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I don't know that it's the kind of movie you're actually admiring or hoping for, but I do think that is one of the main strengths of the John Wick movies. The worldbuilding is wild nonsense, there's almost no deep dialogue, the character motivations are all straightforward, but we're constantly given opportunities to watch Wick move against contrasting backgrounds. There's this Escher print, Three Worlds, and I think John Wick is pulling the same stunt; a single visual divided into three parts: spaces filled with "normal" people, less-capable assassins, and Wick. The way those three world separate themselves is through embodied motion: he's still when everyone is moving, moves when everyone is still, his posture is tight when the room is relaxed, etc. (Like, I get Keanu Reeves is not exactly breaking the mold of Hollywood types, here, but I think the approach to acting is embodied in the way you're describing, even if the approach to casting is bog standard)

Here's a thing I love in other's work and try to imbue into my own work: I love it when characters really inhabit their bodies.

I feel like, the last 20 years of Hollywood making everyone plastic and similar and airbrushed to hell and back, even book characters have started to feel disconnected from having a physical reality. They are identical dolls with different hair colors. You might get a description of how someone is generically good looking here and there.

But in many genres none of these bodies feel alive or specific.

And other than "how hot are you" they're often not treated as moving through the world differently. But if you're 5ft or 6ft you're going to interact with people and objects in your environment differently. If you're skinny or fat, if you're well muscled or not, impact how you move. If your features make you look older or younger than you are impacts how others react to you. That's before we even get into disability or race.

When I do see these variances depicted it's often just for purposes of self-loathing or cheap representation of bigotry.

Show me people sitting differently on the same furniture. Show me characters who sweat or have to blow their nose. Show me characters with fat rolls and gaps in their teeth who aren't there as the buts of jokes. She me characters who walk through a crowd differently.

I don't know. I just. I want characters who have bodies more than when they're injured or horny.

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I think the feeling of failure has to as much to do with how we stop, as that we stop. If you try to make your marriage last 5 years longer than it should have, and end it angry and miserable, yeah, of course that feels like failure. If you spend years of frustration not-writing your next book because you still want to think of yourself an author, that will feel like failure. If you run your business into the ground, and fire your employees without warning because you've spent the last dollar, that's the bit that's the failure.

"I got what I wanted out of it, and now I'm moving on" is very different than "I clung desperately to it but it still returned to dust" in both emotion and behavior. For sure, that difference could be partly attributed to a belief that everything successful lasts forever! But pure, stubborn inertia -- a general unwillingness to accept any change, good or bad -- is a little more base, and may be all that's needed to explain our habit of clinging to things that are over until they transform into failures.

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

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in the late 90's my mother was on a morning walk, and was passing a line of kids waiting for the schoolbus, when one of them had a siezure she is competent and excellent and did the above things, including asking the other kids for something soft to put under the seizing kid's head ...she was handed a tickle-me elmo. I guess the moral of the story is that you can do everything medically right and still traumatize some poor child by having a robot laugh directly in their ear while they can't control their body. still better than a cracked skull, of course, but

what you need to do if i have a convulsive seizure

I was just complaining to my friend that my oldest sister didn’t know what to do the last time I had a convulsive seizure, and I ended up injured because of it. And my friend said that actually, they don’t know what to do when they see someone have a convulsive seizure, either.

So I thought I’d explain it to you.  I’m not a doctor, and I have no medical training and not everything here will apply to everyone who has convulsive seizures, these are just the things that apply to me, and when in doubt, call an ambulance. 

Here’s what you do:

Look around. Am I lying in the middle of a busy street or on the railroad tracks, or somewhere else dangerous, like in the bathtub? If yes, drag me to somewhere where I am not in imminent danger of being hit by a truck or drowning. 

Am I somewhere safe, but lying near dangerous things like fire or knives or broken glass or pans of boiling water or anything that can hurt me? Move the dangerous things away from me.

My body will be convulsing. That means my head and my arms and my legs are rapidly hitting the ground. Put something soft underneath my head. If there’s a cushion right there, perfect. If not, wad up your coat or shove your shopping bag under my head. If there’s nothing immediately to hand that would take you more than a few seconds to grab, stick your feet underneath my head, it’ll work.

Am I wearing anything around my neck, like a tight collar, or a necktie, or a choker? Loosen it, so my airway is clear.

Don’t restrict my movements - don’t try to hold my arms and legs down. You’ve already moved all the dangerous things away from me, and cushioned my head, so don’t hold me down, unless it is necessary to keep me from doing serious harm.

Don’t put anything in my mouth. A lot of people think you need to stick your fingers or a spoon or something into the person’s mouth to prevent them choking on their tongue.  Don’t do this. 

Try to make a note of the time the seizure first started. If the seizure lasts for longer than five minutes, call an ambulance.

When the convulsing/jerking has stopped, roll me onto my side. If you know what the recovery position is, put me in the recovery position, if you don’t, just roll me onto my side, and check my airway. If I’m not breathing, or I’m having trouble breathing, call an ambulance.

It seems to be instinctive to help someone get back to their feet as soon as the seizure is over. Don’t do this with me. After a seizure, I’m in something called a post-ictal state. It makes me very, very confused, and lying on the ground or sitting somewhere soft is the safest place for me. If you pull me to my feet while I’m still this confused, I will walk directly into traffic or put my hand on a hot stove because I won’t know where I am, or what’s happening, and often I won’t be able to see at all for a few minutes. Keep me somewhere safe until I’ve fully recovered.

If I have another seizure before I’ve fully recovered from the earlier one, call an ambulance.

If you think I might be hurt, or you’re confused or not sure about what to do, call an ambulance.

That’s all there is to it. Make sure I’m not in immediate physical danger; cushion my head (but don’t restrain it); when the jerking stops, roll me onto my side and check my airway; keep me somewhere safe until I’m fully recovered, and if the seizure lasts a long time, or I have a second one, or you aren’t sure what to do or you think I might be hurt, call an ambulance. That’s it. It’s not hard, and I promise you can do this.

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Four of Swords. Art by Jesse Lonergan, from The Unveiled Tarot.

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I have a very esoteric question for JF - I remember hearing you did the artwork or photography for the Miscellaneous T album cover. Were the letters cut out of foam? Using a heated wire cutter? The blocky flintstone-ey letters in an interesting hallway is still very cool. Thank you in advance for answering if you answer and thanks for always being great.

The cover of Miscellaneous T

First I designed the typeface on graph paper (which was actually a bigger project than the cover). This was the very end of the pre-computer era, and the word "font" went from being a shibboleth of design people to being common parlance. While computers were shaking up the world of graphic design the limitations were immediate. While the general public marveled at the 25 typefaces available, designers were sorely missing the other 2000.

(At this time I imported my very crude work into a computer-based font design program, and that file named Conant was even uploaded on to a free font site. I have no notion of how long it played out there or if it was ever used elsewhere, but I like to think there is a restaurant menu somewhere using Conant.)

The idea of my design was drawn from the hand lettering of artist Ben Shahn (although I did not have a lot of direct source material!) The big features of this kind of design is the squared-off letter shapes and the modulating upper and lower case forms. His letter changes from poster to poster but in general it looks like this...

I was also thinking about the woodcut letter shapes on the cover of Edward Albees famous paperback books (a book that was everywhere) I suspect the design was also Ben Shahn-influenced.

So regarding the cover of Misc. T-

The letters on the cover were made with an X-Acto knife, 1/4" foam-core, tape, Elmers glue, paper and acrylic paint. They are not solid at all. I made them very quickly, and in a fashion that I had done many other projects.

I "blew up" the typeface just by eyeballing the points on the graph paper to the much larger grid I drew on the foam core. I cut out the letters, then cut the pieces that created the depth, and taped them into place on the inside of the letter form. (This next part I am have no memory of but I am pretty sure this is how I did it) Once the letters were complete I took very light paper (like a rice paper or old fashioned Xerox paper) dipped in slightly diluted Elmers glue and draped it over the edges of all the letters to hide the seams. I suspect I then lightly painted them with white paint just to even it all out.

Then I placed them in the hallway of my apartment. To trick the eye for a moment, I actually shot it from above so you see the letter shapes before you place the forms in my dilapidated hallway. Below is un-flipped image.

And here's me and John holding the letters...

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Mary Jo Van Dell（American）

Solstice 2023 oil on linen 34 x 34 via

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Pierre Menard, Author of the 70's Quixote-sploitation

i’ve seen tons of pastiches of 60s-70s exploitation films and b movies, and i’ve never seen any of them actually successfully recreate the magic, no matter how hard they try. this is because the magic derives from 1. extremely low budgets, short timeframes, and virtually no artistic standards as they throw all the buzzwords de jour onto the screen and add fake blood; 2. drug usage of a scale and quality i doubt is even possible after the reagan administration; and 3. the way that those classic b movies consistently fetishize lesbians, trans women, black culture, mental illness, italians, and more with the naive amazement of a caveman pointing at an airplane—and the last one in particular is all but impossible to recreate today. you can be as period accurate as you like with your afros and parachute pants and your blue-eyeshadowed women who prefer girls, but as soon as the genie is out of the bottle and you’re aware that this is demeaning to black people and lesbians, you have to either attempt to ameliorate it or you’re going to double down on being demeaning, and in either case you’re no longer capable of replicating what you want: the poorly-considered, enthusiastic fetishization of a guy who just learned about trans women from a news program he saw last night and thinks they’re cool as fuck

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whatever, dude. not my falcon, not my gyre

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Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

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This occurs because for any given person, they see n people of the opposite gender and n-1 of the same gender; if you allow for gay onanism -- edges connecting a person to themselves -- the bias disappears. As the old adage goes, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.

Consider the relationship graph of a complete binary polycule (complete = every person is in a relationship with every other person, binary = contains people of only two genders). call an edge in this graph gay if both the people in that edge are the same gender, and call it straight if the people in that edge are different genders.

We will say that a binary polycule tends straight if it has more straight edges than gay edges and that it tends gay if it has more gay edges than straight edges.

Show that if a complete binary polycule contains an equal number of people of both genders, then it will tend straight.

In terms of the size of the complete binary polycule, what is the critical gender ratio for straight tendency? (when the ratio of genders is above the critical gender ratio for straight tendency, the polycule will tend straight)

Do there exist complete binary polycules that trend neither straight nor gay? What about binary polycules that aren't complete?

Research problem: are there other conditions on the relationship graph besides completeness that also result in the existence of a critical ratio?

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Most AI bullshit is the fault of how AI's is made, but this one is also a tiny bit tumblr's fault, in an interesting web-accessibility way. Images on the web can be given alternate text for screen readers to read aloud to vision-impaired users. This is good, and should be done. That text is also used by bots scraping pages in order to build search engines or shitty AIs or whatever. It's free real estate image descriptions! Tumblr does include this alt text for elements of its UI; but it uses the same, single word to describe everyone's little profile pic: "Avatar", with no username or other information.

So every time someone on tumblr quotes "do we think maybe a vegetable would cause less despair" without much context, what bots see is, e.g.:

“do we think maybe a vegetable would cause less despair” still living in my head rent free. Avatar. fnord-official-deactivated2024071. Avatar. broken-giraffe.

Thus: "do we think maybe a vegetable" is a line "from Avatar".

And so I expect many other examples of Tumblr's favorite phrases will be revealed by AI wisdom to have come from the blue alien movie.

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Tolkien: "the name hobbit is the modern english outcome of a hypothetical old english hol-bytla, anaolgically following Westron kuduk from Rohirric kud-dukan."

Readers: "hobbit, eh? sounds hoppy."

i read the hobbit in 3rd grade and i thought it was really lame. however i liked bilbo baggins for some reason and i was fully convinced he was some sort of rabbit/mouse thing until i saw the lotr movies and was really, really confused

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This is the climactic scene in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Frogs

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I hang out with some people who make really distressing horror comics. Real blood and guts and veins in the teeth stuff.

They're the chillest of chill guys. Conjecture: If you want a sex joke that will make you choke on your drink, ask (the right) ace person. If you want violence and gore, ask somebody with no underlying baggage to work out. Why? Because those are people who can be comfortable and secure that whatever appalling thing they say or depict isn't a symptom; it doesn't reveal something. They're just playing in the space -- so they can go further with less fear.

i want what david cronenberg has

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IMO Diane Duane makes a solid and effective choice about this in The Wounded Sky: Scotty loves the Enterprise that is a vast and beautiful machine; and it is as close a love as that kind of love can be. Kirk loves the Enterprise that is a system; not just the machine but also all the people on board and all the things they do and stand for. What he loves is a home and a crew and a mission and a spirit and a history as well as a ship. (That conceit also explains how Kirk can order the ship to self-destruct: the ship is just a part of the Enterprise he loves)

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I can't imagine why the kind of pedantic pap I post here would make you want to, but always feel free

reblog if it's okay for your mutuals to message you and create an actual friendship, not just interactions

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What makes an interesting Batman/Wayne, to me, is when his methods are intensely rational -- world's greatest detective, backup plans with backup plans -- but his motivations are not. Ascribing pros and cons to "no killing" is the same mistake as arguing his money would reduce more crime than his fists. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not; he doesn't don a costume and swoop around at night punching people because it's the optimal solution to crime in Gotham, and he doesn't horrifically injure people physically but stop just short of killing them because that's the perfectly calibrated, calculated line of moral behavior. Bruce Wayne is compelled to literally fight crime. He is compelled to avoid killing. Batman is a great intellect attempting to work inside those constraints, laid down and enforced by trauma etc. The constraints aren't the plan. They're the rules, the context of the plan, like the laws of physics.

The no kill rule is not about Bruce just uwu not wanting to become a murderer it’s about knowing that no person is morally infallible and omniscient and you cannot be judge jury executioner and that you are allowed to keep this last bit of innocence that you do not have to live with the burden of someone else’s crime you shouldn’t have to give away a part of yourself just because someone else decides to commit a horrible crime it’s not about whether the Joker deserves death it’s about whether someone should bear the burden of becoming a murderer none of you fuckers know why the death penalty is bad

do you think a Batman who holds little kids to get them to safety can pick them up with the same two hands that took a life? Don’t they deserve better? Doesn’t he?