mask131
mask131
5K posts
Just a French guy spreading his chaos and madness
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mask131 · 9 hours ago
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The Vampire Group Text:
Ruthven: We have a situation.
Carmilla: Vampire hunters?
Dracula: Another inaccurate movie adaptation?
Ruthven: Varney matched with a woman on an app. Halfway through their first date, she went to the restroom and never came back. Now he's talking about jumping into volcanoes or going overboard off a ship.
Carmilla: Just let him get it out of his system. He'll resurrect. He always does.
Ruthven: That's easy for you to say, you aren't the one who lives closest to him. When he DOES resurrect, it's not your couch he's going to crash on whilst crying about what an abomination he is
Carmilla: So go on vacation.
Dracula: You know what would cheer him up?
Ruthven: Not wolves
Carmilla: Do not say wolves
Dracula: Wolves!
Ruthven: Wolves are not the solution to every problem.
Dracula: LISTEN. Lonely? Not with a wolf pack huddled around you. Sad? Impossible to maintain when a wolf wags its tail. Under attack from an angry mob? They weren't expecting WOLVES
Carmilla: Just have Varney call Edward. He's still married, isn't he? He must know something about successful relationships.
Ruthven: Do you have his number? I never spent any real time around him. Always thought that family was some sort of cult.
Dracula: You know, when Orlok was crying because that new movie made his pulă too small, he came out to my wildlife sanctuary and ran with the wolves for a while. Just saying. Never seen him happier. At least until a few of them started chewing on his decayed flesh.
Carmilla: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR WOLVES, COUNT
Dracula:
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Carmilla: Christ, you made that months ago and you've just been waiting for a chance to use it haven't you? Probably having imaginary arguments with yourself in the shower where you envisioned using a dead meme as some sort of smackdown.
Ruthven: Forget it, I'll see if Aurelia has any ideas
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mask131 · 1 day ago
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I found back an old article about the apocryphal Gospels and it is fascinating how the author points out that it was these numerous apocryphal texts, rather than the four canon ones, that truly shaped Jesus as a character in popular culture, folk-Christianity and peoples' minds as a whole.
It was in them that Mary was fleshed out and given parents. It was in them Joseph actually became a character of his own, existing as an individual person. It was in them that most of the episodes of the Nativity and the Flight from Egypt came from - the idea of a sacred grotto, with an ox and a donkey? That's from the apocrypha, not the canon. They are also the ones that gave the number and names of the Wise Men.
The apocryphal Gospels focus a lot, a LOT, on the figure of Mary. In fact this is very likely why they were not made canon in the first made - due to the very heated debates about the nature (and very concept) of the "Mother of God". The article (written by Marie-Françoise Baslez) points out how, when it comes to the "virginity" of the Virgin Mary, the canon just stops at "virgin conception and that's it". The apocrypha goes further by adding the concept of the "perpetual virginity" - showing a clean, painless, aetheral birth hidden by clouds and lights, and even having a midwife get her arm burned to a crisp when she tried checking if Mary was still a virgin. (She got better though - see the Gospel of James).
Another aspect that probably made them un-canonical was how they felt too much like a "hidden god" story, per the author's own word. The many "Infancy Gospels" (focused on Jesus' childhood) had him perform many miracles and acts of "magic", with angels appearing or surrounding his every moments of life, and Mary herself having sometimes the power to miraculously heal people. Which went against the canon, in which Jesus only started being able to make miracles after being baptized and starting a career as a preacher. These texts were very probably much too reminiscent of common motifs and tropes found in the adventures of half-divine heroes and reborn-deities in the mythologies of the time. (For example you have the Pseudo-Matthew Gospel which echoes the legend of Orpheus, why with all the wild beasts and plants being charmed by Jesus and trying to protect him and following him everywhere he went)
There's a lot of funny little things in these apocryphal Gospels. Like an alternate account of Jesus' resurrection where two angels actually get down from Heaven and drag Jesus' body out of his grave with his cross following him up into the sky (The Gospel of Peter) ; or a testimony by two former Limbo/Hell-inmates about how Jesus went into the Underworld, Satan tried to wrestle him, he broke the doors of Hell and set free Adam (see the Gospel of Nicodemus).
(And of course, some of the apocrypha were just condemned for heresy. Like the Gospel of Peter, which was thought of as encouraging the heresy according to which the "Incarnation" wasn't "real", as in Jesus had no real body and was not truly made flesh - by showing, for example, how he did not suffer of and barely seemed to notice his own crucifixion.)
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mask131 · 1 day ago
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Oh so when Jonathan Harker rides in a black carriage through the wild Eastern European forests to reach an old man's ancient family castle (which contains a beautiful blonde) it's all "best of luck on your endeavors!" and "have a great visit!!" but when I, Carmilla-
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mask131 · 1 day ago
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Yes. Hobbit vampires are repelled by rings and circular shapes instead of crosses, and are compelled to enter houses uninvited.
If a fantasy setting has both fantasy races like dwarves, elves, and halflings and contractible vampirism, I think vampire dwarves, vampire elves and vampire halflings should have their own bespoke weaknesses and powers from human vampires.
Vampire dwarves burn in pure darkness and must always carry a lit candle. Vampire elves can turn into owls. The only way to kill a vampire halfling is to feed it a soup it loved in life. Etc
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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@themousefromfantasyland Reminds you of someone? X)
My toxic trait is that I like to take poorly thought-out worldbuilding from large media franchises that are clogged with decades of legacy cruft and retcons and try to hammer out something internally consistent, yet completely unintended by the rights-holders, then I insist that my interpretation is correct.
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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On an aside note - people usually love to have ivy-covered houses an so forth, but I personally can't out of fear of all the insects that go live in such things. I will NEVER let ivy grow so forth.
I was told constantly of my parents' story with huge spiders living by the ivy covering a house. I had to battle for months with entire hives of various types of ants crawling on our terrace through an ivy-covered wall that invaded. AND I will forever remember how as a kid, as I passed by this specific ivy wall, it kept BUZZING loudly and strongly with the specific buzzing of wasps - not the one of bees, the one of wasps. And the worst thing was I saw nothing, zero insect, it was just the sound SO LOUD when you passed next by this wall - and I was forced to as I had to go by the street.
So yeah I just... You will not often see me reblog ivy-covered walls because for me that's a sure sign I will NOT be living there
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Carlowrie Castle, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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I will need to find a way to block ENTIRE GROUPS.
For quite some times Tumblr has been suggesting to me this group called "Sidewalk Posting". It keeps popping up by "For you" suggestions.
At first it was ALL just posts of dentures people randomly found by the side of streets. I mean... Okay? A bit weird, a bit gross, but I got why Tumblr suggested it to me - I have been posting about The Amazing Digital Circus, of course it'd think I'm into dentures.
But now there's post from this group about how "cute" dead rats by the sidewalk are? WITH PICTURES? I was having such a fine day.
I don't mind the existence of this at all - heck it has been my unofficial job to offer hasty pseudo-funerals for the various pigeon corpses that somehow end up surrounding my house. But I have enough of these sad sights in my IRL life, I don't need Tumblr to just throw it at my face online.
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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This is so accurate
What Does ᶜᵃʳᵐⁱˡˡᵃ Love?
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Support me on Ko-Fi 🍵
Full Picture :
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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OP tag:
#'vampires were created as a metaphor for the aristocracy preying on the working class' nope#vampires started out as similar to zombies in that they were corpses who preyed on the living#Lord Ruthven and Sir Francis Varney preyed on fellow aristocrats#Carmilla is an equal opportunity predator who focuses on aristocratic young women but also preys on peasants#Dracula is really the first one to be depicted explicitly as a nobleman preying on peasants#and yes Bram Stoker very much popularized the default tropes associated with vampires#but it is NOT a simple 1:1 'vampires are a metaphor for class inequality'
THANK YOU!
If people did their basic research they're know the European vampire started out as a "peasant-monster" and the first "famous" vampire were just every day people and humble villagers turned into monsters. The idea of making vampires aristocrats and nobility was a massive twist to the legend and a purely literary invention. It is part of the myth now, to the point that that the "poor vampire" is currently seen as a twist. It might not be glamorous, but the first vampires became vampires after being run over by a cart or stuff of the sort.
love seeing discourse where the people involved don't know what they're talking about but are very confident that they do.
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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rereading dracula after reading carmilla for the first time really makes me appreciate carmilla's efficiency in securing a place. dracula had to deal with all the logistics of the housing market meanwhile carmilla just crashed her car on someone's lawn and she got a cushy guest room and a girlfriend out of it. carmilla the woman you are
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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Interesting
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Restoration of Giovanni Battista Bracelli's work
Giovanni Battista Bracelli created this piece in 1624 before cubism had even been thought of. He made a collection of similar art, and I realized that I could attempt to restore one quite easily if I had the time. I love how ahead of it's time it looks
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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I love this
(though I still don't get the obsession everybody has with changing Ragatha's body but anyway)
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THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS - OVA 5 (1992)
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mask131 · 2 days ago
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Continuing from this post, more points from this tiny book about conspiracy theories. I am mostly putting these downs because, as I explained, I am quite fascinated with the principle of conspiracy theories as part of urban legends and as a form of "modern myth".
Point 7 (this one is giving quite a blast with the Covid situation)
The book talks about how the AIDs epidemic birthed a massive wave of conspiracy theories. One of the most popular was how the AIDs were created by the CIA in secret laboratories to "solve the problem of the world's over-population", as a weapon to kill the people of poor countries.
But the interesting thing with the AIDs epidemic conspiracy theories is that every minority which suffered from it had its own conspiracy theory where they were the victim of the "artificial deadly virus". For example, the "gay conspiracy theory" that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon queer communities and deemed that the AIDs was a secret project to remove all homosexuals from the planet. Or the "Black Holocaust" theory, which was notably spread by the group known as The Nation of Islam - a politico-religious group reserved only for Muslim Afro-Americans, and which saw in the AIDs an attempt by the "White America" to destroy all the Black people on the continent.
A "White conspiracy" that also gets confused with the "Jewish conspiracy", because since the organization is also to promote and dedicate itself entirely to Islam as the sole right religion, it ends up with figures like Farrakhan also spreading anti-Judaism conspiracy theories that get mixed with the other recurring idea of the "White conspiracy for the Black Holocaust". See their famous anti-Jew text "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews". The Nation of Islam also printed an English translation of a famous anti-masonic/anti-semitic French text (Léon de Poncins' Freemasonry & Judaism: Secrets Powers Behind Revolution) and of course, "The Protocoles of the Elders of Sion", with Farrakhan even claiming that every American president since 1932 was under the control of the Jews (1932 being the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which conspiracists usually consider as the most obvious case of a "puppet of the Jews and the Freemasons" - see how his decision to modify the dollar bill was seen as a sign of allegiance to the Illuminati).
All these AIDs theories notably join back the common denunciation of another recurring enemy of the conspiracists: the "biomedical lobby" or the "pharmaceutical industry", sometimes presented as the "Militaro-industrial lobby", opposed of course by the "natural medecine" and by the "naturopathy". Which results in things such as the belief that the AIDs solely exists to impose on the population a mass campaign of forced vaccination, destined to control the population of the world - or worse, to spread more AIDs because, of course, in the conspiracist's mind the AIDs are spread through vaccines.
And by extension (this point is getting quite long, but it is all presented as one big chain) this reflects on the wider process of conspiracists considering anything that is modern or technological as being inherently evil, a diabolical force opposing the "natural" order of things - hence why often you find some conspiracy theorists appearing among those who enjoy or are interested in things such as veganism, biological agriculture, acupuncture, yoga, magnetism, hypnotism, and forms of what the book calls "cheap esoterism".
Point 8
The book points out something interesting: despite most conspiracy theories ending up being anti-Jew, antisemitic, they tend to always use, in their "victimization" process, the imagery of the Shoah, invoking a "new Holocaust" that is about or is currently happening. As such you end up with Holocaust-deniers openly saying it didn't happen, while also claiming it did happen just to explain how they are supposedly getting massively killed by the same people who faked the very thing they use for their comparison.
Point 9
Of course (at the time of the book's writing), in the American mind the "government conspiracy" is indissociable from the "alien conspiracy". Like with the CIA. Ever since its creation and its involvment in the Cold War it is commonly agreed that the CIA is the one causing world-shifting events, leading secret operations, organizing the conspiracies, participating in the "Shadow Government" - and what a coincidence! 1947, the year of the creation of the CIA, is also the year of the famous Roswell incident, the one that spawned back a new wave of "alien encounters and abductions" and led to the strong belief that the government ended up making a deal with an alien power, predatory towards humanity and much more advanced on a technological level.
Point 10
This one, in retrospective, is very funny for a French people. The urban riots in France, at the end of the year 2005, led to a huge wave of conspiracy theories. And one of them, that could be found on the Internet of the time, was published by a certain Christian Cotten. It was on the then famous conspiracist website "On nous cache tout" (They hide everything from us). And he claimed that Nicolas Sarkozy, back then just the ministre de l'Intérieur, was staging a coup d'état for an Americano-Zionist conspiracy.
The exact quote of Cotten explains how Sarkozy, with the "passive complicity" of Chirac and Villepin, was planning with the police and the military a coup d'état, to satisfy the desires of the two "foreign powers" that are the USA and Israel. Cotten wanted Sarkozy arrested to preserve the French democracy and the French population, because he was convinced that Sarkozy wanted to force France to join the USA and Israel in a war against Syria and Liban first, then Saudi Arabia and Iran in a second time. Cotten claimed Sarkozy's behavior was part of a longer process that had begun with the 9/11 terrorist attacks - which were in fact, according to him, planned by "seditious members of the American army and government". He claimed that the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid that had followed were of the same nature: here simply to terrorize the population and "scape-goating" the Muslim Arabian world in order to more easily turn Western democracies into totalitarian regimes. By extension, the 2005 urban riots were just an operation organized by the state itself - who somehow, according to Cotten, were both fully zionist and yet violently antisemitic. Cotten has this very VERY funny sentence "These rots are not the individual work of suffering youth, but the result of a careful strategy of determined zionist forces that are very powerful in France - one of the rare countries that can protect and support political groups that even Israel itself forbids."
[As a personal note, I just love how people who defend the so-called "masses" and the "common people" precisely, in their beliefs, are convinced the masses and the common folks are unable of actually being powerful, effective or manifesting in any form or way]
Point 11
The book identifies three specific "waves" of American conspiracism (aka waves of conspiracy theories born in the USA). The first came with the communism' hunt by McCarthy, and this fear of the omnipresent, omnipotent, shadowy power that was the Soviet Union and the Communist party, infiltrated down to the very American government. The second came with the assassination of J. F. Kennedy, due to how mysterious and unexplained it remained for a while. The third came, of course, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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mask131 · 4 days ago
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Spoilers alert for Discworld. None for TADC.
I can't help but compare and make weird world-crossovers between "Discworld" and "The Amazing Digital Circus".
When "Untitled" aired I was taking a look back at "The Wee Free Men". I already posted about it, but I will repost it here: Discworld's rendition of Fairyland made me immediately jump into the Digital Circus. Think about it... You have this all powerful entity with absolute control over this small pocket dimension, but is fundamentally un-creative, unable to grow up/learn/mature, and can only copy or steal things from the real world. This pocket dimension itself is only half-real and precisely lacks realisms in ways that pokes fun at the workings of early video games. And inside of it, people are from time to time locked into bubbles of dream-illusions that are warped, imperfect copy of specific plots you must play along until you find the exact method to "get out" and escape, to "end" the dream. And the result is people trying to cope in various failed ways (denial, madness) and the only way to manage to beat up and resist it all is basically having a deep session of self-therapy and self-discovery (Second to Fortieth Thoughts).
And now, "They all gets gun" is released as I was checking back "Witches Abroad". And once more, parallels. The fairy godmother hiding at the center of the fairytales being explicitely compared to the ringmaster of a circus having all the real power though you only see the big showy acts. The fairy godmother being obsessed with forcing people into specific paths, and imposing patterns onto human life, and trying to cut off everything human that doesn't fit a very specific frame of a given "story". The danger of "story magic" being described as confusing people because you don't know what is real and what isn't anymore, to the point that you don't know yourself who you are or what you did. The horror manifesting as people being imposed appearances that do not correspond to who they are, AND as beings having their spirit messed up, rewritten and broken into unfitting characters until they become suicidal and insane. The obviously antagonistic and evil power being convinced it is the good and heroic one, and torturing everybody in hope of making them happy.
It is so funny to see how you can so easily switch the computer-horror of TADC for the fae-horror of Discworld without changing much. And yet it makes sense... [Additional purposeless thoughts about it below]
It makes sense because Pratchett's own fantasy is very influenced by sci-fi (which he used to write parodies of before, and then wrote actual serious examples afterward) and actual science (which Pratchett worked with and knew quite a lot about, down to making the "Science of Discworld" collab). And despite being openly a fantasy work, it relies so much on sci-fi reference and scientific principles woven into the absurdist magic and the extravagant fantasy and the mythical lore that it joins back the old traition of "science-fantasy" that used to be so dominant. Heck, the big references and homages that built the Discworld early on were references to massive sci-fantasy works - The Dragonriders of Pern, Vance's Dying Earth, and so forth.
So it makes full sense that a huge half-absurdist half-rationalist fantasy parody written by a big nerd and geek for sci-fi television shows and first-generations video games would match with a big sci-fi parody created to reverse in Looney Tunes way classics of sci-fi horror and to delve into all the possibilities of digital horror and video-game uncanny in absurd way.
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mask131 · 4 days ago
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I guess a lot of people haven't seen as many old movies, or played as many old games, as I have, but did anyone else catch these references?
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Contra a 1987 run and gun game developed and published by Konami for arcades. A home version was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. It was one of the most popular games of its time and has even been described by the Angry Video Game Nerd as a perfect game.
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A boy and his dog (1976.) It really was the most PG way to describe the movie, but still.
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mask131 · 4 days ago
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anyway you guys wanna see more of the completely necessarily horny theseus and minotaur sculpture by canova? because it’s my favourite thing and i legit want to know if canova intentionally made it as homoerotic as he possibly could because
well
imagine doing this *gestures vaguely* accidentally
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mask131 · 4 days ago
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Spellbound Lover Barbie vs. Romeo and Juliet Farewell by E. Fortescue-Brickdale 
This Barbie is meant to be Iseult from the medieval romance Tristan and Iseult. Why Mattel chose to use an image of Juliet instead of one of the many artistic depictions of Iseult I have no idea.
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