So, you’re telling me that this Mike Wheeler right here is the same Mike Wheeler who:

Made it his soul mission to find Will when everyone else - including his friends - believed him to be dead.

Who sobbed into his mother’s arms when he himself believed Will had died.

Who recognised Will’s voice within 0.5 seconds of him singing over a pretty shitty, pretty static, 1983 model walkie talkie.

Who dragged Will away from Halloween so they could talk through his trauma and told him he wouldn’t leave him alone.

Who slept in a hospital chair right next to Will so he never had to leave his side.

Who told Will that asking him to be his friend was the best thing he’s ever done.

Who noticed any slight change to Will’s demeanour within a split second.

Who biked through a thunderstorm to apologise for being twat because he couldn’t stand Will being mad at him any longer than necessary?!

RIP Mike Wheeler, I guess🫡

Analyzing the 5 plays in this drama club poster .From the bts pics of stranger things 4.

So... some of ya’ll know I'm going through the st s4 films given to us by the official st twitter + the films reffed in the show itself or mentioned by the Duffers in interviews .

So I decided to look at the plays mentioned here. Because even if we don't see the monologues in the show directly - the Duffers wouldn't name drop anything unless it inspired them in some way. Similar to films name dropped in the show. Tw : for some dark themes .

This is just a quick little analysis I decided to do since we probably won't get any new st content today (3/22). Nothing too deep. Just mentioning things that caught my interest especially cause these plays have a lot of narrative connections to the st s4 movies I've been watching.

Invitation to a march (Authur laurents)

Reminds me of the stancy/jancy love triangle. "A young woman is having second thoughts about doing the right thing and marrying a respectable , rich, kind, young man with good prospects.By way of a prewedding diversion, this woman becomes interested in the passionate but poor and entirely unsuitable son of a local landlord.Basically, the plot concerns the efforts of Norma Brown to choose between a conventional fiance who "puts her to sleep" but is wealthy (like what her own mother did) or go for this new-poor guy. The play is principally interested in how this youthful love triangle affects the three mothers involved (whether the kids like it or not)

12th night (Shakespeare)

 - viola (el) wrongly assumes a family member (hopper) is dead. She dresses up as a man named 'cesario'. A girl named Olivia falls for 'cesario' (violet dressed as a man). "Finally, when 'Cesario' and Sebastian (violet's twin brother: assumed to have drowned - Will) appear in the presence of Olivia there is more wonder and confusion at their physical similarity. Taking Sebastian for 'Cesario', Olivia asks him to marry her, and they are secretly married in a church. Cough if Olivia is 'straight' cause she fell for Viola (as a doppleganger dressed like her twin brother).Mike being into el who multiple characters in s1 said looked like a boy and specifically like Will is...suspish and a hint he's not straight lol. just like Olivia they're both into guys . plus, this play just has a butt load of love triangles (ugh i hated that aspect). There was also romantically coded letters (which was in the s4 films) . One character is also thrown into an insane asylum and framed as 'insane'.'Pretending that Malvolio is insane, they lock him up in a dark chamber. Feste visits him to mock his insanity'. We all know the psych hospital will be narratively important- talked about it more here.

The seagull (Anton Chekhov-russian)

similar to how I believed s4 will show m*#even already broken up since the months between s3-4 : act 3 (s3) ends with Nina begging for one last chance to be with Trigorin before he leaves/moves away. They kiss and make plans to meet again in Moscow.And in act 4 there's a timeskip where it shows they've been broken up for a long time between acts- and its established they never actually loved eachother. Do i even have to spell out why this parallels the m*#even ending in s3? There is also a play within the play (this is common in a lot of the st films- they have plays- or a story within a story- which illustrate certain themes or emotions of the characters within said film : blackswan, children of paradise, highschool musical, Rushmore, book of Henry, welcome to marwen, never ending story, romancing the stone, wet hot American summer, etc).The play is Konstantin's latest attempt at creating a dense symbolist work. There is also alot of love triangles in the seagull. TW!: for se#ual ab*se/su*cidal thoughts/ inc*st (here and in other play segments). The seagull motif reminds me a lot of Jonathan's rabbit story.Konstantin romantically into Nina shows up to give her a gull that he has shot. Nina is confused and horrified . Trigorin sees the gull that Konstantin has shot and muses to Nina on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: "The plot for the short story: a young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a gull, and she's happy and free, like a gull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this gull."  This immediately reminded me of jon's rabbit story and some of the movies on the s4 list . Like in forrest gump- Jenny (who is poor) was se*ually ab*sed as a very young girl by her father. As a child she runs away into a field-away from her alcoholic father yelling at her -there she prays that she can "be a bird so I can fly far far away" .

Jenny as an adult struggles with this unresolved trauma- being with ab*sive partners, doing dr*gs, and having su*cidal thoughts . She as an adult when contemplating su*icide, jokes 'you think i can fly like a bird ?' while looking down at a bridge.God-i'm worried about jonathan (Jenny was also a musician sort of like jon). In another s4 movie example ' mystic river ' :(in the 80s) a preteen baseball playing boy is r*ped by men in the woods. He later says he wishes he could become an undead monster to not feel the pain of that experience - cause quote " if I'm not human anymore maybe the pain will stop" (Will) . slightly off topic but he also has another personality, imagines a alternate word that dissappears when he turns his head. And as a less direct animal parallel to the play - the boy from the film also imagined his perpetrators as monsters and wolves to cope.In 'getout' the photographer character sees a dead deer in the woods and it represents a parent/his own childhood tra*ma relating to his past. similarly in 'prince of tides' the 2 siblings as kids were ra*ed by men. The older brother remembered it and the younger sibling developed DID (so didn't remember but she would draw wolves- as the perpetrators/villains in her picture stories she created . In the film they also had an ab*sive dad and were very poor. She also tried k*ling herself multiple times-but started to get better after remembering the source of her pain and trauma.  There is also the theme of multiple attempted su*cides in the play- and the play ends with yet another attempt- and the audience is left unaware of the artist's fate at the end of the play.

The tempest (Shakespeare)

Prospereo - (the perceived antagonist) is a wizard with monstrous looks, storm powers , and ability to create monster-dogs

He wants revenge on a man who tried ra*ing his family member & revenge on his other family member who wronged him years ago. I mean... pretty much my did theory.But in the end.Prospero decides to show his enemies the mercy that they did not show him twelve years earlier. He tells Ariel to bring the men to him, he will restore their sanity and then renounce magic forever.Prospero breaks the spell that the men are under .

Diary of a scoundrel (Alexander Ostrovsky-Russian)

-  I suppose this could loosely relate to Jonathan? Glumov, is a young man from an impoverished family lacking status seeking entrance into society's pampered class. A 19th-century Russian scoundrel must scheme his way out of his meager life in a small apartment -whatever it takes.He has a quick mind and some talent for seeing through the hypocrisies of people around him ( Jonathan does make a lot of social critiques about society). That gives him some advantages. A tale of one man's mission to finagle his way into upper-class society and find a cushy job. Set in 1874, this social comedy follows Glumov, a Russian youth who begins his ambitious ascent to social esteem. He progresses by wit, guile and rhetoric. Pitting one stupid person against another, he soon gains his ends. To reach these goals, Glumov will lie, flatter, and cater to the vanities of the wealthy. Unable to contain his disgust with his victims, Glumov decides to relieve his unvoiced satirical comments by recording his schemes in a diary. But he is tripped up by his uncle's wife, to whom he has made passionate love on his way to success. At the end of the play, his diary is stolen and his duplicity exposed, but he can nevertheless suceeds. The author is much more critical about the high society itself than about the main character, so the play keeps attracting generations of directors by opening possibilities for political criticism while also avoiding naming names of the current rulers.The play's aim was to overthrow bourgeois tradition and establish a class-conscious art called eccentricism giving a deliberately comic portrayal of reality.

I suppose I notice some possible commonalities-  besides s3 critiquing the wealthy/capitalism in comedic ways . jonathan since s1 has worried about his family's finances / had some resentment toward the rich . In some of the s4 movies ‘orphan’ & ‘ girl interrupted’ someone reads their diary out loud to get at them (in girl interrupted the winona character’s diary even had critiques of her new friends).  Alot of movies also have someone (usually a teen/young adult) making a documentary about their life -which could narratively replace said diary? A few movies have a poor guy adjusting to snobby rich social circles (or being poor and then getting money)- titanic, kingsmen, karate kid, the craft , godfather,  wardogs,into the spiderverse,flashdance, and many others . And movies like wardogs has a poor-young-character do shady things to finacially support his family . There’s also that whole uncle’s wife thing- which makes me uncomfortable for obvious reasons (but I’m just thinking of Lonnie’s creepy gf who was into him). A few movies had the guy’s step mom innappropriately hit on him- orange county & you got mail. And him trying to avoid her advances. Or...not to mention ... it may be a problematic coincidence /trope. But in enter the void -the guy who needs to finacially support his sibling/ does dr*gs -hooks up with his dr*g dealing friend’s married mom (who would give him money).  Or in gilbert grape- the poor teen-who has to finacially support his siblings/single mom-has his endgame relationship be a girl his own age. But before that he h*oked up with a married woman -who would give him money. Don’s plum -young film guy-propositioned by older female film director (for dream job). Not even mentioning the other films that have the guy hooking up with toxic older women (like ‘the graduate’). Or analyze this-where the therapist accuses him of having an Oedipus complex (not touching that one... but the guy in ‘enter the void’ a 100% had one). It’s possible those movies were just- inspo for s3?  A coincidence? Or s3 was foreshadowing for this in s4- but unlike s3 it will accurately be played as wrong  and a sign of Jonathan recreating past tra*ma caused by Lonnie (cough like the photos) /being desperate for money. And not played ‘comedically’ like how it mostly was in s3. But shown as self destructive  (for Jon) and immoral on the Woman’s end. Like... Billy and Jon are character foils. Both are older siblings into rock music, with ab*sive dads who shoved them into walls. Both lose it (and beat steve to a pulp when Steve accidentally triggers their daddy issues). In s3 it’s established womanizer Billy has mommy issues, than he tries ho*king up with someone his mom’s age, and the characters ref ‘back to the future ‘ and Steve incorrectly says it’s about “alex p keaton trying to bang his mom.” This could illustrate his subconscious issues with parental figures/adults cause of Lonnie’s  possible past se*ual ab*se . One film the friend even says to the guy “you don’t have friends!” guy b: i have friends! him:  no you have acquaintances! ADMIT IT! YOU’RE AFRAID OF MEN!I mean-Jonathan liked Nancy- but he initially hooked up with her cause he wanted to prove he didn’t have ‘trust issues’ from his dad. Also it’s prob a bit of a reach (and maybe a coincidence)- but the fact Murray in the same breath compares Steve (Nancy’s then bf) and Lonnie  ... uh... if you think too long about it ... it’s very sinister .  Especially because in s3: muray tells Joyce  that despite her wanting to be with a nice guy, she’s curious about “the brute” Hopper despite him reminding her of a past “bad relationship”(aka Lonnie). Like- yeah connect some dots.  Quite a few films (other than forrest gump) also have the character who (as a kid) was  r*ped by their dad/parent-  begin to do dr*gs/be pr*miscuous as adults since they never learned to properly cope with their trauma (’girl with the dragon tattoo’,  ‘black swan’, and ‘magnolia’). Unfortunately the whole relative doing such things to kid-relatives is in at least 30+ movies. 

Personally, i would be MUCH happier if Jon had a age appropriate romance- and had not a single creepy adult near him. A few movies actually imply Lonnie gets yet another ‘new model’  replacing his gf in her 20s with a new gf- who is ‘barely l*gal” and just turned 18. so there’s that possibility as well- that she’s jonathan’s age.I just want Jonathan-happy &safe. GOD. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

Stop saying “(insert character name here) has never done anything bad in their life. They’re babie and are so innocent.” Or “(insert character name here) did this so they’re the worst most selfish character and deserve to die next season!!”

news flash! Every. Single. Character. In . Stranger. Things. Has. Made. A . Mistake.

AND THATS OKAY!

All characters have flaws. If they don’t it makes them boring characters. I’ve seen FIVE. F I V E people say today that will is the most selfish character of stranger things and deserves to, and I quote, “die next season, #killwillbyers .” No. I’m not kidding.

For starters: Will may have been inconsiderate last season but reminder!! 1. He’s a 14 year old boy 2. Him wanting to play d&d doesn’t make him a bad character it makes him a DIMENSIONAL character. Stop expecting him to be perfect. He’s learning. He’s growing. He doesn’t deserve to die just because he wanted to play D&D. Him calling El stupid was a throwaway line. Mike didn’t even care that Will called El stupid because Mike understood Will didn’t mean it and that he was frustrated, so you shouldn’t either. I admit, calling El stupid wasn’t cool, but neither was El assaulting Max but apparently that’s justified. My point is: EVERY CHARACTER IS FLAWED. Every one. Stop pretending like Will is the worst thing that’s happened to the show and stop pretending like (insert character here) is the most small harmless bean ever:

This is coming from an EL STAN aswell. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy in this fandom. Because it’s insane. Apparently Will calling El stupid (which I’m not saying wasn��t bad- I’m just saying you can’t seriously hate a character for making a realistic mistake and refusing to acknowledge all of the selfless things Will has done and only pointing out the one thing he’s done that makes him flawed.) but point is, apparently Will calling El stupid makes him the most selfish awful person ever but El assaulting Max and completely not being understanding in some elements of seasons 2 and season 3 and in ways being a brat, it’s fine because “it was a mistake”, which it WAS! El doesn’t deserve to be hated for those things because she’s a dimensional character and I love her. But stop ridiculing others for things you wouldn’t ridicule your fave for.

Every character has messed up. Stop expecting characters to be perfect. I’ve seen people say Will was worse than Billy. Billy, the racist abuser. Exactly.

These characters need to have flaws to be good and entertaining characters. And remember, the party members are KIDS! They’re brains are still developing! They’re children! They’re learning and developing. They aren’t the Pope or Obama. They say and do mean things. Doesnt mean their actions shouldn’t have consequences, it just means that you have to understand that your fave isn’t going to be unproblematic all the time. Deal with it.

Every one of the party members has made a mistake or multiple.

MIKE: made out with el for 6 months straight and ditched his friends. Can be a complete asshole. Ignored the “best thing that’s ever happened to him”, tried to control El, is an ass to Max

LUCAS: was wary of El and insulted her. Can be too blunt and can forget about his surroundings and about others feelings

DUSTIN: kept dart despite knowing it was from the upside down. Can be selfish

WILL: was inconsiderate of Mike’s break up, called El stupid.

EL: assaulted Max, spied on mike despite knowing mike hated it, was very blunt and rude in ways, can be a brat and doesn’t understand some things that are meant to keep her safe

MAX: Can be a total asshole. Very set in her ways. Doesn’t like to understand peoples point of view

THIS DOESNT MAKE THEM BAD CHARACTERS! Instead of paying attention to their bad traits start recognizing all the good things they’ve done. All of their GOOD traits. This fandom can be so pessimistic at times.

Every single member of the party has made mistakes and have done morally incorrect things. But they’ve also done very good things too!!! 97% of the things the party members have done have been GOOD. Stop paying attention to that 3% that isn’t morally correct or selfless or kind. You’ve made mistakes and I’m sure you’d hate being ridiculed for the rest of your life over one thing you did months ago. Or one mistake you made when you were younger and more naive or when you were still growing.

Instead of pointing out the bad things each party member has done and holding them up to impossible expectations because they are CHILDREN, take a minute to appreciate all of the good things they’ve done, which include (but aren’t limited to)

MIKE: Loyal, kind, patient, understanding, puts his friends needs infront of his own, will do anything for the people he loves, trustable

LUCAS: rational, leaves no man behind, defends his friends no matter what, brave, fights for his friends

DUSTIN: Patient, uplifting, funny, always will be there for you and will listen to you. Super smart, can get you out of any scientific or mathematical situation. Unapologetically himself

WILL: loyal, kind, a great listener, the mediator, peaceful, selfless, loves you unconditionally, puts his needs behind everyone else so he won’t worry his mom or the party

EL: selfless, brave, would sacrifice herself for her friends and family. Kind hearted and genuine. Always forgives people for their actions

MAX: will beat someone up if she found out they bullied you. Very uplifting and encourages you to be independent and to love yourself

AND THATS NOT EVEN ALL OF THEM!

Appreciate the good traits your favorite characters have! I’m not saying you aren’t allowed to dislike a character but it’s complete bullshit that you’d create some personal head canon that so and so is an awful person or make up lies about a certain character just to get an excuse to dislike the character.

These kids have trauma. Stop expecting them to deal with their trauma in 100% healthy ways. This is the EIGHTIES. They can’t just go find a support group online or go on Quora to find the answer as to why they’re acting a certain way.

These kids are misunderstood and they really just need a hug. Stop making a certain character out to be something their not.

And for the love of god, El and Will are both great characters and are my 2 favorites so can we stop this war it’s pointless

AND ALSO:

If you wish death upon ANY of the party members I will personally kick you into orbit. They are 14. who wishes death on 14 year old children?! That is disgusting.

Anyways, have your faves. Enjoy the show. And I’m not telling you NOT to dislike a character but instead of hating on them, level with them. Put yourself in their shoes. Reason with them and ask yourself, “Well maybe I also would act like this if I went through what they went through.”

Character are going to have flaws! Don’t let that stop you from appreciating the parts of their character that are good and lovable.

I’ll say it again: a good character needs to have flaws to he entertaining.

So no: the statement “(character here) has never done anything wrong in their life ever.”

Because they have. And that’s OKAY! Normalize having flawed yet lovable and enjoyable characters. That’s why I love ST so much. The party is REALISTIC. The kids ACT LIKE KIDS. Stop expecting them to be and act like 45 year old men or women. They’re learning. Growing. And developing.

PS: this does not go for the characters that have no good qualities and simply are villains *cough, Brenner and Lonnie cough*

thoughts on stranger things three  (spoilers. so many.)

this is just me yellin into the void as usual, but I like recording my opinions on things even if no one will read them 

good:

- every single scene w/ the robin, steve, erica, dustin gang, especially!!! the coming out scene. scoops?? iconic. steve and dustin’s secret handshake? transcendent. the drugged out back to the future scene? perfect. 

- eleven and max say fuck the patriarchy. love el’s new look 

- more competent women is always a win

- funhouse fight!!! carnival fight!!!FIREWORKS??!??!

- the destruction of the mall (sadly the only anticapitalist symbolism I could find)

- the scene after jonathan and nancy get fired where they’re angry about their separate marginalized identities making this loss worse. I really liked how it went into the ways it will impact both of them, and I especially liked when nancy got home and talked to her mom. 

- joyce going buckwild and getting shit done. 

- the portrayal of hypervigilance as a symptom of PTSD. All of these characters have seen some shit, and all of them pick up on the littlest things the second they present themselves because subconsciously, they’re always on edge, always aware of bad it could break. 

- most of will’s character arc. not all, but most of it. the queer experience of watching all your friends get dates and feeling like you’re missing out on something? trying to regain their interest because you feel lost and left behind? worrying that you’re not “growing up” because you don’t recognize romantic interest in yourself? not realizing you’re falling for your best friend until they get a romantic partner and suddenly you hate the partner even though they haven’t done anything wrong? a poignant, beautiful, very painful portrayal of queer teenhood. I really, really wish there was a moment that the audience realized will was in love with mike though. Like, it’s been building for a very long time. Also, a more thorough confirmation of will’s queerness would’ve been nice. I think they meant mike saying “you don’t understand bc you don’t like girls” to be that confirmation, but I want to hear it from will. Robin’s moment is so so so good though. 

- domestic fuckery 

- getting someone on the inside to help them/alexei as a character. not the symbolism or larger ramifications of his character arc, but how his knowledge and personality interacted. 

- mr clarke!!!!

- el going into someone’s memories again

- how prepared everyone is to fight because they’ve seen this shit before and robin and erica are just like ‘this might as well happen’ 

- keeping with the stranger things pattern of having a bunch of different groups of people all in different genres and then together they all meet up and go ?????

- I know every says billy didn’t get enough of a redemption arc but tbh I did not see his character development as redeeming in any way and I liked that. It didn’t excuse his abusive actions, it just explained them. There was no “oh he was secretly good all along”, no dramatic total character reversal on his death bed, just him deciding that he had enough of being controlled. Max didn’t get full closure with him, he didn’t say some big speech about being wrong or realizing the ramifications of his actions bc he hadn’t reached that point yet. he just said “I’m sorry” and died. that could mean “i’m sorry for how I’ve treated you”, “I’m sorry for how many people I’ve killed”, “I’m sorry for not being able to stop the monster”, anything. we don’t know what it means. we don’t get an explanation. It speaks to how survivors of abuse often don’t get to know why, don’t get closure, don’t get all the answers. 

- steve finally won a fight before getting the shit kicked out of him

- the whole no one knowing anything about each other bc no cell phones and/or wasnt there when It Happened. 

- Erica getting the DND set was poetic cinema 

- when joyce sees will on the firetruck and they run towards each other because finally, for once, will is completely unscathed, will isn’t the one who got hurt/possessed. I was already crying but this is the part where i had to get tissues bc I was sobbing. 

Bad:

- the red scare bullshit and glorification of capitalism. this show started out as “the US govt is doing shady shit” and now the big climatic “everything’s alright” is the army getting there?? what the fuck. There’s being accurate to the time period and then there’s sending a message. they could’ve subverted that trope in so many ways, but they just went for straight up “capitalism is great! fuck russia!” and I hated that. also, talk about one-note villainry. there weren’t even any dramatic monologues to make up for it, it just kinda sucked. 

- Hopper’s character in the beginning of the season. the scene where he gets wasted after getting stood up? shitty. not talking to el about his vaguely sexist overprotective actions? shitty. blowing up at joyce for no reason? shitty. he pulls it together in the end but it was OOC for a bit there. Plus I would kill for more “hopper and el work through their trauma together”, rather than “friend group splinters bc hopper did a yell” 

- I don’t know what to think about hopper’s death. It just hurts, and not in a satisfying, last harry potter book way. 

- why the fuck are the byers and el moving?????? did they ever give a reason???? WHY?????? WILL AND EL’S ENTIRE SUPPORT NETWORK, THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT THEY’VE BEEN THROUGH AND CAN HELP THEM, IS IN HAWKINS!!!!!

- the ads. omg the ads. lucas idc about your fucking coke. there’s so much goddamn product placement. christ on a goddamn bicycle. 

- previous seasons have had body horror, but it was all black goo so it was removed from reality and conveyed a psychological, otherworldly horror. and I liked that. WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH FUCJING MEAT IN THIS ONE??? THE MIND FLAYER LOOKED LIKE IT WAS MADE OF BBQ SAUCE AND I HATED IT!!! STOP!!!THE MEATS!!!!!

- can el not be injured......for oNCE?????

- also can people stop standing around staring at shit so much? theyve seen it before. it’s not like it’s a huge shock. people stand around for like 5 minutes before Doing Things and it annoys me. with the New Kids like erica and robin it makes sense but like....whenever theres a monster mike just sits there like :o cOME ON DUDE YOU’VE DONE THIS SO MANY TIMES GET A KNIFE OR SOMETHIN!!!

- WHAT. WAS. THE GREEN STUFF?????????????????? IS IT FUCKING PLUTONIUM OR SOMETHING???? WHAT THE FUCK!!! IF YOU NEED A MACGUFFIN BE LESS OBVIOUS ABOUT IT!!!

- idk about you but murray yelling at them about sex kinda rubbed me the wrong way. 

- speaking of, you caNNOT convince me that murray, 4 locks on the front door lives in a bunker murray, would take a goddamn enemy of the state to a carnival and leave him alone for any period of time. seriously????????

- look.....it was adorable.....i’ll give you that.....but.....the song dustin and suzy sang slapped me with secondhand embarrassment and genre disconnect so hard I found it impossible to enjoy. also...planck’s constant??? you could/......idk........call mr clarke????????? you’ve interrupted the man’s life for less!!!! I was also half expecting it to be joyce who remembered it from all the studying she did on the magnets. I did enjoy the whole “i met a girl at camp” story being unbelievable until it was but like I was expecting the thing she wanted him to say to be like a famous star wars love quote or something not an entire song jesus christ 

- if hopper turns out to be alive I will face god and walk backwards into hell. I suffered through supernatural, I will not be caught in a cycle of fake deaths again. 

- i get the whole “we’re growing up now” thing but aren’t they like 13? theyre still so young??? also like i dont rly care for the vague soap-opera-y vibes the core squad gave off. 

- the only people who got flayed were either a. already pretty shitty or b. completely unknown. like. it just made it less scary????

- hopper just fucking standing by the machine looking at joyce instead of running the 5 seconds up the steps into the room. seriously? was that supposed to be slow motion or was that real time??? 

- the whole thing with cerebro not working at the beginning sucked ass. 

- hey does mrs wheeler have eyes??? like??? there were exactly two (2) scenes she had with mike and nancy and both were Big Conversations like they live there right/????tbh i forgot she was their mom until those scenes bc of the whole billy thing, which i decidedly do not have an opinion on but like....do they eat breakfast there??? 

815: Agent for HARM

I fear I am among the minority who really don’t find the host segments in this episode funny.  They’re kind of tedious and frustrating, really – though I do smile at Crow being a character witness – and when the time came to re-watch the episode in preparation for this review, I actually skipped them and got straight to the movie. It’s pretty drab, too.

Dr. Jan Stefanik defects from… somewhere or other, and moves to California to do… some kind of research.  When his assistant Henry suddenly dissolves into a mess of green goo, spy organization HARM decides Stefanik needs a full investigation and sends Agent Adam Chance, a guy who dresses like Mr. Rogers and still manages to sleep with every woman he meets. Stefanik explains to Chance that his country has new and terrible tool of destruction: an alien Spore that reproduces by feeding on human flesh.  That’s right, they’ve weaponized the space mummy fungus from Being from Another Planet!  The movies are coming together into a single, mud-clear, incoherent whole, again!

Y’know, Secret Agent Super Dragon and Danger!! Death Ray weren’t very good, but they could legitimately claim to globe-trotting adventures.  Super Dragon took us to Amsterdam, and Death Ray at least mentioned Rome and Barcelona.  In Agent for HARM we see one beach and a motel in Mexico.  The whole movie seems to be in pastels, which aren’t really urgent colours, and something about the pacing is off.  No matter what the movie tries to tell us, it just never feels like we’re in any sort of a hurry.

It’s not without legitimate entertainment value.  The music’s not bad – it isn’t totally forgettable, but also not as obnoxiously memorable as the theme from Danger!! Death Ray.  The Spore itself is a scary idea and the makeup that represents it is actually pretty good.  I especially like the impression you get that there’s a dark, hollow cavity underneath the foaming fungus, as if the victim’s face is about to collapse.  The improbably complete eyeball in Dr. Stefanik’s sample is entertainingly gross, and I like the glimpse of his lab animals that hint at what his work actually entails.

I’m sure the thing everybody remembers best about Agent for HARM, though, is Dr. Stefanik’s niece Ava. She’s cute and blonde and spends most of the movie running around in tiny little bikinis, and she works for the bad guys because of course she fucking does.  This plot point is so obvious to anybody who’s ever seen a movie in their lives that I’m not sure why the writers bothered establishing it.  The beautiful woman in a spy movie is always working for the bad guys.

I really would have liked to see way more of the relationship between Stefanik and Ava.  Actually seeing them interact at any length might have helped to dispense with the creepy vibe we get from their age gap, her habit of wandering around in nothing but a tiny swimsuit, and Stefanik’s wistful commentary on how close they’ve become.  It’s easy to see why Mike and the bots made some jokes about incest.  Some character development here might also have suggested why Stefanik trusts her, when he surely must have suspected her of spying when she first showed up.  The interactions we see make her look so damn suspicious that if she’d turned out to be genuine, Dr. Stefanik’s actual niece who really does want to help him, it would have been a shocking twist!

What would not have been a shocking twist would be if she turned out to be a robot.  Barbara Bouchet wears so much makeup she looks like she’s made of plastic (or maybe that’s just her face – she looked exactly the same as Moneypenny in Casino Royale and Maria in Black Belly of the Tarantula… man, I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies) and for some reason her hair looks fake.  She moves kind of robotically, too, and the first time I watched the movie I was thinking about the comparison well before Chance declares ‘she’s a machine’.  He may have been more right than he knew.

What’s somewhat mysterious is when, exactly, Chance figured out Ava was a spy.  His drunken boss asks him, but doesn’t receive a straight answer, and when you watch the movie a second time you can’t help but try to figure it out.  Was it when she blatantly tried to distract him by inviting him to go swimming with her, and he said you’re not fooling anyone, Angel?  But if so, why does he later save her when the guy who looks like Prince threatens her, if he already knew it was a ruse?  Is it so she wouldn’t know that he knew?  Was it when he realized the gun she’d given him wasn’t loaded?

I actually lean towards the latter incident as the moment of revelation, because it’s the one he references when he has her arrested. That also explains why he doesn’t give his boss a straight answer – he’s ashamed it took him that long.

The love story in this movie isn’t between Chance and Ava – or Chance and Karate Girl, or Chance and Beehive Secretary – anyway.  It’s the bromance between Chance and Dr. Stefanik.

The two of them start off deeply suspicious of each other. Chance has been sent to keep an eye on Stefanik and he’s quite worried that the scientist may be some kind of spy himself.  Chance threatens him with both death and deportation.  Stefanik, meanwhile, is a man whose main flaw is that he trusts too easily, and he has learned the hard lesson that people who deal in the fate of nations do not make good friends.  He fears the Americans may try to use Spore as a weapon just as his own people did.  The one person he trusts is Ava, and only because she’s family – and boy, did that backfire on him – and even she is not allowed full access to his work on an antidote.

By the end of the movie, Chance and Stefanik come to trust each other totally, and are good friends to such a degree that their separation, reunion, and the reveal of Stefanik’s death plays out like a romantic tragedy.  The captured Stefanik stares at the horizon, waiting for Chance to come for him.  When they reunite, Chance wants to touch Stefanik despite knowing that the stuff in the bags, with which Stefanik is now covered, is deadly.  When told Stefanik is dead, Chance denies it over and over until the proof is staring him in the face.  If one or other of them were a woman, nobody would question that any of this is meant to be romantic, and they’re certainly closer in age than either of these gray-haired men is to twenty-two-year-old Ava.

This is two episodes in a row where I’ve talked about the homosexual undertones.  Do I just have my tumblr goggles on, or are the movies actually that gay?

A certain number of things about this film become a little clearer when you know that it, like Stranded in Space, was intended as a pilot for a TV series.  That’s why there’s not much for locations – they had to keep the budget down so as not to scare the investors.  That’s why they bring up the cancelled date with the Beehive Secretary – perhaps she was supposed to be a regular love interest.  It explains why not just the villains but the good guy of this particular story – Stefanik – must be dead at the end, because the main character can’t form long-lasting attachments that might carry into future episodes when the actors are guest stars who might not be able to come back. Maybe that’s also why Stefanik’s antidote to the fungus also didn’t work, because they were going to use Spore itself as an ongoing plot point.

Spore is an interesting and scary choice of weapon, probably the most interesting thing in the movie, and it’s possibly a metaphor for how communism was perceived in the 50’s and 60’s – as a disease that consumed societies from the inside.  We saw an example of this in It Conquered the World, when Beulah implanted mind control devices in its victims, infecting them with its poisonous view of progress.  The people in Stranded in Space thought Stryker was the one with the thought disease, here to infect their planet.  Now here in Agent for HARM, we have Spore, which enters the human body and turns it into something unthinking and alien, just as Beulah did.  Also like Beulah’s victims, who had to be killed because they could not be cured, once it has started there is no way to stop it.

Ava the ‘machine’ and the compassionless bad guy Malko also fit into this way of thinking.  Their politics have transformed them into things as unthinking and alien as the fungus. When Chance writes the words Jan Stefanik, Human Being on the toe tag, he is emphasizing that Stefanik had succumbed to a disease of the body but not to this disease of the mind.  Yet Chance’s boss reminds him, and Chance agrees, that they, too, are machines – Chance has, after all, coldly murdered several of Malko’s henchmen.  In order to fight these unfeeling enemies, he has had to cultivate a lack of feeling in himself.  Perhaps he emphasizes Stefanik’s humanity partly because he doesn’t feel quite human anymore.

Agent for HARM is okay, but it’s not great.  There’s some interesting ideas in it, under-used, and a number of those glamorous secret agent tropes, over-used.  It certainly doesn’t come near toppling Danger!! Death Ray as MST3K’s best secret agent movie – it’s just too forgettable.

TDB Rewatch: The Role You Were Born to Play

Ah man - I’m so mixed on all the feelings tonight.  But I’m gonna give this episode some credit -- I was pretty entertained through all of it -- and that’s more than I can say for a good half of season 3 - so there’s that.  

First of all, though, I’m so glad we’re past the break up stuff.  Cause that just looms over, not only the beginning of season 4, but the end of season 3 - and it just gets better from here forward, and that’s nice.  Also - this episode has some really great funny moments.  I know season 4 has a lot of stuff people didn’t like, I get it - I do.  But it brought back comedy, which was sorely missing there for a while.  And I appreciate that. 

Thoughts: 

So - obviously, I don’t come back to this episode very often -- but it’s official! Glee is a club not a class.  Bam.  I guess we can end that debate now. 

So - here’s the biggest thing I’m torn on.  Finn.  On the one hand, I know what’s coming up, I know that he’s going to be a great teacher, and his character development is going to be great going forward.  On the other hand, they’ve reverted back to this tired masculinity trope they’ve done the entire series -- which has been nicely absent for a while, but now that Finn’s back, they’re dragging it back as well.  And I hate it.  It’s the worst reoccurring theme that the show does. I mean, there’s no one like Finn -- even if he’s a straight, white, cis-gendered male -- but he’s still the special snowflake.  It just drives me crazy.  

tl:dr I’m glad that the show is going to give Finn a great arc, but I’m just not here for the conversations discussing masculinity that go around it.  

Let’s talk about the musical - I’m beginning to question my belief that Artie is a good director.  He doesn’t want to let Marley be Sandy because she’s not blonde? What??  I’m so glad Mercedes is there to shut is ass up.  I’m also glad that Finn can make some good calls.  Though - I am side eyeing the fact that they have to throw Artie under a bus to make Finn look good. 

The seniors have all gotten a decent amount of focus in the season so far, but I did miss them in this.  I mean, yeah Blaine!! But also - I want more Sam and Brittany and even Tina.  

Blaine!! I appreciate Sam being his friend.  But also - Blaine’s hurting a lot worse than I think people realize, and unlike Finn, who’s getting a ton of support from everyone, Blaine’s truly on his own.  I suppose Dynamic Duets is for dealing with that -- but still.  

Blaine’s audition speech, though, does crack me up. 

I just realized Brittany was just dumped, too -- is she okay? Sorry Brittana fans - we care about you even less than the Klaine fans. 

Is it sad I’d rather watch Wemma drama than the newbies?  Cause I would.  Can’t believe I’m saying that.  

I don’t really understand Will’s problem though - he really has to have Emma there? This makes no sense.  I think for most couples this would barely be a discussion.  

At least it’s not as bad as stuff in season 3.  Also, Coach Beiste makes the best counselor.  I love the comment about not losing yourself in a relationship -- you still need to be an individual!! 

Also - you know what they say about reservations? You won’t be seated until your party’s all there ;) 

It’s the return of Mike and Mercedes! They don’t get much to do - but their presence has been missed, and it was nice to have them on my screen again.  I kind of agree, though, with @ckerouac at this point - the previous class coming back doesn’t make much sense, and since they already look like they’re five years older, they should have had a time jump, because everyone who returns feels five years older.  

Also - Mike and Tina have a conversation.  I don’t think it’s satisfying or offering any kind of closure - but they were the longest running couple, so at least they acknowledge it.  

Annnd, Sue’s back with a vengeance.  I’m kinda tired of them giving her stuff (even when a lot of it’s funny) that they think they can get away with her saying just because she’s Sue and has no accountability.  

I’m also really tired of her using fat as an insult.  Finn isn’t fat, especially at this point.  You don’t get points for defending Marley’s mom when you’re just going to call your not excessively skinny cast ‘fat’.  Stop.  

I’m kind of surprised by the amount of continuity this episode had -- they remembered Carl and Terri and that Sue had a baby and that Kurt was a cheerio and that he was bullied.  I don’t know why I’m so shocked.  But I am. 

Did anyone remember Sugar and Joe were here? I had not.  I forgot they pop up every once in a while during season 4. 

Okay fine, let’s talk about the newbies. 

Hey - there’s an interesting conversation here with Unique, and this plot I can handle - even if I still think the show was trying itself to figure out if she was transgender or not.  Also Unique and Marley have a good friendship.  That’s good. 

Jake doesn’t bother me that much -- but I’m already dreading this whole love triangle thing that’s going to be coming up.  I’m sorry that Jake’s entire characterization seems to be built up around the girls he dates. 

Kitty’s still too mean for the sake of filling the Quinn/Santana role.  I don’t care for Ryan Murphy’s obsession with mean girls.  

Ryder.  **headdesk** I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry fans of Ryder -- I find him so, so boring.  He’s literally the same as Rory Finn.  Even Joe Hart is more interesting.  But really, I’m sorry Darren, Kevin, and Chord, (not to mention Chris), we know you’ve been here longer, but - we’re gonna drag this Finn-like dude out cause he’s gonna play a “normal” dude, and we just don’t have enough “normal” dudes on this show.  

Whatever, I won’t get into it... 

I missed Kurt, bring him back.  Undecided if I missed Rachel. 

wow! it’s the first blog post and i don’t quite know what to talk about. i asked my instagram stories and the overwhelming response was about the works by Becky Albertalli. specifically, the topic that struck me was, “Why do we need more movies like Love, Simon?” to expand on that, “Why do we need more queer youth and queer love stories in big name pop culture and media?”

and why do we? why is Love, Simon so important to millions of queer youth across the united states and outside? there’s no clear answer other than: gay people deserve better. for as long as humans have been around, gay people have been ostracized and oppressed. not only has homophobia been prevalent, but homosexuality has always been a significant part of human existence. homosexual people have made some of the most amazing and historical changes in our history. so often was the sexuality of these inspiration people erased, not only then, but also now.

for example, you might not have known that Alan Turing, the man who decoded Enigma (the most infamous Nazi code during WW2) and created the first general modern computer was notoriously gay. he was convicted of gross indecency in the spring of 1952 after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man twenty years his junior. both men were convicted and charged, but Turing was exempt from prison due to opting into hormonal treatment to reduce libido via injections of synthetic oestrogen. two years later, after being banned from the cryptanalysis of Enigma and after participating in consistent hormonal therapy, Turing committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. in 2014, The Imitation Game (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing) was released, and the truth about Turing’s sexuality became far more recognized all over the united states.

furthermore, Alexander the Great, who is considered one of the greatest military minds of Persian and Green history, Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most famous artists of all time, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr’s partner in politics and activism, Emily Dickinson, an extraordinarily famous poet, and Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady and advocate for the poor, were (reportedly) queer. i ask you, did YOU know they were queer? some of them were openly gay (most notably Rustin, but Dickinson and Da Vinci also did not hide their sexuality), some of them came out posthumously (first lady Roosevelt, especially, who was discovered to be queer via letters after her death) and some of them never really came out at all (Alexander the Great was just...gay!)

but what does it matter anyway? all of these historical figures are far gone, and there is no point in avenging their personal life when it was erased so long ago. the answer to that might be best as another question - did YOU know they were queer? generally, their sexualities are erased by history books and the were unspoken of during their lives. and, a follow up to my previous question, why is that? why did so many gay and queer and even transgender people have their identities hidden rom the spotlight? is it because the normalization of queerness was (and in many places, still is) outlawed? is it because the general society was far more comfortable with violent hate crimes then than they are now? or is it just because people were not supposed to be gay, it was not the standard, just as people were not supposed to be women or black or whatever. not to compare the plights of gay people, black people and women, but it certainly has the same standing - hate what is different, and what cannot be changed.

so what does queer historical people have to do with movies like Love, Simon? well, did YOU know any of them were queer? most people did not. most people dehumanize queerness and queer people; most people hate and oppress and fear queerness and queer people.

even today, in 2018, countless people in modern media are so quick to hate and oppress queerness and queer people. look at the white house right now; mike pence, donald trump, etc are all considered to be homophobic. LGB hate crimes have been steadily rising in recent years, and transgender youth are in some of the highest risks they’ve been in. but it’s the little stuff too - like how my wifi blocks inappropriate content by using keywords such as NSFW and gay, or how tumblr marks posts as ‘explicit’ when tagged with lesbian or gay, or how in some developing countries, queer movies are rated higher (from PG-13 to R, R to X, etc) because gay people are ‘inappropriate’. Love, Simon, in a nutshell, was and is important because it’s not about this guy who had this horrible homophobic experience and his whole character growth is about being gay and being bullied, but instead his horrible homophobic experiences + being gay and being bullied = a minor part of his story. instead, his story is the same ugly cliches we see in every teen romance movie ever. Love, Simon was as cheesy and goofy and wholesome as The Kissing Booth or F The Prom or Candy Jar or DUFF. Love, Simon followed the same rules as these teen romances, and began to break down the barriers around gay people and sexuality as a whole.

but why are those barriers so suffocating anyway? it’s not like any law in the western world prevents people from being gay or transgender. perhaps it’s because gay youth are take their own lives four times the amount straight youth does. or maybe it’s because that number skyrockets nine times when their family has a poor reaction to their coming out. or maybe because queer young adults with rejecting families (as opposed to mildly rejecting, neutral or accepting families) are six times more likely to have major depression, four times more likely to have unprotected sex and four times more likely to do and use illegal drugs. and with the federal legalization of same sex marriage in 2015, nothing is legally stopping queerness and queer people from existing. in this, though, comes one realization: nothing is legally stopping people from hating, oppressing, fearing and dehumanizing queerness and queer people.

this is a very long, drawn out way of saying Love, Simon (and, more broadly, queer love stories in big name pop culture) is important because it’s not about this kid’s horrible experiences of being gay and how he had to fight tooth and nail and work from the ground up to become a person who’s more than just gay. instead, it’s a story about a kid who’s homophobic backstory is a minuscule detail in his character because he is so much more than the kid who suffered; his character growth isn’t going from hating himself to tolerance, it went from tolerance to LOVE and ACCEPTANCE. his story is so important because it normalizes the way gay kids feel, just like other cliche teen romances normalize the way straight kids feel. it’s just like any other romance movie except that he’s GAY and that one little detail changes so much about him as a person. his story isn’t just about being gay, it’s about finding love, and he happens to be gay; his character growth is about accepting his sexuality and being proud of his differences; he teaches others to also be proud of who they are and to never shy away from using their voice because if you don’t, who will? Love, Simon, and other stories like it (Alex Strangelove, Leah on the Offbeat, Will Grayson Will Grayson, etc) are important because they’re not just about being gay, they’re about being gay and FALLING IN LOVE! and isn’t that just so beautiful?

this was a very drawn out blog post for such a short ending but i am very excited to write better things as time goes on. i just hope you all see how important this story was for ME. his coming out was such a strong scene but such a small part of who he is; he isn’t just the gay kid. he’s the gay kid who lives for theatre and likes oreos and cute boys who make him tongue tied at football games and he thinks ferris wheels and emails are the epitome of teen romance and he drinks iced coffee and he’s a hufflepuff and he’s more important than his coming out story. but with all of that, all of those beautiful wonderful details about him (his iced coffee, his harry potter fanaticism, etc) not once is his identity as gay erased, and that’s much much rarer than so many people realize. after centuries of not only fear but also hiding...i don’t know, i just think everyone should watch Love, Simon and then try to tell me it wasn’t the sweetest gosh darn movie ever.

and that’s me, signing off for the FIRST TIME in this blog. who knows, maybe i’ll actually keep up with this?

Let’s Rank the Samurai Rangers!

Power Rangers Samurai gets a bad rap among fans, probably deservedly so. I don’t watch Super Sentai, but people who do tell me that Samurai is basically a very lazy direct translation of Shinkenger. That may be true, but I actually kind of enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no RPM or Dino Thunder, but it’s also nowhere near as bad as Megaforce. Regardless of where you stand on the show, one of the most consistently-cited issues that people tend to have with the show is the characters (and, depending on who you talk to, maybe the cast too). Again, I tend to hedge on this, because I think most of the actors are fairly capable and do a fine job with what they’re given. That said, I will concede that some of the rangers just...suck. So let’s get to the rankings! From best to worst, here they are (oh, and I’m skipping Lauren):

1. Mike (the Green Ranger)

Mike (Hector David Jr.) is the best, and this is should be so self-evident that I shouldn’t even have to make a case for him. So I’ll limit my argument to this: in “Christmas Together, Friends Forever,” Mike, who loves Christmas more than anything else which automatically makes him the best, gives his only present--a brand new dirtbike--to Bulk and Spike on Christmas, because they have nothing.

2. Mia (the Pink Ranger)

I hesitated whether to place Mia in this spot or the next, but ultimately she gets the nod at second, because I am only a man.

Yes, I may be 31 years old, am happily married, will soon be a father, own my own business, and have a mortgage, but every time Mia (Erika Fong) steps onscreen, I swoon like a 13-year-old girl (I may or may not have even said, “You’re so pretty” out loud). 

Like everything else about this show, her gimmick of loving to cook despite being godawful at it is polarizing, but I think it’s kind of cute, and it also adds a nice touch of brevity in contrast with Jayden and Kevin’s seriousness. She does need further development, but that goes for every else in this series, and like I already said, she’s really pretty.

3. Emily (the Yellow Ranger)

I’m glad that when Saban bought back the rights to Power Rangers from Disney that they decided to carry on the Disney tradition of casting super-cute, perky blondes (Tori, Kira, Syd, Claire, Ronnie, Lily, Summer)...usually as the Yellow Ranger.*

Emily has the potential to be even better, but what we did get is pretty good. She’s fun, kind of clumsy, and occasionally she and Mike make eyes at each other. Yes, they should have done something more with her being chosen to be a Ranger instead of her sister, and her and Mike’s romance could have been developed more (basically they go from sort of flirting to being a couple in the final episode with no in between). That said, when Emily finally gets a chance to go nuts in “Strange Case of the Munchies,” actress Brittany Anne Pirtle grabs onto every scene and takes it for all its worth.

In my own head-canon, I also like to imagine that this episode partly inspired “Dark Betty” in Riverdale.

4. Jayden (the Red Ranger)

Placing Jayden in any place other than last might be controversial for many fans, since he often bears the brunt of their wraith, but I tend to disagree. 

Yes, his brooding lone wolf character probably worked better for his Super Sentai counterpart, given the abundance of these types of characters in Japanese culture (I get Squall from Final Fantasy VIII vibes from him). That said, he does get a lot of backstory that helps establish why he is the way he is, and when you consider that he’s been burdened with the task of destroying Master Xandred since he was a child, you can see why he see’s a bit messed up. It’s not perfect and the execution is sometimes lacking, but there are good ideas there.

Additionally, Alex Heartman actually does have charisma and, on the occasions when he’s given good material, he does a good job with it. Plus, even at his worst, there are two rangers that are much worse than him.

5. Antonio (the Gold Ranger)

There’s things about Antonio that work really well: the fact that he’s a self-trained Samurai Ranger who isn’t descended from a long line of Samurais’, which gives him both a different perspective and approach towards being a ranger, his relationship (bromance? romance? whatever floats your boat) and history with Jayden, and his general light-hearted attitude. The problem is that as good as all those things are, it’s hard to overlook just how grating his character can be.

I don’t mind goofy characters; Ivan and Koda are two of my favorite Power Rangers ever, and I’ve also loved Bridge, Gem and Gemma, Dustin, and Ziggy, among many others. I’ve never understood why some fans get up in arms about these types of characters. Like, you do realize that you’re watching a show made for 5-8 year olds? However, when we’re presented with characters like Antonio (and, even worse, Dax from Operation Overdrive), I can start to sympathize with this mentality.

The problem with Antonio is that actor Steven Skylar spends far too much time mugging to the camera. Everything about the performance is way too over-the-top, including the random Spanish interjections. I suspect that since Skylar is actually of Thai descent, the producers felt the need to have him beat the audience over the head with “Fantastico!” I generally try not to blame actors, especially because it’s entirely possible that they were directed to act in a specific way, but I also can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t have liked Antonio more if he had been played by another actor.

Still, he’s not the worst. There is someone much more deserving of that:

6. Kevin (the Blue Ranger)

God, Kevin, you suck so much. No, seriously, Kevin, you’re the worst.

(This GIF is priceless, but I also kind of wish that Mike just wrapped his arm around Kevin and strangled him right then and there)

Okay, so if you’ve watched more than one season of Power Rangers, you’re probably seen similar characters. Given that the creators essentially have to come up with a brand-new cast every year for 25 years, it makes sense that they would rely on archetypes. Kevin follows of the mold of the stick-up-their-ass, by-the-books second-in-command much like Kai, Jen, and Sky before him. 

There are a few problems from the beginning; for one, those three were all partnered with more laid-back Red Rangers (Leo, Wes, and Jack), and so they served as nice foils, constantly second-guessing the leader. Over time, these characters would gradually see that, although the Red Rangers didn’t following standard operating procedure, they were effective leaders in their own way, and they would come to respect them. It’s a good dynamic, and you can understand why they’ve returned to that well multiple times.

(That “What the fuck”-look that Mia gives Kevin is exactly how we all feel)

With Kevin, they tried something different (which is good, I guess) and had a serious second-in-command who idolizes his equally intense leader. So instead of forcing them to see (and come to respect) a different point of view, this dynamic just reinforces their own stupid biases. Worse yet, unlike, say Erin Cahill (Jen) or Chris Violette (Sky) who were still likable characters even when their heads were up their asses, Najee De-Tiege has no charisma or charm, and it’s impossible to like Kevin.

If you want a quick introduction to why Kevin is the worst, look no further than “The Blue and the Gold.” So two episodes after joining the team, Kevin still hasn’t accepted that Antonio is part of the team. Antonio tells that he made a new Zord, and Kevin’s like, “You made it from Electronic Symbol Power? I don’t accept that!”

Hey, asshole, how many fucking Zords have you made?

“.....”

None? That’s what I thought. So shut the fuck up!

The other rangers tell Antonio that Kevin won’t accept him unless he can adapt to his training habits. So Antonio follows him around observing his daily routine (i.e. non-stop training) and tries to copy him the next day. Kevin catches him and says, “Despite the fact that you’re gone through all this effort to try to copy me, I don’t think you’re taking this seriously so fuck off!” Before Antonio can tell him to take his head out of his ass, they’re attacked and can’t communicate with the other rangers. It’s not a problem though, because they’ll know something is wrong when Kevin is late. This is when we find out that Kevin has a daily routine that goes down to the minute. As much as I despise Kevin, this is so hilariously awful that I can’t help but love it.

Later they’re attacked again, and Antonio hurts his arm, but he sticks around and defeats the bad guys anyway, and Kevin goes, “Wow! You really are dedicated. I finally respect you,” despite the fact that Antonio has been doing this for the past two episodes. Kevin must be one of those people who says, “Yes, the Golden State Warriors have made three straight NBA Finals appearances, won the championship twice, have multiple All-Stars, and a two-time MVP, but I just don’t think they’re very good.” Then if Golden State wins this year, he’s finally like, “Oh, I get why people think they’re good.”

Welcome to the fucking party, dipshit!

*-After this, they’d do it again with Gia (Ciara Hanna) in Megaforce.

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews… Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (S03E01) Kimmy Gets Divorced?! Airdate: May 19, 2017 @netflix Ratings: Streaming Only Score: 7/10

**********SPOILERS BELOW**********

I feel like these short, uber-comedic episodes happen in a blink of an eye… Which is a shame because I feel like, if given the chance, I could watch ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ forever! Waiting a full year is another big negative that puts me in a 'Duh’ like, drooling headspace, where it takes me a little more than a minute to catch up… 'Like uh, why is Titus crawling onto the beach?’ LIGHTBULB! 'That’s right, the Florida trip!’ Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make the return of 'Kimmy Schmidt’ any less appealing… Anything Kimmy (Ellie Schmidt) and company does is endlessly entertaining, whether it’s going to college, falling into becoming an uber driver, or meeting up with her long lost mother whose a massive roller coaster enthusiast. What does it matter when everything they do is comedy gold?

Straight out the gate, at warp speed, they’ve literally set up arcs for all their main characters. I’m sure that subplots for recurring and secondary characters are sure to follow… And I want to go out on a limb here and say that Mikey wouldn’t cheat on Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess). I mean, it does look bad but after all, Mikey (Mike Carlson) does have a lot of 'straight’ friends being in the construction business and all. Though I guess that doesn’t really matter if sexuality is on a sliding scale and all relative anyway… So instead of using the word 'straight’, let’s be 2017-forward and just refer to his construction buddies who catcall and whistle every time a female walks by a construction site as 'hyper-masculine’. Whatever the explanation is, good or bad, I get the feeling that Titus wasn’t exactly keeping good contact with Mikey… So if it is something, he’s going to have to accept that he’s part of the problem.

As usual the series makes use of all the characters it possibly can in one quick go… Lillian (Carol Kane) is hilarious as usual in her attempt to run for City Council to stop gentrification, but dealing with dating a seemingly unstable Robert Durst (Fred Armisen), the son of a notorious city developer. At the time of S2, Lillian standing up against Gentrification seemed like a great idea for quick laughs, but as Spotlight Saga has uncovered a handful of issues, both positive and severely negative that cities need to consider when allowing such an act through the atrocities that a trifecta of NBC’s 'One Chicago’ series (Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and its new, low-rated Chicago Justice) shined a light on. The Ghost Ship Fire rocked Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area, a place I once called home… People are dead, low-income families are displaced, and fire codes & endless citations are basically being ignored. The show has a chance to not only be downright funny with characters like Amy Sedaris’ 'Mimi Kanasis’ and the ever-elegant Jane Krakowski’s 'Jacqueline White’, but they also have a chance to use their platform to pose some socially relevant questions. 'It’s a miracle… But females are strong as hell!’ Welcome back, Kimmy! You’ve been missed! Sip on the show guys, sip! Binging is so… FINAL!

John Cena Shows His Passion For Animation With Dallas & Robo

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Han and Chewy, Kirk and Spock, Groot and Rocket – the science fiction world isn’t hurting for lovable outer space duos. Now, another intriguing pair is putting themselves forward into the “space buddies” canon. 

Dallas & Robo stars the accomplished Kat Dennings as Dallas and WWE megastar John Cena as Robo. The series that bears their name follows the misadventures of Dallas, a sassy space-trucker with a colorful vocabulary and Robo, her bone-crushing artificially intelligent best friend.

The eight-episode series comes from creator Mike Roberts and animation studio ShadowMachine (both of Bojack Horseman). It will be making its cable run debut on what seems to be the perfect fit, Syfy, this August on Saturday’s late night TZGZ programming block.

This past week we had the chance to chat (via phone, of course) to the man behind Robo — the GOAT, John Cena himself. Cena discussed becoming Robo, his love for animation, and how his years in the WWE have prepared him as he continues to further his career in entertainment. 

Den of Geek: I could certainly try to describe it, but since you are Robo, how would you best describe the show for all the potential first-time viewers out there?

John Cena: Robo’s description of the show would be different than mine. Robo would say that AI is absolutely equal to or greater than the human species and should be treated as such. I think, as a viewer, it literally is a fun ride, a look at a quasi-realistic futuristic environment. It gives us a chance to laugh. It’s very lighthearted and it looks at the future through freight, which is not a job that’s going anywhere soon. With all the online ordering and all the shipping to your door, this is something that will be around for quite some time. So it takes something that’s extremely important now, but rather mundane and that’s the basis of the show going into the future.

How exactly did this opportunity come about to play Robo? Is starring in an adult cartoon series something you always wanted to do?

Animation is something that I love. I really think it gives you a chance to tell stories and use tools that aren’t possible in live-action or actual film. So it was very entertaining to me and to do something in the animation comedy space. It’s even more entertaining because of what I’ve done for most of my life, regardless of the risks that I take outside of that, it’s very difficult to break those typecasts. Where I was able to be a voice in an animated comedy, man, that was something that I was really interested in and I really have an interest in AI and the development of electronics. 

Certainly as a semi-professional future, all of these things hit on certain channels that I really do enjoy. The folks at ShadowMachine have a great track record, and I’m so grateful to Syfy. It couldn’t have ended up on a better network. It belongs on Syfy. It belongs on the weekend animation spot. 

You co-star with the amazingly talented Kat Dennings. What was it like recording the voiceovers for the show alongside her?

As with most animation, it’s very difficult to get everybody in the same room, especially when you want to put together an all-star cast. Because of all the outlets of entertainment, everybody’s really busy. It’s a really good time to be an entertainer, which I’m certainly very fortunate for every day. But to be able to stack the cast the way we did, a lot of times you’d have to record without the person being there. Now, Kat and I did record many times together. I wouldn’t see anyone else as Dallas. And she really embraced it.

Animation is realistic yet over the top. And a lot of times you get the opportunity to leave a joke longer. With animation, you can punch home some of the punchlines because there’s stuff you just can’t do without drawing. So she’s incredibly gifted and I think has a brilliant mind for how long to lean into a joke, the correct presentation of the humor, and also giving the character a sense of … you’re very sympathetic to the character, as well. It’s more than just coming in and reading from a paper and she absolutely really did a great job.

I love the chemistry between your two characters. Robo acts as sort of the voice of reason counterpart to his reckless, alcoholic partner, Dallas. Did the dynamic between the two characters come naturally through the script, or did the two of you sort of mold the characters into what they ended up becoming?

Well, I’m pretty straight laced. So I think Robo was easy. It wasn’t beyond my reach. And that’s also what drove me to the character – this kind of skeptical, really logical piece of AI that really just wants to be treated as equal. But he’s also very angular at points, and I hope that that helped Kat let loose because me not pushing those boundaries too much allows her to push her boundaries. And it really gives, like you said, a great comparison between the two characters. 

I think if we were both on that same wave of really trying to push the boundaries of personality, I don’t think either one of us would’ve stuck out. So I’m really glad at how everything came out. And for me to play straight laced and logical, that’s kind of right in my wheelhouse. So like I said, I was very grateful to be able to do it.

Throughout the series, we see the two of you fight off cannibal biker gangs, get into time travel fiascos, and compete and speed races on Mars. Without too many spoilers, what scenes or episodes from the show really made you laugh while watching back?

Dude, I like anything to do with Fat Paul. He’s one of my favorite characters. I actually like some of the attempts to be a futuristic entrepreneur because it really just gives a forum for a whole new sense of stories. The series tackles a bunch of stuff like social isolationism, the development of AI. Then it goes to something as commonplace as car racing and it kind of keeps the environment the same and life on different planets and our expansion of the human race and how certain planets are and how certain environments are. I dig that a lot, that’s the  stuff that makes me laugh. There’s a running joke about a casino operation that’s pretty decent.

I even like the … I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody … the hidden bounty hunter element of what’s going on and all. But there is a lot to be told in each episode and I think you really should enjoy them all together. And I think once you watch one, hopefully you enjoy it and we have good characters and good stories. Hopefully you want to see them all.

Full disclosure: I’m a gigantic WWE fan. In honor of the name of our company, (Den of Geek) … I’m totally geeking out having this interview with you. So how have all your years in the WWE prepared you to play these different roles as you continue to venture off into acting and voice acting?

This one I’ll try to not be so long winded. I’ll sum it up like this. After 15 years or 18 years of putting yourself in front of a public audience six nights a week, constantly, with no break, you begin to really know … you’d either go one of two ways. You don’t know who you are anymore, or you really have a great knowledge of self. And that’s really made me comfortable in my own shoes. Doing that, it’s made me want to challenge myself and grow and get better. The WWE has prepared me not only for live entertainment, but life. And I really hope one of these days in the right circumstances, I can thank the WWE audience for all they’ve given me because it’s been really important in the development of me as a human being.

While we’re on the topic, as I was watching some of the fight scenes in Dallas and Robo, I noticed quite a few wrestling moves out of Robo, including some DDTs and what looks to be a move inspired by your finisher, the attitude adjustment. Did you inspire that decision?

I really get excited when I see stuff like that. I think the animators take a chance and cross their fingers that the artist isn’t going to blow their stack or be offended. I’m never offended with stuff like that. That is such a great homage as to the fact that hopefully I contributed to something that left a lasting impression on somebody. I would have loved to have Robo do the “You Can’t See Me.”

What’s great about a good show, is being able to dig into those nuances. If it’s something you catch, like you being a dedicated fan, that’s cool. If it’s something you don’t, it doesn’t ruin the story. I think great animated programs have a way of doing that, where they can shoehorn in little Easter egg jokes. Dallas & Robo, especially those fight nuances, is a great example of there’s a lot in there and you don’t need to get it all. You can still watch it and have a good time.

I know a lot of fans like myself loved your cinematic style WrestleMania match against Bray Wyatt this year that sort of brought us through this John Cena time machine. What was the creative process for coming up with that idea?

That, in its entirety, is a great example of being given an idea and then when asking, “Well, what is this idea?” then the response from those people that give it to you is, “We don’t know.” I can waste the entire day talking with you about that performance, because it means a lot to me and it’s one of those that is really special. But if anything, it’s a great example of just not stopping and continuing to lean into anything and everything to tell the correct story. We weren’t given any direction. We were just given this thing. And then we made this out of nothing because the response of all of our inquiries was always, “I don’t know.” So instead of taking “I don’t know” as mopey complacency and going back and kicking the rock down the road, we took “I don’t know” as an opportunity. And trust me, man, when we were doing this, everyone involved was like, “This is either going to be awesome or it’s going to suck. No one is going to apathetically watch this and go get popcorn.”

It’s not like we knew we had something special. You talk to anyone who was involved in the process and the theme was, “This is either going to be really good or it’s going to suck. And we’re going to go down with the ship, but let’s not err on the side of caution, let’s be brave and let’s do something different. And if they don’t get it, at least we’ll know right away that they didn’t get it and we’ll know why because our audience is very vocal when they don’t like stuff.” We really could have sat on our haunches and done whatever we want and it would have been okay. It might’ve been just another match. But we all leaned into it and came up with some really creative stuff and in the process, used the forum to tell a great story.

It really was a cool thing. And I say it’s important to me because I also like to help and teach and guide younger performers that are looking for answers. For them to be like, “I get nothing. No one gives me any information.” They don’t realize that that’s a goldmine. Now I actually have multiple experiences, when I started rapping, for example, and the choices then, to even now of like, “Hey man, it happens at every level. You are not alone. Take it by the horns and do your best to make something out of it. And don’t be afraid to fail.” I really was happy with the effort and whether it bombed or it went to the moon, literally, I was happy. But I was also so happy that our audience understood what we were trying to say.

The post John Cena Shows His Passion For Animation With Dallas & Robo appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Magical Realism - part 2

Finding John (Inscriptions series) by IronicNarwhal (orphan account) – Everyone is born with a name on their finger of their soulmate. Sherlock has met 24 Johns, and none of them are his.

Sic Gorgiamos Allos Subjectatos Nunc by etothepii 5 k, teen. (Sherlock/The Addams Family)  Wonderful backstory on John and his unusual family.  (1st in series)

The Dying of The Bees by wordstrings, 17 k, explicit. John doesn’t take to Irene. He doesn’t take to Irene at all.

Cycles by Remy_Writes5, 3 k, mature. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have lived several times over. As best as they can tell, they’ll continue to do so until Baker Street no longer stands.

Fingers Trace Your Every Outline by Remy_Writes5, 2 k, mature. Whenever Sherlock feels angry or Frustrated or lonely, he paints a blond haired man that is a figment of his imagination.

These Lines of Lightning by Handful_of_Silence, 8 k, gen. Ever since he was born, John has been able to perceive people’s auras. So he can see straight away that there’s something special about Sherlock Holmes.

Within His Walls by HollowBliss, 4 k, gen. John Watson is a telepath. He’s never really advertised it, and prefers it to stay that way. When he meets Sherlock Holmes, he finds that he cannot resist the mind of the brilliant detective and his “mind palace”.

Winter of Life by You_Light_The_Sky, 5 k, teen. It was an experiment, really. On Christmas, Sherlock wrote to Santa asking for a friend. He got a broken toy soldier instead. This is the story of how he finds him again and again.

Point of Divergence by suitesamba, 8 k, teen. After leaving the wedding, Sherlock opens the door to 221B and realizes he’s stepped into the other Sherlock’s world.

The Paper Of His Skin by teahigh (orphan_account), 4 k, teen. The first time John paints him, it’s almost three in the morning and he’s drunk on red wine.

Love Is The Rhythm by eyeus, 4 k, teen. Love is a dangerous disadvantage for the Holmes family, immortals until they’ve given their heart to someone else. Nevertheless, it’s not like Sherlock planned to lose his to John.

Mausoleum Skin by MerKat, 8 k, explicit. Even the haze of an omega’s heat isn’t enough to distract alphas from tattoos that don’t move like they should, something John learns the hard way, courtesy of the bullet wound in his shoulder.

Second Waltz by Atiki, 6 k, teen. “The night I died, you wished I could wait for you.”

Anachronisms by GoldenUsagi, 3 k, teen.  “Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?”“We’re gods created by an age that had no use for them. I would be surprised if something weren’t. We were never welcomed by the others, nor adored by humanity. We should have withered long ago.”

The Horse and his Doctor by khorazir, 129 k, teen.  Invalided after a run in with a poacher in Siberia, veterinary surgeon John Watson finds it difficult to acclimatise to the mundanity of London life. Things change when a friend invites him along to a local animal shelter and he meets their latest acquisition, a trouble-making Frisian with the strangest eyes.

we can go wherever we please by stitchy, 13 k, teen. John is invalided home from Afghanistan, but instead of developing a limp- he becomes invisible.

Dust and Ashes by Atiki, 10 k, mature. John becomes used to it. If he’s perfectly honest with himself, he’s become used to it a long time ago. In the dark, the bones whisper. And sometimes John whispers back.

Copy That by maybemalapert (laconicisms), 18 k, explicit. Afghanistan changes a man, some more than others. In which John develops the ability to transform into any animate being he sees.

Studied, in Blue by worldaccordingtofangirls, 15 k, mature. In a world where feelings show up as colors on people’s skin, it is an empirical reality that John Watson is depressed (pale) beyond recovery, and Sherlock Holmes is incapable of feeling anything (blank) at all. That’s the thing about empiricism, though. It never quite tells the whole story.

Upon Waking by 2bee, 3 k, explicit. (Locked to AO3.) It sets on slow: John can only be awake while Sherlock sleeps, and vice versa. Their lives are codependent, but never meeting. Like a set of scales.

Strange Neighbours by jinglebell, 8 k, explicit. (Locked to AO3.) When Sherlock Holmes finds himself stranded in the English countryside at a struggling bed and breakfast, the last thing he expects is for a much more intimate mystery to fall into his lap. (John is under a curse from the Fae, living as a statue in a maze.)

A Touch Too Much by Mianmaru, 8 k, explicit. John learns very early that skin on skin contact with another person can change his whole perception of life. (Locked to AO3.)

To Feel Without Touch by cleflink, 5 k, teen. John lost his career as a surgeon, his life in the army and his empathy in one fell swoop. He never thought he’d miss the last one so much. (Magical Realism)

Alchemy by bigblueboxat221b, 4 k, gen. It is well known that a Born Soapman can, by instinct, create a soap that will combine with your natural chemistry to give you comfort and confidence. It’s been a long time since John Watson had seen a Soapman, and he is sceptical at best, but Mike is insistent that Sherlock is remarkable.

In Words, Like Weeds by You_Light_The_Sky, 4 k, teen. John decides to name the man (the character, the person in his head) Sherlock.

Dead Man Walking by positivelymeteoric, 4 k, teen. Everyone had a gift. Some could run exceptionally fast or kick a football incredibly well. Some could paint or dance or sing. Others still had brilliant minds that cut through the mundane of everyday life to expose the wonder underneath. John Watson could wake the dead.

Second Intention by fiorinda_chancellor, 29 k, teen. John Watson is a soulsurgeon damaged by war and by caring too much – if there issuch a thing. Sherlock Holmes is struggling with the effects of a curse that bids fair to end his days as the world’s only consulting detective unless a way is found to lift it.

Whole and Unbroken by lotherington, 2 k, teen. Something dictates that John and Sherlock can only exist together every leap day, but the connection their hearts have wants otherwise. Magical realism.

Giving In To Contradictions by GoldenUsagi, 4 k, teen. The first thing that John learned about Sherlock was that he hated being hit on. That was odd for an incubus.

Riddles In the Dark by WayWorseThanScottish, 10 k, teen. In a world of Gifted people, John appears to be quite ordinary. Maybe he has a bit of a Gift with healing, but nothing extraordinary. Afghanistan changed him, though, and Sherlock intends to find out just what makes his flatmate so special.

Bring Me a Dream by lotherington, 6 k, teen. After the fall, Sherlock, through some unknown magic, becomes a sandman. He crafts dreams for John and tries to find his way back home.

Music on the Wind by adventureofthedancinggirl, 3 k, teen. Where Sherlock comes from everyone makes music that controls the elements. But instead of calming storms or powering machinery, the soft breeze that flows from his violin seems to disappear into thin air. Somehow Sherlock’s music moves between the worlds so that John can hear it on the wind.

The Still World by esplanade, 4 k, teen. The first time Sherlock Holmes stopped the world, he was seventeen…And while some days he relished in the solitude, others the emptiness of the world was so staggering that he despised it. Then one day, the world stopped at someone else’s hands.

When The Sky Goes Dark by ina_j, 24 k, teen. John meets a friend when he was small, but he didn’t know that his friend was one dangerous being that would haunt him for a long time.

Softly, It Sings by You_Light_The_Sky, 2 k, teen. John can hear music in everything, from the dishes in 221B to the instruments that he touches. Then the Fall happens. Then there is silence.

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart by holograms, 3 k, teen. The first time that John meets Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock figures out what John’s Ability is in less than two minutes, and Sherlock says it aloud as a statement, not a question.

Moon and Mirror by suitesamba, 1 k, teen. In a world where one’s eye colour defines the direction of their life, Sherlock is born.

Little Shop of Hamish by cherielynn503, 10 k, teen. John Watson and his son Hamish discover a genuine magic shop in downtown London. Sherlock, the shop’s owner, takes an unusual interest in both John and Hamish. John begins to remember repressed memories of visiting Sherlock’s shop as a boy.  Now that he has them, will Sherlock let them leave?

The 15 Best Horror Movies of 2017

The best horror movies of 2017 writhe in grief and mourning: Evil is mundane, they say—sure—but what does that actually mean about moving on with one’s life? In two of these films, the grief-stricken struggle to communicate with those they’ve lost, realizing the process of doing so is difficult, an incredibly tedious series of motions (much like one’s everyday life) in which we’re never really sure they’re succeeding, or just feeding their own serious neuroses, plunging them deeper into depression. One film is a musical reveling in the harshness of young love, in the terrifying lengths to which someone, women especially, are expected to go to be loved. One is the highest grossing horror film of all time, and another is a genre-transcending treatise on America’s treacherous post-Obama racial landscape, both changing the industry for low-budget genre films immeasurably. Even M. Night Shyamalan’s pulpy thriller ends on a surprisingly bleak note. In 2017, we’re just trying to find some way out of all of our most pessimistic impulses. We’re just trying to not wake up every day and assume the worst.

In other words, it was a fertile year for horror, America’s most vital form of filmmaking, especially for non-white, non-male voices laying waste to the genre’s most tired tropes. A number of titles almost made our list, worth mentioning: The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a film awe-struck with despair for humanity and a mind-bogglingly great performance from Kiernan Shipka; The Girl with All the Gifts; We Are the Flesh; Alien: Covenant, proving that the older Ridley Scott gets the grosser he’s willing to be; Happy Death Day; one of many good Stephen King adaptations this year (see below), Gerald’s Game; and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which isn’t a horror movie but kind of works like one, and anyway it’s fine because you’ll see it on other lists elsewhere.

Here are the 15 best horror movies of 2017:

15. A Cure for Wellness Director: Gore Verbinski It’s a bit of a tragedy that Gore Verbinski’s delightfully bizarre, absurdly violent and grotesque A Cure For Wellness went largely unnoticed. Hollywood’s versatile trickster, Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe go for broke cramming various sub-genres and mood-drenched tropes into an overstuffed, batshit-crazy horror epic, a loving nod to old Universal monster movies, among many, with the mad scientist conducting experiments that “defy god and nature” in a picturesque old castle perched atop a village that somehow skipped the 20th Century, Bojan Bazelli’s gorgeous cinematography taking full advantage of the Euro-gothic aesthetic. It’s a no-fucks-given gonzo experiment, laced with the riskiness of Giallo and the surrealist imagery of a Lynchian nightmare, disparate tones wrapped dreamily around an angry, blunt satire about the self-destructive, soul-sucking nature of greed and ambition. —Oktay Ege Kozak

14. XX Directors: Roxanne Benjamin, Annie Clark, Karyn Kusama, Jovanka Vuckovic, Sofia Carrillo It’s important that the scariest segment in XX, Magnet Releasing’s women-helmed horror anthology film, is also its most elementary: Young people trek out into the wilderness for fun and recreation, young people incur the wrath of hostile forces, young people get dead, easy as you please. You’ve seen this movie before, whether in the form of a slasher, a creature feature, or an animal attack flick. You’re seeing it again in XX in part because the formula works, and in part because the segment in question, titled “Don’t Fall,” must be elementary to facilitate its sibling chapters, which tend to be anything but. XX stands apart from other horror films because it invites its audience to feel a range of emotions aside from just fright. You might, for example, feel heartache during Jovanka Vuckovic’s “The Box,” or the uncertainty of dread in Karyn Kusama’s “Her Only Living Son,” or nauseous puzzlement with Sofia Carrillo’s macabre, stop-motion wraparound piece, meant to function as a palate cleanser between courses (an effectively unnerving work, thanks to its impressive technical achievements). Most of all, you might have to bite your tongue to keep from laughing uncontrollably during the film’s best short, “The Birthday Party,” written and directed by Annie Clark, better known by some as St. Vincent, in her filmmaking debut. XX is a horror movie spoken with the voices of women, a necessary notice that women are revolutionizing the genre as much as men. —Andy Crump

13. Split Director: M. Night Shyamalan Split is the film adaptation of M. Night Shyamalan’s misunderstanding of 30-year-old, since-discredited psychology textbooks on Dissociative Identity Disorder, but if we deign to treat it with scientific scrutiny, we’ll be here all night. Suffice it to say, don’t go looking at anything in this film as psychologically valid in any way. But do go see Split, because it’s probably M. Night Shyamalan’s best film since Signs. Or maybe since Unbreakable, for that matter. And if there’s one way that Splitreinvigorates Shyamalan’s stock most, it’s as a visual artist and writer-director of tension and thrilling action. The film looks spectacular, full of Hitchcockian homages that remind one of Vertigo and Psycho, to name only a few. It’s a far scarier, more suspenseful film in its high moments than Shyamalan’s last film, The Visit, ever attempted to be, and it may even be funnier as well, although these moments of levity are sown sparingly for maximum impact. Mike Gioulakis deserves major props for cinematography, but the other thing that will stick in my mind is the unexpectedly great sound design, full of rumbling, groaning metallic tones. After so many films that relied on the kind of overwrought twist ending that made The Sixth Sense so buzzy in 1999, it seems like Shyamalan has finally gotten over the hump to make the kinds of stories he makes best: atmospheric, suspenseful potboilers. Here’s hoping that this newfound streak of humility is here to stay. —Jim Vorel

12. Thelma Director: Joachim Trier Thelma (Eili Harboe) is a meek and quiet young woman moving away from her strict Christian parents (Henrik Rafaelsen, Ellen Dorit Petersen) for the first time in her life. To study Biology at a Norwegian university. She’s devoted to her faith and doesn’t indulge in alcohol, drugs or other earthly desires. But all of that changes when she sits next to Anja (Kaya Wilkins), a warm-hearted and empathetic schoolmate, during a study session. The two don’t even know each other yet, but Thelma’s close proximity to a girl she feels an intense attraction toward is enough to trigger a violent seizure, which may or may not be the result of her intense rejection of her feelings, spurned by her religious upbringing. With subtle yet passionate performances by its two leads, the film would have worked fine as a straight drama about Thelma’s journey towards (hopefully) acknowledging her nature. What makes Thelma so special is in the way Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt wrap this already palpable drama around a fairly downplayed supernatural horror premise with surgical precision. —Oktay Ege Kozak

11. It Director: Andy Muschietti 2017 was the year of blockbuster horror, if ever such a thing has been quantifiable before. Get Out, Annabelle: Creation and even would-be direct-to-video gems such as 47 Meters Down turned sizable profits, but they were just priming the box office pump for It, which shattered nearly every horror movie record imaginable. Perhaps it was the uninspiring summer blockbuster season to thank for an audience starved for something, but just as much credit must go to director Andy Muschietti and, especially, to Pennywise star Bill Skarsgård for taking Stephen King’s famously cumbersome, overstuffed novel and transforming it into something stylish, scary and undeniably entertaining. The collection of perfectly cast kids in the Loser’s Club all have the look of young actors and actresses we’ll be seeing in film for decades to come, but it’s Skarsgård’s hypnotic face, lazy eyes and incessant drool that makes It so difficult to look away from (or forget, for that matter). The inevitable Part 2 will have its hands full in giving a similarly crackling translation to the less popular adult portion of King’s story, but the camaraderie Muschietti gets in his cast and the visual flair of this first It should give us ample reasons to be optimistic. Regardless, it’s impossible to dismiss the pop cultural impact that It will continue to have for a new generation discovering its well-loved characters. —Jim Vorel

10. The Lure Director: Agnieszka Smoczynska In Filmmaker Magazine, director Agnieszka Smoczynska called The Lure a “coming-of-age story” born of her past as the child of a nightclub owner: “I grew up breathing this atmosphere.” What she means to say, I’m guessing, is that The Lure is an even more restlessly plotted Boyhood if the Texan movie rebooted The Little Mermaid as a murderous synth-rock opera. (OK, maybe it’s nothing like Boyhood.) Smoczynska’s film resurrects prototypical fairy tale romance and fantasy without any of the false notes associated with Hollywood’s “gritty” reboot culture. Poland, the 1980s and the development of its leading young women provide a multi-genre milieu in which the film’s cannibalistic mermaids can sing their sultry, often violently funny siren songs to their dark hearts’re content. While Ariel the mermaid Disney princess finds empathy with young girls who watch her struggle with feelings of longing and entrapment, The Lure’s flesh-hungry, viscous, scaly fish-people are a gross, haptic and ultimately effective metaphor for the maturation of this same audience. In the water, the pair are innocent to the ways of humans (adults), but on land develop slimes and odors unfamiliar to themselves and odd (yet strangely attractive) to their new companions. Reckoning with bodily change, especially when shoved into the sex industry like many immigrants to Poland during the collapse of that country’s communist regime in the late ’80s, the film combines the politics of the time with the sexual politics of a girl becoming a woman (of having her body politicized). And though The Luremay bite off more human neck than it can chew, especially during its music-less plot wanderings, it’s just so wonderfully consistent in its oddball vision you won’t be able to help but be drawn in by its mesmerizing thrall. —Jacob Oller

9. The Transfiguration Director: Michael O’Shea Michael O’Shea’s The Transfiguration refreshingly refuses to disguise its influences and reference points, instead putting them all out there in the forefront for its audience’s edification, name-dropping a mouthful of noteworthy vampire films and sticking their very titles right smack dab in the midst of its mise en scène. They can’t be missed: Nosferatu is a big one, and so’s The Lost Boys, but none informs O’Shea’s film as much as Let the Right One In, the unique 2009 Swedish genre masterpiece. Like Tomas Alfredson’s bloodsucking coming-of-age tale, The Transfiguration casts a young’n, Milo (Eric Ruffin), as its protagonist, contrasting the horrible particulars of a vampire’s feeding habits against the surface innocence of his appearance. Unlike Let the Right One In, The Transfiguration may not be a vampire movie at all, but a movie about a lonesome kid with an unhealthy fixation on gothic legends. You may choose to view Milo as O’Shea’s modernized update of the iconic monster or a child brimming with inner evil; the film keeps its ends open, its truths veiled and only makes its sociopolitical allegories plain in its final, haunting images.

8. Creep 2 Director: Patrick Brice Creep was not a movie begging for a sequel. About one of cinema’s more unique serial killers—a man who seemingly needs to form close personal bonds with his quarry before dispatching them as testaments to his “art”—the 2014 original was self-sufficient enough. But Creep 2 is that rare follow-up wherein the goal seems to be not “let’s do it again,” but “let’s go deeper”—and by deeper, we mean much deeper, as this film plumbs the psyche of the central psychopath (who now goes by) Aaron (Mark Duplass) in ways both wholly unexpected and shockingly sincere, as we witness (and somehow sympathize with) a killer who has lost his passion for murder, and thus his zest for life. In truth, the film almost forgoes the idea of being a “horror movie,” remaining one only because we know of the atrocities Aaron has committed in the past, meanwhile becoming much more of an interpersonal drama about two people exploring the boundaries of trust and vulnerability. Desiree Akhavan is stunning as Sara, the film’s only other principal lead, creating a character who is able to connect in a humanistic way with Aaron unlike anything a fan of the first film might think possible. Two performers bare it all, both literally and figuratively: Creep 2 is one of the most surprising, emotionally resonant horror films in recent memory. —Jim Vorel

7. Prevenge Director: Alice Lowe Maybe getting close enough to gut a person when you’re seven months pregnant is a cinch—no one likely expects an expecting mother to cut their throat—but all the positive encouragement Ruth’s (Alice Lowe) unborn daughter gives her helps, too. The kid spends the film spurring her mother to slaughter seemingly innocent people from in utero, an invisible voice of incipient malevolence sporting a high-pitched giggle that’ll make your skin crawl. “Pregnant lady goes on a slashing spree at the behest of her gestating child” sounds like a perfectly daffy twist on one of the horror genre’s most enduring contemporary niches on paper. In practice it’s not quite so daffy, more somber than it is silly, but the bleak tone suits what writer, director, and star Lowe wants to achieve with her filmmaking debut. Another storyteller might have designed Prevenge as a more comically-slanted effort, but Lowe has sculpted it to smash taboos and social norms. Because Prevengehates human beings with a disturbing passion—even human beings who aren’t selfish, awful, creepy or worse—in it, child-rearing is a form of real-life body horror that’s as smartly crafted and grimly funny as it is terrifying. —Andy Crump / Full Review

6. mother! Director:   Darren Aronofsky   Try as you might to rationalize Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, mother! does not accept rationalization. There’s little reasonable ways to construct a single cohesive interpretation of what the movie tries to tell us. There is no evidence of Aronosfky’s intention beyond what we’ve intuited from watching his films since the ’90s. The most ironclad comment you can make about mother! is that it’s basically a matryoshka doll layered with batshit insanity. Unpack the first, and you’re met immediately by the next tier of crazy, and then the next, and so on, until you’ve unpacked the whole thing and seen it for what it is: A spiritual rumination on the divine ego, a plea for environmental stewardship, an indictment of entitled invasiveness, an apocalyptic vision of America in 2017, a demonstration of man’s tendency to leech everything from the women they love until they’re nothing but a carbonized husk, a very triggering reenactment of the worst house party you’ve ever thrown. mother! is a kitchen sink movie in the most literal sense: There’s an actual kitchen sink here, Aronofsky’s idea of a joke, perhaps, or just a necessarily transparent warning. mother! is about everything. Maybe the end result is that it’s also about nothing. But it’s really about whatever you can yank out of it, it’s elasticity the most terrifying thing about it. —Andy Crump

5. Personal Shopper Director: Olivier Assayas The pieces don’t all fit in Personal Shopper, but that’s much of the fun of writer-director Olivier Assayas’s enigmatic tale of Maureen (Kristen Stewart, a wonderfully unfathomable presence), who may be in contact with her dead twin brother. Or maybe she’s being stalked by an unseen assailant. Or maybe it’s both. To attempt to explain the direction Personal Shopper takes is merely to regurgitate plot points that don’t sound like they belong in the same film. But Assayas is working on a deeper, more metaphorical level, abandoning strict narrative cause-and-effect logic to give us fragments of Maureen’s life refracted through conflicting experiences. Nothing happens in this film as a direct result of what came before, which explains why a sudden appearance of suggestive, potentially dangerous text messages could be interpreted as a literal threat, or as some strange cosmic manifestation of other, subtler anxieties. Personal Shopperencourages a sense of play, moving from moody ghost story to tense thriller to (out of the blue) erotic character study. But that genre-hopping (not to mention the movie’s willfully inscrutable design) is Assayas’s way of bringing a lighthearted approach to serious questions about grieving and disillusionment. The juxtaposition isn’t jarring or glib—if anything, Personal Shopper is all the more entrancing because it won’t sit still, never letting us be comfortable in its shifting narrative. —Tim Grierson

4. A Dark Song Director: Liam Gavin In Liam Gavin’s black magic genre oddity, Sophia (Catherine Walker), a grief-stricken mother, and the schlubby, no-nonsense occultist (Steve Oram) she hires devote themselves to a long, meticulous, painstaking ritual in order to (they hope) communicate with her dead son. Gavin lays out the ritual specifically and physically—over the course of months of isolation, Sophia undergoes tests of endurance and humiliation, never quite sure if she’s participating in an elaborate hoax or if she can take her spiritual guide seriously when he promises her he’s succeeded in the past. Paced to near perfection, A Dark Song is ostensibly a horror film but operates as a dread-laden procedural, mounting tension while translating the process of bereavement as patient, excruciating manual labor. In the end, something definitely happens, but its implications are so steeped in the blurry lines between Christianity and the occult that I still wonder what kind of alternate realms of existence Gavin is getting at. But A Dark Song thrives in that uncertainty, feeding off of monotony. Sophia may hear phantasmagorical noise coming from beneath the floorboards, but then substantial spans of time pass without anything else happening, and we begin to question, as she does, whether it was something she did wrong (maybe, when tasked with not moving from inside a small chalk circle for days at a time, she screwed up that portion of the ritual by allowing her urine to dribble outside of the boundary) or whether her grief has blinded her to an expensive con. Regardless, that “not knowing” is the scary stuff of everyday life, and by portraying Sophia’s profound emotional journey as a humdrum trial of physical mettle, Gavin reveals just how much pointless, even terrifying work it can be anymore to not only live the most ordinary of days, but to make it to the next. —Dom Sinacola

3. Raw Director: Julia Ducournou If you’re the proud owner of a twisted sense of humor, you might sell your friends on Julia Ducournau’s Raw as a coming-of-age movie in a bid to trick them into seeing it. Yes, the film’s protagonist, naive incoming college student Justine (Garance Marillier), comes of age over the course of its running time: She parties, she breaks out of her shell and she learns about who she really is on the verge of adulthood. But most kids who discover themselves in the movies don’t realize that they’ve spent their lives unwittingly suppressing an innate, nigh-insatiable need to consume raw meat. Allow Ducournau her cheekiness: More than a wink and nod to the picture’s visceral particulars, her film’s title is an open concession to the harrowing quality of Justine’s grim blossoming. Nasty as the film gets, and it does indeed get nasty, the harshest sensations Ducournau articulates here tend to be the ones we can’t detect by merely looking. Fear of feminine sexuality, family legacies, popularity politics and the uncertainty of self govern Raw’s horrors as much as exposed and bloody flesh. It’s a gorefest that offers no apologies and plenty more to chew on than its effects. —Andy Crump

2. It Comes at Night Director: Trey Edward Shults It Comes at Night is ostensibly a horror movie, moreso than Shults’s debut, Krisha, but even Krisha was more of a horror movie than most measured family dramas typically are. Perhaps knowing this, Shults calls It Comes at Night an atypical horror movie, but—it’s already obvious after only two of these—Shults makes horror movies to the extent that everything in them is laced with dread, and every situation suffocated with inevitability. For his sophomore film, adorned with a much larger budget than Krisha and cast with some real indie star power compared to his previous cast (of family members doing him a solid), Shults imagines a near future as could be expected from a somber flick like this. A “sickness” has ravaged the world and survival is all that matters for those still left. In order to keep their shit together enough to keep living, the small group of people in Shults’s film have to accept the same things the audience does: That important characters will die, tragedy will happen and the horror of life is about the pointlessness of resisting the tide of either. So it makes sense that It Comes at Night is such an open wound of a watch, pained with regret and loss and the mundane ache of simply existing: It’s trauma as tone poem, bittersweet down to its bones, a triumph of empathetic, soul-shaking movie-making. —Dom Sinacola

1. Get Out Director:   Jordan Peele   Peele’s a natural behind the camera, but Get Out benefits most from its deceptively trim premise, a simplicity which belies rich thematic depth. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) go to spend a weekend with her folks in their lavish upstate New York mansion, where they’re throwing the annual Armitage bash with all their friends in attendance. Chris immediately feels out of place; events escalate from there, taking the narrative in a ghastly direction that ultimately ties back to the unsettling sensation of being the “other” in a room full of people who aren’t like you—and never let you forget it. Put indelicately, Get Out is about being black and surrounded by whites who squeeze your biceps without asking, who fetishize you to your face, who analyze your blackness as if it’s a fashion trend. At best Chris’s ordeal is bizarre and dizzying, the kind of thing he might bitterly chuckle about in retrospect. At worst it’s a setup for such macabre developments as are found in the domain of horror. That’s the finest of lines Peele and Get Out walk without stumbling. —Andy Crump

Nevermind The Russians, Meet The Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter

At 7:23 on Sunday evening, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich tweeted that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the “unmasking” of Americans connected to the Trump campaign who were incidentally mentioned in surveillance readouts. At 7:30, the owner of the Twitter account MicroMagicJingleTM noticed, and began blasting out dozens of tweets and retweets about the story.

“Would be nice to get 'Susan Rice' trending,” he tweeted at 8:16. And then, he made exactly that happen.

MicroMagicJingleTM is the latest incarnation of MicroChip, a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader once described by a Republican strategist as the "Trumpbot overlord.” He has been suspended from the service so frequently, he can’t recall the exact number of times. A voluminous tweeter, his specialty is making hashtags trend. Over the next 24 hours, following his own call to arms, MicroChip tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times about Rice, everything from a photoshopped image of Donald Trump eating her head out of a taco bowl to demands that she die in jail, almost always accompanied by the tag #SusanRice. Meanwhile, in massive threaded tweets and DM groups, he implored others to do likewise.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the tag was being tweeted nearly 20,000 times an hour, and was trending on Twitter; by 11 a.m., 34,000 an hour. (As of Tuesday morning, the tag was still trending, partially thanks to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.) At 4:48 p.m. Monday, 18-odd hours after he started his campaign, MicroChip was ready to call it a success:

Before? What did he mean by “before"? Before the election, before the campaign, and long since before “Russian interference” was the mantra of every political consultant, British former member of parliament, and American senator turned Tolstoy enthusiast, MicroChip has been figuring out how to make pro-Trump tags go viral on Twitter. When people talk about Russian Twitter bots, they are, very likely, sometimes talking about his work. They’ve ranged from the innocuously rah-rah (#TrumpTrain) to the wildly xenophobic (#Rapefugees) to the extremely unconfirmed (#cruzsexscandal and #hillarygropedme). What they’ve all had in common is a method, the focus of speculation for nearly a year, and a chief promulgator, MicroChip, about whom little is known.

Indeed, MicroChip, who operates behind a VPN (a special secure network that obscures his location), is an object of fascination and fear, even among some of his political and ideological fellow travelers, who hope not to end up on the wrong side of one of his Twitter campaigns. One conservative observer of the alt-right, who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that his name not be used, claimed he once hired private investigators to trace him.

“You can’t,” the observer wrote in a text message. “He’s too good.”

Unconvincing internet investigations have suggested that MicroChip may be anyone from the prominent alt-righter Baked Alaska to Justin McConney, the director of social media for the Trump Organization, to a shadowy Russian puppet master.

But in an interview with BuzzFeed News — his first with a media organization — MicroChip said the truth, both about his identity and the method he developed for spreading pro-Trump messages on Twitter, is far more prosaic. Though he would not divulge his real name or corroborate his claim, MicroChip said that he is a freelance mobile software developer in his early thirties and lives in Utah. In a conversation over the gaming chat platform Discord, MicroChip, who speaks unaccented, idiomatic American English, said that he guards his identity so closely for two reasons: first, because he fears losing contract work due to his beliefs, and second, because of what he calls an “uninformed” discourse in the media and Washington around Russian influence and botting.

“I feel like I'm a scientist showing electricity to natives that have been convinced electricity is created by Satan, so they murder the scientist,” he said.

Indeed, in a national atmosphere charged by unproven accusations about a massive network of Russian social media influence, the story of how MicroChip helped build the most notorious pro-Trump Twitter network seems almost mundane, less a technologically daunting intelligence operation than a clever patchworking of tools nearly any computer-literate person could manage. It also suggests that some of the current Russian Trumpbot hysteria may be, well, a hysteria.

“It’s all us, not Russians,” MicroChip said. “And we’re not going to stop.”

MicroChip claims he was a longtime “staunch liberal” who turned to Twitter in the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and “found out that I didn’t like what was going on. So I redpilled myself.” Through Twitter, he found a network of other people who thought liberal politicians had blindly acceded to PC culture, and who had found a champion in Donald Trump. In his early days on the platform, MicroChip said, he started “testing,” dabbling in anti-PC tags like #Rapefugees and seeing what went viral. His experience as a mobile developer had exposed him to the Twitter API, and a conversation with a blogger who ran social media bots convinced him he could automate the Twitter trending process.

“Micro is a true believer alt-right guy,” wrote the alt-right observer who had MicroChip investigated. “He’s brilliant and is not LARPing. His tech skills are real as is his opsec.”

As MicroChip found other like-minded accounts, he said, they began to organize themselves into enormous, 50-person direct message groups. Within these groups, members would distribute content from the Drudge Report and Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit, then tweet it with a commonly decided hashtag, and retweet one another’s tweets ad infinitum. MicroChip called the DM rooms, simply, “retweet groups,” and by September of last year, there were 15 of them. Some of the groups were chock-full of egg and anime avatars, according to MicroChip, but others were composed of Christian conservatives or hardcore Zionists. Taken together, they were like a strange Twitter mirror image of the Trump coalition.

MicroChip added automation to these dedicated DM groups, which he insisted are populated entirely by real people with real accounts. He started using AddMeFast, a kind of social media currency exchange, in which people can retweet or like other tweets in exchange for points that they can then can spend to list their own content (such as pro-Trump hashtagged tweets) to be promoted. You can also buy these points, and an investment of several hundred dollars, according to MicroChip, can yield thousands or even tens of thousands of retweets.

A third component of MicroChip’s blended army of DM groups and crowdsourced social media signal boosters were simple Google script bots. These bots, which MicroChip said “you don’t have to do any programming at all to run,” can be programmed to find and like or retweet tweets featuring certain terms or hashtags.

At its height, MicroChip said, the network he helped create could reliably generate 35,000 retweets a day.

“It’s high volume and it takes work,” he said. “You can’t take a break — you sit at the screen waiting for breaking news 12 hours per day when you’re knee-deep in it.” It’s hard work: MicroChip would sometimes reach his daily limit of 1,000 tweets a day, sometimes taking Adderall to focus — though he added, “Shaping a message is exhilarating.”

Along the way, Twitter started to suspend MicroChip’s accounts — first his original handle @WDfx2EU, then subsequent variations, each started with a link to his Keybase page to verify his identity, and each presided over by the same avatar: the Instagram hunk Brock O’Hurn wearing a Make America Great Again hat and eating an ice cream cone. MicroChip showed BuzzFeed dozens of other accounts he owns, ready to activate if and when his current account, @WDFx2EU95, gets suspended.

While it may take work to stay active, MicroChip said he has has an ideal platform in Twitter with which to shape a message. "Twitter is easier [than other social networks] and more volatile," he said. "Emotions run high at 140 characters. The chaos is perfect."

MicroChip is well aware that many of the tags and stories he promotes haven’t been proven or aren’t true. He’s thrown his network behind #Pizzagate and #SpiritCooking. And days before the election, he posted a tweet to r/The_Donald about an alleged plot by then-president Obama and Hillary Clinton to have Trump assassinated in Reno.

“This ignorant shit needs to be stopped,” replied one user.

“I can make whatever claims I want to make,” MicroChip shot back. “That’s how this game works.”

It’s true that MicroChip can make any claim he wants, and it’s impossible to say that his stories about his identity are true: He could be Vladimir Putin. But multiple aspects of his method can be confirmed: MicroChip provided records of his activity on AddMeFast to BuzzFeed News, alt-right sources confirmed that he was a consistent presence in their DM groups, and the day after the election multiple pro-Trump accounts thanked him for his efforts:

“Micro put in serious work during the election and I really respect his lack of ego,” said another source within the Trump internet world who has worked closely with MicroChip. “He's anonymous and doesn’t care about the credit.”

Indeed, the fact that MicroChip’s network — that much pro-Trump internet activity — is now reflexively assumed to be part of a Russian influence campaign is one of the reasons MicroChip wanted to explain how he helped build it: not to take credit (he repeatedly referred to the network as a group effort) but to set the record straight.

“I’m not Russian,” MicroChip said. “I don’t work for Trump. There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. We’ve been on Twitter every day for the last year and a half. I haven’t seen any bots that I don’t know who they are.”

And if MicroChip is a Russian agent, it’s worth wondering why he, nearly three months into the Trump presidency, has plans to expand his network in the coming weeks with a new set of botting tools.

In a Twitter argument Monday with the Brooklyn developer Nathan Bernard, MicroChip teased that his network is about to get much, much bigger.

"The botnet [is] about to happen 10 X in about a week," he wrote. "Get ready."

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oBN47M

Nevermind The Russians, Meet The Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter

At 7:23 on Sunday evening, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich tweeted that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the “unmasking” of Americans connected to the Trump campaign who were incidentally mentioned in surveillance readouts. At 7:30, the owner of the Twitter account MicroMagicJingleTM noticed, and began blasting out dozens of tweets and retweets about the story.

“Would be nice to get 'Susan Rice' trending,” he tweeted at 8:16. And then, he made exactly that happen.

MicroMagicJingleTM is the latest incarnation of MicroChip, a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader once described by a Republican strategist as the "Trumpbot overlord.” He has been suspended from the service so frequently, he can’t recall the exact number of times. A voluminous tweeter, his specialty is making hashtags trend. Over the next 24 hours, following his own call to arms, MicroChip tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times about Rice, everything from a photoshopped image of Donald Trump eating her head out of a taco bowl to demands that she die in jail, almost always accompanied by the tag #SusanRice. Meanwhile, in massive threaded tweets and DM groups, he implored others to do likewise.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the tag was being tweeted nearly 20,000 times an hour, and was trending on Twitter; by 11 a.m., 34,000 an hour. (As of Tuesday morning, the tag was still trending, partially thanks to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.) At 4:48 p.m. Monday, 18-odd hours after he started his campaign, MicroChip was ready to call it a success:

Before? What did he mean by “before"? Before the election, before the campaign, and long since before “Russian interference” was the mantra of every political consultant, British former member of parliament, and American senator turned Tolstoy enthusiast, MicroChip has been figuring out how to make pro-Trump tags go viral on Twitter. When people talk about Russian Twitter bots, they are, very likely, sometimes talking about his work. They’ve ranged from the innocuously rah-rah (#TrumpTrain) to the wildly xenophobic (#Rapefugees) to the extremely unconfirmed (#cruzsexscandal and #hillarygropedme). What they’ve all had in common is a method, the focus of speculation for nearly a year, and a chief promulgator, MicroChip, about whom little is known.

Indeed, MicroChip, who operates behind a VPN (a special secure network that obscures his location), is an object of fascination and fear, even among some of his political and ideological fellow travelers, who hope not to end up on the wrong side of one of his Twitter campaigns. One conservative observer of the alt-right, who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that his name not be used, claimed he once hired private investigators to trace him.

“You can’t,” the observer wrote in a text message. “He’s too good.”

Unconvincing internet investigations have suggested that MicroChip may be anyone from the prominent alt-righter Baked Alaska to Justin McConney, the director of social media for the Trump Organization, to a shadowy Russian puppet master.

But in an interview with BuzzFeed News — his first with a media organization — MicroChip said the truth, both about his identity and the method he developed for spreading pro-Trump messages on Twitter, is far more prosaic. Though he would not divulge his real name or corroborate his claim, MicroChip said that he is a freelance mobile software developer in his early thirties and lives in Utah. In a conversation over the gaming chat platform Discord, MicroChip, who speaks unaccented, idiomatic American English, said that he guards his identity so closely for two reasons: first, because he fears losing contract work due to his beliefs, and second, because of what he calls an “uninformed” discourse in the media and Washington around Russian influence and botting.

“I feel like I'm a scientist showing electricity to natives that have been convinced electricity is created by Satan, so they murder the scientist,” he said.

Indeed, in a national atmosphere charged by unproven accusations about a massive network of Russian social media influence, the story of how MicroChip helped build the most notorious pro-Trump Twitter network seems almost mundane, less a technologically daunting intelligence operation than a clever patchworking of tools nearly any computer-literate person could manage. It also suggests that some of the current Russian Trumpbot hysteria may be, well, a hysteria.

“It’s all us, not Russians,” MicroChip said. “And we’re not going to stop.”

MicroChip claims he was a longtime “staunch liberal” who turned to Twitter in the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and “found out that I didn’t like what was going on. So I redpilled myself.” Through Twitter, he found a network of other people who thought liberal politicians had blindly acceded to PC culture, and who had found a champion in Donald Trump. In his early days on the platform, MicroChip said, he started “testing,” dabbling in anti-PC tags like #Rapefugees and seeing what went viral. His experience as a mobile developer had exposed him to the Twitter API, and a conversation with a blogger who ran social media bots convinced him he could automate the Twitter trending process.

“Micro is a true believer alt-right guy,” wrote the alt-right observer who had MicroChip investigated. “He’s brilliant and is not LARPing. His tech skills are real as is his opsec.”

As MicroChip found other like-minded accounts, he said, they began to organize themselves into enormous, 50-person direct message groups. Within these groups, members would distribute content from the Drudge Report and Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit, then tweet it with a commonly decided hashtag, and retweet one another’s tweets ad infinitum. MicroChip called the DM rooms, simply, “retweet groups,” and by September of last year, there were 15 of them. Some of the groups were chock-full of egg and anime avatars, according to MicroChip, but others were composed of Christian conservatives or hardcore Zionists. Taken together, they were like a strange Twitter mirror image of the Trump coalition.

MicroChip added automation to these dedicated DM groups, which he insisted are populated entirely by real people with real accounts. He started using AddMeFast, a kind of social media currency exchange, in which people can retweet or like other tweets in exchange for points that they can then can spend to list their own content (such as pro-Trump hashtagged tweets) to be promoted. You can also buy these points, and an investment of several hundred dollars, according to MicroChip, can yield thousands or even tens of thousands of retweets.

A third component of MicroChip’s blended army of DM groups and crowdsourced social media signal boosters were simple Google script bots. These bots, which MicroChip said “you don’t have to do any programming at all to run,” can be programmed to find and like or retweet tweets featuring certain terms or hashtags.

At its height, MicroChip said, the network he helped create could reliably generate 35,000 retweets a day.

“It’s high volume and it takes work,” he said. “You can’t take a break — you sit at the screen waiting for breaking news 12 hours per day when you’re knee-deep in it.” It’s hard work: MicroChip would sometimes reach his daily limit of 1,000 tweets a day, sometimes taking Adderall to focus — though he added, “Shaping a message is exhilarating.”

Along the way, Twitter started to suspend MicroChip’s accounts — first his original handle @WDfx2EU, then subsequent variations, each started with a link to his Keybase page to verify his identity, and each presided over by the same avatar: the Instagram hunk Brock O’Hurn wearing a Make America Great Again hat and eating an ice cream cone. MicroChip showed BuzzFeed dozens of other accounts he owns, ready to activate if and when his current account, @WDFx2EU95, gets suspended.

While it may take work to stay active, MicroChip said he has has an ideal platform in Twitter with which to shape a message. "Twitter is easier [than other social networks] and more volatile," he said. "Emotions run high at 140 characters. The chaos is perfect."

MicroChip is well aware that many of the tags and stories he promotes haven’t been proven or aren’t true. He’s thrown his network behind #Pizzagate and #SpiritCooking. And days before the election, he posted a tweet to r/The_Donald about an alleged plot by then-president Obama and Hillary Clinton to have Trump assassinated in Reno.

“This ignorant shit needs to be stopped,” replied one user.

“I can make whatever claims I want to make,” MicroChip shot back. “That’s how this game works.”

It’s true that MicroChip can make any claim he wants, and it’s impossible to say that his stories about his identity are true: He could be Vladimir Putin. But multiple aspects of his method can be confirmed: MicroChip provided records of his activity on AddMeFast to BuzzFeed News, alt-right sources confirmed that he was a consistent presence in their DM groups, and the day after the election multiple pro-Trump accounts thanked him for his efforts:

“Micro put in serious work during the election and I really respect his lack of ego,” said another source within the Trump internet world who has worked closely with MicroChip. “He's anonymous and doesn’t care about the credit.”

Indeed, the fact that MicroChip’s network — that much pro-Trump internet activity — is now reflexively assumed to be part of a Russian influence campaign is one of the reasons MicroChip wanted to explain how he helped build it: not to take credit (he repeatedly referred to the network as a group effort) but to set the record straight.

“I’m not Russian,” MicroChip said. “I don’t work for Trump. There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. We’ve been on Twitter every day for the last year and a half. I haven’t seen any bots that I don’t know who they are.”

And if MicroChip is a Russian agent, it’s worth wondering why he, nearly three months into the Trump presidency, has plans to expand his network in the coming weeks with a new set of botting tools.

In a Twitter argument Monday with the Brooklyn developer Nathan Bernard, MicroChip teased that his network is about to get much, much bigger.

"The botnet [is] about to happen 10 X in about a week," he wrote. "Get ready."

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oBN47M

Nevermind The Russians, Meet The Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter

At 7:23 on Sunday evening, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich tweeted that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the “unmasking” of Americans connected to the Trump campaign who were incidentally mentioned in surveillance readouts. At 7:30, the owner of the Twitter account MicroMagicJingleTM noticed, and began blasting out dozens of tweets and retweets about the story.

“Would be nice to get 'Susan Rice' trending,” he tweeted at 8:16. And then, he made exactly that happen.

MicroMagicJingleTM is the latest incarnation of MicroChip, a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader once described by a Republican strategist as the "Trumpbot overlord.” He has been suspended from the service so frequently, he can’t recall the exact number of times. A voluminous tweeter, his specialty is making hashtags trend. Over the next 24 hours, following his own call to arms, MicroChip tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times about Rice, everything from a photoshopped image of Donald Trump eating her head out of a taco bowl to demands that she die in jail, almost always accompanied by the tag #SusanRice. Meanwhile, in massive threaded tweets and DM groups, he implored others to do likewise.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the tag was being tweeted nearly 20,000 times an hour, and was trending on Twitter; by 11 a.m., 34,000 an hour. (As of Tuesday morning, the tag was still trending, partially thanks to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.) At 4:48 p.m. Monday, 18-odd hours after he started his campaign, MicroChip was ready to call it a success:

Before? What did he mean by “before"? Before the election, before the campaign, and long since before “Russian interference” was the mantra of every political consultant, British former member of parliament, and American senator turned Tolstoy enthusiast, MicroChip has been figuring out how to make pro-Trump tags go viral on Twitter. When people talk about Russian Twitter bots, they are, very likely, sometimes talking about his work. They’ve ranged from the innocuously rah-rah (#TrumpTrain) to the wildly xenophobic (#Rapefugees) to the extremely unconfirmed (#cruzsexscandal and #hillarygropedme). What they’ve all had in common is a method, the focus of speculation for nearly a year, and a chief promulgator, MicroChip, about whom little is known.

Indeed, MicroChip, who operates behind a VPN (a special secure network that obscures his location), is an object of fascination and fear, even among some of his political and ideological fellow travelers, who hope not to end up on the wrong side of one of his Twitter campaigns. One conservative observer of the alt-right, who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that his name not be used, claimed he once hired private investigators to trace him.

“You can’t,” the observer wrote in a text message. “He’s too good.”

Unconvincing internet investigations have suggested that MicroChip may be anyone from the prominent alt-righter Baked Alaska to Justin McConney, the director of social media for the Trump Organization, to a shadowy Russian puppet master.

But in an interview with BuzzFeed News — his first with a media organization — MicroChip said the truth, both about his identity and the method he developed for spreading pro-Trump messages on Twitter, is far more prosaic. Though he would not divulge his real name or corroborate his claim, MicroChip said that he is a freelance mobile software developer in his early thirties and lives in Utah. In a conversation over the gaming chat platform Discord, MicroChip, who speaks unaccented, idiomatic American English, said that he guards his identity so closely for two reasons: first, because he fears losing contract work due to his beliefs, and second, because of what he calls an “uninformed” discourse in the media and Washington around Russian influence and botting.

“I feel like I'm a scientist showing electricity to natives that have been convinced electricity is created by Satan, so they murder the scientist,” he said.

Indeed, in a national atmosphere charged by unproven accusations about a massive network of Russian social media influence, the story of how MicroChip helped build the most notorious pro-Trump Twitter network seems almost mundane, less a technologically daunting intelligence operation than a clever patchworking of tools nearly any computer-literate person could manage. It also suggests that some of the current Russian Trumpbot hysteria may be, well, a hysteria.

“It’s all us, not Russians,” MicroChip said. “And we’re not going to stop.”

MicroChip claims he was a longtime “staunch liberal” who turned to Twitter in the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and “found out that I didn’t like what was going on. So I redpilled myself.” Through Twitter, he found a network of other people who thought liberal politicians had blindly acceded to PC culture, and who had found a champion in Donald Trump. In his early days on the platform, MicroChip said, he started “testing,” dabbling in anti-PC tags like #Rapefugees and seeing what went viral. His experience as a mobile developer had exposed him to the Twitter API, and a conversation with a blogger who ran social media bots convinced him he could automate the Twitter trending process.

“Micro is a true believer alt-right guy,” wrote the alt-right observer who had MicroChip investigated. “He’s brilliant and is not LARPing. His tech skills are real as is his opsec.”

As MicroChip found other like-minded accounts, he said, they began to organize themselves into enormous, 50-person direct message groups. Within these groups, members would distribute content from the Drudge Report and Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit, then tweet it with a commonly decided hashtag, and retweet one another’s tweets ad infinitum. MicroChip called the DM rooms, simply, “retweet groups,” and by September of last year, there were 15 of them. Some of the groups were chock-full of egg and anime avatars, according to MicroChip, but others were composed of Christian conservatives or hardcore Zionists. Taken together, they were like a strange Twitter mirror image of the Trump coalition.

MicroChip added automation to these dedicated DM groups, which he insisted are populated entirely by real people with real accounts. He started using AddMeFast, a kind of social media currency exchange, in which people can retweet or like other tweets in exchange for points that they can then can spend to list their own content (such as pro-Trump hashtagged tweets) to be promoted. You can also buy these points, and an investment of several hundred dollars, according to MicroChip, can yield thousands or even tens of thousands of retweets.

A third component of MicroChip’s blended army of DM groups and crowdsourced social media signal boosters were simple Google script bots. These bots, which MicroChip said “you don’t have to do any programming at all to run,” can be programmed to find and like or retweet tweets featuring certain terms or hashtags.

At its height, MicroChip said, the network he helped create could reliably generate 35,000 retweets a day.

“It’s high volume and it takes work,” he said. “You can’t take a break — you sit at the screen waiting for breaking news 12 hours per day when you’re knee-deep in it.” It’s hard work: MicroChip would sometimes reach his daily limit of 1,000 tweets a day, sometimes taking Adderall to focus — though he added, “Shaping a message is exhilarating.”

Along the way, Twitter started to suspend MicroChip’s accounts — first his original handle @WDfx2EU, then subsequent variations, each started with a link to his Keybase page to verify his identity, and each presided over by the same avatar: the Instagram hunk Brock O’Hurn wearing a Make America Great Again hat and eating an ice cream cone. MicroChip showed BuzzFeed dozens of other accounts he owns, ready to activate if and when his current account, @WDFx2EU95, gets suspended.

While it may take work to stay active, MicroChip said he has has an ideal platform in Twitter with which to shape a message. "Twitter is easier [than other social networks] and more volatile," he said. "Emotions run high at 140 characters. The chaos is perfect."

MicroChip is well aware that many of the tags and stories he promotes haven’t been proven or aren’t true. He’s thrown his network behind #Pizzagate and #SpiritCooking. And days before the election, he posted a tweet to r/The_Donald about an alleged plot by then-president Obama and Hillary Clinton to have Trump assassinated in Reno.

“This ignorant shit needs to be stopped,” replied one user.

“I can make whatever claims I want to make,” MicroChip shot back. “That’s how this game works.”

It’s true that MicroChip can make any claim he wants, and it’s impossible to say that his stories about his identity are true: He could be Vladimir Putin. But multiple aspects of his method can be confirmed: MicroChip provided records of his activity on AddMeFast to BuzzFeed News, alt-right sources confirmed that he was a consistent presence in their DM groups, and the day after the election multiple pro-Trump accounts thanked him for his efforts:

“Micro put in serious work during the election and I really respect his lack of ego,” said another source within the Trump internet world who has worked closely with MicroChip. “He's anonymous and doesn’t care about the credit.”

Indeed, the fact that MicroChip’s network — that much pro-Trump internet activity — is now reflexively assumed to be part of a Russian influence campaign is one of the reasons MicroChip wanted to explain how he helped build it: not to take credit (he repeatedly referred to the network as a group effort) but to set the record straight.

“I’m not Russian,” MicroChip said. “I don’t work for Trump. There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. We’ve been on Twitter every day for the last year and a half. I haven’t seen any bots that I don’t know who they are.”

And if MicroChip is a Russian agent, it’s worth wondering why he, nearly three months into the Trump presidency, has plans to expand his network in the coming weeks with a new set of botting tools.

In a Twitter argument Monday with the Brooklyn developer Nathan Bernard, MicroChip teased that his network is about to get much, much bigger.

"The botnet [is] about to happen 10 X in about a week," he wrote. "Get ready."

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oBN47M

Nevermind The Russians, Meet The Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter

At 7:23 on Sunday evening, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich tweeted that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the “unmasking” of Americans connected to the Trump campaign who were incidentally mentioned in surveillance readouts. At 7:30, the owner of the Twitter account MicroMagicJingleTM noticed, and began blasting out dozens of tweets and retweets about the story.

“Would be nice to get 'Susan Rice' trending,” he tweeted at 8:16. And then, he made exactly that happen.

MicroMagicJingleTM is the latest incarnation of MicroChip, a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader once described by a Republican strategist as the "Trumpbot overlord.” He has been suspended from the service so frequently, he can’t recall the exact number of times. A voluminous tweeter, his specialty is making hashtags trend. Over the next 24 hours, following his own call to arms, MicroChip tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times about Rice, everything from a photoshopped image of Donald Trump eating her head out of a taco bowl to demands that she die in jail, almost always accompanied by the tag #SusanRice. Meanwhile, in massive threaded tweets and DM groups, he implored others to do likewise.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the tag was being tweeted nearly 20,000 times an hour, and was trending on Twitter; by 11 a.m., 34,000 an hour. (As of Tuesday morning, the tag was still trending, partially thanks to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.) At 4:48 p.m. Monday, 18-odd hours after he started his campaign, MicroChip was ready to call it a success:

Before? What did he mean by “before"? Before the election, before the campaign, and long since before “Russian interference” was the mantra of every political consultant, British former member of parliament, and American senator turned Tolstoy enthusiast, MicroChip has been figuring out how to make pro-Trump tags go viral on Twitter. When people talk about Russian Twitter bots, they are, very likely, sometimes talking about his work. They’ve ranged from the innocuously rah-rah (#TrumpTrain) to the wildly xenophobic (#Rapefugees) to the extremely unconfirmed (#cruzsexscandal and #hillarygropedme). What they’ve all had in common is a method, the focus of speculation for nearly a year, and a chief promulgator, MicroChip, about whom little is known.

Indeed, MicroChip, who operates behind a VPN (a special secure network that obscures his location), is an object of fascination and fear, even among some of his political and ideological fellow travelers, who hope not to end up on the wrong side of one of his Twitter campaigns. One conservative observer of the alt-right, who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition that his name not be used, claimed he once hired private investigators to trace him.

“You can’t,” the observer wrote in a text message. “He’s too good.”

Unconvincing internet investigations have suggested that MicroChip may be anyone from the prominent alt-righter Baked Alaska to Justin McConney, the director of social media for the Trump Organization, to a shadowy Russian puppet master.

But in an interview with BuzzFeed News — his first with a media organization — MicroChip said the truth, both about his identity and the method he developed for spreading pro-Trump messages on Twitter, is far more prosaic. Though he would not divulge his real name or corroborate his claim, MicroChip said that he is a freelance mobile software developer in his early thirties and lives in Utah. In a conversation over the gaming chat platform Discord, MicroChip, who speaks unaccented, idiomatic American English, said that he guards his identity so closely for two reasons: first, because he fears losing contract work due to his beliefs, and second, because of what he calls an “uninformed” discourse in the media and Washington around Russian influence and botting.

“I feel like I'm a scientist showing electricity to natives that have been convinced electricity is created by Satan, so they murder the scientist,” he said.

Indeed, in a national atmosphere charged by unproven accusations about a massive network of Russian social media influence, the story of how MicroChip helped build the most notorious pro-Trump Twitter network seems almost mundane, less a technologically daunting intelligence operation than a clever patchworking of tools nearly any computer-literate person could manage. It also suggests that some of the current Russian Trumpbot hysteria may be, well, a hysteria.

“It’s all us, not Russians,” MicroChip said. “And we’re not going to stop.”

MicroChip claims he was a longtime “staunch liberal” who turned to Twitter in the aftermath of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and “found out that I didn’t like what was going on. So I redpilled myself.” Through Twitter, he found a network of other people who thought liberal politicians had blindly acceded to PC culture, and who had found a champion in Donald Trump. In his early days on the platform, MicroChip said, he started “testing,” dabbling in anti-PC tags like #Rapefugees and seeing what went viral. His experience as a mobile developer had exposed him to the Twitter API, and a conversation with a blogger who ran social media bots convinced him he could automate the Twitter trending process.

“Micro is a true believer alt-right guy,” wrote the alt-right observer who had MicroChip investigated. “He’s brilliant and is not LARPing. His tech skills are real as is his opsec.”

As MicroChip found other like-minded accounts, he said, they began to organize themselves into enormous, 50-person direct message groups. Within these groups, members would distribute content from the Drudge Report and Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit, then tweet it with a commonly decided hashtag, and retweet one another’s tweets ad infinitum. MicroChip called the DM rooms, simply, “retweet groups,” and by September of last year, there were 15 of them. Some of the groups were chock-full of egg and anime avatars, according to MicroChip, but others were composed of Christian conservatives or hardcore Zionists. Taken together, they were like a strange Twitter mirror image of the Trump coalition.

MicroChip added automation to these dedicated DM groups, which he insisted are populated entirely by real people with real accounts. He started using AddMeFast, a kind of social media currency exchange, in which people can retweet or like other tweets in exchange for points that they can then can spend to list their own content (such as pro-Trump hashtagged tweets) to be promoted. You can also buy these points, and an investment of several hundred dollars, according to MicroChip, can yield thousands or even tens of thousands of retweets.

A third component of MicroChip’s blended army of DM groups and crowdsourced social media signal boosters were simple Google script bots. These bots, which MicroChip said “you don’t have to do any programming at all to run,” can be programmed to find and like or retweet tweets featuring certain terms or hashtags.

At its height, MicroChip said, the network he helped create could reliably generate 35,000 retweets a day.

“It’s high volume and it takes work,” he said. “You can’t take a break — you sit at the screen waiting for breaking news 12 hours per day when you’re knee-deep in it.” It’s hard work: MicroChip would sometimes reach his daily limit of 1,000 tweets a day, sometimes taking Adderall to focus — though he added, “Shaping a message is exhilarating.”

Along the way, Twitter started to suspend MicroChip’s accounts — first his original handle @WDfx2EU, then subsequent variations, each started with a link to his Keybase page to verify his identity, and each presided over by the same avatar: the Instagram hunk Brock O’Hurn wearing a Make America Great Again hat and eating an ice cream cone. MicroChip showed BuzzFeed dozens of other accounts he owns, ready to activate if and when his current account, @WDFx2EU95, gets suspended.

While it may take work to stay active, MicroChip said he has has an ideal platform in Twitter with which to shape a message. "Twitter is easier [than other social networks] and more volatile," he said. "Emotions run high at 140 characters. The chaos is perfect."

MicroChip is well aware that many of the tags and stories he promotes haven’t been proven or aren’t true. He’s thrown his network behind #Pizzagate and #SpiritCooking. And days before the election, he posted a tweet to r/The_Donald about an alleged plot by then-president Obama and Hillary Clinton to have Trump assassinated in Reno.

“This ignorant shit needs to be stopped,” replied one user.

“I can make whatever claims I want to make,” MicroChip shot back. “That’s how this game works.”

It’s true that MicroChip can make any claim he wants, and it’s impossible to say that his stories about his identity are true: He could be Vladimir Putin. But multiple aspects of his method can be confirmed: MicroChip provided records of his activity on AddMeFast to BuzzFeed News, alt-right sources confirmed that he was a consistent presence in their DM groups, and the day after the election multiple pro-Trump accounts thanked him for his efforts:

“Micro put in serious work during the election and I really respect his lack of ego,” said another source within the Trump internet world who has worked closely with MicroChip. “He's anonymous and doesn’t care about the credit.”

Indeed, the fact that MicroChip’s network — that much pro-Trump internet activity — is now reflexively assumed to be part of a Russian influence campaign is one of the reasons MicroChip wanted to explain how he helped build it: not to take credit (he repeatedly referred to the network as a group effort) but to set the record straight.

“I’m not Russian,” MicroChip said. “I don’t work for Trump. There could very well be Russian bots. I just never saw them and we were in this deep. We’ve been on Twitter every day for the last year and a half. I haven’t seen any bots that I don’t know who they are.”

And if MicroChip is a Russian agent, it’s worth wondering why he, nearly three months into the Trump presidency, has plans to expand his network in the coming weeks with a new set of botting tools.

In a Twitter argument Monday with the Brooklyn developer Nathan Bernard, MicroChip teased that his network is about to get much, much bigger.

"The botnet [is] about to happen 10 X in about a week," he wrote. "Get ready."

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2oBN47M