yourcousin-vinny

[yourcousin-vinny]

jedi girl and her pink astromech

[yourcousin-vinny]

Kallus is so funny it’s like he’s not even a Star Wars character. He’s elevated

[yourcousin-vinny]

Padmé’s death lands as a major societal taboo while embracing Star Wars' oldest influences. This reaches across aisles and gives everyone a reason to be pissed off. Padmé is a mother character who loves her kids but finds herself unable to go on: she is a woman who rejects motherhood in the most basic sense. She is also a classic Ophelia-lite character, a tragic heroine who dies when betrayed by her love. Moreover, Padmé operates as a withering personification of democracy, of peace, of hope for unconditional love in the face of brutality. The trilogy loses her as it plunges fully into darkness. All of this is blunt and operatic and not easy to fit into some pre-approved Good Female Character mold. So it is blanket-dismissed as degradation, an insult to Padmé's previous triumphs and unworthy of analysis. And so it goes that most call Padmé's death inexplicable, and shy away from the big word: suicide.  This essay aims to bridge that gap, taking Padmé's death seriously and arguing against commonly pitched fix-its. It also serves to set up my following essay, “The Skywalker Suicides Part II”, and establish a thematic connection to Luke. In short, this is a good faith, overwrought close reading of the one thing no Star Wars fan will stop laughing about. (x)

the first part of my "Skywalker Suicides" essay is up on my site! 7k words of padme suicide truthing! leave me a comment! :)

[yourcousin-vinny]

no because what was this

[yourcousin-vinny]

star trek the motion picture:

my exact reaction:

[yourcousin-vinny]

Do you guys like my new playlist?

[yourcousin-vinny]

Han’s lucky that Alderaan blew up because their press would eat him alive. My guy has to contend with the fact that the last Viceroy who married into the royal family is Bail freaking Organa and he ran drugs for a living. Somewhere there is a space Piers Morgan throwing a fit about it.

"han solo would be star wars meghan markle in an alderaan isn't exploded au" isnt meta i ever expected to read but it is nonetheless very correct

[yourcousin-vinny]

THE MAIDENS by ALEX MICHAELIDES

I’ll do my best to be charitable, because I know I went into this book with the wrong expectations, but as the first book I finished in 2025, it doesn’t bode well for the year. (Chat, I did not enjoy this book.)

Forgive me for seeing the cover and reading a blurb and expecting a dark academia novel. Of course, most in the genre will pale in comparison to the blueprint (The Secret History by Donna Tartt), but I like a campus novel. I like a paperwork narrative. I like when things get weird and ritualistic. I love when there are allusions to ancient texts. I even like a murder mystery sometimes. What I failed to realize is that The Maidens is, by the author’s own admission, more of an homage to Agatha Christie than to Dead Poets Society.

Again, I can enjoy an Agatha Christie caper, but so much of the connotation of “old lady writing mysteries” is crackling fires and Murder, She Wrote and Desdemona Hughes that I forget about the ending of Crooked House: the family was so traumatizing for everyone involved that there will never be a happy ending for any of them. It’s a type of twisted and intriguing that is popular for the same reason true crime podcasts are popular: it’s real fucked up. Michaelides provides us with plenty of traumatized, fucked up people, who have all grown up and manifested that trauma in different ways. Mariana is incredibly suspicious and paranoid that everything is connected to the tragic death of her husband; her patient, Henry, obsesses over Mariana’s attention; her niece, Zoe, carries out the plan of her abuser even though it won’t bring either of them any relief; Fosca manipulates and coerces everyone around him; and Sebastian, whose childhood we see in tortured snippets even though we never hear from him directly, sets events in motion to torment everyone closest to him. It’s all supremely fucked up and could’ve been a really interesting exploration of generational and cyclical trauma. It’s honestly the type of book my parents would like (they love their gruesome crime thrillers).

I know I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I wanted to because it was a different type of book than I expected; that’s on me. I have other qualms, however. I found there to be too many characters—too many men for a book titled The Maidens, frankly. (I wanted to see more of the mysterious all-women student cult, but that wasn’t the type of book this was.) Many of these characters felt one-note: Serena has a secret admirer, Fred is clumsy, Henry is obsessive, Clarissa is epicurean, Sangha drinks tea, Fosca is performative, Mariana is paranoid (so paranoid, her conclusions sound like stretches even from her limited-third POV). In order for me to care about solving the murder, I gotta care about the characters, and I simply didn’t. I think we know surprisingly little about most of them—or rather, we know surprisingly little about any of the women. Each of the titular Maidens receives, not exaggerating, a single-sentence description. I think the buildings and flower beds of Cambridge get more descriptions than any of the victims.

Maybe I’m just not used to murder mysteries, but it felt like there were too many red herrings (again, too many kinda creepy, off-putting men, each of whom is hinted as being the killer at one point), and the ultimate reveal didn’t seem like it had been hinted at throughout in any clever fashion. Maybe I’m used to meticulously planned murder mysteries, in which each detail is accounted for, and this mishmash of mystery and dark academia ended up doing neither one that well. It doesn’t claim to be a procedural, but our protagonist does try to investigate the murders, so one would hope for efficiency? discretion? less time getting meals and drinks and more time answering questions? It very much wants to be a dark academia novel, but since our protagonist isn’t a student and seemingly had little interest in academia while she was one, the narrative has a very thin varnish of dark academia with none of the substance. The aesthetics are barely even there (do these students even take Greek?) and the whole thing left me wanting.

Ya fooled me, book cover with a Grecian bust. Next time I’ll do more research, but I imagine I’ll always be chasing the high of Richard saying to Bunny, “have you tried the locative case?”

[yourcousin-vinny]

Southern California is on fire

In 2024, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass defunded the LA Fire Department by $17.3 million.

The LA Police Department, however, got a $138 million budget increase.

Among the firefighters, 30% of them are inmate firefighters who are risking their lives for $2 an hour. Only for them to not be able to get a job as a firefighter once they're released.

There are now 4 fires burning across Socal. The one getting the most attention is the Palisades fire which has grown to over 11,000 acres. Alongside it is the Altadena fire (over 10,000 acres), Hurst fire (700 acres), and Lidia fire (50 acres).

Due to the unprecedented Santa Ana winds, which have blown to over 100 mph, firefighters have not been able to make a dent on these fires.

A thousand homes have been destroyed. Two people lost their lives from the Altadena fires.

Instead of showing sympathy for the thousands of victims, right wing conspiracy theorists on twitter are blaming the fires on LA Fire Chief, who is a lesbian, while Trump is blaming CA Governor Gavin Newsom for not removing water from a delta that would have endangered a native species.

Not climate change. Not the Resnicks, a billionaire couple who took control of California's water supply and now use over 150 billion gallons every year for their companies.

If you're in Southern California, please download the Watch Duty app. It brings up to date information on the fires along with evacuation zones. If officials tell you to evacuate, you do it. Make sure you look up shelters and mutual aid organizations where you'll evacuate to. If you have to abandon your car, please move it to the side or leave your keys in the car so firefighters can move it out of the way.

The consequences of this disaster will be catastrophic. It's become increasingly clear that our government officials will not protect us as they would rather fill their own pockets. Stick together. Protect your community as best as you can.

Please keep Southern California in your thoughts. We're going to need them.

[yourcousin-vinny]

Kallus actually invented commiting to the bit

[yourcousin-vinny]

thinking about how padmé isn't even mentioned by name in the original trilogy and yet the entire story is shaped around the hole she left behind

[yourcousin-vinny]

Listen, I'm having fun playing with the ultra patriotic voice, but after a couple years in blue-collar landscaping jobs, you really do need to phrase things like that.

"I'm pretty sure that fella ain't here legally."

"Well, that ain't your business Chip, it's his."

They hate being preached to. If you pull out words like 'gender wage gap' they'll tell you you're brainwashed by the far left media.

"He's one of them transgenders."

"He got freedoms too, Jimmy."

[yourcousin-vinny]

Hey guys will you beat me to death with sticks if I post this

[yourcousin-vinny]

Committing to the bit so hard you actually start thinking all the technology on the set is real

[yourcousin-vinny]

i wish people who dunk on “silly” southern accents and vernacular could experience the total derealization that comes with listening to yourself talk and realizing that it’s not your real voice anymore. i spent so many years flattening my accent to sound smarter that i have to remind myself constantly that it’s okay to use my real fucking voice. i’ve had customers at my job make fun of me to my face when i let it slip. when i’m public speaking or even speaking in class with my peers it goes away completely because i’m so terrified of being perceived as a hick. just imagine opening your mouth and hearing a strangers’ voice come out. i can’t stress how viscerally upsetting it is to not know what the real you sounds like anymore. just think for two seconds before you yell about how you can’t take southern or appalachian dialects seriously or i will blow you up with this bombbbbb i swear to godddddd

[yourcousin-vinny]

in order to not succumb to sex negative conservatism you have to accept that people will get off to things that are upsetting to you. and you cannot assume anything about what they have or have not experienced, what they do or do not believe, and how they act based solely on what gets them off. even if it's extremely confusing and disturbing to you. there are people who have only ever had heterosexual vanilla sex in missionary with the lights off, who actively contribute to more real world harm than your average fetish artist. kink is not a reliable source of information on someone's moral standing. it just feels good to think that way.

[yourcousin-vinny]

YOu ASK like I wouldn’t even consider it!!

a continuation from last post