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thefreakishmuffin · 3 years

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The Owl House season 2 analysis: Eda and the Owlbeast

(May not have as many screenshots in this one, so I apologize in advance for the long walls of text. I’m getting the pics I can from google).

Alright everybody, strap in, because this is gonna be a pretty long read, as this is the part of the episode that hit me the hardest. And I mean that in the absolute best way possible. But son of a gun, just when I think The Owl House can’t depict the struggles of mental illness and trauma any better, they top that bar and go above and beyond. Dana Terrace and the rest of the crew, you’re doing amazing!

So let’s start off with Eda. After losing Raine and getting an inside view from them about the Emperor’s plan for the Day of Unity, Eda has started to work herself to the brink of exhaustion, feeling like she has to protect those around her. In an attempt to help Eda relax and get some sleep, Hooty makes her cookies spiked with sleeping nettles, which apparently gives you heightened and eerily vivid dreams. And here is where we get to what I feel is the most intense part of the entire episode.

Part of the reason Eda’s been avoiding sleep is so that she won’t have to come face to face with the Owlbeast again. But now, she decides to confront the Owlbeast herself. She states that the Owlbeast is the reason she ran away from home, and the reason she never got close to anyone. She decides that now’s the time that she’s gonna be the one to haunt the beast that has always haunted her. She seems very vengeful here, with a kind of rage in her eyes.

However, when she’s about to head down the hall, the dream transitions Eda back to her old room from when she was young, and finds herself transformed into her teenage self as well. We see here that she’s at home with her family, and it’s here that we see her father for the first time. It’s here that she runs up and hugs her father. This shows that she does indeed love her father very much, and has been missing him all this time. Her father even calls her by the cute nickname of ‘pumpkin’. This shows that the two of them have - or at least have had - a loving father-daughter relationship.

Unfortunately, things start to go south when Eda’s father, who we learn is named Dell, pulls out a little party favor for his kids before heading out to the Mandible. The sudden loud noise appears to scare the Owlbeast inside of Eda, triggering her to go into her Owlbeast form. This causes the Owlbeast - which I interpret as Eda herself, as she is reliving traumatic flashbacks - to attack her father causing severe damage to his right eye.

Now this could be very well be why Eda was so uncomfortable when Lilith spoke of reconnecting with their father. Eda feels terrible about what happened, and is nervous about seeing their father again after the incident. She is burdened with guilt for what happened. However, she tries to tell herself that it wasn’t her fault, but rather the fault of the Owlbeast inside of her.

The dream transitions to another scene later in her life, about her mid-twenties, where she was dating Raine. But this isn’t a happy memory, as here Raine accuses Eda of lying to them about her curse, and how they feel as if they don’t know her anymore. It’s here that Raine admits to Eda that they are joining the Bard Coven, and that they are breaking up. The emotional devastation of this moment activates Eda’s curse. Raine asks Eda if she’s okay, to which Eda pushes Raine away and states that she’s okay. Raine, unable to help despite still loving Eda, takes their leave, knowing that Eda will never let them really help her. Present day Eda pleads with her past self to let Raine help them, to which her past self insists that everything is fine and that she’s okay.

This, to me at least, is a very big metaphor for mental illness, and how it can push those you love away simply by refusing their help. Eda, not wanting to hurt or burden anyone with her problems, constantly tells everyone she’s fine. By not letting others help her, she’s hurting herself in the process. And in turn is pushing away those who genuinely want to help her, but they don’t know what to do if she won't tell the what’s going on. The Owlbeast is making it a point for force Eda to relive some of the moments of her life where the Owlbeast curse affected her relationships with others the most.

Eda then attacks the Owlbeast when it shows up again, repeatedly blaming the creature for ruining her life and making her miserable. But then Eda turns into her Owlbeast form herself, and is ensnared by a mysterious figure in a cloak decorated with celestial patterns, and where its face should be is dark with a crescent moon - or perhaps an eclipse. The figure then states, “Don’t bother beast, you can’t run away anymore. It’s over.” With a menacing laugh.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know totally what to make of this being. But I assume it has something to do with the Day of Unity, given all the celestial bodies and eclipse symbolism that the two have in common. Is this perhaps the being that created the spell that cursed Eda? Does this mean that this curse will play a vital role in the Day of Unity? I honestly don’t know. I’m kinda stuck on this one. This scene felt very ambiguous to me.

Eda takes off in flight, only to fall into the sea with her figure becoming the scroll that possessed the spell that cursed her in the first place. the scroll gets picked up by a passerby, and is presumably taken to the night market. We then have a sad Eda sitting on the banks of an ocean, with the smaller version of the Owlbeast trying to get away from her. But there is a red string connecting them. This could be the ‘red string of fate’. It originates in Chinese folklore, but the idea is that the string connects two destined soulmates. Now, I don’t think the Owlbeast is a soulmate to Eda, but this does sow that the two of them are definitely tied together.

And it’s here that it finally hits Eda; just as she is haunted by the Owlbeast, the Owlbeast is haunted by her as well. She now tries to show kindness to the shrunken Owlbeast as it climbs up onto the shore, exhausted from trying to be free from her. And then one of Eda’s potions washes up on shore. And Eda does something amazing here. She accepts the reality that the two of them are stuck together, regardless of whether they like or not. And that the potion is the only reason the two of them can see each other and communicate face to face. Eda then says, “If we can’t learn to accept each other, this nightmare will never end.”

Eda asks for a temporary truce, to which the Owlbeast agrees by drinking some of the potion from Eda’s hand and resting on her lap, seemingly in a moment of peace. the sky changes color to a beautiful, rainbow-like scene, to which Eda states, “I’ve never had a dream this pretty.” And then she finally wakes up.

This whole scene was symbolic of someone accepting a mental illness. A piece of themselves that they resent and wish they could live without. As someone who suffers from a few mental illnesses myself, this part of the episode really spoke to me. Eda is accepting the reality of her curse, but is doing her best to try and not to resent it, now accepting that it’s a part of her. And I think she’s even coming to the understanding here that, even though the Owlbeast has blame for pushing Eda’s loved ones away, she shares just as much blame as well for never allowing those she loved to help her.

This particular part of the episode highlights just how important it is to allow others to help you when you are suffering. You are not a burden to someone who unconditionally loves you and is willing to do everything in their power to help you, no matter what. Just earlier she was saying that she needs to protect those she loves the most from the Emperor’s plans. Now that Eda is once again surrounded by people who love her, she is no longer going to try and push them away. But instead, she’s decided she’s going to protect them no matter what.

Eda wakes up from her dream to find that she can now transform into a new form she has complete control over. One that we’ll call her Harpy form from now on. This, I believe, is now a version of her Owlbeast form that she can control. This can even be a metaphor for someone fully accepting themselves with their mental illness and, in a way, “transforming” themselves into their best self.

#toh #the owl house #toh analysis #the owl house analysis #toh speculation #the owl house speculation #toh eda #eda the owl lady #the owl house eda #toh theory #the owl house theory #toh edalyn #the owl house edalyn #toh season 2 #toh season 2 spoilers #toh spoilers #the owl house season 2 #the owl house season 2 spoilers #the owl house spoilers

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onpaperintofilm · 4 years

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Oliver Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ Is, More than Ever, the Spectacle of Our Time

Yet it has never gained true respectability.

Variety

Owen Gleiberman

“ Works of art that were once radical tend to find their cozy place in the cultural ecosystem. It’s almost funny to think that an audience ever booed “The Rite of Spring,” or that the Sex Pistols shocked people to their souls, or that museum patrons once stood in front of Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings or Warhol’s soup cans and said, “But is it art?” In 1971, “A Clockwork Orange” was a scandal, but it quickly came to be thought of as a Kubrick classic.

Yet “Natural Born Killers,” a brazenly radical movie when it was first released, on August 26, 1994, has never lost its sting of audacity. It’s still dangerous, crazy-sick, luridly hypnotic, ripped from the id, and visionary. I loved the movie from the moment I saw it. It haunted me for weeks afterward, and over the next few years I saw it over and over again (probably 40 times), obsessed with the experience of it, the terrible lurching beauty of it, the spellbinding truth of it. It’s a film that has never left my system.

I’ve met a number of people who feel the way I do about “Natural Born Killers,” but I’ve also run across a great many people who don’t. The reaction has always been split between those I would call “Natural Born Killers” believers (they included, at the time, such influential critics as Roger Ebert and Stanley Kauffmann) and those who thumb their noses at what they consider to be an over-the-top spectacle of Oliver Stone “indulgence.” At the time of its release, it was said that the film was bombastic, gonzo for its own sake, pretentious as hell, and — of course — too violent. Too flippantly violent. In a way, “Natural Born Killers” was the “Moulin Rouge!” of shotgun-lovers-on-the-lam thrillers. Either you got onto its stylized high wire, its deliberate pornography of operatic overkill, or you thought it was trash.

The divide has never been resolved, and the movie has never gained true respectability. Which I think is a good thing. Some works of art need to remain outside the official system of canonical reverence. But if you go back and watch “Natural Born Killers” today, long after all the ’90s-version-of-film-Twitter chatter about it has faded, what you’ll see (or, at least, what I hope you’ll see) is that the movie summons a unique power that descends from the grandeur of its theme. Far more than, say, “The Matrix,” “Natural Born Killers” was the movie that glimpsed the looking glass we were passing through, the new psycho-metaphysical space we were living inside — the roller-coaster of images and advertisements, of entertainment and illusion, of demons that come up through fantasy and morph into daydreams, of vicarious violence that bleeds into real violence.

I’ve always found “Natural Born Killers” a nearly impossible movie to nail down in writing (it’s like trying to capture what music sounds like). Sure, it’s easy to summarize the tale of Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson), a sloe-eyed drawling psycho in a blond ponytail, and his ragingly damaged bad-apple lover, Mallory (Juliette Lewis), the two of whom go on a killing spree that turns them into celebrities, like Bonnie and Clyde for the age of TMZ.

Yet it’s the moment-to-moment, shot-to-shot texture of the movie that transforms a two-dimensional story into a four-dimensional sensory X-ray. I took my best shot at writing about it in my 2016 memoir, “Movie Freak,” in which I said:

“The tingly audacity of ‘Natural Born Killers,’ and the addictive pleasure of watching it, begins with the perception that Mickey and Mallory experience not just their infamy but every moment of their lives as pop culture. Their lives are poured through the images they carry around in their heads. The two of them enact a heightened version of a world in which identity is increasingly becoming a murky, bundled fusion of true life and media fantasy. It works something like this: You are what you watch, which is what you want to be, which is what you think you are, which is what you really can be (yes, you can!), as long as you…believe.”

What form does this kind of belief take? It’s a word that applies, in equal measure, to the fan-geek hordes at Comic-Con; to the gun geeks who imagine themselves part of a larger “militia”; to the gamers and the dark-web conspiracy junkies; to the people who think that Donald Trump was qualified to be president because he pretended to be an imperious executive on TV. It applies to anyone who experiences the news as the world’s greatest reality show, or to the way that social media is called social media because it’s about people treating every facet of their lives as “media” — as a verité performance. Made just before the rise of the Internet, “Natural Born Killers” captured, and predicted, a society that turns reality itself into a nonstop channel surf, a simulacrum of the life we’re living. One of the film’s most brilliant sequences is a dystopian sitcom, with a vile fulminating Rodney Dangerfield, that depicts Mallory’s hellish home. It’s a dysfunctional nightmare reduced to TV, which is what allows Mallory to murder her way out of it.

“Natural Born Killers” took off from a script by Quentin Tarantino that got drastically rewritten (Tarantino received a story credit), though it provided the basic spine of the film’s evil-hipsters-on-the-run structure and kicky satirical ultraviolence. But there’s a reason that Tarantino didn’t like the finished film; it’s not, in the end, his sensibility. His vision is suffused with irony, whereas Oliver Stone directs “Natural Born Killers” as if he were making a documentary about a homicidal acid trip.

The patchwork of film stocks that Stone employs (black-and-white, glaring color, 8mm, grainy video) turns the movie into a volcanic multimedia dream-poem. And it’s no coincidence that those clashing visual textures are an elaboration of the style that Stone invented for “JFK,” a drama about political reality (the assassination of a president) that gets sucked into the vortex of media reality (the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mesmerization of the Zapruder film). “Natural Born Killers” pushes that dynamic several steps further, as Mickey and Mallory’s murder spree becomes a hall of mirrors that’s being televised inside their own heads. In 1967, the tagline for “Bonnie and Clyde” was “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” The tagline for “Natural Born Killers” should have been: “They kill people. So they’ll have something to watch.”

“Natural Born Killers” captures how our parasitical relationship to pop culture can magnify the cycle of violence. Yet that theme may be more dangerous now than it was in 1994. As a liberal who’s a staunch advocate of every gun-control measure conceivable, and would never think to “blame” a mass shooting on a piece of entertainment, I am nevertheless haunted by the possibility that half a century’s worth of insanely violent pop culture has had a collective numbing effect. In “Natural Born Killers,” a psychiatrist, played with diligent dryness by the comedian Steven Wright, gets interviewed on television about Mickey and Mallory, and his analysis is as follows: “Mickey and Mallory know the difference between right and wrong. They just don’t give a damn.”

That, to me, is one of the most resonant lines in all of movies, because what it’s describing now sounds chillingly close to too many of us. Sure, we all say that we care. But if you look at the actions, the judgments, the policies supported by millions of Americans, it seems increasingly clear that we’re turning into a society of people who know the difference between right and wrong, but just don’t give a damn.

Or maybe that’s too dark a thing to say. But the beauty, and brilliance, of “Natural Born Killers,” which draws on and radicalizes a tradition of movies (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” “Taxi Driver”) that deposit the audience directly into the souls of sociopaths, is that the film dares to ask us to ask ourselves what we’re made of. To ask whether we’ve removed life from reality by turning it into a spectacle of nonstop self-projection. To ask whether we’re now watching ourselves to death. “

-- I loved it when I saw it. I saw it once. It scared me. It was too real and too predictive, too foretelling. But brilliant. Scary brilliant. To see the parody of the sitcom is to live your present life, your past life, and realize a subtle and not so subtle horror coursing through our filtered vision every day.

#oliver stone #natural born killers

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sunlightpike · 5 years

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Theory: the Assembly isn’t allied with anyone but the Assembly, and they’re playing both sides of this war to their benefit.

Here’s why: [under the cut as it’s very long-- tldr; they seem to have been working both with and against both sides as it served them, and their direct possession of the Beacon ties the stealing of it to them and not the Empire. they’d have reason to want to use this war to their advantage and they would’ve strengthening themselves while the Empire and the Kryn weakened each other. Dairon even seems to think that the Assembly playing both sides is a possibility, one that scares her.]

First of all, there’s varying opinions on the Assembly throughout the Empire. Because it is a group of the Empire’s most powerful magic users, their power worries some people. Others say that it keeps the crown in check. However it’s clear that they’re independent of the king-- they work with and under him, yes, but they have their own structure and motivations.

There’s near proof that they’re working against the Kryn, or at least stole the Beacon from them, in this exchange with Thuron (the Kryn who tried to steal it back that they corner in the sewers):

Molly: How did you lose the thing in the first place that you need to get it back Thuron: It was taken from Xhorhas. Molly: By who? Thuron: (chuckles darkly, looks up towards the surface) [...] your fucking wizards.

One of the wizards that had been fighting him was confirmed to be Ikithon. And who would an outside force consider the Empire’s wizards? It’s very likely that it’d be the Assembly.

There’s also proof--though more tangential--that they were working in some respect with the Kryn. Dairon is convinced of it-- when she speaks about her suspicions that the Assembly may be aiding the Kryn. Caleb asks about the allegiances of the Assembly and they respond with

“I have a hunch. There have been signs of meetings, whispers of something involving them. I’m still trying to discover the root. But I do not trust their interests lie with the empire. And something about this dunamantic magic seems to be intrinsically tied to their movements as well.”

I wonder if the Assembly approached the Kryn as allies, earned some of their trust, and then stole the Beacon. It’d make sense as to why they had met with the Kryn, why there were rumors of them being involved. Dairon also mentions them being tied to dunamancy, and we know once they had the Beacon they were experimenting with it and distilling it.

(This also raises the question as to why it seems like Dairon isn’t aware that they had the Beacon and were experimenting with dunamancy on the Empire side of the border. It could be possible the Assembly had kept it to themselves to heighten the tensions even further, bc the Empire would then be clueless as to why Xhorhas was growing angry.)

And during the conversation with Dairon, Caleb asks if it’s just a hunch and gets this

“I have spent enough time working in the Empire to know that they [the Assembly] are not to be trusted. And if anyone is to try to find a means to gain by pitting one side against the other, well, they are far more intelligent than I am, and that is very scary to me”

Which is exactly what I’m beginning to think is going on here. The Assembly steals a powerful Xhorhasian relic, possibly without the knowledge of the King. The Kryn believe that the Dwendalian Empire have stolen their relic, and tensions start building. Unrest grows at the border as the Kryn look to reclaim their relic, and eventually a war begins.

While both sides fight each other, the Assembly sits by and, in theory, has the Beacon in their possession (but not in reality, bc tM9 ruined their plans by taking it). They have ample time to study and work with it while the Empire and Xhorhas fight each other. Yeza’s experiments as well as the notes found in his lab certainly prove they were working with it until it got stolen. While the notes do mention combat and soldiers, and insult the Kryn heavily, they do not mention the Empire. In fact, the only allegiance the notes show is to the Assembly: “Imagine what could be accomplished by the Assembly should we further learn to command these [illegible] of existence. The dreams are already thrilling.”

Additionally, the first time we see the Beacon itself-- and not dunamancy in general-- being presented as a powerful weapon is in the notes. The idea doesn’t seem to come from the Kryn. In fact, Thuron flat out responds “no” when Jester asks if it will hurt people (though the insight check here is failed so lying is a possibility), and the first thing he mentions about the Beacon is that it is part of their culture and allows rebirth. And Leylas Kryn’s reaction to having the Beacon returned to her in e56 doesn’t seem to imply that they’ve given her a weapon, but that they’ve given her something important to her people and her culture. It could still be a weapon, but the Kryn are able to use dunamancy without the Beacon.

Now, in this theory, it’s easy to see how the Assembly might’ve planned this out. Have both sides fight each other while they study this powerful relic and grow more powerful themselves, gaining the ability to power up their people at least somehow. And then, once the Kryn and the Empire had weakened each other, they could step in and arrange things in a way that is favorable to them, whatever that may be-- whether that’s by establishing their own rule or by arranging the terms of their existence within the Empire to their favor.

And the Assembly does have a clear reason to do this. When Caleb reads about the Assembly in e18, he learns that there were warring mage houses that nearly destroyed part of Rexxentrum and, “as part of the ceasefire and the arrest of these mage houses [...] as opposed to imprisoning them, they agreed to bind themselves to the Empire and work for them.” Which means that the initial terms of the Assembly’s creation was not under their own terms, but rather an alternative to imprisonment. Meaning that they’d have a reason to be dissatisfied with their arrangement and hope to change it.

(Also of note is that, while it’d be his job to be there because he’s in charge of Domestic Protections, Da’leth, who is the only original member of the Assembly still surviving, is present in Felderwin and talking to DeRogna-- and is later seen heading to Yeza’s shop. He’d possibly be part of the source of this dissatisfaction, and is definitely involved with the Beacon.)

(One more interesting thing about this event-- the way Caleb tells it when he is telling tM9 about his past is different. He says that the mages “came to a truce and banded together and proposed to the king at the time that they serve as an advising body alongside the throne,” rather than the Assembly’s creation being part of an alternative to imprisonment. Considering the book he found was by the Cobalt Soul which is less biased and more about information, while the story he tells here is likely what he learned in the Academy, it’s likely that this different version of the story is purposefully being told by the Assembly. This could imply their dissatisfaction with the way it really was, and a desire to have it be different.)

Another thing that seems to add to the idea that the Assembly is building up its own power (rather than the Empire’s or the Kryn’s) is the way it seems to be looking to boost the power of its students specifically. We know it has been for a long time through Caleb’s backstory with the crystals being used to try to boost his power. Additionally, when the Beacon was stolen by Thuron and his friend in Zadash it seemed to have been stolen from the Zauber Spire, the tower of the Hall of Erudition (the Zadash branch of the Soltryce Academy). Oremid Hass is the Assembly member in charge of the Hall, and according to Matt’s campaign notes is “tasked with watching and grooming the next generation of mages and arcane specialists outside of Rexxentrum.” If they were working with the Beacon and what it could do to boost people’s abilities, this seems like the place outside of Rexxentrum to take it-- and it’s much closer to where the Beacon was being experimented on in Felderwin.

Caleb’s backstory does bring up the way he was being trained to view the Empire. That he was “being trained to serve our Empire above all else.” But I don’t think that this entirely discounts this theory-- after all, lower level members of the Assembly probably wouldn’t have been informed about any plans to work against the King, because that could very quickly get leaked out and become a problem. And there’d likely be ways to get the students to remain loyal to the Assembly rather than the Empire when the time came, whether through magic or false information or manipulation or more than one thing. We know the Assembly-- Ikithon in particular-- don’t seem to have an issue with that.

All-in-all (while King Bertrand Dwendel has been very absent in terms of the story) the Empire as an entity hasn’t been shown to be extremely shady or extremely good. It’s had some good things presented about it and some bad things. It’s where tM9 are originally based, but that’s about it in terms of their allegiance to it. And from e56 we know that at least part of the cause of the war on the Kryn’s side was the loss of the Beacon, and Leylas Kryn seemed to react very positively towards the Mighty Nein after getting it back, despite how terrible the Empire framed the Kryn to be. The shadiest figure in this whole political ordeal is the Assembly, which has many active players in the story and seems to be involved in a whole lot of the shady things going on.

It’ll be interesting to see if this really is how the Assembly is woven into the war. If it really is corrupt in the way all this implies, then we’ll begin to see definite signs of it soon-- hopefully tM9 is going to talk to Leylas Kryn about the Beacon and how it got taken, and Yeza will be able to offer insight into what he was up to with it. And in that case, tM9 will probably end up on a path leading to trying to take them down-- which will be interesting for Caleb. But they’ll also, in that case, probably be trying to avoid becoming the enemy of either side (we’ll see how that goes), which will take work, especially if they’re going into the Empire to try to take down one of its most influential groups of magic users. (Additionally, Dairon’d have to reevaluate a lot about their worldview, if Beau/tM9 even bring them in on it or if she figures it out herself-- both of which would be interesting to watch play out.)

#critical role spoilers #critical role #meta #c2e56 #mine #m9 #lots and lots of politics and theorizing based on threads matt has woven #throughout the whole campaign #i think the earliest ep i cite here is like... 9 #if this is true there've been tiny tiny hints for a while

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bluerene · 6 years

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Do you take requests for stories? If yes, I have one: Family Fluff involving a sick day for Starfire, having her husband and her two kids Mar'i and Jake take care of her. Do what you like.. Pretty Please?

Ahhhh omg yes, this sounds adorable. Here’s some Grayson Family Fluff! Hope you enjoy it

Remedy

Of all the illnesses his wife had ever taken to, Dick had found the Tamaranian Cold to be the worst.

Fevers were easy. Fevers meant Kori took an icy shower, swaddled herself in blankets, and slept for two days. Fevers were the evenings when Dick tucked the kids into bed before shutting himself in his office to work late, without the worry that his beautiful, terrifying wife would burst in and drag him off to sleep.

Eight days before Jake’s fifth birthday, an explosive sneeze from the master bathroom rattled the windows and doors of their home. This was not a fever.

The Cold always arrived without warning. It hit hard and fast, and each turn came with a bout of unpredictable symptoms. It needed a plan of attack. As it turned out, Mar’i and Jake’s mixed physiology made them immune to the common strain of cold that left their mother miserable for days. So when it reared its ugly head, the Grayson Household had all hands on deck.

“Let’s get you back into bed, m’lovely.”

“Do not baby me, Richard, it was merely a small sneeze -”

Dick shook his head, “You can tell that to the neighbors. Want me to fix those?”

Kori crossed her arms and leaned forward, allowing him to fluff the pillows at her back.

“You are fussing.”

“I’m your husband, I’m allowed to fuss.”

“It begins with the fussing, but then you will sound for the children -”

“MAR’I! JAKE!” Dick bellowed, clapping his hands over his wife’s ears, “OPERATION EXTREME SNIFFLES IS A GO!”

“X’hal, Richard.”

The sound of giggles and feet padding along the floor that reached their ears was enough to wipe the exasperation off her face and replace it with a smile.

To Dick, that alone was everything.

Mar’i floated into their bedroom and seated herself at the edge of her parent’s bed, watching the door expectantly.

“Jakey!” she called, “hurry up or else Dad’s gonna start the plan without you!”

“Wait!” her younger brother wailed, running into the room as quickly as he could, a half-dozing Silkie struggling to wiggle out of his grip, “don’t start without me, Daddy, I’m here, I’m here!!”

Dick chuckled, bending down to scoop his son up into his arms.

“Slow down, buddy, you didn’t miss a thing. Now, who remembers the plan?”

Mar’i bounced on the bed, waving her hand excitedly, “I do! Jake and me get to help you make soup and read Mom books and give her medicine so she doesn’t ‘splode the bathroom and make cards and watch The Little Mermaid until she falls asleep so that Rella and her mom can come over and help fix Mom’s cold -”

“I am still here, you know,” Kori said indignantly, unable to hide the grin that had spread across her face, “and even if I am fighting a small guffax’hlr, it is unreasonable to expect Raven to drop everything for me.”

“We already called her,” Dick said triumphantly, “and she says she could hear you sneeze from Jump.”

“She did not, do not be a clorb -”

“Kids! Let’s go make Mom some breakfast. Jake, wanna keep her company?”

Jake nodded and floated out of his father’s grasp, landing clumsily beside his mother.

Mar’i took advantage of the newly freed space on her dad and clambered onto his shoulders quickly.

“Dad,” she whispered, holding out a fist, “Operation Breakfast for Extreme Sniffles is in action!”

Kori watched Dick bump knuckles with their daughter, shaking her head as they left. The headache that had been quietly raging in her skull had heightened to a hard pounding. Her limbs felt heavy and drained of energy, there was an odd flutter in her stomach, and an itch in her nose that could only be a starbolt sneeze.

She sighed and held her arms out.

“Come here, my bumgorf.”

Jake smiled and crawled into her embrace, curling up on her chest as he always did when they cuddled.

Kori stroked his dark hair gently, pressing a soft kiss on the top of his head.

“Can I tell you a secret? You must promise not to tell your pyha’r.”

“Are you gonna tell Mar’i too?”

“No,” Kori said, “it is just between us. I am feeling a little bit of the sickness. But if you tell pyah’r he will tease me. So you must not say a word to him or your sister.”

Jake sat up and tilted his head, studying her with wide blue eyes.

“Daddy says if you’re feeling bad you’ll get grumpy ‘cuz of your tummies hurting.”

“My tummies are hurting a little,” she admitted, smiling despite herself, “but I will do my best to not be the grump.”

Her son crossed his arms, and there he was again, a miniature version of the boy she had fallen in love with all those years ago. Kori’s four year old was serious, thoughtful, and surprisingly observant. Mar’i, who was every bit the acrobat her father was and possessed her mother’s energy and sunny personality, flitted about in crowds with confidence. Jake, on the other hand, demonstrated the same silent watchfulness as her Robin. Whether they were at the movie theater, a dinner party, or in their home, he behaved like a quiet protector. Just like he was doing now.

“If your tummies are hurting, Daddy should know.”

Kori rolled her eyes.

“I am sure he already does. Now, I believe I was promised some of the get well cards?”

“Can I make them in here if I’m quiet? I promise I won’t get marker on your bed.”

She nodded and allowed Jake to wiggle out of her hold, climbing off the bed, and racing out of her bedroom.

Kori leaned back into her pillow and groaned, shutting her eyes. She hated the cold. What she wanted and needed more than anything was a steaming bowl of-

“Fyegnar Root and Jek’k soup!” Mar’i announced cheerfully, balancing a full tray of food in her arms. Dick followed her with arms open, ready to grab her if anything fell.

Mar’i placed the tray on her mother’s lap and grinned, “Daddy says it’s your favorite.”

“I always keep a few packs of it frozen, just in case,” Dick explained with a wink, “we also made you toast with sp’tflink jelly.”

“And zorkaberry juice!”

Kori beamed, touching her daughter’s cheek.

“That is very sweet of you Mar’i. Will you go check on your brother and make sure he is not having trouble bringing his items for coloring?”

Mar’i nodded and bounded off to find Jake, leaving her parents to themselves.

Dick held up his hands apologetically (though the smug look on his face said otherwise).

“I know you said you aren’t sick, but I cleared my schedule and the kids didn’t have anything planned for today, so I figured we’d take care of you. It’s good practice anyhow.”

“For?”

Her husband grinned.

“When baby number three comes around, Team Grayson will be totally ready to handle the mood swings, the morning sickness, and everything in between.”

Kori burst into laughter and shook her head, taking Dick’s hand.

“I should not be surprised you know, but I would like to know how you figured it out. I have only known for a few days.”

Dick bent down to kiss her cheek, intertwining their fingers.

“I’d be a pretty terrible husband if I didn’t pick up on any of the signs the third time around. And you’ve been overly sneaky this last week. Mar’i also found six positive tests in the trash while she was doing her chores and she asked me what they were soooooo…”

She smacked his arm lightly.

“You are such a…an usstor varblernelk. Why did you not say anything to me?”

He shrugged.

“I trusted you’d tell me when you felt ready. I remember how nervous you were when we found out about Mar’i and Jake. It made more sense to wait.”

Kori kissed the back of his palm and smiled.

“That must have been difficult for you.”

“Oh, you have no idea, it’s been exhausting,” he joked, “so I’d love it if you’d indulge me with some bed rest and family snuggles. Just until you’re feeling better.”

“It will be seven months before that happens,” she mumbled, playing with their joined hands.

“Totally worth it, babe.”

They sat there for hours, talking and touching and laughing as their children flitted in and out of the room, bringing books and hastily scribbled cards to the foot of the bed. Dick dared to taste the sp’tflink jelly that his wife had loved for so long, quickly tossing it at Silkie to finish it off before she noticed. Mar’i refilled her mother’s juice dutifully, before floating into bed with her tablet to watch The Little Mermaid. Jake lay curled up against Kori’s side, napping peacefully. There, with her family bundled up in her arms, her husband beside her as he had always been, Kori finally fell asleep.

When she roused she could feel the headache pass and the tightness of her limbs ebb away as the flow of energy slowly returned to her body. The fluttering in her stomach had grown stronger, but it was clear to her that it wasn’t a symptom of the cold.

“Feeling better?” Dick asked softly, stroking her hair.

She nodded, blinking tiredly, “much better. I believe it was the soup.”

“Well, Raven popped by while you were sleeping, “ he admitted, “but we didn’t want to wake you. She gives her love, by the way. And -” He paused for a moment to retrieve his phone from his pocket, “she’s confirmed a strong heartbeat, good flow of energy, and a lot of activity.”

“Oh,” Kori said, drawing her hands to her mouth.

“I wanted you to worry about it a little less,” Dick said, lips pulling into a half-smile, “I know you would’ve wanted to be awake for it but you’re sick and stressed -mmph!”

She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him down to her level, kissing him soundly, careful not to move Jake.

“I love you so much, Richard,” Kori whispered, pecking him on the nose, “I love you now and always and our beautiful family.”

He touched his forehead to hers, gazing into her shining green eyes.

“I love you too, Star. Always have and always will.”

“Did Raven say it was safe to tell people?”

Dick placed a hand on her stomach and nuzzled her neck, peppering kisses along her skin. She giggled and tilted her head back, beaming as he shared his enthusiasm with her.

“Another week if you’re still worried, but otherwise, yeah, she’s given the green light. Wanna wake the kids?”

Kori glanced over at the little boy snoring by her ribs and the fierce girl snuggling beside her brother. She placed her hand on her stomach and closed her eyes, imagining the feelings to come in the next few months.

“Tomorrow. For now, it can just be us.”

The cold, in an unusual twist of fate, had passed quicker than Dick had ever seen it go. In the Grayson Household that night, there was only warmth.

#blue writes #blue answers #thank u for asking!#steward-of-geekdom62 #starfire #dick grayson #mariand'r #jake grayson #dickkory #fic #teen titans #grayson family fluff!!!#ahhhhh is this good or not i can't tell lmao #robstar

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femmesfollesnebraska · 3 years

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Artist Feature: Kara Dunne

Pleased to present this q-and-a with artist Kara Dunne. All words and images (c) Kara Dunne...

A Trailer is a Castle on Its Side

Where are you from? How did you get into creative work and what is your impetus for creating?

I like to say I’m from Vermont because that’s where I was born and most likely will end up someday. Currently I live in Massachusetts.

My observation skills got me into creative work. I was always good at drawing from observation growing up, and in general observing things that were odd or quirky in the world. Once I tapped into these heightened skills of seeing things in a new way, I think the gift of creativity followed suit. Once you are super-honed into the world around you, you naturally start making unusual connections that you’d like to share (secretly in hopes that you may be the first one to make them of course).

As a practicing artist over the years, my work accumulates around me in boxes and flat file drawers. And since I mostly create multiples of things, sometimes I feel like an unintentional hoarder. But the thing is, unlike a hoarder, I don’t want to hold on to the stuff I make. I have increasingly felt the “what is the point of producing all this stuff?” question that is not unique to the artist’s experience. I can relate to the: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, then it doesn’t make a sound” concept. If I make work that remains in my flat file, then it too, remains silent. So what is the point? I can only amuse myself for so long by producing for myself. One needs an audience. Coming from a performance background, audience interaction for me was always the most exciting part of the practice. I’ve recently made it my main goal as a printmaker to reach an audience with my work by finding new ways in which I can just give my prints away. I’ve never wanted to sit with my stuff at a table making puppy dog eyes in order for people to stop and buy something from me. No surprise that I was terrible at selling girl scout cookies.

Tell me about your latest project and why its important to you. What do you hope people get out of your work?

Just before the world shut down, which for me was a year before the pandemic because my time was happily consumed as a new mom, I had just finished a long term research project that connected the agrarian and urban versions of what it meant to be a shepherd and gather something. It compared the idea of a shopping cart attendant at the grocery store to that of a traditional shepherd gathering and caring for a flock of sheep. The final result from my years of research into this concept was a limited edition artists’ book, titled, Shopping Cart Shepherds. Printed on a letterpress, it combined drawings, screen-prints and interviews from my conceptual journey that began in 2012 when I spent time in a small town in Ireland (and yes, around sheep and people who raised sheep). I met a local man in his eighties named Tom Tarpey, who had been raising sheep for about thirty years at that point. Strangely enough and quite a rarity in Catholic history, he was the retired priest of the town. He had left the church in order to marry the love of his life. Once a shepherd of the people, he became a shepherd of sheep. What a rare find! I thoroughly enjoy my work when I can interact with the world more directly; when my artistic research connects me to people in places I have never been and with whom I remain in contact with. I have all these great big ideas, and usually I will be hesitant at first (shy?) to make connections with the community in order to see those ideas come into fruition, but ultimately things pan out in one way or another. For example, when I came home from Ireland and was blabbing about sheep, a friend gave me a newspaper article about traditional Basque shepherds still working in this country- in the mountains in Idaho. For a long time, the article was taped to my wall as a reminder to contact some guy I read about named Henry Etcheverry. In 2014 I was awarded a residency at a fabulous spot called Surel’s Place (thank you so much Surel Mitchell), and it gave me the opportunity to the make necessary connections out there for this book. Needless to say, it was an amazing experience and the Etcheverry family embraced me like one of their own; and I learned a lot about sheep. I now consider them my extended west coast family.

110 copies of the book, Shopping Cart Shepherds, exist (that’s all I could afford to get printed) and inside the back cover it asks the reader to pass the book along to someone else once they finish it. It is my hope that the ideas in this book will travel and reach more than 110 people. (More trees falling in more forests?) I have given away most of the copies at this point, both to people I know and don’t know. The books serve as messages in bottles- it’s honestly difficult to not to have control over where they go, but I guess an artist never really knows where their artwork will end up after it is purchased anyway. Perhaps my books are mostly buried in the sand dunes of someone’s office book pile, or they have actually reached new beaches far far away. I will never know.

Since completing this major work, all of my ideas for making prints have the underlying purpose of getting out into the world and reaching an audience.

I find certain design elements of architecture to be amusing, and often make work about the structures around us, as they are extensions of our culture and can change with popularity just like anything else. Cupolas, ultimately a very useful and functional architectural ventilation add-on to barns and other large buildings, have been on the rise where I live. Decorative cupolas mainly, seem to show up on top of garages overnight, like cherries atop sundaes. (Makes the sundae and the house look better). I made an edition of screen-prints based on this idea- a vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce and sprinkles in a fancy glass serving dish…with a cupola on top. To get them out to cupola-adorning people, I made up a survey of questions about cupolas. I printed the survey onto paper door hangers and distributed them. The survey could be cut out from the door hanger as a postcard and mailed to my special P.O. box in town. If the survey was sent back, that household would receive an original artist print. I had the post box and distributed the door hangers for a few months before I had to stop the project because of the emergence of covid. I had received at least a dozen responses at that point, and mailed out a portion of the edition. I’d like to start it up again at some point.

My next print- based community outreach project idea is in process now and will involve restaurant placemats. I just need to make some local restaurant connections. (Another pre-pandemic idea forced to simmer on the back burner). Here’s the basic idea. A table at a restaurant is the perfect gallery space. It is especially ideal because it is the location where a group of people will sit and wait for a long period of time together with nothing else to do but sit and chit-chat in one place. Not even in a gallery do you have the same group of people staying near each other and talking for longer than fifteen minutes in front of a single artwork.

A paper placemat at a restaurant is viewed for a longer period of time than a work of art on a gallery wall. It is hard not to look at a placemat- it is one of the few places to look while waiting for food. I will use the format of the dining placemat as a way to bring fine art into the everyday world. I believe an etching is the perfect kind of print for this project. An etching is considered the finest of fine art printmaking, mainly because the process of making an etching plate is just as time consuming as printing the edition itself. Also, it would be perfectly ironic if a plate made a placemat. And the thought of such a sacred piece of paper so carefully processed as an art work that should end up underneath someone’s sweaty beer glass and dinner plate is simply…exciting to me. Equally, the thought that a restaurant guest may decide to not get it messy because they want to take it home is the kind of leave-it-to-chance scenario that I gravitate to as an artist; it forces me to relinquish my control and challenges the idea of art as an artifact. For the viewer, the idea plays with the preciousness of “art” and the context in which we view a work of art (in a gallery vs. the real world). For the restaurant owner, it may also bring more business and create a new kind of hype attracting more customers. Let’s say I print a series of five placemats, and if people collect all five placemats they get a free limited edition non-placemat print worth X amount of dollars. Or maybe they collect all five and get ten dollars off their next meal. Something like that.

This project connects directly with the public and gets the fine art print into the hands of the everyday person. The imagery within the frame of the placemat will vary- from beautiful local scenery and landmarks (as everyone enjoys a pretty picture), to several different designs that will engage the table with non-phone related activities- like a dining room scavenger hunt or a list of dinner conversation starters, as well as other designs that are more cerebral and open to interpretation, serving as conversation starters themselves (with digestion friendly, witty imagery). It is also my intention to make one of the placemats at each table have a QR code with a link to a video of how the placemat was produced, essentially educating the public about what an etching is, and moreover- what printmaking is.

Considering the political climate, how do you think the temperature is for the arts right now, what/how do you hope it may change or make a difference?

The climate is quite volatile right now, to say the least, and I think artists have a responsibility now more than ever to connect people from both sides of a political issue in order to start a meaningful conversation. I think the temperature for artists right now is great- get in the pool! Art always impacts at least one person looking at it, so that’s something. Art is mainly a non-confrontational way to interpret something about the world that needs to change for others who may not understand why change needs to happen. The best example I can think of within the visual arts is installation and involves statistic- based information. For example, a person may come across a beautiful sculpture of a sea monster made from plastic cups. Then they read about the work and how two million cups were used to make the work and that two million cups end up in the ocean every day; that person now has the physical representation in front of them of what two million actually means and it is forever burned into their mind. That person can stand next to the giant sculpture of cups and can better understand what the number means in relation to how it impacts the environment. A real life artwork that is forever burned in my mind like this is a video piece by the ceramic artist Ehren Tool called the ‘1.5 Second War Memorial’. In it, every 1.5 seconds a cup is shot and breaks. Each cup represents a human life. You would have to watch the video for eight minutes to get to the number of people who died in the Gulf War (Tool is a veteran of that war) and watch the video for two years to get to the number of total casualties in WWII.

Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, examined the perspective of femininity and race in her work, and spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art; does feminism play a role in your work?

More often than not, feminism lies under the surface of my work. How can it not, as I am living as a woman in this world? Feminism is always going to be relevant. It does not end, it is forever in existence; Feminism should not be considered as waves of the past, but as the water itself. I hate that ‘feminism’ is still considered a ‘dirty’ word. Mostly I experience this as a high school teacher, when every so often I will have a male student who expresses their thoughts about what they think feminism is and after I cringe, mostly internally and sometimes externally, I sadly realize that this wrongly informed opinion comes from the belief system of the parents. I try my best to inform them of what is true and false without becoming pushy; it is my hope that these particular students gain more perspective in the world through life experiences once their bubble becomes bigger- and of course once their bubble of close-mindedness has popped.

Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of when to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.” What is your favorite advice you have received or given?

One of my first professors, Nick Tobier, had a five line mantra of sorts that he told us to write down during his first lecture.

“Public space is yours to take.

Reveal the things that are hidden.

What you see has been filtered for you.

Let private notions become public.

You can make icons”

https://www.karadunne.com/

Les Femmes Folles was a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world. Editor Sally Brown retired from active blogging after 10 years in 2021, but still accepts submissions. [email protected] https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing

Check out the 10th anniversary LFF exhibit, Feminist Connect, here:

https://www.les-femmes-folles-feminist-connect.com/

#contemporaryart #feministart

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dingoat · 6 years

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The Right Way | Part Three

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He saw Ahuska, the Bothan girl, eyes blazing red and a wicked, grinning snarl fixed on her snout. He grabbed her roughly around the waist, dragging her close, and she laughed, flicking the power switch of the whip she carried, causing a crackle of energy to light it up. She lashed it, once, expertly, the end curling around and sending a sharp jolt against the back of his leg. He grunted. Then laughed as well, something savage in his tone as he seized the back of her head and forced their lips to lock for a brief, hungry moment. She whipped him again, and his eyes lit up like burning embers. “Down, Ulfy boy. We’ve got work to do.” Ahuska… this other, terrible Ahuska, craned her neck over his shoulder and whistled. “Let’s go, Puppy! No time to lose!”

Ulfran’s stomach churned.

It wasn’t just the obvious wrongness of what he saw; it was the way the vision resonated in his mind, just out of sync with his perception of what was real, what was correct, what was actually happening. He wasn’t particularly well versed in prophesy or farseeing; it was an aspect of the Force he tended to steer well clear of. Far stronger users than he had lost themselves to the currents of what-ifs and maybes. But the way this vision grated at him; it wasn’t the wide, clear disparity from the present of a distant possibility, it wasn’t a culmination of many different choices across decades. This was the thrumming discord of two notes separated by not even half a step. This was a path stumbled upon by but the smallest of difference; a single tiny event splitting what was real from what he was being shown.

And he burned to know what that was.

Ulfran tried to tell himself his desire came from a need to protect. To find what little slip could cause such a disparity of events, what tiny change in the past could lead to him and her looking like that. To find it and know it so that he could prevent such a future ever coming to be. And he knew that such reasoning lead many Sensitives down paths of obsession. He knew that it really was nothing but a dark and morbid curiosity that pushed his next action.

He felt Nela begin to pull away. He felt her physical grip lessen, and their presence in the Force current start to fade. Not yet, he hissed, not knowing if he made the words audible, as he clamped down hard on Nela. His mind, his hands, his cold cybernetic fingers, all took a firm hold of the girl, because he knew without her he’d never be able to find this particular current again. It was only through her connection that he was able to steady himself and steer through the vision that thrummed painfully against them both. I’m sorry. I have to know.

Back, back through time Ulfran and Nela went. Scenes flashed and flickered past them; too fast to get a sense of the whole. Ahuska sending out a baying, surging pack of Anooba. Himself, eyes blazing, poised atop an elegantly decorated mansion staircase. Nines in a pair of tinted sunglasses, her cascade of blonde hair catching the light as she threw a dazzling smile over her shoulder. Lyrisal, halting at the sound of a blaster being primed to fire. Ahuska again, blue-eyed and armour clad, screaming at the sky. A pair of Mandalorians in silver and green, bumping their helmets together. A wampa roaring in the snow. A street on fire. A ship slowing, lilting as it changed course.

Ulfran began to wonder if he somehow had it wrong, as they traveled further and further back. Had he somehow slipped into another path? Was he watching some other lives, some other past entirely? But still, that discordant whine pressed at his consciousness, that ever present feeling that these events, though so terribly different from what had truly happened, veered from the true path, the right path, by just a breath.

And then, the sensation abruptly buzzed more sharply, almost unbearable for less than a second, before completely fading. This was it. The moment where that horrid vision would or would not become the future.

Huh.

The kid ran, fast as his scrawny legs could carry him, through the filthy alleyways of the Coruscant undercity. Something caught his eye; a scribble on one of the walls. Some sort of crude rendition of an animal; a wolf, perhaps. A flash of blue light flickered past overhead; he entertained the notion of turning away from the familiar path to his usual hideout, instead turning in the direction the wolf was pointing.

The kid began to move, lifting his foot from the pavement to make his first step, and everything began to buzz again.

The kid decided to go with his whim, and in that instant the buzzing faded. He took off to the right and ducked behind a dumpster just in time. The search passed him by, and once the sound of sirens and blare of lights was well in the distance the boy with an unruly mop of jet black hair slunk out, glanced about, and with a cocky, self assured grin sauntered off down the street. This was what actually happened, Ulfran was certain. This was the past as it truly was. Which meant…

With a delicate bit of focus, Ulfran let his consciousness slide back, back to the moment of indecision. As the vision began to resonate, he fixed on that uncomfortable sensation, and was able to follow as the kid instead opted to turn left, like in his dreams. Left, down the familiar stretch of road, and into the powerful grip of a Coruscant patrolman. “Ha!” came the triumphant bark, at the exact same moment as the kid let loose a curse.

“Kriff!”

That hazy buzz was ever-present, and Ulfran recognized it as the result of the deviation of realities. While he watched the alternate version unravel, the true events skirted at the periphery of awareness. He wasn’t yet ready to leave the flow of the Force. He wanted to watch this play out. He wanted to know who this kid was, and how such a whimsical decision could have such a profound effect on his own life. He was finally able to see beyond what his dreams had been willing to show.

The kid struggled and bit at the hands that seized him, but he was small and weedy, and had no chance. “Let me go, you son of a Gamorrean—“

The officer delivered a sharp smack across the boy’s face, which only served to make the kid thrash more wildly. One of his kicks actually met its mark, at which point the officer lifted him clean off his feet. “Give it up, kid, this is the end of your-“

Zzzzzzzzzzzt.

A blaster bolt thudded into the man’s shoulder and he cried out, more anger than pain, and the kid took his chance as the officer’s grip loosened, weaseling out of the vice like grasp and hitting the ground, ducking out of reach quicker than a greased gizka.

“You heard the kid, pig!” Shouted a tinny voice, as a pair of armoured individuals bore down on the officer, jetpacks blazing.

“The boy is a criminal,” came the snarled response, as he whirled and took aim at the newcomers, only to have his blaster shot out of his hand. Again he grunted, pain more evident in his tone, only to have another shot thud into his chest. He wore good armourweave; the bolt serving only to push him back a pace rather than cause any damage, but he was incensed.

“He can’t be more than eight years old. Go fight some real crime, will you?” The second warrior sneered, sweeping around in the air to give the officer a fierce kick from behind, sending him sprawling.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” the first one darted over toward the boy, offering an arm. “You ever flown before?”

The kid shook his head, but took up the offer eagerly, immediately trusting the pair of helmeted individuals who battered the officer to the ground.

He’d never flown before, but he relished every second of it. Swept into the air and carried to safety by his armoured rescuers, they took him around to a sector he’d never been before, setting down on a mid-level balcony of what he could only guess was where the pair were living.

“You got family, kid?” The first asked as he pulled off his helmet, revealing a young adult with sandy blonde, spiked hair and a cheeky, freckled face.

“It’s just me,” he replied. “Got some mates, but I live on my own…”

“You want to change that?”

The kid just stared, a little apprehensive, a little excited.

The armoured man chuckled. “You heard me. You’ve got spirit, we both watched you down there. You’re made of the right stuff. Our family’s not big, but there’s always room for someone like you amongst us. Boss would hate to think of a little fighter like you going to waste in the slums of Coruscant.”

“What do you think? People always at your back,” offered the second, a woman with burn scars on her cheek and vivid green eyes. “We could teach you to fly.”

The kid’s eyes, bright blue, grew ever wider under his unkempt mop of jet black hair. He was plainly awestruck. “Yeah. Yeah, I want to learn to fly. Not just a jetpack. I want a ship!”

The duo laughed, and the woman reached forward to ruffle up his fluffy hair. “Sure thing. What do we call you, then?”

“Mar’an,” he stated, puffing out his chest and flashing them both a ridiculously broad and toothy smile. The kid very nearly looked like he had fangs.

Ulfran and Nela both seemed to startle at the same moment, their interest in the scene playing out before them heightened astronomically. Dad, came the whisper of Nela’s internal voice. It’s Dad!!

“My name’s Mar’an.”

#fuck me that was a long bit #ahahahaa #writing #swtor writing #the right way #ulfran #ahuska #nela #crow #omfg #i'm having way too much fun with this #sob #i'm sorry

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coll2mitts · 4 years

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#97 Were the World Mine (2008)

This movie was made in 2008, and it hits differently in 2020. I feel like it wasn’t that acceptable in 2008, either, but whatever. I sat on this review for a few days because I wanted to see if my opinion softened over time, but it hasn’t. I need to also place a disclaimer that I’m a bisexual woman, not a gay man, so I’m not the target demographic. I would love to get other perspectives on the impact of this movie, because it did nothing for me.

Timothy attends an all-boys school and is bullied constantly for being gay. His literature teacher encourages him to audition for the school play, and subsequently he is cast as Puck in his high school’s rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He DaVinci Codes the play’s text and discovers the formula for a potion that will turn anyone he sprays it on gay. He then sprays it on half the town, and they all start making out with each other. At the performance, he nullifies the effects of the potion and everyone is suddenly nice to each other because being gay for 24 hours made them empathetic people.

I have to approach this like a fairy tale, because every single person in this movie is a stereotype. All the students at his all-boys school are dude-bros. The rugby coach (like, where do they live?!) is extremely homophobic and is constantly saying that pesky things like education and the arts are getting in the way of his team playing sportsball well. The entire town, save his two friends and his love interest, are also vocally homophobic. His MLM hun mom’s upline literally starts screaming at her on a street corner when she finds out Timothy is gay, like OK.

The weirdest choice this movie makes is how it handles Timothy’s mother. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, she reacts disproportionately every time there is a hint her son is gay. He gets a black eye from being beaned with a dodgeball, and she throws dishes across the kitchen because she thought someone punched him for being gay. She finds out he’s cast as Puck and she gets angry because Puck is a fairy (and her son is a fairy, because he’s gay, get it?). In one particularly egregious scene, she tells her son it’s his fault his father left her, and that she’s also suffering because he’s gay. After all the work they do setting up the unsympathetic “why can’t you just be different?!” mother type, some off-screen miracle takes place and she begins sewing him fairy wings out of her wedding dress. She also spends the rest of the movie telling everyone her son is gay and she’s proud of him. It’s like the movie didn’t like the narrative and pivoted immediately because they needed Tim to have more allies.

Here’s my problem with portraying people like this... not all homophobes are Westboro-Baptist-sign-waving-funeral-protesting nightmares. It’s easy to portray those people as wrong and absurd, even in 2008, because the general attitude of the country was supportive of the LGBT community. Not to be glib, but this is post-Queer Eye and Ellen. There were a lot more queer-positive media streaming into boomers television sets. Homophobia was being OK with gay people, but not wanting your children to be gay. It’s saying consenting adults can do whatever they want, but then getting upset when your kid’s boy scout leader is gay. It’s saying you have a lesbian friend, but not wanting to live with her because you’re afraid they’re going to fantasize about your body or whatever. It’s hush toned dissent that is the most prevalent, and this movie does nothing to address that. It’s all dudes spray painting f-bombs on Tim’s locker and parents screaming at administrators that Shakespeare was a queer and having their kids act in this play has made them want to kiss each other. What kind of message is this this trying to send to heteroes? That you’re either rainbow flag-waving ally, or beating up the gay kid just because you don’t like that he’s gay?

...I’m about to address the consent problem in a second, so here’s a palette cleanser of a genuinely adorable moment of Timothy dancing in his kitchen.

Timothy sprays the entire cast of his production of Midsummers with this potion he creates, including the guy he likes, to seemingly “make” him gay, and then he spends the next day pretending he’s his boyfriend. This guy was in a relationship with someone else at the time, and when that got too real because she was upset her boyfriend randomly left her for another person, Timothy sprayed her with the potion, too, to make her infatuated with his best girl friend. Everyone is now gay and horny and making out, and the ones who were not sprayed are trying to get the people attracted to them to go away because they are relentless.

I mean, this is perpetuating 3 terrible gay stereotypes:

The Gay Agenda is real, and gay people are just trying to convert other people to be gay.

Gay people will not back off if you do not share the same sexual preference

Gay people are just constantly horny and weirdly do not care about consent?

Did nobody think about this for more than a few seconds? Are these people acting on their otherwise buried attraction, or are they forced to have this attraction now? Because I highly doubt everyone in this city was just closeted and now that the potion is coursing through their veins their inhibitions are down. Like, don’t fuck your friend when they’re too drunk, or under the influence of a gay aphrodisiac, is what I’m saying. BUT IT’S OK GUYS, when the potion wears off, nobody is upset, and it turned out his crush wanted to date him this whole time! What a hero, changing the world by drugging one person at a time.

Yeah, this premise was never going to work for me. Which is a shame, because I enjoyed the musical numbers a lot, even though there were only like 4 in the entire movie. The lyrics are based on passages from A Midsummers Night’s Dream, and their portrayal themselves live within Timothy’s fantasy.

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I liked how they take place in heightened, romantic versions of real locations, and that the costumes were clearly of the homemade high school stage production caliber. They were great interludes into Timothy’s mindset, and had the most beautiful imagery of the movie.

I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I really wanted to like this movie, guys. I have been disappointed by more than a few straight girls, but not once did I have the fantasy “but what if I could change them to make them love me?”. It just feels gross. But I will be the first to admit that I’m overthinking this, and maybe it’s 12 years too late for this movie to make an impact on me.

Next is Meet the Feebles, which looks like it involves puppets of some sort...

#unwarranted opinion #100 best musical movies of all time rotten tomatoes

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/why-new-parents-need-to-take-a-break-from-the-news-and-what-they-should-do-instead-2/

Why New Parents Need to Take a Break From the News (and What They Should Do Instead)

In the months after my kids were born, the news cycle would send me into tailspins of anxiety and fear. The Penn State sex-abuse scandal and the Newtown shootings paralyzed me for days—I wept while changing diapers, wept in the bathtub, wept while pushing the stroller down the street. What might have been (merely!) horrifying pre-kids was now incapacitating. For my own mental health, I had to stop reading the news and looking at social media.

Take a Media Fast

Judging from the conversations in my moms’ groups, these feelings aren’t at all unusual. New parents are especially vulnerable to anxiety, says Laura Venuto, a New York City therapist specializing in postpartum mental-health issues. “Sleep deprivation and hormones exacerbate mood and anxiety symptoms. With new parenthood comes a heightened awareness that you’re suddenly not only responsible for yourself, but also a small child in what sometimes seems like a dangerous world.”

Dr. Venuto suggests a total news-media fast or at least a major reduction, corralling your news into 10 or 15 minutes (“In the morning! Not before bed!” she says), and then doing something pleasurable, like playing with your baby or calling a friend. For those worried that being out of touch means slacking off in their political activism, she gently suggests cutting yourself some slack: “If you’re a new parent, you’re not going to be making changes on a global scale. You’re in survival mode. You can put in a call to your representative, and that can be enough.”

Practice ‘Containment’

Lissa Hunsicker Kenney, a social worker in Brooklyn who counsels trauma survivors, also recommends “containment”—the first line of treatment for anxiety—as a first step. “Turning off your iPhone is containment—because it’s so easy for it to become uncontained. It just scrolls and scrolls, and it’s endless.”

So what are we supposed to do, instead? (Besides take care of our kids, I mean.) I asked Lifehacker readers, and my own new-mom friends, what media they turn to for good escapist distraction. I didn’t vet all the answers (though I did nix anything that had “horror” in its IMDB description—what about “non-disturbing” did these people not understand?) so do your own research before leaping into something totally unknown. They’re a good mix of classics, favorite sitcoms and adventure shows, a few kids’ shows and books, comics, and pretty much the entire oeuvre of the BBC.

Ideally, this list will remind of you of beloved books, TV shows, and movies that you’ve enjoyed in the past and will be soothing entertainment now, while you’re still in the sensitive new-parent stage. I read all of Jane Austen at night instead of mindless smartphone scrolling; others swear by sitcoms: “When my son was born we very quickly figured out we had to stop watching Breaking Bad and Walking Dead and just ended up re-watching Parks and Rec on a continuous loop for like three years,” one commenter wrote. Check out the original comments here, and please add your favorite comforting (no child-in-peril, no dead parents, no rapes or murders) media below.

TV & Movies

30 Rock

All Creatures Great and Small

Alias (a spy thriller spanning five seasons, so there are murders and occasional child-in-peril plotlines, but it’s a pretty campy show, so I didn’t find it especially distressing)

The Andy Griffith Show

Flip This House (or any fixer-upper/DIY type shows)

Any stupid Adam Sandler movie

Archer

Arrested Development

Black Adder

Black Books

Bob’s Burgers

Boondocks

Borgen

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (skipping “The Body” and maybe the second half of season five)

Catastrophe

Community

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Critical Role on Geek and Sundry

Doctor Thorne (almost comically predictable, appropriate for anyone with only half a functioning brain, but any costume drama will do in a pinch. Check out this terrific resource for period dramas, but I strongly urge you to skip Call the Midwife if you have a newborn.)

Drunk History

Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy

Elimidate

Everybody Loves Raymond

Farscape

Father Ted

Friends

Futurama

Get Smart

Ghostbusters

Gilmore Girls

Gravity Falls

The Great British Bake-off (or any cooking show)

Grey’s Anatomy (I can’t believe this is still on the air; I have like 10 years to catch up on. Warning: it’s a hospital show, so people do die. Deeennnnnnny!)

Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Laaaaaaaaaw

Hogan’s Heroes

How I Met Your Mother

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Jeeves and Wooster

Kids’ shows and movies, like Adventure Time, Reading Rainbow (the awesome 80’s-90’s version), A Dragon’s Tale, Out of the Box, Teen Titans GO, Rocko’s Modern Life, Hey Arnold!, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Babe, the Narnia movies, Nanny McPhee

Kiki’s Delivery Service (“Miyazaki in general is a great way to escape into a different realm. The colors, the music, the gorgeous inventive artwork and the great characters in all his films makes him a master illusionist and conductor into a whole new world..” “…but not Grave of the Fireflies,” says another commenter.)

Broad City (“It’s hilarious and my life feels like a complete financial success by comparison.”)

King of the Hill

Last Man on Earth

Lucha Underground

M*A*S*H

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Midsomer Murders (“While there are murders, everyone is so provincial and charming, it’s like coming home where you know everyone except for that darned stranger that got themselves killed.”)

The Mindy Project

Mr. Bean

MST3K

Any terrible reality TV (“I watch The People’s Court or Judge Judy, which I DVR in case I need them.”)

News Radio

Northern Exposure

Office Space

Only Fools and Horses

Over the Garden Wall

Parks and Rec

Party Down

Real Genius

Real Housewives (“Oddly enough, RHOC comforts me in that I always feel smart, competent, healthy, and sane afterward.”)

The Simpsons

SlowTV “Right after the election, my wife and I started watching a lot of SlowTV on Netflix. Things like Norwegian knitting competitions.”

Smallville

South Park

Space: 1999

Star Trek

Steven Universe

Supernatural

Taxi

The Blues Brothers

The Eagle Huntress (“a thoroughly enjoyable documentary”)

The first three Muppet movies

The IT Crowd

The Office

The Simpsons

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

The West Wing

The X Files

Top Gear

Trainwreck

Veep

Veronica Mars, season 1

The Vicar of Dibley

Waiting for Guffman

What’s Up, Doc?

Books

A Suitable Boy

The Age of Innocence, or really anything by Edith Wharton

Alexander Hamilton

All Creatures Great and Small

Anne of Green Gables (really anything by L.M Montgomery)

Born Standing Up

Bossypants

Bridget Jones’s Diary (good escapist movie too)

Calvin and Hobbes

Circle of Friends, or really anything by Maeve Binchy

The Code of the Woosters, or anything by P.G. Wodehouse

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Grand Sophy or anything by Georgette Heyer

the Harry Potter series

I Capture The Castle

I’m Your Biggest Fan

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Jane Eyre

The Last Days of Night

Love in a Cold Climate

Maisie Dobbs

Ms. Marvel (comic)

My Family and Other Animals

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

The Other Boleyn Girl, or anything by Philippa Gregory

Pride and Prejudice, Emma, or really anything by Jane Austen

The Pursuit of Love

A Room With a View

Restoration, or anything by Rose Tremain

Sir John Mortimer’s Rumpole books

Sherlock Holmes

Today Will Be Different

Tom Jones

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (comic)

Washington Square

West With the Night

Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Yes Please

Recommended Stories

What Stress Actually Does to You and What You Can Do About It

How to Get Some Rest When Stress Is Keeping You Up at Night

Why You Need to Start Drinking in the Shower

2 notes · View notes

ooc-but-stylish · 7 years

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There’s a lot that gets me about the love story in FFXV and how it relates to the characters, or rather, what gets me about the characterization and how it relates to the love story, but it’s going to be a long read.

TL;DR the characterization tried to lift tropes from previous Final Fantasies ( particularly VII and X ) but XV’s version just seems like a hollow echo that takes the tropes on the surface without actually figuring out why they worked for the characters and their plot, instead banking on telling us that everything is supposed to work out and be coherent and letting nostalgia pull some weight. It also didn’t help that any use of those tropes was completely shot to pieces by the story being a forced tragedy requiring ( in my opinion, unnecessary ) character deaths to be “touching” ( read: edgy ) and playing that tragedy straight instead of subverting it, exposing the writing as having a juvenile lack of vision.

First off, Luna’s character is badly written. So is Noctis’s -- he got “the most” development from being the main character, but he still suffered from terrible writing and his “I matured into a man by taking a ten year nap and interacting with 0 people” thing was... it just was. But let’s just talk about Luna. Characters within the game tell us that she’s doing amazing things and we see brief glimpses of the aftermath of her actions. Characters also tell us that she loves Noctis, or that she must love him because she did X Y and Z.

That doesn’t come close to being a proper substitute for good writing nor is it a sub for actual development of a love story, starting with “she must have loved him/been strong because she did things”. She did things and was imbued with the standard “strong willpower and determination” typically found in characters that in reality have zero agency of their own in order to affect their destiny and are usually made to suffer.

She's basically the shadow of a strong woman - she's what people THINK strength should be, in she’s only around to briefly pay lip service to the idea of a strongly-written character yet she’s more or less completely powerless where the actual strength is needed, but the fact that she puts faith in something “greater than herself” to guide her actions and is “determined” to stay the course and effectively be a pawn to these forces and “sacrifices” something that the story is taking from her to begin with ( her happiness, her life ) is what makes her Pure and Good and Strong. Basically “she’s strong because the story guts her and she takes it with a smile”. A mule can carry a load and take a beating too, but people generally do not respect beasts of burden. They’re used until they die, and people breed more of them to repeat the process.

The extent of just what she did is only hinted at, leaving plenty of room for exaggeration ( as in, people frame Luna forming covenants as if she were in physical combat with the Astrals the same way Noctis was doing, instead of just talking to them ) or otherwise overblown or completely undermined by the plot itself. Such as Luna deflected Leviathan’s attack in Altissia and it looks badass, but then she immediately defaulted to “Noctis will come and settle things!” which, okay, it sure is easy to talk shit and “be strong” when ultimately someone else is coming to sort out the issue.

Even if narratively speaking, “Noctis couldn’t have done a lot without Luna’s intervention, he saves the world because of her”, that’s to be expected when Luna’s character is that of a walking plot device whose purpose is wrapped entirely around Noctis and getting him ready to do his duty. This is what highlights the difference between story and plot. Story is what happens around the characters, plot is what happens because of the characters. The story dictates that Luna acts in ways that directly benefit Noctis and prepare him for his ultimate role. She’s supposed to succeed in this regard because the hero needs to vanquish the villain. Luna’s character in particular has nothing to do with the direction the story goes in and neither does her “strength”, in the sense that she’s not personally pushing everything to go in the direction it went into because of her own interests. She’s pushed by the story to behave in that way. It’s in her role as Oracle, dictated to her since before she even became an Oracle. Anyone else could have had her job and they’d have to do the same thing. (1)

Luna’s role is not just “helping Noctis”, but doing so to her clear detriment and not expecting anything in return. Since people still haven’t let go of stuffing women in fridges like that’s a valid thing to do in storytelling, here comes unnecessary death number one ( Noctis makes the second ). The entire plot was set up to kill her when she was done doing her duty and not a moment sooner. Luna was done story-wise after Altissia, and needed to die to a) heighten the sense of drama and b) make Noctis sad and facilitate “character development” (2). Tellingly, we have no clue who she is as a person outside of whatever she was doing for Noctis, so they probably literally ran out of anything for her to do in the case that she’d lived.

The story then tried to insult the player and justify Luna’s murder by presenting her as “doomed from the start”-- after she dies we get a scene that reveals that the contact with Astrals was physically draining for her-- a.k.a., nothing anyone could have done would have saved her, short of her not carrying out her divinely mandated role and instead putting the rest of the world in danger, so that’s just the way it had to be. How convenient! It’s addressed absolutely nowhere else and Noctis himself never learns about it, so it was just for the audience. I guess so we feel less bad about Luna? Or more bad about her? Or act like her killing herself in service of a boy she met 12 years ago is proof that she was such a “Strong Character” and that she “loved him”? I don’t know. Considering the game already told us that she was set to die no matter what because it was her job, even if she’d never met Noctis at all she would still need to do it. Trying to argue in that instance that she had to have been in love would be asinine. Noctis himself dies in the end for all of Eos and arguing a romantic love between him and every person in Eos would be just as dumb.

Then the game further tried to present it as a good thing that Luna died, because if not, then she wouldn’t be in the Astral Realm to pop in and touch Ardyn for a grand total of one second to weaken him conveniently and then fuck right off to nowhere. She could’ve been omitted from that ending and left it as Noctis pulling off his Knights of the Round summon with the Lucian Kings, and not a single thing would have been wrong with that, firstly because we received no word that Luna even was supposed to be in the Astral Realm or able to act in that way, and secondly because if it only took one second of arm-holding to paralyze Ardyn after all, what was she doing with the other thirty the first time around, when she was dying? Just fucking around with him and having herself a giggle? He was more offended about her trying to heal him than wounded from it.

Anyway, she pops in just in time for Noctis to deal the finishing blow ( and again, the brief glimpses of her doing things open themselves to exaggeration, so when fans try to sell that Luna was particularly strong because of this scene it’s framed by fans as if she were a major character in the party or that she was waiting for Ardyn to show up so she could kick his ass, like she was cracking her knuckles with a smirk on her face, or something ). We literally do not see her with a presence in the Astral Realm beyond “help Noctis” and later on “marry Noctis”. She has no individual personality, no ambitions, no presence unless Noctis needs it.

In my mind, none of this could go hand in hand with a love story. If a love story is what the game wanted to get to with Luna’s and Noctis’s interactions, it is poorly told. Luna’s character as a person took a backseat to her other roles which are ( again! ) wrapped around Noctis’s other roles. Oracle? Serves the Chosen King. Princess? Marries the Prince ( at least by the time of FFXV, because there’s no word on previous Nox Fleurets having married Lucis Caelums ). Luna is committed to fulfilling both roles and has been ever since she was a child (3), and all of her actions were based on the roles to the point where I’d be hard pressed to say that any of that was actual proof that she loved Noctis in a romantic sense, or that she loved him in a special way that would have followed him no matter what role he was in that wasn’t already chosen for him by birth. Even if the story did need the romance for Luna and Noctis, it didn’t necessitate that Luna have no individual personality of her own in order to benefit Noctis’s story. Unfortunately for us, the characterization and writing behaves as if the previous Final Fantasies didn’t happen. Obviously not in a narrative sense but in terms of tropes. Luna’s characterization is a mix of Aerith and Yuna, except individually, Aerith and Yuna were better written.

Like, Yuna had to form pacts with summons too, with the ultimate purpose being to attain the Final Aeon and defeat Sin. There was also a sense of “doom” in the story in that the Final Aeon would kill the Summoner that used it, bringing peace at the cost of their life, and Yuna knew that and had come to terms with it by the time she set out on her pilgrimage. That was her story. But her plot was different than that, thanks to her characterization. She was portrayed as self-sacrificing, but to a clear point. When it turned out that the Final Aeon thing was more or less a hoax and that she needed to effectively kill one of her friends in order to defeat Sin and then die anyway, she rejected the Final Aeon ( unlike the Summoners before her ) and she and her party set out to change fate and bring the Eternal Calm. We see Sin die for good, and the Aeons disappear because they’re not needed anymore, but we’re left with a prosperous people ready to finally live their lives without fear of Sin ever coming back. (**)

In contrast, XV’s heroes simply accept that they need to die because they’re told that it’s a permanent solution to the Starscourge problem, but we are shown no evidence that they did anything except turning the lights back on in a landscape devoid of people and that’s it. Everything is empty. Sunny, yes, but empty. It obviously can’t be permanently daytime, so nighttime would have to fall. But we are shown no instances of existing daemons burning up and dying, or of people afflicted with Starscourge recovering ‘miraculously’. There’s no reason we can’t just think everyone is fucked as soon as the sun goes back down. There is no more King or Oracle, no protective Wall, and Insomnia is still in ruins. That’s happy?

Like Luna, Aerith was also tasked with powers passed down by her bloodline, and was the last of her kind. She died at the hands of the villain that showed up out of nowhere. The world wouldn’t have been saved without her actions, and she also had some kind of presence post-death. The key difference was that her presence lasted longer than one second in the afterlife at a convenient moment to the hero (***). She controlled the lifeforce of an entire planet to stop Meteor when Holy didn’t work. She showed up in spirit and gave Cloud the last boost he needed to defeat Bahamut-SIN. She pulled off Great Gospel in order to cure Geostigma ( first Cloud, then eventually all the people in Midgar exposed to the healing rain ). Yes, Cloud fought Sephiroth physically and that’s important, but in both the game and Advent Children, fighting Sephiroth alone did not solve the entire issue/danger of the story. Defeating him in a swordfight didn’t reverse the course of Meteor or eradicate Geostigma. Aerith was the one who performed the actual world-saving contributions, so it was more like Cloud and the rest of the party was there to make it easier for her to do her thing.

And even though Aerith, like Luna, was killed by the villain of the plot and it made the hero sad, Sephiroth stabbed Aerith because she was literally the only person in the entire world capable of thwarting his plan. Luna wasn’t particularly threatening to Ardyn -- at that point, no one in the story was a real threat to his plan given his absurd OPness. Luna’s ability to keep the Starscourge and its darkness at bay wasn’t a real concern because of the plot revelations that happened on the side (4). He stabbed her to spite Noctis when the story put her on death’s doorstep anyway and felled her with an inconvenient coughing fit. Not even the healing touch was of real threat to him outside of the one-second sneak attack in the ending. Luna held on to Ardyn’s arm for a good half minute in her last living moments and he wasn’t reeling from her touch. He backhanded her so hard she turned back into Stella Nox for a second. That’s the opposite of threatening.

Anyway, XV forgot that a love story involves people. If we don’t care about the characters as people, we’re not going to be as involved in the romance which will inevitably feature more of them. And Luna wasn’t a person. She was a plot device, with a forced tragedy that made the whole thing pointless.

(1) Luna as Oracle and as Princess had a duty to help the Prince and Chosen King and help him become the True King of Light. If it’d been literally any one else in Noct’s shoes as the Chosen King like, say, Prompto, Luna would still have to do her quest because of destiny, not because she loved the guy. She’d still be expected to heal people of the Scourge, to awaken the Astrals, to protect the King from the Astrals if need be. None of that requires a love for Noctis or even for Noctis to be Noctis, nor for Luna to be Luna, or for the bond between them to be a love story. Let’s say it this way: the story could have been about their parents. If events transpired so that Regis had to go on the quest and Sylva was the one to go around awakening the Astrals, the story would be that Sylva would have to do Oracle things regardless of whether she loved Regis or not unless the plot seriously wanted to make their kids into stepsiblings. That’s what Oracles do.

(2) one strike in particular against Lunoct is how Luna’s death was handled and Noctis’s character development was framed in light of it. Frankly, the way the scene was presented didn’t seem like he lost Luna as someone he loved and thought of as a peer, but that he lost Luna as a parental figure who shielded him from the rest of the world’s evils. They’re shown as children, then Luna suddenly transitioned into an adult, and Noctis remained as a child. So her death was more like him losing his sense of safety and being orphaned, forcibly unmoored from his innocence and made to “finally grow up/become an adult”. Their unmatching mental states were so obvious that Noctis had to be aged to 30 before he and Luna ( now perpetually 24 years old ) looked like “an actual couple”. Also, Luna never even got a proper funeral. She got stabbed, she drowned, and then her body was conveniently lost at sea because the story stopped giving a crap about her.

(3) the second strike is that the story is set to kill these characters right off. Luna was “dead no matter what” thanks to the Astrals’ covenant taking a toll on her body at the tender age of 24 even though Regis had a literal “age yourself to death” plot device in his use of the Ring of Lucii and still lived to, like, 50 while constantly maintaining a Wall. Anyway, Noctis was also fated to die and short of him not doing his divinely mandated task to wipe Ardyn and the Starscourge off the map and instead dooming the world to a hellish landscape with daemons running loose, there was nothing else he could do. It was a suicide mission. It’s one that not only Regis, but Luna knew about and didn’t tell him, robbing him of the chance to come to terms with it as she undoubtedly had. He thought he was going to be a King and retake/rule over Insomnia only to find out in the eleventh hour that he was actually a pig led to the slaughter. No one stops to think about how ethically fucked up this all is. It just seems like tragedy for the sake of tragedy that’s not earned nor treated like what it is by even the characters within the game ( you have to hunt down the Dawn trailer to see Regis actually mourning his son’s fate, because otherwise, not a damn peep about it. But he knew ). I don’t know about you, but if I loved someone and knew they were going to die, I’d let them know about it. It’s understandable if Luna withheld information about her own death from Noctis because it’s her life and not his, but withholding information about his death? No. Unacceptable. This doesn’t make any sense unless we just assume that no one has particular feelings around death and suicide to begin with.

(4) Not that we find out this detail in any immediate place that would show its importance even though it was set up in the beginning that way, but the problem of the nights getting longer and the days shorter came about from the least likely place -- a friggin’ note in Takka’s diner. Killing daemons would release the photophilic particles of the Starscourge into the air, thereby spreading the darkness instead of making it better. That’s it. Now, the Empire's been manufacturing demons and Magitek soldiers in great numbers, even prior to the start of the game. They were going it so much that 30 years before XV took place, it overwhelmed the 112th King of Lucis and forced him to shrink his wall to being just around Insomnia instead of covering all of Lucis, in order to preserve what was left of his lifespan. Then the Crystal being moved from Insomnia during Kingsglaive also caused longer nights. So, with absurd amounts of daemons being forcibly made, the daemons that already existed possibly attacking people, the removal of the Crystal, the killing of daemons, and even the Oracle’s ( by FFXV’s point, obligatory ) death all contributing to the darkness basically made sure that the Oracle’s living presence alone meant absolute piss all in terms of combating it, and ultimately it’s Noctis who used the Light of the Crystal to banish the Scourge completely. Until he did, Ardyn stuck everyone in a lose/lose situation that made Luna’s contribution meaningless as hell outside of, of course, whatever benefited Noctis. So it’s hard to argue that Luna’s task of staving off the darkness was especially hard considering the story itself tries to make it meaningless.

(**) Mentions of Tidus are completely absent in the comparison between Yuna and Luna because none of Yuna’s plot required using her power as Summoner to serve him specifically, nor did the story go to great lengths to portray him as the Only Chosen One to defeat Sin. They both did it. The story presented them more or less as equals. We’re also given a chance to view Yuna as a person and see that while she’s possessing of good traits-- kind, loyal, and full of conviction-- we also see her flaws, or even the way those good traits backfire on her. As Auron said, “she’s naive, serious to a fault, and doesn’t ask for help”. She’s overly apologetic. She’s secretive. She doesn’t allow herself to show negative feelings in front of her friends. We eventually see her show anger and disgust, and in both X and X-2 she openly challenges the plans of other people who think they know better than she does and with it the idea of senseless self-sacrifice and the constant hammering of “There’s no choice”.

(***) None of what Aerith did necessitated “being useful to Cloud” or serving his story-mandated “higher duty to save the world”, with this obligation passed down through generations. She saved the world, and Cloud just happened to be living in it. There was the brief scene where she visited Cloud in his headspace more or less, and that was honestly optional on her part. We also learned about her as a person throughout FF7 and witnessed her virtues and vices. She was kind and forgiving and playful, but she also expressed jealousy, uncertainty/doubt, a reluctance to find out more about herself ( at least in the beginning ), overconfidence, stubbornness, and meanness/insensitivity in certain moments. And they at least waited until the sequel movie to make her into Jesus 2.0 instead of canonizing her out the gate, so there’s that. Luna’s characterization in contrast was just a collection of good ideals and virtues, with the one scene of her actually expressing doubt/reluctance in her role amounting to “I might not be as useful to Noct as I’m supposed to be, maybe Ravus should take the Ring to him instead”. And I suppose that one scene in Kingsglaive where she pulled the bafflingly stupid stunt of jumping out of a moving plane and nearly getting herself killed in the process for no reason. That too, I guess.

#anti lunoct #lunafreya nox fleuret critical #lunafreya negative

326 notes · View notes

apsbicepstraining · 6 years

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7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future

As we remind you all the time, the future ain’t what it used to be. We have no jetpacks or robot butlers, and we’ve still not upgraded from Land Wars to Star Wars. The dreamers fell short … but it is about to change that some of the pessimists came pretty close to the mark. In the same method that no one in the ‘5 0s envisaged “millions of strangers across the world inadvertently saw your dick” is to be able to become a realistic question, our near-future is likely to be filled with aggravations that chime completely ridiculous to us now.

Here are seven incoming issues that will acquire you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to put up with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

Any denizen of the digital generation knows that anything you say on the Internet can and will be used against you, specially if it’s embarrassing love story. However, that’s a logical propagation of using written material as evidence, as we’ve done for centuries. The newest road to incriminate yourself online has far less precedent: the data collected from wearable engineering, such as the Fitbit.

You can run, but you can’t secrete( the fact that you only killed a hobo ).

Yes, your clothes could send you to jail. It may sound like Law& Order: The Jetsons , but there’s no real reason this kind of data can’t be admissible in tribunal. In happening, it’s already happening. A maiden in Pennsylvania called 911 and claimed that a home invader abused her, but her Fitbit denied her story( she was awake and walking around when she said she was fast asleep ). Her own fitness watch facilitated is proof that she’d attracted the whole story out of her … you know, and now she’s facing misdemeanor charges.

So wearable tech can help make the offender to right. That’s good, right? Well, here’s where it gets fishy. There are already “alibi apps” — planneds that secretly enter all your interactions and circumvents to prove you weren’t( for example) propping a chandelier in the study when Colonel Mustard went whacked. Sounds innocent enough, until you remember that there’s a term for people who intentionally go around establishing alibis: “guilty as fuck.” Using this app is a little bit like going up to a policeman and saying, “By the direction, I’ll be at the movies this afternoon when my bride gets murdered.”

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

The idea that people are already reputing onward to use their trackers as alibis means that these things will have all sorts of clusterfuck legal capability. What happens when someone offer a hobo to hold their smartphone( or straps it to a bird-dog) while they go out and do violations? Or what if someone acquires your Fitbit to incriminate you? These occasions will happen at some object. Hey, maybe that’s why everyone was becoming couch potato in WALL-E . In the future, being fit won’t is worthy of the hassle.

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

The future of tripping will involve hitting into the stratosphere instead of wheeling along the route, but that doesn’t necessitate all family vacation traditions will change. “You should’ve gone before you left” is still about to become a common phrase, except that in the future, it’s going to get much direr. Why? Because in space, everybody can see you shit.

He’s not being propelled by a plane .

All of the companies designing prominent commercial-grade space shuttles have clearly forgotten Newton’s Fourth Law of Motion: Everybody poops. None of these shuttles include showers. A excursion to the International Space Station can take between six and 30 hours — that’s a hell of a long time to “just hamper it, ” dad. Hell, even the earthbound high-speed Hyperloop being developed by Elon Musk lacks a comfort station. Oh, or windows. If you thought making gaze contact with the person or persons sitting in front of you in the instruct was tricky, wait until you’re captured in a windowless, toilet-free metallic cylinder with person for hours.

Getting carsick is another tradition that won’t be changing any time soon; in space, it’ll plainly get much more intense. There will be no spaces to wind down and no back of the road to stain. If you’re shuttle-sick( and let’s face it, “youre supposed to” is likely to be ), your little chunder-cloud will be hanging around, becoming another passenger of the aircraft. Developers acknowledge that clearing out the odor and existence of opening vomit will be extremely important, as none play around Space Invaders with the substance of your bowels.

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

One of the main benefits of living in the future is that we no longer drop dead at age 40. Now we get to stick around for decades and decades! And decades. And decades . This will ultimately have some bizarre impacts in some regions of our( increasingly lengthy) lives, starting with the workplace. To evade vanquishing the Social Security system, people will be working long long. Fifty Shades Of Grey won’t only has become a literary masterpiece; it’ll be the lineup behind the bar at your neighbourhood Starbucks.

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

The job market will become even fiercer as girls fresh out of college have to compete with “midlife re-trainees.” Of trend, some people will ever prefer to stay in their occupations for life … which will have even more frightening ramifications. Career politicians, judges, and tenured academics might stick around for the better part of a century, as would their old-fashioned feelings. Remember Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, the old-time mongrel who spent a good hunk of the 20 th century effectively pushing back against every type of social change? Now thoughts a Highlander version of that guy.

It gets weirder. Grey growing the new pitch-black will altogether alter which is something we think about as clas. With longer lifespans and later marriage ages, we’ll have more grandparents to take care of and fewer brothers and sisters to share that load. Family reunions will transform into an indignant mob of cybernetic geriatrics telling kids to stay off the lawn. Instead of robust family tree, we’ll have rickety family beanstalks.

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the shower at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

Living longer will even change the very notion of wedlock — or marriages. Single lifelong organizations will become more demanding, so psychologists predict that weddings might become less “until death do us apart” and more “until we get bored of each other in a few decades.” Older pairs who would decide to condone each other if they only had 15 years left to live might say “Screw this, I’m out” when they recognises they have 50 instead.

Finally, with all the pressure living to three digits throws on matters of employment and housing marketplaces, leaving the nest will have to be delayed. So you don’t have to be ashamed about interpret Cracked at 35 in your mother’s basement; you’re merely ahead of the curve.

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

As more and more virtual reality companionships pop up, we’re already starting to see them working to differentiate themselves from each other. Some are trying to appeal to hardcore gamers, some want to attract filthy casuals, one is aiming at people who don’t want brain damage … await, what?

This clarifies so much .

Yep, VR company Magic Leap is boasting that its headset is wholly brain-damage-free. Sure, their competitors’ products might fry your sentiment into a smoldering little ember, but their terribly same one certainly won’t! This does not announce as reassuring as they probably imagined.

While beings said the same about video games, video, and perhaps even pinball machines, this time, the brain-frying dismay has a basis in reality. VR gets your eyes to behave in ways they should not — they’ll go along with it, but there’ll be side effect. Some investigates investigating VR hire cabs for participants after sessions, because after you’ve been in polygon-land for a while, it takes time for “youve got to” relearn how to reach for things that are actually in front of you without overshooting it. It’s hazardous to drive in such a state, but we doubt your console will call an Uber for you if you’re playing alone.

Our good guess of what driving after a VR conference looks like .

Meanwhile, Samsung’s brand-new headset has a huge list of advice, including that if “youre starting” having a seizure, you are able to take it off. After all, it’s expensive engineering — you wouldn’t want to damage it.

Health issues aside, virtual reality likewise elevates complex moral questions. In one Sony VR demo, the simulation forms you flirt with a young-looking maiden, while it’s clear that you’re an old man. At the end of said demo, the developers continue the “No brain damage! ” selling veer by assuring you that the character you were interacting with was definitely give full play to an adult actress.

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

Whether there’s meant to be a wink with that renunciation or not, it heightens a whole legion of questions for what VR should and shouldn’t be allowed to show. Can they get away with a pedophilic simulation if “theyre saying” “No, it’s all actors and actresses”? What about a torturing simulator? What about people watching VR reruns of Two And A Half Men ? These are the hazardous a number of aspects of national societies. But would presenting them virtual simulations eradicate or irritate their predilections? That’s a question we can’t answer right now, but we do know that those in the group watching Two And A Half Men don’t need to worry about any more brain damage.

As we remind you all the time, the future ain’t what it used to be. We have no jetpacks or robot butlers, and we’ve still not improved from Land Wars to Star Wars. The dreamers fell short … but it turns out that some of the cynics came pretty close to the mark. In the same way that no one in the ‘5 0s concluded “millions of strangers across the world inadvertently saw your dick” is to be able to become a realistic difficulty, our near-future is likely to be filled with aggravations that reverberate completely ridiculous to us now.

Here are seven incoming issues that will induce you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to was put forward with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

Any denizen of the digital generation known to be anything you say on the Internet can and will be used against you, specially if it’s humiliating devotee fiction. However, that’s a logical propagation of using written information as evidence, as we’ve done for centuries. The newest channel to incriminate yourself online has much less precedent: the data collected from wearable engineering, such as the Fitbit.

You can run, but you can’t disguise( the fact that you precisely killed a hobo ).

Yes, your invests could send you to jail. It may sound like Law& Order: The Jetsons , but there’s no real reasonablenes this kind of data can’t declared admissible in court. In happening, it’s already happening. A maiden in Pennsylvania announced 911 and claimed that a home invader crimes her, but her Fitbit belied her legend( she was awake and walking around when she said she was fast asleep ). Her own fitness watch helped is proof that she’d pulled the whole story out of her … you know, and now she’s facing misdemeanor accusations.

So wearable tech going to be able to create criminals to justice. That’s good, right? Well, here’s where it gets fishy. There are already “alibi apps” — planneds that secretly enter all your interactions and borders to attest you weren’t( for example) nursing a chandelier in such studies when Colonel Mustard went slapped. Sounds innocent enough, until you remember that there’s a expression for people who intentionally go around launching alibis: “guilty as fuck.” Using this app is a little bit like going up to a polouse and saying, “By the room, I’ll be at the movies this afternoon when my partner gets murdered.”

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

The idea that people are already anticipating ahead to use their trackers as alibis means that these things will have all sorts of clusterfuck legal potential. What happens when someone compensates a hobo to hold their smartphone( or buckle it to a hound) while they go out and do crimes? Or what if someone borrows your Fitbit to incriminate you? These happens will happen at some object. Hey, maybe that’s why everyone becomes a couch potato in WALL-E . In the future, being fit won’t be worth the hassle.

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

The future of tripping will involve killing into the stratosphere instead of rolling along the freeway, but that doesn’t represent all family vacation habits will change. “You should’ve been going on you left” is still going to be a common motto, except that in the future, it’s going to be much direr. Why? Because in space, everybody can see you shit.

He’s not being propelled by a spurt .

All of the companies designing foremost commercial space shuttles have been remarkably forgotten Newton’s Fourth Law of Motion: Everybody poops. None of these shuttles include bathrooms. A trip-up to the International Space Station can take between six and 30 hours — that’s a inferno of a long time to “just hamper it, ” dad. Hell, even the earthbound high-speed Hyperloop being developed by Elon Musk lacks a comfort station. Oh, or windows. If you thought acquiring seeing contact with the person or persons sitting in front of you in the train was awkward, delayed until you’re captured in a windowless, toilet-free metal cylinder with someone for hours.

Getting carsick is another tradition that won’t be changing any time soon; in space, it’ll simply get much more intense. There will be no windows to wind down and no side of the road to stain. If you’re shuttle-sick( and let’s face it, “youre supposed to” is likely to be ), your little chunder-cloud is likely to be hanging around, becoming another passenger of the skill. Developers acknowledge that clearing out the odor and attendance of seat vomit will be extremely important, as nothing play around Space Invaders with the substance of your bowels.

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

One of the main benefits of living in the future is that we no longer drop dead at age 40. Now we get to stick around for decades and decades! And decades. And decades . This will eventually have some creepy outcomes in some regions of our( increasingly lengthy) lives, starting with the workplace. To forestall vanquishing the Social Security system, people will be working much longer. Fifty Shades Of Grey won’t simply be a literary masterpiece; it’ll be the lineup behind the counter at your local Starbucks.

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

The job market will become even fiercer as girls fresh out of college have to compete with “midlife re-trainees.” Of track, some people will ever prefer to stay in their professions for life … which will have even more unnerving deductions. Career politicians, judges, and tenured professors might stick around for the better part of a century, as would their old-fashioned thoughts. Remember Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, the old mongrel who spent a good glob of the 20 th century effectively pushing back against every type of social change? Now sees a Highlander version of that guy.

It get weirder. Grey becoming the brand-new black will absolutely shift what we think of as pedigree. With longer lifespans and later union ages, we’ll have more grandparents to take care of and fewer brothers and sisters to share that quantity. Family reunions will transform into an enraged syndicate of cybernetic geriatrics telling kids to stay off the lawn. Instead of robust family trees, we’ll have rickety family beanstalks.

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the bathroom at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

Living longer will even change the very notion of matrimony — or marriages. Single lifelong unions will become more demanding, so psychologists predict that unions might become less “until death do us apart” and more “until we get bored of each other in a few decades.” Older couples who would decide to condone one another if they only had 15 years left to live might say “Screw this, I’m out” when they realises they have 50 instead.

Finally, with all the pressure living to three digits gives on matters of employment and housing sells, leaving the nest will have to be delayed. So you don’t have to be ashamed about construe Cracked at 35 in your mother’s basement; you’re simply ahead of the curve.

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

As more and more virtual reality firms pop up, we’re already starting to see them working to differentiate themselves from one another. Some are trying to appeal to hardcore gamers, some want to attract filthy casuals, one is aiming at people who don’t want brain damage … waiting, what?

This shows so much .

Yep, VR company Magic Leap is boasting that its headset is absolutely brain-damage-free. Sure, their competitors’ commodities might fry your intellect into a smoldering little ember, but their particularly same one certainly won’t! This does not sound as reassuring as they probably imagined.

While beings said the same about video games, television, and perhaps even pinball machines, this time, the brain-frying fright has a basis in reality. VR gets your eyes to behave in ways they should not — they’ll go along with it, but there’ll be side effects. Some investigates analyzing VR hire cabs for participants after conferences, because after you’ve been in polygon-land for a while, it takes time for “youve got to” relearn how to reach for acts that are actually in front of you without overshooting it. It’s hazardous to drive in such a state, but we doubt your console will call an Uber for you if you’re playing alone.

Our best guess of what driving after a VR seminar looks like .

Meanwhile, Samsung’s new headset has a huge list of admonishings, including the right if you start having a seizure, you are able to take it off. After all, it’s expensive engineering — you wouldn’t want to damage it.

Health editions aside, virtual reality also promotes complex moral difficulties. In one Sony VR demo, the pretending stirs you flirt with a young-looking wife, while it’s clear that you’re an old boy. At the end of said demo, the developers continue the “No brain damage! ” selling veer by assuring you that the character you were interacting with was definitely played by young adults actress.

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

Whether there’s meant to be a wink with that disclaimer or not, it causes a whole host of questions for what VR should and shouldn’t be allowed to show. Can they get away with a pedophilic simulation if they say “No, it’s all actors and actresses”? What about a anguish simulator? What about people watching VR reruns of Two And A Half Men ? These are the hazardous a number of aspects of national societies. But would affording them virtual simulations eradicate or irritate their tendencies? That’s a question we can’t answer right now, but we do know that those in the group watching Two And A Half Men don’t need to worry about any more brain damage.

The post 7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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apsbicepstraining · 6 years

Text

7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future

Here are seven incoming issues that will acquire you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to put up with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

You can run, but you can’t secrete( the fact that you only killed a hobo ).

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

He’s not being propelled by a plane .

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the shower at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

This clarifies so much .

Our good guess of what driving after a VR conference looks like .

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

Here are seven incoming issues that will induce you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to was put forward with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

You can run, but you can’t disguise( the fact that you precisely killed a hobo ).

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

He’s not being propelled by a spurt .

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the bathroom at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

This shows so much .

Our best guess of what driving after a VR seminar looks like .

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

The post 7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2pTClHT via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

apsbicepstraining · 6 years

Text

7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future

Here are seven incoming issues that will acquire you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to put up with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

You can run, but you can’t secrete( the fact that you only killed a hobo ).

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

He’s not being propelled by a plane .

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the shower at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

This clarifies so much .

Our good guess of what driving after a VR conference looks like .

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

Here are seven incoming issues that will induce you yearn for an ape and/ or machine insurgency. At least in such a case, you wouldn’t have to was put forward with …

# 7. Your Fitbit Could Be Utilized As Evidence Against You

You can run, but you can’t disguise( the fact that you precisely killed a hobo ).

“I was at the … * looks at watch * OJ Simpson retrospective. FUCK! ”

# 6. The First Commercial Space Shuttles Won’t Have Bathrooms

He’s not being propelled by a spurt .

# 5. Living Longer Will Make Family Life Really, Really Weird

“You’ve been taking my ordering for the past three decades. How can you still not spell my reputation right? ”

“A toast to great-great-grandma Mary, who went to the bathroom at Thanksgiving and hasn’t am coming yet.”

# 4. VR Trial And Error Will Be A Nightmare

This shows so much .

Our best guess of what driving after a VR seminar looks like .

“Yes, it’s me, Andy Serkis.”

The post 7 Insane Trouble We’ll Have To Deal With In The Future appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2pTClHT via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

ultralifehackerguru-blog · 7 years

Photo

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/why-new-parents-need-to-take-a-break-from-the-news-and-what-they-should-do-instead/

Why New Parents Need to Take a Break From the News (and What They Should Do Instead)

Take a Media Fast

Practice ‘Containment’

TV & Movies

30 Rock

All Creatures Great and Small

Alias (a spy thriller spanning five seasons, so there are murders and occasional child-in-peril plotlines, but it’s a pretty campy show, so I didn’t find it especially distressing)

The Andy Griffith Show

Flip This House (or any fixer-upper/DIY type shows)

Any stupid Adam Sandler movie

Archer

Arrested Development

Black Adder

Black Books

Bob’s Burgers

Boondocks

Borgen

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (skipping “The Body” and maybe the second half of season five)

Catastrophe

Community

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Critical Role on Geek and Sundry

Drunk History

Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy

Elimidate

Everybody Loves Raymond

Farscape

Father Ted

Friends

Futurama

Get Smart

Ghostbusters

Gilmore Girls

Gravity Falls

The Great British Bake-off (or any cooking show)

Grey’s Anatomy (I can’t believe this is still on the air; I have like 10 years to catch up on. Warning: it’s a hospital show, so people do die. Deeennnnnnny!)

Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Laaaaaaaaaw

Hogan’s Heroes

How I Met Your Mother

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Jeeves and Wooster

Broad City (“It’s hilarious and my life feels like a complete financial success by comparison.”)

King of the Hill

Last Man on Earth

Lucha Underground

M*A*S*H

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Midsomer Murders (“While there are murders, everyone is so provincial and charming, it’s like coming home where you know everyone except for that darned stranger that got themselves killed.”)

The Mindy Project

Mr. Bean

MST3K

Any terrible reality TV (“I watch The People’s Court or Judge Judy, which I DVR in case I need them.”)

News Radio

Northern Exposure

Office Space

Only Fools and Horses

Over the Garden Wall

Parks and Rec

Party Down

Real Genius

Real Housewives (“Oddly enough, RHOC comforts me in that I always feel smart, competent, healthy, and sane afterward.”)

The Simpsons

SlowTV “Right after the election, my wife and I started watching a lot of SlowTV on Netflix. Things like Norwegian knitting competitions.”

Smallville

South Park

Space: 1999

Star Trek

Steven Universe

Supernatural

Taxi

The Blues Brothers

The Eagle Huntress (“a thoroughly enjoyable documentary”)

The first three Muppet movies

The IT Crowd

The Office

The Simpsons

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

The West Wing

The X Files

Top Gear

Trainwreck

Veep

Veronica Mars, season 1

The Vicar of Dibley

Waiting for Guffman

What’s Up, Doc?

Books

A Suitable Boy

The Age of Innocence, or really anything by Edith Wharton

Alexander Hamilton

All Creatures Great and Small

Anne of Green Gables (really anything by L.M Montgomery)

Born Standing Up

Bossypants

Bridget Jones’s Diary (good escapist movie too)

Calvin and Hobbes

Circle of Friends, or really anything by Maeve Binchy

The Code of the Woosters, or anything by P.G. Wodehouse

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Grand Sophy or anything by Georgette Heyer

the Harry Potter series

I Capture The Castle

I’m Your Biggest Fan

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Jane Eyre

The Last Days of Night

Love in a Cold Climate

Maisie Dobbs

Ms. Marvel (comic)

My Family and Other Animals

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

The Other Boleyn Girl, or anything by Philippa Gregory

Pride and Prejudice, Emma, or really anything by Jane Austen

The Pursuit of Love

A Room With a View

Restoration, or anything by Rose Tremain

Sir John Mortimer’s Rumpole books

Sherlock Holmes

Today Will Be Different

Tom Jones

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (comic)

Washington Square

West With the Night

Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Yes Please