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[decovulous]

I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:

I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.

That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!

But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?

Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…

[decovulous]

Mark Rothko, Untitled. 1969 Ink on paper The National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.

© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / ARS

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Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

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Hey yall bc I've been keeping an eye on this the Itch.Io bundle for the PCRF is now live

they had an issue last week with itch.io so they had to postpone opening for a few days but for those who wanted to d/ona/te it's here!

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eclipse, 2013, oil/cardboard, 15 x 20 cm

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its so brave that you have such a 2012-coded url in this 2024 world

would you call a bear brave for standing in a new construction suburb or would you recognize the unfamiliar world they built around him

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James baldwin’s the artists struggle for identity. Btw.

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Eclipse of the Sun in Venice in July 8, 1842 by Ippolito Caffi.

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happy tdov <3

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Color has been disappearing from the world.

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

source paper

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Scott McCloud’s incomparable “Understanding Comics”.

I swear you can open this book to any page and it’s amazing.

(ps it’s actually a digital image of a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe)

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this is a poem to me

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When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

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i see posts here about how people are so mortified when they are acknowledged as being a regular customer somewhere that they never return. cowards. the employees at taco bell treat me like a celebrity. like royalty. i am their strange little pet customer who gets traded along as staff comes and goes. they know my car before i even speak in the drive-thru speaker. today i was 2 hours late and she ran over and squealed that she "thought i'd left them!" and that she "made my order with extra love!" and you what, she did

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have you been enjoying absurd Helldivers 2 nonsense?

multiple players have independently called my compared my satirical scifi skirmish storytelling TTPRG 🎲 PLANET FIST to Helldivers—so much as to call it "exactly the tone of Helldivers." the new Faithless Edition of PLANET FIST will be releasing this year, and if you buy it now, you get the new edition for free!

in PLANET FIST, SHOOTOUTS ARE STORIES, and they're goofy and over the top. you're an undying, unsleeping soldier who can get blasted to bits and thrown right back onto the battlefield next round. if you're looking to see how it hits that Helldivers tone, just check out some of the FACTION TRAITS below!

what's PLANET FIST about? what does it play like? read the PRINCIPLES OF PLAY here!

what are people saying about PLANET FIST, besides that it's like Helldivers 2?

"PLANET FIST is a quick-to-learn and quick-to-play system for characters thrown into FPS-style deathmatches on a world that knows nothing but war. It's a game of high-emotion, low-consequence combat, for when you're wondering what the infinite Master Chiefs are thinking during Halo multiplayer. PLANET FIST is 'war never changes' said with the same inflection as 'it's all made up and the points don't matter.'"

- Caleb Zane Huett, designer of Triangle Agency

"An absolute blast—and then another, and then another, and then another, each leaving remains splattered on a wall. Gleeful, and tactical, and winkingly tongue-in-cheek; a masterful game from top to bottom."

- Jeff Stormer, host of the Party of One actual play podcast

or check out some table stories:

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Hundreds of Jews and allies, including Writers Against the War on Gaza, sagaftramembersforceasefire and Film Workers for Palestine are present in the heart of Hollywood on the day of the Oscars to say: ALL EYES ON RAFAH!

While Hollywood celebrates, Israel prepares for the ground invasion of Rafah, where over 1.3 million Palestinians are seeking refuge. This comes as reports of extreme hunger continue to mount on the first day of Ramadan.

As filmworkers, Jews, and allies, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians. We won’t stop bearing witness. WHILE YOU’RE WATCHING, BOMBS ARE DROPPING" from Jewish Voice for Peace Los Angeles, 10/Mar/2024: