My cats have this meow that means "please come with me to fix this" after which they'll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or 'empty') food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem', they look back at me, clear message.
What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.' I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me... the rain. "Please fix this" they say. "Please get rid of the wet"
"Silly kitty," I say, "I can't control the rain." I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.
A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
“No homo” is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard come out of the mouth of a human. This is my second favorite way to reply - the first, bloody retribution.
In 1940 the Indiana Supreme Court decided a case in which Santa Claus, Inc. sued Santa Claus of Santa Claus, Inc. over the question of lease rights in the town of Santa Claus, Indiana.
Unfortunately, this did not result in a law firm called “The Suing Santas.”
Excerpt from Haunted by the Narrative: Fictional Fiction at the End of the Early Internet Era, by H. Ma and T. O’Neill. Published in the Journal of Digital Archeology, Issue 43, pp. 87-93, May 2094:
In late 2022, a surge of posts on early social media site Tumblr (2007-2029) appeared discussing a film entitled Goncharov, supposedly directed by Martin Scorsese and with a tagline that called it “the greatest mafia movie of all time”. While references to this film exist on movie review sites such as IMDB (1990-present) and Letterboxd (2011-2036), they all appeared after the creation of the earliest posts discussing the movie on Tumblr. Despite the fact that Goncharov appears to be completely fictional, Tumblr users collaboratively generated a cohesive narrative for the movie including characters, themes, and story beats (Figure 3). The vast majority of these elements were communicated through the creation of fictional analysis, discourse, and memes reflecting the popular modes of discussing media on Tumblr during this time period. In Figure 4, a post from user “lesbiancousingreg” references in a derogatory manner fans of Goncharov who ignore the deeper meaning of the film in favour of focusing on “shipping” the various main characters together, a common complaint in online fan spaces at the time (Aiken et al. 2091). Exemplifying the ways in which the self-referential nature of Goncharov’s creation was used by those participating in it to hold up a mirror to themselves in a form of light-hearted self-parody.
The Goncharov meme is such a fun little spotlight on how people view media. Like, fake academic analysis about a movie that doesn't exist. Cool. But that's only the first level.
Next you have posts recreating a modern tumblr audience "discovering" an older piece of media and engaging with it through the lens of fan culture. Particularly tumblr-specific fan culture. Particularly in a way that feels like it got its blueprint from Dracula Daily. (Shitposts and memes, intense love for the most prominent female character, reads of complex romantic dynamics between characters, etc.)
Then you get fake discourse about the fake fan response to a fake movie that are quietly complaining about real ways real people respond to real media. I.e., America-centric readings, shallow, shipping-based readings, fans lionizing a protagonist not meant to be admired, etc.
(My personal favorite are posts that recreate the experience of being told a piece of media is so gay, you guys, only to watch it and find it isn't even remotely, that fans who wanted queer subtext wrung blood from a stone and thoroughly misled you.)
I also like the extra-meta ones about "this obscure movie being recently re-discovered," fake film history about copyright battles or the original cut being suppressed, etc. And of course, Johnny fucking Truant is here to give his editorial take on it, as he should be.
Pale Fire, House of Leaves, Goncharov. Humanity is such that every now and then we need to get really invested in fake arguments about a piece of media that doesn't exist.
It’s kinda funny that dictionaries show pronunciation with phonetic symbols, assuming most people that can’t pronounce stuff can crack that crazy code instead
every once in a while i can’t help but think about how wild it is that some lesbian was like “I’m so fucking starved for representation that I don’t watch movies unless there’s at least one scene where two women aren’t talking about a man so I can pretend they’re lesbians for five seconds” and then another lesbian put that sentiment as a gag in a comic, and then straight women took it and ran with it as Official Criteria for Feminist Media and then other straight women got offended by it and now straight women just debate the merits of it back and forth forever while still ignoring lesbian representation (and lack thereof) just as much as they always did
My friend is too afraid to ask you anything on her own so I said I'd help out. She would like to know if you've had to get stunt fennec foxes for any death defying scenes that you would have otherwise thrown David Tennant into without a second thought.
Thank you!
No, the fennec foxes will be doing the acting. For actual death-defying stunts we’ll have the actual David Tennant come in for the day and risk life and limb for us.