shiver - used record - junji ito

Every Nico Di Angelo fan focusing more on the background of the episode than the actual plot

*Married life playing in the background

This idea was probably funnier in my head

y’know what? FUCK you. i’m putting your ass in the control group. *injects you with boring saline instead of the fun and exciting glowing green goo i originally had planned*

Shiver - Junji Ito Review

Shiver is a short story collection by Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito. I first stumbled onto Junji Ito through the viral "Th-This is my hole. It was made for me!" meme that was popular around the internet a few years back.

I was fascinated by that image and it led me to reading the story it was based on "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" which is one of my all-time favorite horror stories, long or short. Shiver is now the third complete manga I've read by Junji Ito and to date is probably my favorite. It doesn't reach the highs of Amigara Fault, but I think it's really solid. According to the notes, it seems like Ito gets a spark of an idea and builds off the initial idea, sometimes putting several ideas together over the course of a span of time. The initial hooks are always interesting and pretty original though, even if the results of the story don't always quite land. With some quick pitches; my favorite stories in this collection are Used Record - What if there was a song of the dead and someone alive heard the song? What would that do to the person who is alive? Fashion Model - No comment. Just this image.

Hanging Blimp - People all around Japan are bizarrely committing suicide, hanging themselves, fashioning things into a noose. Shortly after their deaths, bizarre blimp like floating heads with what look like balloon strings show up around the country and begin chasing people. Marionette Mansion - Haruhiko's family travels around Japan putting on puppet shows. One of the puppets frightens Haruhiko's friend Kinuko, the puppets name is "Jean-Pierre" and it seems like there may be more to Jean-Pierre. Is Haruhiko's family controlling Jean-Pierre, or is Jean-Pierre controlling them? The Long Dream - Probably my favorite story in the collection. What if when we slept, an infinite amount of time could pass in our dreams? We could live hours, days, months, years or even several lifetimes worth? What would that do to our bodies? What would it mean for us as a species?

Greased - Haha this one got me to groan in disgust audibly, so I have to give it a nod. Yui and her family run a barbeque shop and live in an apartment above the shop. From poor ventilation in both the shop and apartment, there is a thick, heavy, filmy layer of grease covering everything. The grease gets heavier as time goes on and begins to effect Yui's family, specifically her brother Goro and ugh at what happens lol. Overall, a really solid collection of stories. Really enjoyed it!

4/5

Customer: IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER DMV: DRUGS Verdict: DENIED

WAIT WAIT WAIT

YOU'RE TELLING ME

THE TITLE CARD FROM CINDERELLA (1950) EXPLICITLY SAYS IT'S BASED ON THE PERRAULT VERSION OF THE STORY???

WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED ALL THE SANCTIMONIOUS EDGELORDS SMARMING ABOUT HOW "well Disney toned it down; the One True Grimms' Original akschully has blood and no fairy and feet getting cut up, so there" IF THEY HAD JUST

BOTHERED TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE MOVIE AND THEN GOOGLE "PERRAULT CINDERELLA???"

excuse me I need to go scream into a pillow

(I'm not saying Ashenputtel isn't possibly older as a folktale than its 1812 publication date in the Grimms' book, but Perrault's version was published in the 1690s. so...)

Ground Control to Major Fenton.

Danny's chosen for a space mission, along with a group of other astronauts. They're gonna rendezvous at Justice League Watchtower, and then go for a part of space as of yet unexplored as a part of a Justice League effort to map the cosmos.

But something goes wrong with the ship.

And one of the escape pods gets damaged.

So Danny tricks the Captain of the team into a pod and fires it away into space.

He then immediately turns around and makes sure that the ship won't explode, just turning off his breathing on the way.

Danny did this because, unbeknownst to his employers, he is the only person on the crew capable of surviving the harsh nothingness of Space. As a half ghost, he doesn't need to breath and his heart doesn't need to beat, even while in human form.

So when the Justice League sends out Hal for salvage and corpse retrieval, Hal get's the absolute shit scared out of him. Like, the dude almost legitimately shit himself.

It went a little like this.

He managed to pry his way into the dead ship; no oxygen, no gravity, no nothing. He checks the rooms one by one, noting along the way that the ship shows signs of attempted repair.

His head is filling with images of the lone astronaut, Fenton, desperately doing his best to save the ship.

All the rooms are empty.

So if Fenton was trying to save the ship, then that would mean the last place to check would be the engine room.

Hal goes to the engine room, and there, cradled in wires that had been pulled from the ceiling, is the corpse of astronaut Daniel James Fenton.

The wires show clear efforts from the man to anchor himself in place, probably when the gravity went, so that he could still try to save the ship.

With a heavy heart, Hal moves forward and starts to detangle Fenton.

Only for Fenton's hand to shoot out with inhuman speed and catch his wrist in an iron grip, and when Hal looks up he sees a pair of glowing, inhuman eyes staring at him from an impossibly pale face, the neck at a strange an unnatural angle.

Hal screams like a little bitch and runs to the other side of the engine room.

Danny, however, had just tied himself to some cables so he could finally get some fucking sleep without bouncing around the room. (He woulda gone to his bunker and just used the seatbelts on his bed, but that room was Creepy without lights).

i talked about it a little bit already but i have things to say about it. for context, i was born with amniotic band syndrome. the amniotic band wrapped around my left wrist in utero and stunted the growth of my hand. i was born with about half a palm, four nubs for fingers, and a twisted half of a thumb. i can open and close my thumb and pinkie joint like a claw.

yesterday at work i had a shift in the room with 5-10 year old kids. i had my left hand hidden in my sleeve (a bad habit of mine). a kid asked if he could see my hand, and even though internally i was debating running into traffic, i said “sure you can” and showed him my hands. he stared for a moment, looking disturbed, and then said “i don’t want to look at that anymore”. that hurt to hear, but i understand that kids are new to the world and he probably didn’t mean it out of malice. i put my hand away again, told him that it was okay, and that i was just born that way.

he then went on to talk about how he knows a kid with a similar hand to mine and called it “ugly”. i told him that wasn’t a very kind thing to say and that he wouldn’t feel good if someone said that to him, and he replied that no one would say that to him—because he has “normal hands”, and he’s glad he does because otherwise he’d be “ugly”. i tried to talk with him for a bit about how everybody is born differently, but he just started talking about a girl he knows with a “messed up face” and pulled on his face to make it look droopy. i went on some more about how it wasn’t very kind to talk about people that way, but the conversation moved on to something else.

i’ve told my supervisors about it and they’re going to have a talk with his mom. what i wanted to say is this: i’m genuinely not upset with the kid. kids are young and naturally curious, and he clearly simply hasn’t been taught about disabled people and kind ways to speak to/about others. which is why i am upset with his parent(s). i know he’s encountered visibly deformed/disabled people before (he said so himself!), yet his parent(s) clearly haven’t had any kind of discussion with him about proper language and behavior. i knew from birth that some people were just different than others, but my parents still made a point to assert to be kind to and accepting of others. i wonder if adults in his life are the type of people to hush him and usher him away when he points out someone in a wheelchair. that kind of thing doesn’t teach politeness. it tells children that disabled people are an Other than can’t be acknowledged or spoken about; which, to a child, means disability must be something bad.

i’m lucky enough that this was a relatively mild incident, and that i’m a grownup with thicker skin. i’m worried about the other kids he mentioned to me. has he been talking to them this way? when i was a kid, i had other kids scream, cry, and run away at the sight of my hand. or follow me around pointing at me and laughing at me. or tell me i couldn’t do something because i was ugly or incapable or whatever. one time a girl at an arcade climbed to the top of the skeeball machine, pointed at me, and screamed at me to put my hand away and wouldn’t stop crying until she couldn’t see me anymore. another time, a kid saw my hand, screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran into my friend’s arms, crying hysterically about how i was scaring her. that second incident made me cry so hard i threw up when i got home. i can kind of laugh it off now, but having people react to me that way as a child is something i’m still getting over. why do you think i have a habit of keeping my hand in my sleeve? it just irritates me to see children that have clearly not been taught basic manners and kindness—their parents Clearly missed something pretty important .

eddie is this guy on tiktok that is notorious for having both a ridiculously accurate hobie impression and for having the most unhinged tiktok live comments so. it had to be done

(edit: there's more now. parts two and three here)

more weird zinks because im insatiable lately. tentatively titled "damn girl yuor some kind of wretched beast"

silly bonus doodle:

every sex scene in a movie is necessary, actually. we called for a vote on it while you were in the bathroom. yeah, even the people who were on the fence voted in favor of it because you were being a whiny child. and we don’t like you.

Crimes against short people

Pac: I'm not going to say anything to you guys [Chat], I'm not going to say anything to you. I'm not saying absolutely anything, I'm not going to comment. Man, you broke me here, you broke me in 3 parts! I'm not going to- no no no no no, I won't fall for your game, I won't fall for your game.*

Pac's chat allows viewers to make music requests, which led to this very well-timed moment today where Careless Whisper started playing as soon as Pac met back up with Fit.

* [Approximate translation. I'm not a native Portuguese speaker, so as always, please feel free to let me know if there's a better way to translate things!]

[volume warning]

straight out of a horror movie

i think it would be funny if people occasionally arose from the dead. like if that was a real-life one-in-a-million but well-documented Thing That Sometimes Happens, and the entire legal system around death (laws on inheritance & marriage & murder etc) had to include caveats for the unlikely-but-scientifically-possible event that the dead person in question might spontaneously self-resurrect, even years or decades after death. it would raise so many inconvenient and absurd possibilities