xarrixii

[xarrixii]

hi! it seems that there is some misinformation being spread on tumblr. not surprising, but i'm here to address the allegations

(source: i wrote the "book")

Alph's full name is NOT Alphredo. it's Alph Jury Roy-Wolford (named by their mother)

Alf from the retro sitcom Alf is NOT their real father. that's Garry Roy and their mother Amaterasu will have you know that it was some of the best⸺

when they were a kid they did NOT secretly invent Digimon, license OR distribute it, nor are they currently independently wealthy. they are unemployed and only not in college debt because of their mother

their favorite food is NOT two hot dogs, no bun. close. it's literally just sub-style sandwiches. their dad relents he wishes he'd never introduced Alph to sandwiches

happy late birthday, Alph. i forgot the day until it was too late in my timezone and get hypnotized. you're actually having a really great day right now. like some new Transgressor stuff dropped. yeah i know,

Hi in honor of it being the birthday of Alph from @xarrixii's flash/burn, here are some of my favorite facts about Alph.

(source: I read the first third of the book that has been revised enough that I've officially decided to start over)

Alph's full name is Alphredo

Alf from the retro sitcom Alf is their real father

When they were a kid they secretly invented Digimon, licensed and distributed it, and are currently independently wealthy

Their favorite food is Two Hot Dogs, no bun.

Happy birthday, Alphredo. Your creator forgot the day until it was too late in their time zone, and as your self-appointed godparent I have taken the mantel of spreading misinformation.

[xarrixii]

[xarrixii]

OH MY GOD IT'S ALPH'S BIRTHDAY. I DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING. HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT AND NOT ME

[xarrixii]

reformatting flash/burn into LibreOffice (which @goodluckclove introduced me to) took maybe an hour.

i'm pretty happy with how this looks, though. i explored ellipsus briefly before deciding it wasn't comfortable enough for me personally to write in.

who knows maybe having it in its own program in my taskbar rather than in my firefox header will keep me more focused (probably likely scenario)

"an hour" not including the several hours spent screwing around clicking various customization buttons

[xarrixii]

the buttons only turned white when i hovered over them i don't know how that happened

Can't stop thinking about how today I walked @xarrixii through installing and setting up LibreOffice, and within minutes they'd somehow customized all the buttons to be white with white text.

[xarrixii]

i perhaps require some writing encouragement at the moment. i request at least one very stupid flash/burn question

[xarrixii]

"motion is an illusion because if motion wasn't an illusion you would have to complete an infinite number of tasks to move" oh my goddddd can you just throw the bag

Writing prompt:

Zeno's Paradoxes are real now.

@xarrixii @goodluckclove

[xarrixii]

Zeno is a buzzkill at parties

Writing prompt:

Zeno's Paradoxes are real now.

@xarrixii @goodluckclove

[xarrixii]

minor dialogue edit: changed Alph saying "He who shunned himself from the world?" in chapter 19 to "He who fate no longer commands?" to better replicate the Transgressor comic lore

[xarrixii]

"in all 50 states" okay "including Alaska and Hawaii" yes that's what that means

[xarrixii]

A PSA from Robert the Cat

Hello yes. It has come to my attentions that I am perceived by the General Public as a "silly boy" and a "no thoughts man". I do not dispute! But it is needful to remember that Silly Boys can also be OTHER things like:

Smart Boys

Feelings Boys

Snacky Boys

Bob

That is all. Thank you goodnight you mail me your phone now yum yum.

[xarrixii]

If you're in LGBT friendly spaces and someone introduces themselves and cautiously says they're fine with any pronouns, it is your duty to notice which pronouns the people around you tend to default to for them and ensure that you refer to them with any and every pronoun under the sun except for that one. You must.

[xarrixii]

one time my sister had her headphones in and so did i, but sitting in the same room and she went "yeah, [arri]?"

i turned around, took out an earbud, went "what?" and she confided in me that i had apparently been singing along (in sync) with the song she was listening to that i couldn't hear

i think about it randomly

[xarrixii]

so. there's that. i suppose

also this one was TARGETED and surprise it WASN'T EVEN THE MOST ACCURATE. i picked a different option. get blasted by the mud gun into the walls, Dave Grohl

I made a personality quiz for a mediocre fantasy series that doesn't exist

I am in a bummer mood and this made me laugh a lot. Please enjoy, perhaps share your results. Know that this is not a real series and this is not a real indicator of your actual personality. Unless you want it to be, I guess?

[xarrixii]

clove if it helps the day you told me about that i had a dream literally the night before about edgar getting yelled at by genevieve to get off a swingset. i don't know where this came from but i had it and i woke up really confused

a few months ago i had a dream where i received an anon ask on tumblr saying my ocs were tcc bait and i woke up very confused because : what the fuck does that mean and why am i receiving anon hate in my DREAMS

anyway it's been haunting me ever since

[xarrixii]

i hate that i have to unlike a post to like a reblog on it

Disney’s Dinosaur (2000) – Review and Retrospective

I’ve realized that my thyroid medicine still might be a little out of wack, and part of that means I spent most of today in bed, occasionally asking my wife to remind me whether or not I was dying. My wife, knowing what I need to a frightening degree, ordered Thai food and put on a movie they had referenced and were shocked I hadn’t heard of.

That movie was Disney’s pre-9/11 adventure epic, Dinosaur. I then spent the next eighty minutes really leaning into the disorientation that comes with many thyroid issues. After we watched it, I found a video essay about the messy production history of the movie, and we watched that too. Now I’m writing this, and it might be a long and rapturous manifesto.

I’ll add a read more because I’ll be getting into spoilers. It seems weird to take a dinosaur movie and talk about spoilers – but I think it fits here. My rating is: watch it. Watch this one. As Christian media review blog Plugged In* says, “Dinosaur offers adolescents and adults with meager expectations a reasonably enjoyable, morally grounded 80 minutes of distraction”.

As my wife told me within the first few minutes “It’s not grotesque – it’s Dinosaur”.

*Why did I find a review from a Christian media blog? This movie has a weird amount of Biblical undertones I picked up on midway though! Not a ton, but definitely more than I expected from a movie about dinosaurs!

Hi.

Dinosaur is a combination disaster movie and religious allegory where the extinction event happens maybe ten minutes into the film, and at the end is pretty clearly seen to be not a super huge deal. Most of the dinosaurs have lips that they use to talk, aside from certain species of dinosaur that are arbitrarily deemed more primal or of lesser intelligence. All the dinosaurs are CGI, except for a few briefly seen that are clearly puppets. All the backdrops are live-action.

It had a budget of over $127 million dollars, and went through two directors, three screenplay writers, and five story writers. One crew member was killed on set during production of a film received so tepidly that Disney does little else but occasionally include in the chonology of films they’ve made.

I just – needed to get this out of the way. Can’t slow-burn this one. The production for this movie is a messy one. It was pitched as a darker, stop-motion animated movie with an all animal cast and no dialogue. In the original pitch, we would follow a styracosaurus through various settings and conflicts, akin to a nature documentary. After winning a climactic fight with the film’s T-rex antagonist, the film would end in the beginnings of what we know to be the mass extinction event that forever altered the face of the Earth.

Jeffery Katzenberg, former Walt Disney Chairman and Professional Dipshit, said the $75 million budget quoted in the pitch didn’t justify the costs. He then punted the leads of the project (industry veterans previously involved in massively successful movies), and ten years later released a talking CGI dinosaur film that cost nearly twice the original estimate. And lo, many responded with resoundingly middling interest that faded nearly immediately. Phil Tippet and Paul Verhoeven, the two originators of the idea, have gone on to continue pretty successful careers in their respective niches. Including Paul Tippet, special effects supervisor, who recently released his stop motion horror film, Mad God in 2021.

Oh, and he was the Dinosaur Coordinator for two of the Jurassic Park reboots. And the Dinosaur Supervisor of the original Jurassic Park.

I can’t get too deep into the biblical allegory. This is partially because there isn’t much there. It’s also because there’s definitely something there, only it's executed so strangely that I struggle to understand what the point was.

Midway through the movie, I made a joke to my wife. “With a few minor edits to the script,” I said, “this would be a Christian film.” This was said because the morality that acted as most of the plot – altruism, faith, and unconditional love for your fellow dinosaur – appeared, from my experience, to be a lot of what's preached in the Bible. And the thought of Christ-like dinosaur was ironic and confusing enough to be surreal and amusing to me.

Then, at the climax, I looked at my wife and said “Hey, so this is a reach - I know. But am I crazy, or is it not that much of a reach?”

Turns out I was not crazy. This story went through multiple iterations, and early versions centered around two dinosaur bothers named Noah and Cain. Noah, at some point, was an oracle with visions of the asteroid strike. At others, he was a kind dinosaur torn between the more loving teachings of his adopted lemur family, and the loyalty his has to his own species.

Cain was, from my understanding, a semi-antagonist figure until he was scrapped for his vibes being off.

I am not the only one who sees the biblical undertones of this dinosaur movie. I assumed my take to be a product of my thyroid issues making me a little wonky in the brain, but I looked it up online and other people also see it. It’s not just me I swear. It seems most draw a comparison between the central character and Moses, due mainly to the dinosaurs being led through the desert to a pretty blatant “promise land”. This is different from my interpretation, but I haven’t actually read the story of Moses so the direct scripture experience I have is pretty limited.

Oh right, the Promised Land. Uh, the main goal of the movie is for the herd to make it to the “nesting ground”, which is believed to be a safe place for all the remaining dinosaurs to find safety in as their new home. A pack of maybe thirty or so dinosaurs trudge through a barren desert, facing conflict with other dinosaurs who are meaner and less sapient than them. And at the end, once all seems lost…

They find it! The Nesting Ground or whatever. It’s there and it’s great. There’s a minor issue with the main entrance being blocked off, but they navigate around that with little difficulty. And once they do, everything’s fine! Our hero dinosaur gets his dinosaur bride and becomes a dino-dad. In fact, his kid is one of a new generation of healthy, living dinosaurs. And one of the lemurs that acts as the voice over narrator explains how she’s pretty sure their story isn’t over yet, as the camera pans across a modest populous of Very Alive Flora and Fauna.

That was the most baffling part of the movie for me. Over the next fifteen minutes, I stared in stunned silence and thought to myself – did Disney just completely side-step a mass extinction event? Was I misinterpreting something? The mom character outright told an injured dinosaur that his dying would be his own choice. What? Huh?

While learning about the complicated history of this film, we found out that right up to release there were talks of a sequel. To which the questions repeat: What? Huh???

I get it. There were a lot of dinosaur movies made for children in the 90’s-2000’s, which I’m only just now realizing is a buck wild subject matter to build off of. I think most choose to place their stories well before the asteroid strike. That still had to have led to some conversations between parents and their children, but at the least I think it could be a generally easier experience. What Dinosaur does – explain outright how a massive asteroid resulted in death and chaos, but was ultimately fine and many dinosaurs ended up happy and healthy and able to repopulate – is just so much weirder to me.

It’s great. This is a great, terrible movie. It cost so much money to make, and the result was a gift for me personally. That gift was not the film itself, but how watching it allowed me to look at the love of my life, ask them “so are the Disney corporation extinction deniers, then?”, and watch their expression as they realize how that is a semi-reasonable question for me to have.

Uh, watch it. It’s on the Internet Archive. It’s also at your Local Library, I bet. Don’t watch it on Disney Plus. Don’t get Disney Plus.

Clove’s Second, Secret Rating: What????? Huh?????

[xarrixii]

i don't really know how someone might hate audiobooks with a burning passion by sheer nature, but i know that i personally find trouble listening to other people read books. speed of reading versus my own, where someone chooses to put emphasis versus where i put the emphasis, and of course sour past experiences with teachers putting the most boring droning voice ever playing in the background of an already boring book.

some people might potentially take a personal dislike and misconstrue that as an objective thing. i don't know. people are weird about others trying to find ways to read when they don't have to be

Why do some people get weird about audiobooks? I've only recently gotten into them, but I immediately see the appeal. It's like a way longer podcast with no commercials. If you get it off Libby you can support your local library.

What's the deal against it? I know a big argument that it isn't real reading. My initial response to that is "who cares", but my more objective take is that, while I get reading text exercises different mental muscles, this still seems like a perfectly good way to engage with new ideas and word views. Which is also good.