imp-furiosa - Tumblr blog

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that thing about how removing the middle 2 panels of a cad comic makes it funnier is true 

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MAD MAX Fury Road

Petrick Animation

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Hey one of my best friends wrote a book!

You can order it at the link above in ebook, hardback, or paperback.

It's a fantasy/sci fi story in a modern setting that is fun in a dysfunctional sort of way. Here's the blurb from the back of the book:

A seemingly normal teenager discovers her extraordinary origins. Caught between two worlds with no real place to call home, Shiloh Frear must work to uncover the hidden truths of her reality. Can she rectify her choices and escape her prescribed fate, or will she remain a permanent fixture in a strange and uncertain world?

I also know that the second book for the series is already well under way.

Oh, and there's a cute lesbian romance. :)

Help out my friend and read a cool story doing it!

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Gun to your head you have to eat one of these American delicacies

The Europeans who made that poll have no idea how bad it can get.

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Weird bins, right? I have assumptions about how this breaks down and want to see how they stand up to some data.

After the poll closes I'll share my hypothesis with y'all.

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so if you just got each poll option to match the values of the numbers it shows you'd get pretty close. Like the first option at 1% of the votes, second option with 2%, and so on. It doesn't work perfectly but is a decent approximation compared to how it's looking now.

I think everyone needs to stop voting for the first option glfor this to have any chance of success though.

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I was thinking about the bit in breaking bad where saul wants walt to buy an arcade or whatever to launder his money and...

I realized that the show for a good chunk of it shows that despite what he wants, walt is no master criminal and that those around him are essentially as good at this stuff as him. like when it comes down to it skylar is a quick study on criminal activities. it ain’t that hard

but then also we get the mastermind walt who wins in the end and gets to be a hero of his own little twisted drama. I think it’s better if walt gets beaten. like you have to make some changes in season 4 (and basically an entirely different season 5), maybe earlier, for it to be cathartic, but let these other characters be as smart as him, honestly. it’s not the story that was told but the story that was told undermines a good chunk of who the characters are in order to make walt the black sheep winner of the tale

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glass onion tidbit (spoilers)

before I do this, know that this is a down and dirty quick splash of an idea that’s been knocking around my head since watching it. particular wording I know needs work and if I were writing up a paper this would be much more thought out and particular words would be very considered. in short, there are a few phrases I use here which could be picked at to undermine the entire argument and that’s not the sort of feedback I want to engage with. consider the vibe rather than the exact phrasing

thesis: Blanc’s character can point out what’s wrong but will not take the necessary corrective actions. a perfect allegory of liberal American politics that just wants to be correct, not do the correct thing

antithesis: it wasn’t Blanc’s action to take. he’s not some sort of white savior. he helped create the situation by exposing the truth but then left the shot at justice in the hands of the one person who deserved it, Brand

synthesis: Netflix workshopped and focus grouped a fun film targeted at a specific audience one might describe as “woke maskers” -- no offense intended to fellow politically motivated mask wearers. the film works very hard to create a situation where you can feel good that the Mona Lisa gets destroyed while of course the Mona Lisa doesn’t get destroyed irl. one of the first things it does is make up a fantasy mouth spray so that you don’t have to hand wring about Blanc and the others not wearing masks during their Covid party. our antagonist/villain is a guy just as insufferable as everyone else you want to punch on the screen, with the exception that we’re given some good reasons you’d actually punch him, whereas the social norms (the status quo we wouldn’t dare disrupt) say we can’t do that to the others

it’s a film about feeling good when the stars align and some rich asshole gets justice but not actually rocking the boat enough to do it for real. it’s about ignoring systemic issues to focus instead on intensely personal ones. the system is unimpeachable. you can only lash out at individual actors within the system when they commit some personal crime. like the “disruptors” in the film, the work’s final act of disruption and the good feelings it brings the audience are ultimately the false catharsis of a bourgeois placebo intended to placate its target audience. you know you’re good because you consumed a good film. there’s no need to do more (and you’re good: good people wouldn’t burn the Mona Lisa)

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Oh and I forgot to mention the second big issue with standardizing and cataloging it. The thing's a fever dream where you can't verify anything. Establishing a canon of largely accepted ideas defeats that. We need to deconstruct and destroy what we've already done and rebuild.

Keep it an unverifiable mess. Reboot.

If I were to venture a guess (and I’m about to), the attempts to standardize and catalogue Goncharov will kill it. Doing that begins to close it off. Trying to say this or that idea is accepted “canon” makes it feel less like a space you can play in and make stuff up. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but it certainly sours me on the thing to see people iterating the same ideas and not spinning so many new scenes and things that just obviously couldn’t all fit into a single film.

And like it may not die as a meme and the big stuff will still get out to a wider audience, but it’s less inviting for new people to come in because rather than just looking at a poster and thinking “what would I want to see in a 1970 gangster flick?” and making something up that fits that, there’s this feeling, this obligation, that you’ve gotta work with the “canon.”

So this is your call to buck the observation that we’ve collectively made a movie that reduced its homoeroticism to subtext. The meme’s like 5 days old. My favorite scene was the car sex scene that woulda fit in the Titanic except it’s Pacino and De Niro steaming up the windows and Scorsese shows Al jerking of Rob until he cums on their fancy suits.

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how good are deep fakes? how hard are they to make? I feel like this is a pandora’s box sort of thing but... Goncharov deep fakes?

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If I were to venture a guess (and I’m about to), the attempts to standardize and catalogue Goncharov will kill it. Doing that begins to close it off. Trying to say this or that idea is accepted “canon” makes it feel less like a space you can play in and make stuff up. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but it certainly sours me on the thing to see people iterating the same ideas and not spinning so many new scenes and things that just obviously couldn’t all fit into a single film.

And like it may not die as a meme and the big stuff will still get out to a wider audience, but it’s less inviting for new people to come in because rather than just looking at a poster and thinking “what would I want to see in a 1970 gangster flick?” and making something up that fits that, there’s this feeling, this obligation, that you’ve gotta work with the “canon.”

So this is your call to buck the observation that we’ve collectively made a movie that reduced its homoeroticism to subtext. The meme’s like 5 days old. My favorite scene was the car sex scene that woulda fit in the Titanic except it’s Pacino and De Niro steaming up the windows and Scorsese shows Al jerking of Rob until he cums on their fancy suits.

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Moby Dick Chapter One

***Spoilers for an 1851 novel, be warned. (As in if Whale Weekly is your first experience with Moby Dick, even in my discussion of Chapter One there will be spoilers from later in the book.)***

Ishmael goes to the sea to die. It's his stand in for actual suicide. “This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” But more than that, he notes how this draw is universal in people. “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.” These people are looking to the sea and more than that, want to get as close as they possibly can to the mass of timeless, bottomless, meaningless water that dwarfs their entire existence in every respect. And for them that's enough. Ishmael, however, cannot stop at the shore. He must meet death much closer.

Even when away from the immense ocean, Narcissus drowns himself in a small fountain: such is the pull of water. Ishmael seeks out the sea when living becomes too much. There's a tinge of consumerism in the problems he has with life. He specifically goes as a sailor so that he subverts the typical transactional exchange one would expect—that of a passenger. There's still a transaction as Ishmael gets paid for his work, but one gets the idea that he'd go and do it without pay all the same. What he gets from it is much deeper and more meaningful than pay. And it's absolutely impossible that a passenger could achieve the same.

Or perhaps!

This book is a post mortem for the Pequod and its crew. Ishmael has returned home from a harrowing journey. He is already changed forever and we don't even know it. As a modern audience we might diagnose him with survivor's guilt if we knew what unfolds in the tale. When we meet Ishmael he has already died. The man who cheerfully consigned himself to perdition boarded that ship years prior and the man we are to call Ishmael has since returned, trying to deal with his experience and make some sense of it.

His search for sense in the death and destruction ranges far and wide: from Greek tragedy to the Fates and a sort of predetermination, to a more broad and vaguely Christian sort of mysticism or at least acknowledgment that the sea has long been considered mystic and holy. The take away here is that none of it is satisfactory. Ultimately the thing comes down to Ishmael desiring the escape in his deepest being. The truth is in him and him alone, both as the sole survivor and as the man from the past who signed on to the journey under “the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.”

Whatever the broad cornucopia of possible beliefs and sense-making available in the world, Ishmael returns to an intensely individual and personal interpretation of it all. Even as we participate in the world, interact with it, and connect so deeply with others, we still ultimately live and die discretely. Any truth we can find is solipsistic despite a desire for something grander, something universal, and Ishmael doesn't refute this but instead lives in the contradiction of a desire... rather a compulsion that he can't quite fully embrace. Because at this point to embrace it is to accept a necessity or rightness in the callous destruction of a force of nature, as well as the suicidal bent of the man who brought them to face it.

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Goncharov is a Bad Meme...

...because it’s a bad movie. I don’t begrudge anybody their cult movie favorites, but so few people have heard of Goncharov that there’s a joke going around that it doesn’t exist and people have made it up just to troll. Ironically the things that have won it acclaim as a cult success are the very things that doom it as a work. You need look little further than the box office reception for proof.

Check out the top grossing movies of 1973 and you’ll notice that Goncharov doesn’t make the list. The Exorcist tops things out with a gross of $193 million. The bottom spot goes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with $8 million. Goncharov on the other hand was a commercial failure at release, barely recouping its unnecessarily bloated budget. Not that the budget was big, it was really a shoestring, but a list of production issues and re-shoots ate more and more time and money just to get something out the door.

Now I’m not trying to argue that box office revenue is all that matters for a good movie. It doesn’t at all. But in the case of Goncharov, the box office flop is informed by the way the film was made and thus informs its unique problems.

You see, Goncharov was filmed on location in Naples in the early 1970s during one or perhaps two extended “vacations” for most of the cast in the film. Highly unusual. But that’s sort of how things work when Stefano Pessina of Walgreens Boots Alliance (then Petrone Group) has an urge to play in an American mobster movie. He footed the bill himself (or rather convinced his daddy to), and the mess they shot was largely derivative and not worth any notice.

Scorsese wasn’t even involved until De Niro and Keitel approached him for help. Doing what he could to piece together what he assessed as workable bones, Scorsese tied together formerly loose threads and themes (notably the clock motif wasn’t nearly as significant before he took to work on it). The biggest thing is that he insisted on re-shoots as possible, adding new scenes, cutting scenes entirely, and notably excising all but a cameo of former star Pessina--the man can’t act. But he was paying the bills and while he’d find himself lucky to break even on the venture, his checkbook did at least allow the thing to see the light of day. Saved as much as possible by Scorsese’s talented eye.

All that cut material was saved, possibly at Pessina’s insistence, and has found its way to the public in the half century since its debut. Which has resulted in a number of new cuts and editions. It’s a favorite for film students to practice editing because the copious extra scenes allow wildly varying stories to be told. Since most people aren’t even aware of the movie in the first place, those that see it happenstance may well have found an unofficial edition. This is why we see many wildly varying “canonical” scenes. They all exist, but very few of them actually showed up in Scorsese’s theatrical release back in ‘73.

This is also why it’s lauded on that famous poster with “Martin Scorsese presents.” Despite his extensive work directing re-shoots and new scenes, editing and producing, Scorsese saw it for the train wreck it was and chose to distance himself from the thing. Al Pacino once joked in a TV Guide interview that he wished he had been “able to distance my name from it in that manner. I think we all do.”

Look, who among us has watched Mean Streets or Serpico? Both of those are better works than Goncharov and came out that same year. For a modern audience they would have worked just as well for this joke. Except then instead of topping it off with the ultimate punchline of hunting down the thing and being disappointed you wasted two hours of your life, Mean Streets or Serpico would be enjoyable watches. So save yourself some disappoint and go watch one of those instead.

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This is gonna be a Moby Dick blog for the next 2.5 years or so. Just read the first chapter and I get some thoughts. More to follow.

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was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. of "oh you mean like horton hears a who?"

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Hi y’all, haven’t posted in a long while but I had to say I think anyone who enjoyed Fury Road is likely to find a lot to love in The Last Girl Scout.

Hey!  Y’all like books?

If you like stories with queer protagonists, cool lady action heroes, hope in the midst of ruin, love in defiance of despair, cheesy military adventures, and lesbiabs who are in girlfriends and hold hands, check this shit out:

(cover art by the very cool and smart @soul-hammer​)

The past lies like a nightmare over the world. Two hundred years after the War when atomic fire rained from the skies and burned the world to cinders, human civilization has had time to rebuild within the burned-out husk of Old America.  But the old terrors of the past still persist, and while some work to build a better world, others still dream of reclaiming the glory of the Old World. In southern Appalachia, political commissar Magnolia Blackadder is sent on a mission into the irradiated Exclusion Zone of Old DC, where an evil that humanity thought it had vanquished centuries ago is waking up and rebuilding its strength.  Along the way, she meets a strange woman with terrible secrets and an unspeakable past, and as they forge a bond and brave the terrors of the wasteland together, she learns that some demons are not so easily exorcised, and that some stones are better left unturned. In this her debut novel, award-winning author Natalie Ironside delivers a new vision of the post-apocalypse, a tale of adventure, terror, love, and that most basic and most powerful of all human desires:  Freedom.

The  Last Girl Scout is a dystopian adventure story about queer hillbillies  going on a big adventure in the irradiated ruins of Old America.  If you  liked Fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or all things American Gothic then I  got five bucks says you’ll like this.  Plus it’s got lesbians in it  &and they are in love & they even hold hands.

“But Natalie,” you say, “How can I become a part of this amazing and true way?”  Well, I will tell you!

Buy on Amazon: (ebook AND paperback!  Wow!)

Buy on Gumroad:

Cashapp five bucks to $NatalieIronside and include an email address and preferred file type

Message me your X number and an email address and preferred file type (we call that Big Bill’s five-finger discout)

***

Here’s what the cool youtube man has to say about this very good book:

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been seeing a lot of bad takes comparing real life politics, particularly in the last week, to star wars or harry potter and I think I know the underlying issue

I mean, the issue aside from people being so buried in just one major source of media and especially one that has been so heavily tailored to sell stuff

the issue is that in both of these franchises, politics all gets boiled down to intensely interpersonal relationships to the point that a single death of a named character means much much more than a horrific act of genocide--and the narrative/author treats it that way so much that we may as well assume they feel that way too

many Potter fans love Snape. abusive, racist, sycophant of the wizard-hitler up until wizard-hitler killed his crush. so then he bides his time until he can get revenge in some manner and we’re supposed to understand that as some ultimate romantic nonsense and completely redeeming. never mind what he facilitated and how that arguably in part led to the death of the Potters. never mind that these teachers are just out here teaching power to kids and it’s just sort of understood/hoped that they’ll be good about using their powers or that Dumbledore will have the sense to find them in a moment of conflict to provide a one-on-one sort of ethics lesson. the institution of Hogwarts is absolutely fucked as far as providing a social framework for how and why to use magic in a responsible manner

the star wars scene that stands out to me as especially illuminating of this is in Revenge of the Sith when Anakin and Obi-Wan fight on Mustafar. Kenobi tells him Palpatine is evil and his response is that “from my point of view the Jedi are evil.” the whole story arc of the prequels hinges on Anakin’s relationships, particularly to Padme. Palpatine claims to want to help Anakin save her and the Jedi believe his attachment is immoral. but while it provides a personal motivation, and is a halfway decent condemnation of the sort of thing that’s wrong with the Jedi Order, we don’t really touch in any way about what sort of systemic stuff is going on or what any actual politics are aside from Palpatine wanting dictatorial power from an American-esque representative chamber

there’s no systemic analysis. and thus many people who enjoy these works are not taking any sort of lesson about how systems work to oppress people from them. it leads directly to a mentality of fight the people you don’t like because they’re evil because you don’t like them because they’re evil... it’s why even now Pence’s image in the eyes of liberals is partially rehabilitated because he simply did nothing to help Trump’s coup attempt. Pence is a monster, has been a monster, was a monster before Trump was ever on the political scene. but he’s literally being compared to Snape in some circles right now as admirable

on the flip side, Fury Road grounds EVERYTHING in what’s happening systemically--who controls the cars, the gasoline, the water, the very blood and bodies of the people? it’s intricately tied into the plot and the culmination of the movie, from the personal relationships to the structure of the world, is about reworking the the system. we see it in Max donating his blood to Furiosa in an intensely intimate moment. we see it in water being released to the masses in a grand and victorious gesture destroying the status quo

what I’m getting at is systems are set up to turn people into tools to continue to perpetuate that system. it doesn’t matter if you personally like a politician or not, you have to step away from that and see them as a tool of the system just as much as they see you as a tool (a vote) to get them elected. is this or that particular tool doing things to oppress you? are they fighting for your material well being? are they saying they’re fighting for you but actually advocating policy that will oppress you?

we need to understand politics as our relationship to the arrangement of power structures if we’re ever going to actually have those structures serve us. and more likely we need to recognize they were not built to serve us and we will only be served by destroying the structures and building new ones

finding a Snape or even a Harry Potter to cheer for will never accomplish that