot of stuff again, some even for grad school.

August

Lola Rennt (1998) - banger soundtrack and editing

Vertigo (1958) - the most boring of the Hitchcock films I've seen so far

A League of Their Own (1992) - makes me want to watch baseball

White Men Can't Jump (1992) - did not expect jeopardy to be so important in this film, also loved the fashion

The Fall Guy (2024) - my mum loves the original series so we had to watch this and I had an amazing time

Blinded by the Light (2019) - the dialogue is strange at times but a banger soundtrack (obviously) and some amazing editing, very uplifting and I watched this on my flight to the US btw

Good Will Hunting (1997) - I watched this during my first week in Massachusetts before starting grad school here

Alien3 (1992) - this film says so much about gender, actually

Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears (1973) - taking lots of liberties with Texan history and also surprising homoerotic subtext

September

Causeway (2022) - a film that I originally only found meh but then kept thinking about all the time

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) - equally blood libel as the og with an added bonus of cycle of violence, might write an essay about this

Sleepaway Camp (1983) - another horror film that says so much about gender and I could write an entire essay about it

My Best Fiend (1999) - Werner Herzog must be studied under a microscope

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) - not as good as I saw the tv glow imo but asking some important questions about online communities and reality

Jacob the Liar (1974) - the film felt a little too empty but I also don't want to say something negative because I am still angry about a bad review I saw

Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson (2024) - absolutely transformed the way I think about stand up comedy

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - the old lie dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

The Shock (1923) - as ableist and racist as you expect from the 20s but with a great performance from Lon Chaney

Trap (2024) - I actually really enjoyed this, even though I was waiting for an even crazier plot twist

Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (2014) - a documentary that nearly made me cry

Hudson Hawk (1991) - technically a rewatch but I need to speak my truth and it's that I like this film

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - I have so many issues that this would take an entire post or even conference paper

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming! (1966) - had me in stitches half the time, I love a good cold war comedy

The Bone Collector (1999) - spooky!

Monkey Shines (1988) - also horror and gender but also silly

Death in Venice (1971) - boring :/

October

UPSIDEdown (2013) - I watched this one twice, once with the director, also had lunch and coffee with him, I had an issue at first with how child protection service is portrayed but that part is apparently real, also he cast a neurodivergent kid, which is awesome

The Master (2012) - I love when men are also poorly trained attack dogs, also can you imagine sending that guy to the cult from Midsommar? Also still haunted by Philip Seymour Hoffman

Like Stars on Earth (2007) - neurodivergent kids need neurodivergent role models!!!

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) - I have so much to say about this tbh

Farewell Disco (1990) - at first I found this kinda boring but then I was also enchanted by the inclusion of Sorbian culture

The Kangaroo Conspiracy (2022) - just read the books

November

Srikanth (2024) - fairly standard biopic, meanders a bit but solid soundtrack and performance

Innocent Witness (2019) - this one impressed me so much I recommended it to multiple people, also I'm an autistic person who is besties with my lawyer so bonus points for that, I could talk a lot about this too

Hunt (2022) - Probably less confusing if you know more about Korean history, fun plot twist and imo some homoerotic tension

Scarlett Innocence (2014) - tbh I didn't even watch the whole thing because I don't go for erotic thrillers, I just watched the scenes where Jung Woo Sung is a poor little meow meow

Inseperable Bros (2019) - some dialogue was a bit awkward but that might have been the translation, I like that this was about interabled platonic relationships

Remember You (2016) - the first plot twist is predictable as hell but the second one hit me in the face like a brick

The Childe (2023) - Kim Seon-ho has the range (creepy and babygirl) (covered in blood and coughing up blood)

The Good The Bad The Weird (2008) - not only the best western I've ever seen but also one of the best films I've seen this year at all

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002) - very unsatisfying, but in a good way

As We Were Dreaming (2015) - the German answer to banlieu films, a film about the reunification of Germany from a different perspective than you're used to, despite living decades later and in the west I feel like I know these characters

Transit (2018) - the anti Casablanca, a double exposed picture of past and present, a Kafkaesque limbo of bureaucracy and loss of identity

Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020) - long, confusing, too smart for me and I still couldn't stop watching it. There's something very queer about this film too.

Wicked (2024) - I haven't seen the musical but went to see the film with my friend (and her family) and physically went 👀 to her every time something gay happened. I'm sorry I doubted you Ariana Grande.

December

Fly Me to the Moon (2024) - I watched this on a terrible transatlantic red eye flight and it entertained me. Unique concept but predictable execution

Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through the Snow (2015) - shout out to the Jewish biker guy handing out free puppies

Round and Round (2023) - Actually a really fun Hallmark holiday film?? And a nice twist on the time loop genre??

Wicked Little Letters (2023) - Very fun to watch on new years eve while tipsy

[posttexasstressdisorder]

180,000.0 miles. Happened while driving to the clinic this morning.

Original never-torn-into 22-R. The most bulletproof Toyota engine ever made. Designed to run irrigation pumps 24/7/365 in Japan.

She's just startin' to breathe easy, as they always say.

Just wish I had what I need to get her fully legal again, and to get the damage done by the Karen that hit me repaired...that would go a long way to relieving some of my day-to-day stress. It's been weighing heavier the longer it goes without resolution.

So another little milestone for Li'l Truck.

November '87 is her birth date, so she's 37 years old this year, in a little over a month.

She kicks over effortlessly and idles like a kitten. It's the same kind of bond like the bond I had with my '63 Beetle, Gertrude. Li'l Truck feels like an extension of me when I'm driving. ManMachineMeld.

Where you're the only person who can start it because nobody's ever seen a carburetor before. Or has never had to (sometimes) rock a standard back and forth to get the starter teeth to do their thing right. lulz.

The link goes to a page of photos taken in 2014, when I'd first gotten her completely re-worked. Before any Karens had hit her. Laugh to keep from cryin'.

I was kinda miffed when California wouldn't give me "Lil TRK" for a license plate when I first got out here...something about "LiL" having gang connotations. FFS...sigh.

[visualtaehyun]

This is old news by twt standards lol but there's tons of stuff in my bookmarks still that never made it to tumblr soooo here's New at the Tiktok Awards this November, answering a question about P'Zee being more publicly affectionate lately :)

[iguesswhatimtryingtosayis]

Okay I have known for a little bit that terfs exist, and while it makes me so sad, I know that it's because there will always be sucky people in the world. I was furious when I found out though, because my whole life being a girl was something to be looked down on for, because it was bad to throw like a girl, cry like a girl, dress like a girl, everything. It didn't really matter how good at something I got, I had no chance of being anything besides a girl who was 'not like other girls' or something similar. When I found out that people could be trans, it made me really happy, because it meant that being a woman was not only something that someone could want to be, it was something that was worth being, and it made me feel less looked down on. So to find people who said that those women weren't women because they weren't oppressed their whole lives, or whatever reason that they have, it kind of felt like going back to that place where instead of lifting each other up, it was that same 'not like other girls' mindset. And I hate it.

I got a new thing to hate in addition to that when I found out about swerfs recently. (To be clear: the people who spit in other women's faces because they are in that position. Not people who hate the industry.) People don't realize that most of the women in those places are not there by choice. Sex workers are some of the most exploited and abused people, and the majority of them have been forced into those positions, or they fall back on them because they have no other choice. If you ask most people why they don't want to be a stripper or a prostitute or something similar, there is a 90% chance that they will say that it is because they don't have to, because most people have an awareness that most women don't choose that life. And the sex industry abuses most if not all of those women. But the thing is, even if they wanted (not felt like they had no choice, or were coerced in any way shape or form, like they actually wanted to go into it as a career choice and nothing else) to go into sex work, who cares? (as in who are you, a stranger, to judge them for what choices they make in their life) That is their choice to make with their own lives, and they still deserve to be respected by the people around them; their career choice shouldn't make them considered inhuman. This doesn't mean that the industry does not need to be drastically changed because it is not a safe place. But those women are still human beings who deserve your respect. To exclude these two groups feel to me that it is the same as it was years ago, that in order to have the respect of the world, you have to meet certain standards. And that is not the point of feminism.

Like, I understand that some of the best first steps women made as a whole came from Susan B. Anthony, who was racist. (She actively worked against Sojourner Truth from speaking at the seneca falls convention. "During the Civil War, Sojourner Truth took up the issue of women's suffrage. She was befriended by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but disagreed with them on many issues, most notably Stanton's threat that she would not support the black vote if women were denied it. Although she remained supportive of women's suffrage throughout her life, Truth distanced herself from the increasingly racist language of the women's groups. Truth died on November 26, 1883. In her old age, she had let go of Pentecostal judgement and embraced spiritualism. Her last words were "be a follower of the Lord Jesus."" This Far by Faith . Sojourner Truth | PBS) And a huge proponent of peace, Ghandi, was extremely misogynistic. I get that progress often starts in low places. But it doesn't make the bad things about them suck any less. Feminism is supposed to be a beautiful thing where women lift each other up to make the world better, not a place where women tear each other down to make themselves look better.

(I didn't always know these things so in case other people don't know they mean Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist and Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist)

Edit: apparently someone thought that I was excusing the corruption in the sex industry which is not the case so I made some changes to clarify things

[black-arcana]

ARCH ENEMY's ALISSA WHITE-GLUZ Opens Up About Health Scare During Mexican Tour: 'This Is The Most Pain I Have Ever Experienced'

Alissa White-Gluz has apologized to ARCH ENEMY fans for not being able to perform up to her usual high standards during the band's ongoing Mexican tour.

The 39-year-old Canadian-born singer took to her social media on Sunday (December 8) to write: "Mexico - I [love] you! I am seriously blown away by this country. The nature is diverse and gorgeous; the people are warm, friendly, funny, creative and welcoming; the history is fascinating; the architecture is jaw-dropping; the rich culture of music and art is full of colour and beauty; the food is incredible (every city is like a vegan paradise)… I could go on.

"Thank you so much for your understanding and well-wishes. I feel extremely guilty that I cannot give a normal show because you guys absolutely deserve it. I insisted that we should reschedule but that was apparently not possible.

"This might be TMI [too much information] but since the news is out already I just want these amazing fans in Mexico to know how serious this was and that it absolutely is killing me to not be able to give you 100%.

"Trust me - I have broken my ribs on stage and not missed a show, I have performed through bronchitis, complete laryngitis that took months to heal — everything. This is different.

"I had a doctor come to my hotel bed two days in a row and she said 'she is experiencing a total collapse.' My body is so exhausted that I have a hard time walking. I'm confused. Dizzy. Shaking.

"A bacterial infection lodged in my ears and then aggressively spread to all the soft tissues of my upper body. Ears, eyes, throat, lungs, nose… I had pus leaking out of my EYES. Blood leaking out of my nose. I was freezing and sweating simultaneously and had a fever of 102F for over a week. And yes, I did several shows in this state. I was going into shock. It was an infection that was probably lingering for a long time and finally started winning — my body was losing and it was happening quickly. I think if I didn't get the antibiotics when I did I would be hospitalized or dead right now. I have never experienced a more scary medical situation before in my life. This is also the most pain I have ever experienced and I have a very high pain tolerance (like most women).

"I can feel the love from you guys and it is honestly helping me heal. Thank you for your smiling faces in the crowd — they really do cheer me up.

"It will be several weeks or months before I fully recover but when I do — I am demanding that we come back here so I can give you guys the best concert of your lives. Seriously — I have fallen in love with you, Mexico, and I WILL be back to give you 1000% AWG."

ARCH ENEMY played a full set without White-Gluz on December 3 at El Foro Jai Alai in Tijuana, Mexico after the singer became "very sick" and was unable to join her bandmates at the gig.

ARCH ENEMY's Tijuana performance was part of the group's 18-date tour of Mexico, which launched on November 12 in Toluca and is scheduled to wrap on December 11 in Mexico City.

White-Gluz, former vocalist of Canadian extreme metallers THE AGONIST, joined ARCH ENEMY in 2014 as the replacement for Angela Gossow. Angela, who joined ARCH ENEMY in 2000 and made her debut on the now classic "Wages Of Sin" (2001),stepped down as frontwoman and is now focusing on management, while Alissa took her place.

ARCH ENEMY's new album, "Blood Dynasty", is slated for release on March 28, 2025 via Century Media Records.

The band has released three songs so far from "Blood Dynasty": "Dream Stealer" in July, "Liars & Thieves" in October, and the title track, "Blood Dynasty", in December.

"Dream Stealer" marked ARCH ENEMY's first new music since the release of the "Deceivers" album, which came out in August 2022.

"Dream Stealer" was mixed by Jens Bogren and mastered by Tony Lindgren at Fascination Street Studios.

ARCH ENEMY played its first concert with new guitarist Joey Concepcion on April 24 at Musinsa Garage in Seoul, South Korea. The show was part of ARCH ENEMY's 2024 Asian tour.

In December 2023, ARCH ENEMY announced that it had "amicably" parted ways with longtime guitarist Jeff Loomis.

Jeff, who was the main songwriter in his previous group, NEVERMORE, joined ARCH ENEMY in late 2014, but was not involved in the writing for the latter act's last two albums, 2017's "Will To Power" and the aforementioned "Deceivers".

[ilovepeachicetea]

𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐑𝐚𝐢𝐧, 𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐅𝐚𝐭𝐞 ⋆˚✿˖

𝐋𝐞𝐨𝐧 𝐊𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐱 𝐅!𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

• 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 1.3k

• 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: 2nd person, Fluff, SFW

• 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: A chance encounter on a rainy night, a vending machine, and a stranger who felt like fate. One year later, the past repeats itself but this time, it’s not just coffee waiting for you.

• 𝐀/𝐧: Y'all this my first story, hope u enjoy 😛

21 long years, 7,670 days longing for true love,

184,086 hours of yearning for physical intimacy.

Life was moving very fast around you, with uni finished, everyone around you, friends and mates all seemed to have their life clicked together, from kids to houses..even finding their soulmates.

While you were still wondering if you left your hair straightener on, while on the train ride to work.

You were never the one to crave for romance untill you were introduced to the vast media of movies by your older sister.

Watching '13 going on 30' with your bestest of friends in that one rainy sleepover years ago forever altered your brain chemistry for the better.

It was this very reason your standards were very high, never settling for the bare minimum lead you to not find love so easily.

Hence why you were always left comforting your heartbroken friends.

But this year was different, this year you met Leon Kennedy.

Leon came to your life like a rocket.

Being in your 20's and never in love was quite a shock to the ordinary human..

But to him? It just made him fall for you even more.

─────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────

It was a windy night in November, The rain was cold, wet and relentless..all the adjectives you despised.

Pulling onto your old jacket that was due to be thrown, shivering slightly as you stood under the dim and flickering light of a convience store awning.

The vending machine in front of you, your supposed saviour to this ass weather, was refusing to cooperate.

"You have got to be kidding me"

Jabbing the button seemed to upset the machine even more as it spewed random noises incomprehensible to your soaked ears.

You felt very miserable, all you wanted was that damn coffee.

"Need some help?"

The voice was low, smooth, edged with amusement. You turned, blinking through the rain

And there he was.

A stranger, yet somehow inevitable. Like the universe had been quietly rearranging itself for this very moment.

Your knight in shining armor. Your future. Your everything.

You just didn’t know it yet.

You didn’t know his name yet, but he stood like he belonged in the moment..tall, effortlessly composed despite the weather.

The dim streetlight above cast just enough glow to highlight the sharp angles of his face.

Fate has a funny way of working. Sometimes, it doesn’t knock..it crashes right into you, drenched in rain.

You arched a brow, arms folding as you shot him a look. “Unless you’ve got some secret talent for sweet-talking vending machines, I think your out of luck.”

The man huffed a quiet chuckle, stepping forward like he had all the time in the world.

“Let me see.”

He reached out, pressed the button once and then twice— and the machine let out a mechanical hum before dropping the can smoothly into the tray below.

You stared. “Are you kidding me! Misogynistic machine..”

He crouched down, retrieving the coffee before standing back up and holding it out to you, his smile widening just slightly.

“I guess I’ve got a magic touch.”

You snatched the can from his hand, half-glaring at the machine, half-glancing at him. “Do you just go around saving people, or am I special?”

The man tilted his head slightly, as if considering his answer. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

And just like that, the rain kept falling, the city kept moving, but something in the air between you and him shifted..something important, something undeniable.

─────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────

Thats what brings you today, getting ready for your first anniversary with your dream man!

The city lights flickered like distant stars as you stared at your reflection in the restaurant’s mirror-lined walls.

Tonight felt special, more than just an anniversary. There was something about the way Leon had been looking at you all night, something unreadable in those deep blue eyes of his.

He had gone all out for this dinner. A private rooftop, candlelit table, soft jazz humming in the background as the skyline stretched out around you. The kind of night straight out of a movie.

Afterall he was loaded.

You glanced across the table, taking him in, the way his suit fit just right, the way his fingers tapped absently against his glass, the way his gaze softened every time it landed on you.

"You keep looking at me like that, Kennedy, and I’ll start thinking you’re up to something," you teased, taking a sip of your wine.

Leon smirked, leaning back slightly. "Maybe I just like looking at my girl."

Your heart did a little flip, but you rolled your eyes, setting your glass down. "Smooth."

Dinner passed in a haze of stolen glances, quiet laughter, and the kind of comfortable conversation that came with knowing someone was yours.

But even as the night went on, there was an undercurrent feeling.

Then, just as you were finishing dessert, Leon stood, reaching out a hand. "Lets go."

You blinked up at him. "Where?"

He just smiled. "You'll see."

And of course, you followed.

─────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────────୨ৎ────

The moment you stepped out of the car, you heard it, rain. Pouring, relentless, just like that night a year ago. You pulled your jacket closer, frowning as Leon led you forward.

Then you saw it.

The convenience store. That vending machine.

You turned to him, raising an eyebrow. "Okay, seriously..what are we doing here?"

Leon shrugged, completely unfazed by the downpour. "Just reminiscing."

You scoffed, crossing your arms. Your well done makeup now running down your cheeks.

"In the rain? You’re unbelievable."

But he was already stepping forward, pressing the same button he had a year ago.

You sighed. "Leon, if you seriously brought me all the way here for a canned cof—"

Clink.

A small velvet box dropped into the tray.

Your breath hitched.

Slowly, hesitantly, you reached down, fingers trembling as you picked it up. And when you turned back to him.

Leon was already kneeling.

The rain poured, soaking his suit, dripping from his hair, but he didn’t care. His gaze locked onto yours, steady, certain, filled with everything.

"That night, I thought fate was just playing around. But now I know… it was leading me to you."

A breathless laugh left you, somewhere between a sob and a gasp.

"So," he continued, opening the box to reveal the most beautiful ring you’d ever seen,

"What do you say? Wanna make this official?"

For a second, all you could do was stare at him—this man who had once been a stranger in the rain, and now? Now he was your home.

Your answer came in a rush,hands in his hair, lips crashing into his, tears mixing with the rain.

"Yes, you idiot. A million times yes."

And as he pulled you close, kissing you like you were the only thing that ever mattered, the vending machine hummed quietly behind you.

One year ago, he got you coffee, Tonight he got you forever.

[kaleen-art]

The Big Golden Showdown is Peak Part 1

I have been a long time Part 1 fan but I always had a few episodes I never finished. Back in November or December of last year, I embarked on a rewatch of the Part 1 episodes I had already seen as well as watching the ones remaining, primarily the last 3. It took a while due to personal issues, but I completed the last 3, and I especially enjoyed the final episode (#23), The Big Golden Showdown. So I wrote an essay on it! Read it below!

Hayao Miyazaki has always had a thing for raising the stakes to the utmost degree in his finales. Though I have not yet completed Part 2, I have watched the finale of which he was the director of and you can see that there especially, in which the usually low-stakes silly Part 2 builds a level of tension and terror in the air through its sheer scope. Part 1 however differs, because at face value there is nothing particularly different about the Part 1 finale. It’s a pretty standard Lupin caper, and it ends as most Lupin capers do. They get the treasure, end up losing it somehow anyway but just barely make it out while Zenigata chases after in an attempt to apprehend them. But it’s on a character level I think this episode captures my heart.

Most evidently, Zenigata is at his literal wits’ end. It’s important to note this episode solidifies one of my favorite aspects of Part 1, its continuity. Zenigata acknowledges by now he has captured Lupin twice in the series, and has twice lost him, and after continually failing to get and keep him behind bars, even with the help of a supercomputer, he seems to have given up when he admits to the Police Commissioner that even if he was at the bank when they were transferring the gold coins over, Lupin would’ve been able to steal it anyway. This appears to be a far cry from the Zenigata we’ve previously seen who stuck it through thick and thin. Goemon even remarks that Zenigata is acting differently, though Lupin stubbornly denies it (this underestimation becomes his crucial flaw at the end of the episode). But now he says that if he’s unsuccessful, he’ll resign. This already adds serious weight to this episode. You can observe this in the general tone. 

Additionally, while Part 1’s soundtrack is often ridiculed I find it incredibly fitting for how it’s used. The somber tones of the songs set an overture of finality to this episode, and it really makes things seem like this is the end. And historically speaking, this show failed to meet rating expectations, so to the staff at the time, for all they knew, it WAS. This would be the last time Lupin would ever be animated and the manga was already over, so I believe knowing this, they made this episode as a somber farewell to the characters. It is a bittersweet goodbye.

I think another facet of this is how the characters act. Even though for a majority of it, we see Lupin and the gang act on usual business, they sense something is different, as Goemon says. When Lupin goes to his old hideout, he carelessly wrecks tons of his family heirlooms saying they’re junk and he doesn’t need them. As if he’s ready to move on. Everything seems like it’s going to culminate in this heist, and though I don’t think this was ever going to be their last heist, it’s the climax of their careers (at least up to that point) in a way.

And on that note, it’s in the episode’s climax that these themes come together. Lupin the entire series is always very brash and though it always works out for him, it is here where his crucial flaw comes in. He makes a grave error in this episode and ends up leading the police and Zenigata to him and the gang. Now LUPIN is at his wits’ end. Even though at first it seems like Lupin was just bluffing to Zenigata about not wanting to live anymore after making such a screw-up, I think in a way he was being genuine. As we saw in Episode 4, Lupin takes it hard when he loses to Zenigata. That's why he was willing to fake his death rather than just be taken into custody. There's no doubt he would have escaped, but the idea he could be arrested over such an oversight, he'd rather fake his own death in a dramatic explosion. A true finale.

But that's when the beautiful ending comes in. Lupin thinks he's finally won once and for all, that he successfully faked his death, and the viewers then likely thought that this would be the end of the adventures of Lupin III, once and for all. But then, Zenigata comes back unexpectedly, and in that moment where Lupin and Zenigata look into each other’s eyes, under the water, I think both them and the viewer realize something. It will never be over. And though "the chase will never end" is an easy thing for people to say in a world where this show has been running for 50+ years, back then, that meant something truly special.

Once again, it is the perfect bittersweet ending, and I think the episode’s character writing and exploration in how these characters deal with such heavy stakes make it a personal favorite of mine. Part 1 was so good, only an ending like this could top it off.

[fibula-rasa]

How’d They Do That?

Special Effects & Stunts of Silent Cinema - Part 2

This is the second installment (here's the first) of an open-ended series where I try to highlight and illustrate the work of special effects and stunt artists of silent filmdom. Using articles from contemporary fan and trade magazines, I’ll make gifs or dig up images and/or video clips to accompany the descriptions of how the sequences were executed.

My notations will be bracketed and highlighted in a different color. Hope you all enjoy! Fair warning: this is a long read.

Risking Life and Limb for $25

[from Photoplay, November 1927]

By Dick Hylan

True tales of “stunt” men and women. You cannot afford to miss a single paragraph of these thrilling yarns. There’s one towards the end of the story that alone is worth the price of admission. Read—and don’t jump—this story

DUST—the crash of six-shooters—the thunder of horses’ hoofs on hard ground—the roar and rumble of an onrushing train—the shrill call of man to man—and out of the dust and roar ride thirty men to board the speeding train. Jesse James and his men are on the loose and heaven help the poor working girl!

The horses are alongside the train—and the dirty deed is done. No one seemed to notice that the train was going thirty miles an hour when the men “transferred” from horse to car and engine. No one seemed to care that underfoot the ground was dangerously uneven. No one seemed to worry about the wheels rolling over the steel rails. Nasty wheels that would cut, mangle and kill anything getting under them.

And closest to these wheels, riding the brake beams under the oldest and most dilapidated coach Fred Thomson could find for his latest feature, “Jesse James,” was one man. As Thomson climbed down out of the engineer's cab he saw him.

[Jesse James (1927) is unfortunately considered lost and I was not able to dig up any stills that depict a train-specific stunt. However, here are a few promotional images of Thomson and his amazing horse, Silver King from the film.

Thomson was a stunter turned star whose popularity at the time of this article rivaled Tom Mix. Like Jesse James, the majority of Thomson’s films are now presumed lost and only one film featuring Thomson in a cowboy role is extant: Thundering Hoofs (1924).]

“Mason! What the devil are you doing under there? That's one stunt I don’t remember the script calling for. What's the idea?” He really seemed put out about it. Those brake beams were old and rusted and liable to fall apart.

“Aw, Boss. don't get sore. I didn’t have anything to do on that scene and wanted to get a good look at you crawling into that cab from your horse.”

And so I first saw “Suicide” Buddy Mason, stunt man extraordinary. Like the mail-carrier who went walking on his day off Buddy liked to be in the middle of things. Later I talked to him.

[Buddy Mason was a stunting legend working as a stunt performer/double and stunt coordinator from the 1920s into the 1970s. That’s impressive longevity for the profession!]

“Who are stunt men,” I asked him. “And have you any standard by which stunt men are judged—by other stunt men?”

“Nope. It’s just—well, when you get so they call you by your first name when you come into the hospital, then you belong.”

READ on BELOW the JUMP!

Their creed might be Nietzsche's famous line, “Be hard. Live dangerously.”

It was Winnie Brown, most famous of feminine “stunt men,” who once defended a director like this: “Can't nobody run that man down to me. He treated me whiter than any director I ever worked for. You remember the time I was doing that stuff on a trestle in one of Mix’s pictures? Say, every time I made that jump he had an ambulance waiting right there on the bank for me. That’s the kind of a guy he is.”

Photo caption: Winnie Brown — stunt woman. Some directors are so kind to her that they have ambulances waiting for her after she takes a jump

[Winnie Brown appears to be one of those unsung heroes of the stunt world. There’s very little biographical information out there about her, and none of the films I could confirm her work in (as stunt rider, stunt double, or actor) are extant or accessible for gif making. That said, I’m planning an addendum to this post with a profile of Winnie from a 1922 issue of Photoplay, so stay tuned!]

AN author will have a nightmare and wake up with it still in his mind. He'll put it in his next script and think it’s fine. And it is because when the time comes to do it the casting director for Fox or First National or M-G-M will just take down the telephone and call Al Wilson.

“Hop over to the studio, kid. You’re due to take a dive out of a flaming aeroplane with a parachute which won't open for company.”

And Al will hop—and dive—and then the nurse will say, “Hello, Al. Back again?”

The golden age of the stunt men is passing. That is why it is well to write this brief saga now. To sing a little of the song of their amazing deeds, their mad courage, and their inevitable laughter. Nor is it well to forget that some of the greatest stunt men in the world are high salaried stars, such as Tom Mix and Douglas Fairbanks.

But the progress of photography is rapidly writing the epitaph of the stunt man. The magic double exposure of the Williams process and other inventions in trick photography and development of film are fast rendering it unnecessary to subject any man to the long chances of “stunts.”

[With the privilege of hindsight, we know that optical/photographic effects did not in fact put stunt workers out of a job. Although, the technological developments that progressed out of The Williams Process have made formerly dangerous stunts much safer and impossible stunts possible. To learn more about The Williams Process, you can check out the first part of this series: How They Do It]

So, before they pass, let’s chronicle a few tales by which to remember them.

The average life of the stunt man in motion pictures is under five years. He either gets killed or he gets a little sense and quits.

When you've talked to a few of them you'll realize that they are the kind you like to have around when a fight is brewing, but that they have more nerve and less sense than any other man you've ever met. Few quit.

The greatest stunt man who ever lived—he is dead now and the manner of his death, of which I will tell you, is a typical page in stunt history—was Gene Perkins. The fraternity itself, and such directors as specialize in stunt pictures, seem to agree on that. He was twenty-four when he was killed and had been in the game a little over four years.

THE secret of Perkins’ greatness lay in his amazing ability to figure out a stunt ahead of time, calculating it perfectly according to time and distance, and in the icy clear-headedness which enabled him to carry it out to the hairline the way he had planned it. His nerves—he had none.

Clarence Brown, the director who has just finished “The Trail of ‘98” and who has put on a heap of thrilling stunts in his day, told me a lot of things about “Perk,” particularly the day he asked him if he’d jump into the top of Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park.

Now Nevada Falls is seven hundred feet high and the water in the stream just before it pours over the cliff, from which drop no man could possibly return alive, dashes and whirls along over jagged rocks at a perilous speed.

Brown and Perkins went to the river bank and shouted at each other above the roar of the falls.

“Can you make it, Perk?” Brown asked. “I want you to jump in here,” indicating a spot some forty feet from the edge of the falls, “and go as near to the edge as you think safe.”

“Just a minute and I'll tell you,” said Perk.

He broke the branch off a tree and threw it into the water at the spot the jump was to be made. His eyes narrowed as he watched it intently.

“Sure, I can do it,”’ he said. “When I get here,” he pointed to a spot only two feet from the brink, “throw me a rope and try not to miss me. That water looks cold.”

According to Brown he did the thing with the perfection of a machine.

“I'll never forget the first time Perk ever worked for me,” Brown went on. “When I saw him I thought he was the coolest looking person I’d ever seen. His self-control was astounding. His eyes were like ice, yet they were always smiling.

When the Doctors Call You by Your First Name, You’re a Real Stunt Man

“I wanted him to jump out of a fourth story window. It was a night shot. We stalled around most of the afternoon waiting for it to get dark enough to shoot and about dusk I decided we could do it. I went looking for Perk and found him shooting craps with some of the boys. ‘All ready, Perk?’ I said. He looked at his watch. ‘Excuse me a minute while I telephone,’ he said. I heard him behind me talking over the phone to his wife. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be a little late for supper. I got to jump out of a fourth story window and then I’ll be right along home.’”

Yet Perkins was killed doing something Clarence Brown begged him not to do, warned him against.

“He had a hankering to play around with aeroplanes and used to ask me questions about them,” said Brown, who was himself an aviator during the war. “The advice I gave him was to stay out of them and he'd stay healthy.”

In telling me of Gene Perkins’ last stunt, Brown brought out clearly that greatest of all dangers to the stunt man—the other fellow. You've probably heard a hundred people say about automobile driving, “I don’t worry about myself. It’s what the other fellow is going to do that bothers me.”

[I wasn’t able to positively identify which films the Nevada-Falls or the fourth-story-window appear in. However, I believe that the Nevada Falls shoot may have been a film Clarence Brown was an assistant director on. Every performer in this article required quite a bit of research as stunt performers were practically never credited unless they also had a role in a film.

So, what I was able to unearth as Jean/Gene Perkins filmography includes:

Around the World in 18 Days (1923, serial, presumed lost)

Stunt double for Bill Desmond 

Perkins’ fatal accident occurred on this shoot in Riverside, CA (described below)

Citations: Camera, 20 December 1922; Motion Picture News, 6 January 1923; Exhibitors Herald, 13 January 1923;  Screenland, April 1923; Photoplay, August 1925; Cinelandia, February 1928 

The Vanishing Dagger (1920, serial, presumed lost) 

Production title was “The Fallen Idol”

Perkins also served as assistant camera

Citations: The Moving Picture Weekly, 31 May 1919; Exhibitors Herald, 7 June 1919 

Do or Die (1921, serial, presumed lost) 

Filmed on location in Havana, Cuba

Citations: The Moving Picture Weekly, 21 May 1921 & 18 June 1921; Canadian Moving Picture Digest, 15 June 1921

The Storm (1922, extant at UCLA and EYE Filmmuseum) 

Citations: Camera, 7 January 1922; Motion Picture News, 3 June 1922]

Noomis took the car up about a mile and brought it down hill so that he would crash the gate at a certain speed. Naturally, he couldn't see until he’d crashed through the gate, what was being done the other side of it. And the gate was just on the land side of the apron. When he did see it, it was too late to stop. The engineer of the ferry boat had made a mistake and was three automobile lengths away instead of one. The car and Leo shot into space, did a beautiful one and a half gainor, and came down in forty feet of black and dangerous water. Fortunately the centrifugal force of the thing threw the driver out of the car and they fished him out more dead than alive.

[Nomis is yet another legend of stunting. As mentioned above one of Nomis’ specialities was automobile stunts, but he was also one of the most skilled aviation stunt performers from the 1910s until his untimely death in the 1930s. It was in an accident during an aviation stunt for The Sky Bride (1932), due to unsafe working conditions created by the film’s director, Stephen Roberts. In a tragically ironic turn, at the time of filming Nomis was head of the newly-formed Associated Motion Picture Pilots (AMPP) union—the primary goal of which was to increase safety regulations. 

Unfortunately, as Nomis’ career was so expansive and he was uncredited for most of his work, I was unable to identify which film is associated with the Fort-Lee-Ferry mishap described here.]

The same sort of a mistake on the part of the “other fellow” cost Perkins his life.

“I TOLD him,” said Clarence Brown, “to stay on the ground. Told him he was all right as long as he did his stuff alone. His sense of timing and distance was so perfect and his body control was so fine that he had a pretty good chance to pull through most of his stunts. But he didn’t listen. They never do. One day he did a stunt from a rope ladder hanging from a plane. The pilot was supposed to swoop down and let Perk drop to the top of a freight train. He swooped too low. The ladder banged Perk against the side of a freight car at seventy-five miles an hour—and Mrs. Gene Perkins was a stunt window, that’s all.”

It’s a funny thing how a man wants to see his family carry on the tradition of his work. Gene Perkins had a kid brother whom he tried to break in as a stunt man. But after a few months the kid lost his nerve and went back to—a clothing store! He’s still alive.

As a stunt man Tom Mix has no superiors and few equals. The man doesn't know the word fear, is as inventive as the devil when it comes to figuring out safe ways of doing dangerous things, and has a positive genius coupled with extraordinary physical strength, for getting himself out of tight places. The thin vein of philosophy, which is the foundation of Tom’s character, colors even his viewpoint on stunts.

“If you do it,” he said, sitting on the edge of his beautiful tiled swimming pool in the reddest bathing suit I have ever seen, “it's easy. If you don’t, it’s a mistake—and you'll either not worry about it or have plenty of time to figure out what went wrong while in the hospital.

“FUNNY thing—the hard one is always easy and the easy one hard. That sort of sounds tail first, but looking back over some fifteen years of these things I know it’s true. The reason being that you get prepared for the hard ones. You get arranged a whole lot before you do ‘em. But some fool little easy one comes along and throws you clean out of the saddle. A horse that advertises he’s bad ain't near as hard to ride as one of these meek lookin’ cayuses who on limbers himself in a onlooked for manner.

“Sure, I’ve had a few funny experiences with stunts, and one or two the lady novelists might call hair-raisin’. Had to fall offa bridge into a river in Florida once and didn’t find out until I was shakin’ hands with ’em that the darn river was more full of alligators than water.

“Another that comes to my mind had to do with an aeroplane. Say, ain’t you the feller who plays football for Stanford?”

“Check. But what about the aeroplane?”

“You know I used to play a lot of football in—— ”

“Great. Come up for our Big Game and I'll get you a ticket if you wear your purple suit. Better wear a red one and root for us. What about the aeroplane?”

“That? It was kinda funny. We were workin’ up at Mt. Whitney, which as you probably know is the highest spot on North America. Well, there’s to be a rope hangin’ down from the aeroplane and I’m supposed to climb down it and do some triflin’ service for the hero-ine, the nature of which plumb escapes me for the minute, and climb back up.

“WELL, we dope it out careful. The rope has a series of knots in it as big around as your two fists, which makes climbin’ up and down it what appears to be a comparative simple proposition. I’m to do this on one plane and the cameras are in another. We arrange a set of signals whereby I can let the other plane know if anything untoward happens, and he can signal the pilot in my plane.

“And I remarks to my pilot, ‘And if you get the signal that I can’t get back up, you head right for the ocean and drop me off.’ The ocean ain’t but about an hour or so away, so I figure we’re all set. An ocean is a darn sight softer place to land than a mountain.

“Well, I don’t have any trouble gettin’ down. But when I start up things take on a different aspect. There’s considerable wind blowin’ up there, what with the speed we’re makin’ and the natural velocity in those parts. I get hold of the knot up higher and start to pull myself up and, by gosh, the wind just blows the rope out behind me like a tail and I haven’t got any knot to set down on like I figured.

“I stewed around quite a spell, tryin’ it out several times, but every time the wind coppers my bet. Oh yes, I’m forgettin’ to mention that I’ve got a loop at the end of the rope which I put my leg through, so I can set there pretty comfortable while we’re travellin’. But once I’d started up and the trouble began, I discover my arms are gettin’ pretty tired. So I finally figure out that the only thing is to pull myself up with one hand quick and reach under quicker with the other and hold that consarned rope down so I can set on it. I tried it and it worked. And that was all there was to that. I got up all right.

[Tom Mix was one of the biggest western stars of the era and, as he was a star as well as a stunter, his career is much better documented than others profiled in this article. However, a significant portion of Mix’s career was spent at Fox, so due to the Fox Vault Fire of 1937, most of his nearly 300-films are now presumed lost.

While I couldn’t track down the films he described above, Mix performed similar stunts in Sky High (1922):

In the wide shots, the leg loops on the rope that Mix described are visible.]

“ANOTHER time, somebody—may be it was me—gets the bright idea of havin’ me grab a rope ladder hangin’ down from the plane when I’m on horseback.. Don’t sound very dangerous, but the first time we try it out, it just naturally scares the poor hoss to death and he mighty near gets himself and me both beheaded.

“So we decide to hang a big cable between two cliffs—one of ’em about 500 feet high and the other about 300—and put the plane on the cable with pulleys. That does away with the noise of the engines and I think I can manage the hoss all right then. We allow enough sag, according to our mathematics, to get the plane just close enough to the ground for me to grab onto the ladder.

“Well, when I see the thing comin’ I figure out that maybe it’d be a good idea to get my leg through the first rung of that there ladder, so that when I arrive on the other side I'll be in a position to start grabbin’ something to hold onto.

“So when I make the jump, I do it that away. Which, as it turns out, is mighty close to a fatal and certainly a right uncomfortable error. Either our calculation is off about forty degrees or that cable develops more sag, because we're a heap closer to the ground than we expected to be. I can’t get my leg out and the darn thing just drags me right along the ground for quite a spell, before they can stop it.

“OF course it wasn't exactly dangerous, but it sure burned me plenty. That ground was so hot when I finally got up it had burned off everything but my boots, including considerable hide.”

[When I first read through this article, I thought that the set-up for this stunt would be distinctive enough for me to identify the film—but no! While I’m not the biggest Mix fan, the stunts in his extant films are always ambitious!]

He gave me one of his friendly irresistible grins.

“Had a funny one happen once with a train. It was up at Colorado Springs. The stunt was like this. I’m on top of the train when it comes to a low tunnel. You can see for yourself that’s no nice place to be. So just as it goes roarin’ in, I’m to grab the tell tales hangin’ outside and swing myself up a little and hold on. We had it fixed so that the engineer would just go inside the tunnel and then back right out and I could drop down again.

“It comes off accordin’ to schedule up to the time I grab the tell tales and start hangin’ on and the train goes into the tunnel. I’m fairly peaceful in my mind, bein’ as I expect him right back. But the engineer had ideas of his own, I guess. He stopped on the other side of the tunnel to fill up his pipe and give his engine a nice drink of water and wind his watch, and all the time I’m hangin’ on to that damn tell tale, thirty feet above a lot of railroad ties and little sharp rocks and steel tracks. Naturally I’m not hankerin’ a whole lot to fall onto that kind of a bed.

“IF I’d known he wasn’t comin’ back, I could have swung myself up onto a rope we had stretched across, but I'm a confidin’ son-of-a-gun and by the time I realize this engineerin’ gent is operatin’ on his own, my arms are too tired to make the pull. And just about that time I hear the train start back, my arms is beginnin’ to give out and it dawns on me that I’m goin’ to hit the middle of that track just about ten seconds previous to a large amount of train.

“Well, there wasn’t nothin’ for it but to jump then, so l’d have time to get out of the way, and I did. I reckon I must have missed that train all of six inches. And my legs was black and blue to the knees for weeks and I got a lot of blood vessels down there that haven’t resumed friendly relations with the rest of my carcass since.”

[Obviously the stunt gone wrong did not appear in The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926), but the shot of Mix running off the top of a moving train and grabbing the tell tales is very impressive and is followed by a cut to him climbing down.]

For thrills, no picture in years has caused so much comment as Paramount's great aviation spectacle, “Wings.”

And a lot of that stunt stuff was done by regulation United States Army air pilots. They did things any stunt man would be proud to call his own and merely remarked in passing that it was “all in the day’s work.”

The particular officer who qualified for admission to the inner circle was one Lieutenant Rod Rodgers. This young gentleman went up in an army plane filled with the sort of explosives which produce an effect of a plane bursting into flames. In his mouth he carried a quantity of the kind of stuff actors use to make it look like they’re bleeding to death. The idea was that when he got up to 6000 feet he was to turn on a mechanical camera which operated itself and which was located just in front of the pilot in the cockpit. He would then pretend to be hit by a bullet, allow the blood to gush from his mouth, let go the stick, and kick the plane into a tail spin with his foot. While the mechanical camera ground on and on, he would come down out of control.

The shot recorded by the camera is one that is picking audiences out of their seats and according to aviators is about the toughest stunt on record—to sit limp and useless while your plane tail spins toward the earth, knowing that at the last moment you must right it or see “Finis” written across your record.

IT isn’t in the picture, by the way, but the studio has the film and a few people have seen it—the moment when Lieutenant Rogers peeped over the side and saw that he was only 500 feet above ground. He came out of his trance, grabbed the stick and pulled it back against his waist and made one remark, which subtitle registered on the screen in amazing fashion and can be compared to those seen—not written—in “What Price Glory” and “The Big Parade.”

It was on “Wings” also that Dick Grace, for several years a famous air stunt man, had his neck broken. He wore during these “crash” sequences, a wide leather belt, reaching from the place where he sat down right up under his arms. Then he was encircled by a series of very strong steel springs, so that it was hoped when he crashed he would be protected.

Photo caption: Immediately after the crash in “Wings,” Dick Grace (center) was photographed with his aeroplane. Later, it was discovered that his neck was broken!

HE wasn't. In one shot, where he had to turn a plane completely over on its back, and land, the stunt apparently came off fine. Grace climbed out of the wreckage, had his picture taken, and only then collapsed. It was discovered at the hospital that his neck was broken.

But what's a little thing like a broken neck to a stunt man? He started right on over to Honolulu, with his neck still done up in all sorts of steel braces, to try and hop across the Pacific from Honolulu to San Francisco in advance of the Dole flyers. He crashed trying to get off the island, but he is still flying, and back in Hollywood ready for more work.

They’ve got some funny expressions in this stunt game. One of them that stopped me was when Buddy Mason first pulled the expression “yucca-nutty.” He remarked that a certain stunt man was yucca-nutty and I had to holler for help.

[Like Mason, Dick Grace was a prolific legend of stunting who survived his career. Pretty impressive considering Grace was an aerial specialist. Grace was a founding member of the AMPP and served as president in the 1930s.]

“Well, it’s like this,” Buddy said kindly. ‘‘All this furniture you see busted over guy’s heads in pictures is made of yucca, which is the lightest wood in the world. You know—yucca is a plant that grows in the California hills. Of course it don’t amount to much, but if you get beaned with enough yucca chairs, in time it begins to make a few dents in what you like to call your brain and then you get yucca-nutty. That's the explanation for a lot of things that happen in Hollywood.”

Another expression which Buddy applies to his pals in the great industry of stunting is “crash-goofy busters.” Which is self-explanatory and descriptive.

[I feel like I haven’t been living my life to the fullest because I have no reason to incorporate the phrases “yucca nutty” and “crash-goofy busters” into my regular vocabulary.]

Photo caption: Greta Garbo and Jack Gilbert after a smash-up in “Love.” Jack uses no doubles for this dangerous work

I asked Buddy what was the worst stunt he’d ever done and after some meditating he unbosomed himself about as follows:

“The amateur gets hurt the most, of course. A boob thinks it’s all easy, and that there’s no technic to the game. Thinks that nerve is required and that’s all and that it’s an easy way to make money. We've got a pretty good scale of prices now—a certain stunt is worth so much, some other one is worth so much more. If an outsider comes in and works for less, he gets told where to head in at. We haven’t the slightest objection to new men coming in. But it isn’t fair to cut prices.

“WELL, the worst smash I ever had was in one of the old serials. I was supposed to drive a motorcycle through the guardrail of a bridge and land on top of a freight train passing under the bridge. They had part of the roof of one of the freight cars cut out and covered with thin laths and cardboard. In the car, beneath the opening made in the roof, were mattresses for me to land on. Everything went fine except the engineer got the speed bug and went faster than he was supposed to and I didn’t quite hit the hole. I landed half in it and about half on the good strong roof of the car and drove the handlebars of the motorcycle up through my ribs. I bounced into the car after that, but I missed the mattresses. All I got was a broken shoulder, five broken ribs, and a dislocated hip. And they say football is a rough game.”

[What an awful accident! There isn’t enough context here for me to identify the serial, but if any of you remember seeing an outrageous stunt like this please shout it out!]

Buddy told me another one about a pal of his, named Bobby Dunn, who was working on a Keystone comedy. They wanted Bobby to dive out of an eighth story window of a fashionable apartment house on Wilshire boulevard. He was to land in a mortar box. The only difference between that particular mortar box and the common one seen in front of buildings when the walls are being plastered was that this one held milky water and was four feet deep instead of one foot. It had been sunk three feet deep into the lawn so that it looked like the regular ones.

BOBBY took one look at the layout and said it couldn’t be done. The box was too close to the wall of the building. From such a height it would be practically impossible to land that close. Somebody took him around to the back of the building and talked persuasively to him. During the course of the conversation several drinks changed hands—from the persuader to Bobby. Finally, Bobby went back and took another look. This time it didn’t look nearly so dangerous. Again they repaired to the back yard and discussed the matter over a bit of liquid refreshment. When they returned this time, Bobby said it was one of the simplest things he’d ever been asked to do and he could do it any time they were ready.

He did. The tank being so shallow, Bobby had to cut his dive very flat. He did that, too, cutting it so flat that he skipped right out of the tank and landed out in the middle of the street on his face. If you have ever thrown flat stones on a lake, you know how Bobby Dunn skipped out of that mortar-box diving tank.

[At the time of writing, I haven’t identified the film featuring this stunt, but since I’m a pretty avid silent comedy fan, I’ll update the post if/when I come across it!]

Which reminds me of one Anita Loos told. She always has a pet story based on fact for every imaginable situation. I had asked her what she knew about stunt men. She laughed. How that little brunette can say gentlemen prefer blondes I don’t know.

[Content warning for this section: Loos’ story here is a racist characterization of Native American actor and stunt performer Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye, while not as fete-d as his white colleagues, had an impressive resume and his career is slightly better documented since he was also an actor. His specialty as a stunter was big falls. Eagle Eye reportedly made a 200-foot drop for the film The Fatal Black Bean (1915, presumed lost). 

Photo of Eagle Eye (right) with Wallace Reid and Loretta Blake in At Dawn (1914) from Reel Life, 5 December 1914

If you want to skip the racist bit, the gifs of the falling stunts from Intolerance will be at the end of the anecdote.]

“YOU probably remember the battle scenes in ‘Intolerance’,” she said. “Well, during that sequence somebody had to take a particularly hard back dive off one of the high  battlements. Of course nets were spread to catch the diver, but who knows much about nets? They have been known to give way or to be some place else when most needed. The stunt man who was to do the trick was an Indian named Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was a good stunt man, but he had to be full of firewater before he could perform. A minister had been after him for six months to give up drinking, and after a long life and with 364 other days in the year, Eagle Eye had to choose the day before this big stunt to get religion and sign the pledge. The pledge meant no firewater and no firewater meant no stunt.

“D. W. Griffith, who was directing, ran around wild-eyed to find another stunt man. He couldn’t find anybody who would tackle it, so he finally went to the minister and prevailed on him to get a special dispensation from Mencken or somebody so that Eagle Eye could imbibe just once more for the good of his art and do the stunt. And he did.”

MOST of Doug Fairbanks’ great stunts are simply feats of athletic prowess. There is no great element of danger in them. They take infinite skill, training, practice, but they either can be done or they can’t. They are what I should call legitimate stunts and require the skill of a great athlete and not the peculiar angle of the stunt man.

I caught him between a couple of them. He had just finished leaping from his horse which was going at full speed. And he came right back to ride into a mob of milling, long-horned cattle where a slip of the horse’s foot would have meant as nasty a death as anyone could conceive. But you didn’t feel any sense of danger in them at the moment because of the perfection of Doug’s work.

I stopped him just long enough between the two to ask one question.

“What's the most difficult thing you’ve ever done before a camera?” said I.

“Make love,” said Doug, and went on with his horses and cattle.

Up until recently Fred Thomson, whose fame and popularity as a western star are growing by leaps and bounds, did all his dangerous work. Fred, as you doubtless remember, was champion all-round athlete of the world several years and he figures he has a better chance than a less trained man. Regardless of Fred’s feelings in the matter, Paramount officials have recently forced him to use a double for the more dangerous stunts in order to protect the large amount of money invested in the picture. (I can’t help wondering what they call dangerous—those train wheels looked very mean to me.)

Thomson keeps this stunt man on a regular salary, whether he works or not. The reason Fred gives is that said stunt man will do anything at all times and the kid would go out between the Thomson pictures and get all busted up.

Photo captions: Above: Ralph Forbes about to be crowned with a Yucca chair. Below: Harry Carey plays a human torch. Both in “The Trail of ‘98”

One of the most dangerous stunts ever attempted was in “The Trail of ‘98” and was pulled by Harry Carey. After they had saturated Carey’s clothes with kerosene, the hero—Ralph Forbes—smashed a lighted kerosene lamp over his head. This immediately turned him into a living torch. He had to dash across the room, onto a balcony, and leap ten feet onto the floor of the dance hall below. You can see quite plainly in the picture that Carey did this thing himself. They had every foot of the route he had to cover manned with fire extinguishers and if the fire burned through his heavy underwear he was to holler and they would instantly put the fire out—if it didn’t put Carey out first.

[I don’t know if it’s true that Carey did these stunts himself but I’m amazed they let a movie star perform all that!]

AN odd commentary on the perverse nature of all things is the death of three men on his big Alaskan story. It was reported that they were killed in a stunt. As a matter of fact they were killed repairing a safety device.

A big cable had been extended across the river and these four men went out in a boat to repair the tell tales which were to furnish protection for the actors who had to come down the river in light boats. The man up on the cable fell when it broke under him, hit the side of the boat and tipped it over. Three of the men could swim and the fourth couldn’t. He hung onto the boat and was saved while the others tried to swim ashore and were drowned.

Joe Bonomo is a well known stunt man who broke into pictures with a heart-breaking experience. Joe was a circus man for years, an acrobat and diver and horseman. He heard a lot about the big money his brothers of the celluloid were making so he decided to have a crack at it himself.

He answered an advertisement, which is one of the first things young girls are warned against in a big city. The producer he encountered was Jewish and belonged on Poverty Row though this was in New York.

“It’s all very well, Mr. Bonomo,” he said, “you should sit there and say you are a stunt man. How should I know? If you are a stunt man, for me you should do some stunts.”

SO Joe, who is a trusting soul, complied. He went out and jumped off a skyscraper, dived off liners, changed wings on an aeroplane and did various other things on which he prided himself. All the time the camera was grinding. But Joe didn't think anything of that.

The producer told him he’d done very well and he would let him know later if he wanted him. He took Joe’s telephone number. And that was the last he heard of it until he saw himself and all his stunts in a two-reeler in a Broadway house.

He is still trying to collect.

[Joe Bonomo was a strongman turned stunt performer, who also acted. His film career petered out slowly after the advent of sound. Bonomo moved on to become a fitness instructor, publishing multiple books on the topic. At the time of this article, he likely would have been working as a stunt performer on The Trail of ‘98, discussed above.

Joe holding Louise Lorraine aloft in The Great Circus Mystery (1925, serial, presumed lost)]

Janet Ford, Universal’s stunt woman, has the same philosophy as Mix. She says, “Stunts? If you do them they are easy. I’ve been lucky so far and always done mine so I think they are easy. The only time I’ve ever been hurt was once down in San Diego. I had to swim about two hundred yards and then do a drowning act right under the camera. Guess I was too realistic about it because it scared an old man who was on the pier at the time. He thought I was going down, so jumped in after me and grabbed me around the middle to save me. For sixty-five years old that baby was strong, because in addition to crabbing the scene, he broke four ribs for me.

“YES, I like the game. We are hitting the high spots of life all the time. That is, nothing we do is commonplace, it is always at top speed. And I’ve noticed that it’s generally the cocksure amateur who gets panicky and takes a smash up. That’s especially so among the women ‘stunters.’”

[Janet Ford’s filmography is tough to pin down not just for the same reasons as other stunters, but because there was a contemporary actress with the same name. Ford performed stunts for over a decade starting in 1920, with a specialty in aquatic stunts. There isn’t enough context here for me to identify the film from this anecdote, but I do know that she doubled for Virginia Valli in The Storm (1922, extant at UCLA and EYE Filmmuseum) and for Virginia Brown Faire in Shadows of the North (1923, presumed lost) citation: Picture-Play Magazine, March 1925

Photo of Lord from Picture-Play Magazine, March 1925]

Yes, some of them talked sane enough—for a time. But talk to them long enough and you find that a wheel is missing somewhere.

That they do not look upon life as do the rest of us.

They seem to be divided into three classes: 1. Those in the game for the money; 2. Those who see in this a chance to “break into the movies”; and 3. Just the plain nut who does it.

And some of the tales you hear of them are pathetic. At least they would be if they weren’t comic.

Here’s just two short ones for a final fade out.

A stunt flyer was sent for not long ago and asked to take a bad crash for one of the larger studios. He was to nose dive into the ground from 4,000 feet. He said:

“Sure, I’ll do it—for three thousand dollars. It’s a hospital job and I have to take care of my wife while I'm laid up.”

They paid him the money, he gave it to his wife, took the crash, and went to the hospital for six months. When he got out his wife had run away with another stunt man and the three thousand!

Freddie “Speed” Osbourne raced a motorcycle off a cliff for a news reel. A parachute—but let J. B. Scott the camera man who took the pictures of the stunt tell it.

He saw it.

“OSBOURNE was to race his motorcycle up to the edge of the cliff and then he and the whole works were to go over the edge. He had a parachute attached to his back and was to open it when about thirty feet from the take-off. This would give it time to open and let him down safely.

“About the time ‘Speed’ should have pulled the parachute the motorcycle developed carburetor trouble. Instead of pulling the ’chute, the nut reached down and primed the carburetor.

“By the time he straightened up he was out in the air. He crashed and busted himself all up. I was the first one to him and his shin bones were sticking straight out through his boots. All he said was, ‘Cut those damn boots off, will you, Scotty?’

“He’s still in the hospital and spends his time figuring out how he can make that jump in a Ford coupe!”

[British Pathe’s youtube has the clip of Osbourne performing the stunt. It almost seems impossible he survived this!

The incident happened on 24 November 1926 and Osbourne had just finished filming airplane stunts for a film. Unfortunately his stunt career isn’t well documented, but Osborne/Osbourne was an aviation stunt specialist as well as a motorcycle stunter.]

I was properly impressed and still inquisitive.

“Scotty, you’ve talked to this bird a lot. Can you tell me for what under the sun he does things like that?”

“Sure,” said Scott. “For twenty-five dollars.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pinkdrunk Linkdump

Today (November 18) at 1PM, I'll be in Concord, NH at Gibson's Books, presenting my new novel The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

On Monday (November 20), I'm at the Simsbury, CT Public Library at 7PM

Happy Saturday! As is so often the case, I have finished the week with more stray links that I can fit into my blog, so it's time for a linkdump post, in which an assorted assortment is assembled. This is my tenth such linkdump – here are the previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

While nostalgia is a toxic impulse (h/t John Hodgman), there's no denying that there once existed an old, good web, and that it has given way to the enshitternet. I don't want to bring the old, good web back, but I would welcome a new, good web, and by studying the factors that contributed to the old, good web's rise and fall, we can both conjure up that new, good web – and protect it.

Above all, the old, good web was contingent, a series of lucky accidents, like Tim Berners Lee's decision to make the code and ideas and protocols for the original web as open and free as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

This meant that there was no way to use the law to capture the web. Contrast that with, say, AOL or Compuserve. If you were the Compuserve's CEO and one of your rivals started using your servers to deliver a service that your users preferred, which shifted value from you to this new rival, you could just pull the plug on them. If they came back – using reverse-engineering or fake signups or whatever – you could sue them. Compuserve's bosses made the rules, any rules they wanted, and could kick you off if you violated them. If you pressed the issue, they could get the government to come and fine you, or, in extreme situations, arrest you.

But the open web didn't have these enforcement hooks. If you ran an early website and Yahoo deeplinked to it, you could change the link, but you couldn't make Yahoo stop. The open web was competitive, and that prevented anyone from exercising a veto over who could make the web, and how. It meant that the web was always up for grabs, with key chokepoints like browser market share swinging around wildly from one vendor to another (until Microsoft started illegally tying blocking rival browsers in Windows).

That meant that the "governance" of the web was often just a matter of the technical details of its standards. Code may not be law, but it was sure law-like – if something was in, say, a W3C browser standard, then all the browsers would support it, and then anyone trying to do something cool on the internet could rely on every potential user having it.

Naturally, this made standards development organizations into the sites of vicious power-struggles. These SDOs are classic "weak institutions," lacking the robust rules of, say, a competition regulator, to say nothing of the investigative and enforcement powers of the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

But in the old, good web days, the SDOs had an important advantage: the corporate fragmentation of the web. Because of TBL's decision not to create IP chokepoints, even the wildly overcapitalized companies of the go-go dotcom bubble days weren't able to control the web. No one company was indispensable to the web.

If Microsoft wanted to tilt a W3C standard to its advantage, it couldn't threaten to leave the consortium if it didn't get its way. For one thing, the consortium had such a diversity of membership that losing any one member's dues wouldn't sink the org's finances.

For another, if Microsoft boycotted the W3C, that would just mean that the web standards that all those other companies were making wouldn't reflect its priorities or desires. By staying in the W3C, Microsoft got to participate in rulemaking – if it left, it would be relegated to rule-taking.

But the DoJ and FTC spent the ensuing decades in something like a coma. After a failed bid to break up Microsoft – killed when GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the case – America's antitrust enforcers snoozed through decades of consolidation, and the transformation of the old, good web into "five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

This turned SDOs into increasingly fraught battlegrounds where giants duked it out among each other for control of the web. In the days of the old, good web, the W3C was able to continue TBL's chokepoint-free ethos, creating rules that forced members to surrender their patents at the door:

https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/

But once the enthitternet was fully in force, the largest corporate members became so important to SDOs' ability to operate that even the W3C wasn't able to resist. They started turning out IP-encumbered standards that were so proprietary that even filing bug-reports against browsers could mean jailtime:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

Within a couple years, it became functionally impossible to implement a web-browser without a license from one of a tiny handful of gigantic, monopolistic corporations, who could use the license to exercise a veto over both who could make a browser, and what that browser could do:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Standards development is one of those esoteric, hugely important activities that almost no one knows anything about. Good standards are key to an open, free internet, and as governments around the world grapple with Big Tech monopolies, their plans often include a block that basically reads "insert good standard here."

As exciting as the EU's Digital Markets Act and US proposals like the ACCESS Act are, the "insert good standard here" stuff is wildly underspecified and undertheorized. Making a good standard – one that is robust, flexible and secure – is hard enough even under competitive competitions where the SDO can play independent referee, more powerful than the participants. But making good standards under monopolistic conditions is really hard.

And yet, it happens! Look at the Fediverse, powered by Mastodon and its adaptation of a W3C standard called ActivityPub. The Fediverse has done more for an interoperable, decentralized web than all the other projects of the past decade combined:

https://fediverse.party/

How did something so useful and capture-resistant emerge from the enshitternet, from the same standards-body that gave us a proprietary "standard" that allowed three giant companies to seize the right to authorize the production of web browsers themselves?

Therein lies quite a tale. In a talk for this year's Association of Internet Researchers conference, Robert Gehl talks about the weird, highly contingent factors that delivered a fit-for-purpose Fediverse standard:

https://fossacademic.tech/2023/10/15/APnonStandard.html

Gehl starts by describing ActivityPub as a "non-standard standard." The technologists who created it at the W3C were largely unpreturbed by the Big Tech members, who viewed ActivityPub as unimportant, a folly. While this meant that the ActivityPub creators were free from Big Tech attempts to corrupt the standard, they were also insulated from the discipline of Big Tech standards people, who are expert at propelling a standard to completion while resolving conflicts to create a single, unified spec.

By contrast, ActivityPub's creators made seven different specs, resolving factional disputes by letting everyone get their way. Critical parts of these standards – including support for federation! – was marked as optional in group's charter.

Then along came Mastodon, implementing the draft spec for ActivityPub. This triggered two extensions to the deadline for ActivityPub's completion. ActivityPub moved to final draft against the backdrop of the real-world experiences of early Mastodon users. Four of the five ActivityPub authors self-identified as queer, and they set out to make Mastodon more harassment-resistant than corporate social media:

https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/053-fediverse-reflections-while-the-bird-burns.html

The early success of Mastodon shifted the focus of ActivityPub authors and implementers. In Gehl's words, "half of ActivityPub" is now ignored. Gehl's essay shows how many needles Mastodon threaded to get to where it is today, and while there's an argument that there was a Fediverse-shaped hole in the internet that something was going to fill, the Mastodon-inflected flavor of ActivityPub we got is pretty great.

Gehl is working on a book about this for Oxford University Press, "Move Slowly and Build Bridges":

https://fossacademic.tech/2023/08/17/OxfordUP.html

One of the more contingent elements of the nascent new, good web is Signal, the secure, robust, easy-to-use encrypted messaging tool that has stepped in to fill the gap that encrypted email tools like PGP struggled to fill for years (though that doesn't mean that secure email is impossible!):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/01/end-to-end-encryption-is-too-important-to-be-proprietary/

Like Mastodon, Signal threaded a bunch of different needles to get to its current status, and it's still threading needles. In a new article, Signal's amazing new president, Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund explain what it costs to keep Signal running:

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Bottom line: Signal costs $50m/year. The breakdown is fascinating and weird. Signal pays a fortune to send SMS messages to verify your number when you sign up. Here's an irony: as Signal displaces SMS, telcos are making up for lost revenue by charging Signal ever-higher rates to send those signup codes – Signal's spending $6m/year on SMSes!

Storage costs Signal another $1.3m/year. Servers are $2.9m/year. Bandwidth is $2.8m/year. Signal's storage and compute costs are low because they're privacy-first, so they're collecting, processing and storing as little data as possible. Add a couple more zeros per user to approximate the costs for high-surveillance alternatives to Signal.

Because Signal is end-to-end encrypted, they can use untrusted (and cheap) third parties for bandwidth, relaying and storage. Your phone encrypts the data before it leaves your device, and no one can decrypt it except the person you're talking to. That lets Signal shop around for server infra, saving much more. Even so, voice and video calls consume a lot of bandwidth, and it gets more expensive because they jump the connection through multiple servers to prevent the people you're talking to from capturing your IP address.

Signal's got 50 full-time employees – a "shockingly small" team by industry standards. But still: 50 developers, managers, designers, accountants, etc all add up to $19m/year (the org pays "as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit").

As Signal scales up, it is discovering new and exciting bugs and problems. A one-in-a-billion bug that may never crop up in a small service can suddenly start occurring on a daily basis once you hit scale. That means Signal will continue to hire engineers to crush these weird little bugs, and they're going to be the kinds of specialists who can preserve privacy while fixing servers.

Signal is amazing. It's been six years since they figured out how to transmit userids, numbers and photos as fully encrypted blobs. Not one of their competitors – not even the "secure" ones from giant Big Tech companies – have managed this. Even Signal's system for embedding animated GIFs is privacy-preserving – the system doesn't reveal your search terms to the GIF repositories.

Today, Signal is tooling up to create "post-quantum resistance" to the system, anticipating the arrival of functional quantum computers that will (theoretically) make short work of existing encryption techniques.

The article ends – logically enough – with a plea for donations. I'm a Signal donor already:

https://signal.org/donate/

The Signal and ActivityPub stories reveal the important interplay between principled individuals and sustainable institutions. Benevolent dictators – whether that's Tim Berners Lee, or Mastodon's Eugen Rochko – work well, but fail badly. No matter how benevolent a dictator is, they are not infallible or omniscient. A critical juncture in any good project is its transition from a dictatorship to a democracy – an individual to an institution.

Take the Archive of Contemporary Music, the largest archive of popular music in the world. It was founded in 1985 by Bob George, who had amassed a collection of 47,000 LPs in a loft he'd lived in since 1974:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/16/archive-of-contemporary-music-new-york

George and his co-founder, David Wheeler, have since grown the collection to 3m pieces of media with 90m songs. They were the first people to start seriously collecting and preserving music that others viewed as ephemeral and disposable. The collection wandered from place to place before settling in a Hudson Valley facility that it is about to outgrow.

In part that's because they're still one of the only places where others' collections can be reliably consigned. When Keith Richards wanted to turn his blues collection over to a facility for long-term preservation, he chose ARC. Now, ARC is working with the Internet Archive to digitize and make available its vast holdings.

But that's a fraught and contingent business, too. The Internet Archive has been targeted with one of those bowel-loosening record-industry lawsuits last seen during the Napster Wars, with Sony, Universal and others seeking damages that would permanently shutter the Archive and bankrupt its founder, the wonderful Brewster Kahle:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/14/internet-archive-responds-to-recording-industry-lawsuit-targeting-obsolete-media/

The suit argues that when a library makes 78RPM recordings available for its patrons to check out over the internet, they cannot avail themselves of the copyright exemptions that have been a feature since copyright's inception. Remember, libraries are an order of magnitude older than copyright! The core of this suit is that libraries cannot move into the digital world.

Rather than doing what libraries have done since (literal) time immemorial – collecting works, preserving them and making them available – digital libraries can only license time- and circulation-limited copies of works that can't be preserved. It's a grim vision of a future without libraries:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/they-want-to-kill-libraries/

Giant corporations are an existential threat to human thriving. After 40 years of neoliberalism, there's a growing recognition that the market's invisible hand would like to swat you like a bug. Hence the rise and rise of the labor movement. Though "union density" (the proportion of unionized workers) is still at an historically low ebb, union support among the public is higher than at any time since the New Deal.

That's why UAW president Shawn Fain is planning a general strike in 2028, calling on other unions "to align your contract expirations with our own" so that all the contracts come up for renegotiation at the same time:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-auto-workers-general-strike-contract-labor-unions

This is a very clever way to overcome America's ban on sympathy strikes, which was introduced in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act. Sympathy strikes – where all unionized workers refuse to provide any service to employers who won't bargain fairly with their own workforce – are a hugely powerful tool for labor movements. Look at Sweden, where Tesla has refused to bargain with the technicians who fix its cars.

In response, the entire Swedish workforce has united against Tesla. Dockworkers won't unload its cars at the port. Electricians won't fix its chargers. Cleaners won't clean Tesla showrooms:

https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-tesla-strike-cleaners/

This is how it's done. Musk has made his fortune by crushing worker power in every one of his businesses, joining the ranks of Apple and Amazon as one of the world's leading maimers and killers of his workforce:

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-11-18/us-lawmakers-urge-scrutiny-of-spacex-worker-injuries-after-reuters-report

While Musk's latest turn toward open antisemitism is grim, especially in light of his ownership of Twitter, it's perfectly in character for a man whose businesses have always been charnel houses of "crushed limbs, amputations, head injuries and death."

But Musk can't fire or even intimidate the dockworkers who won't unload his cars. Sympathy strikes enlist workers who are beyond the reach of intransigent employers in aid of workers who are subject to retaliation for striking. That's why Taft-Hartley abolished sympathy strikes.

But if all the major unions are negotiating their contracts in 2028 – as Fain has called for – they can all strike without falling afoul of Taft-Hartley. That's some shrewd tactics.

Even if you believe in markets as a force for increasing human thriving, it takes an act of will to miss how corporations who can exploit their customers or workers will. When it comes to exploitable customers, prisoners are the ultimate captive audience. Most of us are familiar with the horrors of private prisons – especially after the acute phase of the covid pandemic, when corporate prison managers simply left America's prisoners to die.

But prison privatization is fractal. You can privatize a prison facility, but you can also privatize the commissary, the library, the mail, even phone calls and visitations. Some of the slimiest prison profiteers are the ones providing telecoms facilities to prisons. These companies lobby to ban in-person visits and mail and then provide "free" phone service to state facilities – service that can cost prisoners and their families $10/minute.

One of the worst of these companies is ViaPath (formerly Global Tel*Link). Not only did they charge prisoners sky-high rates for contact with their families, they ran a wildly insecure service that breached the data of 600,000 users:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/prison-phone-company-leaked-600k-users-data-and-didnt-notify-them-ftc-says/

These prisoners and families had "sensitive personal information" exposed online in unencrypted form, and were not informed of the breach, according to an FTC complaint:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Complaint-GlobalTelLinkCorp.pdf

The company went on to defraud state and local prison systems whose contracts they were bidding on, by claiming to have never have suffered a breach.

The sleaze of the prison-tech system is the worst imaginable – which is about what you'd expect. After all, prison-tech is at the very foot of the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The prisoners who are abused by companies like Viapath are test subjects for technology that will work its way up the privilege gradient, moving on to mental patients, asylum seekers, kids, blue collar workers, white collar workers – then, everyone.

This makes prison-tech a great oracle for understanding what's coming for the rest of us in a decade or two. That's why I made prison-tech the McGuffin of The Bezzle, the sequel to my 2023 novel Red Team Blues, which comes out next February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

High-tech forensic accountant Marty Hench is back in The Bezzle for a story of early-2000s internet consolidation, LA Sheriffs Department gangs, prison privatization, collateralized debt obligations, and the absolute depraved sleaze of prison-tech privateers. If you still have a Twitter account, you can enter this sweepstakes to get an early copy:

https://twitter.com/torbooks/status/1725544405879447745

(There will be other ways to get an early peek for non-Twitter users, rest assured!)

Attentive readers will note that The Bezzle will be my fourth book in 14 months. I'm presently touring my third book of 2023, The Lost Cause, a climate emergency book that Rebecca Solnit described as "a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Book tours are exhausting and exhilarating. They have the weirdest social dynamic, where you're bouncing to a new city every day or two, having high-speed social contact with hundreds of people at a go, then hunkering down alone in a hotel room to do press calls and answer publicity emails. I've been doing this since 2006 or so, and one mystery I've pondered all that time is the weirdness of stinky hotel soap:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53339503041/

Go to any Marriott, any Hilton, a Comfort Inn or a Holiday Inn, and you will find yourself in the Kingdom of Beige. The wallpaper, art, carpets and bedspreads are all calculated to be as generic and invisible as possible. But the soap and shampoo stocked by these redoubts of nothingness are wildly perfumed. I'm not a big fan of floral perfume anyway, but the hand-soap in your typical hotel bathroom makes Axe Body Spray seem innocuous. No taxi air-freshener, no urinal puck, not even the most lethal of 1960s-era douches ever aspired to the eye-watering, clinging, scent of hotel soaps, shampoos, conditioners and hand-cream.

It's like hygiene perfume is the mid-priced hotelier's equivalent of 1980s Wall Street traders' suspenders: while everything else must be absolutely uniform and staid, this is the one realm where you can really let your freak flag fly. I'm always up for a unfettered freak-flag, but holy shit does this stuff stink.

I'll get a chance to ponder this anew on the tour for The Bezzle next February, and again for Picks and Shovels, the February 2025 Martin Hench novel that's already pending.

I need to get ready for my bookstore event, but before I sign off, one more bit of science fiction publishing news. An indie filmmaker in Paris is working with the brilliant John Varley on an adaptation of his sf classic Titan, and they're trying to raise $65k on Kickstarter to pay for it. I kicked in – a world with more Varley in it is a better world:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/superstory/themis-the-next-frontier

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/18/collectanea/#bricabrac

Image: Famartin https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021-01-06_12_15_43_Cranberry_trail_mix_with_cranberries,_peanuts,_raisins,_walnuts,_almonds,_sunflower_seeds,_pepitas_in_the_Franklin_Farm_section_of_Oak_Hill,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[xpc-web-dev]

Daily Journey : Day 1

This tumblr started with me just wanting to share my coding journey in November of last year.

No pressure of wanting likes, followers or anything like that. Just share in a safe place.

And I understand that now that has changed. Now I worry about the reach of my posts, I worry about people thinking I'm a failure and that I won't get things and likes.

And all this is useless in my life. I don't have to show anyone anything and I don't need to be liked, etc.

And I don't want that for myself.

So I thought about keeping my diary about this stage in my personal life private, as I already do with my emotions/days normally.

But I also think it might be cool to have that record here.

So, for now I'm here and overcoming my desire to start a tumblr from scratch (I always start something from scratch when I want to feel free). Now this idea is not so cool in my head. But I love seeing my old posts that I was thinking about giving up and now I'm in a better place.

Anyway:

Notes on the first day.

In general, I was very anxious, insecure because I don't know how to socialize with strangers who don't know what they're going to ask me. I need to know what is going to be said or know the subject to feel good. But it was nice and fun, they made it friendly.

We introduce ourselves in a fun way to get to know each other.

We learned more about project delivery and the like.

We had a 30m class where we talked about web introduction. Like mozilla, url, domain etc.

+++ I know that on tumblr the post photo dynamic is different, but I want to keep it standard. So I will follow my rules, because this is my account.

If you are reading this post, I wish you to be well, have discipline and consistency to achieve your goals.

Update notes:

As they leave the classes recorded, I went to watch it now and found a lot of doubts.

1. I paid attention on the recording (I don't pay attention live, maybe this will improve and maybe not)

2. I wrote down the questions

3. I researched each one and left some to ask in class because they want us to do this.

And now I'm feeling productive.

I didn't let it pile up, I did what had to be done and I'm ready for tonight's class.

I think I'll set the default of my posts for after rewatching the classes.

Have a great night, afternoon or morning.

[jonathanbrandisarchive]

Jonathan Celebrates Happy Old Year

On New Year's Day, Jonathan Brandis spends time reflecting on the past, not getting all obsessed over what's ahead.

Big Bopper, 1994

Making New Year's resolutions isn't a big item on Jon's list of things to do. Not that he thinks they're a terrible idea or anything. He has even made some in the past. But, in his experience, they just don't seem to stick. "I do make resolutions things like, 'I'm going to stop biting my nails,' or I'm going to keep my room clean," he tells us. "But I always forget on January 2!"

Another reason why Jon tends to play down the whole New Year's thing is that, in his opinion, January shouldn't have a monopoly on fresh, new beginnings.

"You never know when a good year is going to start," explains Jon. "It may start on May 13, or it may start on November 5. I think people look at January 1 and go, 'Oh, good, maybe this year will be good!' You always have good hopes for the next year. But you never know when anything good is going to start."

Jon does think that this time of year marks more of an ending than a beginning. For this reason, he feels it makes more sense to spend his energy appreciating the past rather than wondering—or, for that matter, trying to somehow control—what the next 12 months will bring.

Says Jon, "I think the end of the year is a time for reminiscing about what important events happened. You know, it's like when you move out of your house, and then you remember all the things that happened there. It's the same thing. When you're moving on to a new year, you remember all the events that occurred that maybe you were kind of oblivious to, and then you notice how important they were."

It's hard to believe Jon has been oblivious to the important events of 1994, a pretty monumental year by anyone's standards. Jonathan passed one milestone on April 13, when he turned 18. Then there was the month-and-a-half-long experience last spring of living in a foreign country—the Czech Republic—while filming Good King Wenceslas. In late summer, Jon moved from his parents' home in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley to the new-and-improved seaQuest set in Florida. Though his parents, Greg and Mary, helped get him settled, these days, Jon is living on his own for the first time in his life. sea Quest is doing great in the ratings, and Jonathan is a bigger star than ever.

Hmm, J.B., we can't help but wonder what's in store for you in 1995!

[joesalw]

First of all, I’m happy to learn that I’m not alone in my becoming anti TS journey. I realized it’s my love for her since I was 10 years old that made her special in my eyes. Now that the glasses made of childhood nostalgia are off, all I see is a mediocre artist who doesn’t deserve everything she has right now. There are far more talented artists that deserve the recognition and fame, but they don’t have Daddy’s money when they were starting out so 🤷🏽

Save for folklore and evermore, most of her lyrics are also meh. My Lit major friends were right when they said “lyricism? what lyricism?” 😂 it’s embarrassing to see swifties (me included back then) compare her to Shakespeare or Jane Austen lmaooo

Like a lot of other people on here, I became resentful of her this year because of her behavior to the point that I have her muted on Spotify and blocked in social media since the start of November. How she dealt with and treated Ana’s death just really rubbed me the wrong way, sorta like it’s a confirmation that she doesn’t care about BIPOC lives when her whole brand is her loving her fans so much and having a close relationship with them. BIPOC lives are relevant to her only insofar as ✨ diversity and equality ✨ and “no i’m not racist or a bigot i literally have [insert minority group here] friends” damage control are concerned. Watched videos of her LatAm shows and the difference of her energy/how she engaged with people was glaring. It’s embarrassing to see swifties defend her like besties go get some standards and make sure you get your money’s worth, lmao.

And of course, how she’s intentionally associating herself with known abusers and SA apologists. I guess #MeToo was just another era for her and now she’s over it.

I got tickets to her show early next year, but after giving it time (to see if it’s just a phase and I’d like her again eventually), I decided I don’t wanna watch her anymore. Ironic because I stayed during the events of 1989 and after, but it’s ultimately TS herself who made me hate her, lol. Spending $2,000 (includes flights, hotel, etc) over an objectively mediocre artist who’s starting to show her real colors now that she thinks she’s unstoppable is just not worth it. Glad I now see the light 🙆🏽

Anyways, would you know about Ticketmaster’s policy on transferring the e-tickets? I’m the account holder and they did confirm that I don’t have to be physically present for my friends I was supposed to go with to get in. (Ticket transfers via TM are not possible.) I just wanna sell my own ticket and get my money back. Thanks in advance!

.

[purplekoop]

Koop's 2024 Year of Art in Review

This year's been a strange one to be certain, going a whole year without a PC that can run the full suite of modern games and streaming I built a habit of using in 2023, but looking back it was a shockingly productive one in terms of art. Guess that's what not having OW on PC sucking away my attention span. I didn't get something made every month, but had a pretty substantial output anyways, so I wanted to recap the months I did have something.

January:

January got some notable additions to the War Bots cast with the polar opposites Nekross and Harmony, as well as some Kirby humanizations! Honestly a lot to revisit here, these WB characters need some polish and I've never been content with this as "my" Susie. Might give her another pass and try and also humanize the Mage Sisters, that's well overdue at this point.

February:

So this month brought Dredge, the most recent addition to my lineup of Splatoon OCs. Not much to say other than every day I haven't drawn these goofy splesbians weighs heavy on my soul.

March:

March brought the last Bot to get art this year, since Lyonn's only art is years old. Honestly pretty happy with Otto's art, cheaping out on some details aside I think this nails his unique look. at least until that Minion-lookin-ass-poser came around...

April:

Was busy with work, travel, device repairs, and Endless Ocean Blue World this month, so no art. Oops.

May:

Yeah this was all I made this month. Can't complain, this was fun to draw and got decent notes by my standards. I might come back to these two, this art is relatively on-model but I keep seeing people have too much fun being more creative with Queen and Tasque Manager's designs, especially with bigger poofier hair for the latter. Eh, I'll think of something when I have the time.

June:

The smell of artistic combat on the horizon... and also humanized Queen Sectonia is here for some reason. This was when I updated Mugie and Shadow Boxer too, the tip of the iceberg for DWS this year, though at the time it was just for the sake of Art Fight. And the peak of getting ready for the month was Grand Machino, one of my favorite original guys getting his best design yet. Of course, this month's output would look shallow compared to...

July:

Art Fight month is always a doozy, and after an underwhelming run last year and one final reference update in my DnD OC Zecanna, I'm much prouder of my output this year. Maybe not in terms of quantity, but I put out some high-effort individual pieces and really tried to push to go bigger and better... as demonstrated by the two attacks I chose to highlight here. I'm happy to report that the bottom art of my partner's DnD bad guy is proudly displayed in her bathroom in a custom frame, which is probably one of my highest honors.

August:

Not much out of my post Art Fight stupor and birthday month, but I did get a proper art for my current DnD character Lightspring. These always feel like special pieces, considering my DnD characters have a guaranteed fanbase of at least the 6 other people in the campaign.

September:

This was the only thing to come out of September and it was very clearly both an effort to get out of a slump in art and also an omen of things to come. The more big mario princesses I draw in a year the better that year thusly is.

October:

Darkworld-oween folks!! The only way for my output to rival any given July was for another month-long art endeavor, this one dedicated to my original seasonally-fitting fighting game project Darkworld Showdown. Extremely proud of how much I got done, and how well I managed to update a cast in desperate need of it. Obviously given how I got like 20 designs done, I only showcased some of my favorites from the earlier end of the month here.

November:

An oddly productive month for being right after a major month-long art project and on a month where I went out of town for about a week. These are only a couple of the big (in. a few senses.) pieces I got done, starting with a marginally late Halloween piece and ending with one of a couple Mario-themed pieces. er... Maria, as I later decided is the context these pieces take place in. I also dabbled in some Pokemon anthro characters to get in some more body type practice and sate the insatiable need for further avenues of yuri.

December:

Rounding out the year, December was extremely busy with work and holiday prep, so I only had time for a couple gift pieces to friends, one of which was a personal art for my partner, but this one here is of one of my friend's player characters in an upcoming superhero-themed TTRPG game I plan to run next year. We did a secret santa event in my one friend group, and I knew I had to go the extra mile with my friend's delightfully insane robot design who certainly deserves it. Certainly not a shabby way to end the year, I'd say.

I'm not sure what all 2025 holds in terms of what I hope to accomplish art-wise. For a basic and realistic goal I'd love to finish the War Bots cast with art for its final four characters, and perhaps take this October to do the same for Darkworld Showdown. I may also talk about my other major dream game project, City of Desos, though considering how far out any serious work on that is I'm not in a hurry. With my new PC I could even start on actually developing a game... maybe not a full-on platform fighter or team shooter to start, but it'd be nice to start working on those skills properly. The new PC also means streaming is back on the table, and while my setup isn't perfect for it I think I can figure out something. I do also have a whole dang TTRPG system to develop now, so. That might keep me busy. Either way, I'm looking forward to spending plenty of time with friends this year after a lot of plans got bottlenecked by not having a PC that could do half the stuff I wanted. But honestly, as much as anything I wanna have fun with art this year, something I'd say I did pretty good on in 2024. I chased a lot of ideas without any grander ambition besides it sounding fun, and it was refreshing. Maybe I'd like to set up commissions and hope to find an audience for the nonsense I got up to in November, or just have a side space to focus on that indulgent sort of thing more. That might mean spanning out to more social platforms, been putting off making a bluesky account for long enough maybe... maybe. I dunno, got a whole year ahead of me, and plenty more after that.

To anyone reading this far, thanks for indulging me. That goes even further for anyone who's been following for however much longer, or just checking a few posts. Sorry December's been quiet, hopefully I'm not too wrapped up in PC games and the rest of my holiday-gotten backlog to remember to do some art this year, maybe even enough to not need to skip any months next year. I still gotta do that New Donk City poll winner piece... the WIP of the first part is somewhere around here...

But all that said, here's to a bright 2025, let's make it as great as it can be! Happy New Year!!!!