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Today is my birthday so...

Please make my dream of having my four best photos seen by many people come true!! ︎

Please spread this post! ︎

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Everything gold. 1984 interior design

Scan

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From the moment she met you, all she wanted was to be⸺

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Don’t forget the first victims when you go see Oppenheimer this opening weekend. Unforgivable not to include them in the narrative.

We love us some Nolan and Cillian but this is also a story that should never have taken place.

For further reading:

This is what happens when the US government goes nuclear-crazy during the Cold War and mines a shit ton of uranium. Lambs born with three legs and no eyes, and human stillbirths and agonizing deformities for those that survive. For decades it was referred to as a Navajo-specific hereditary illness. No one made the link to the mines and the drinking water.

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A lot of the response to Oppenheimer criticism has been "Clearly, you haven't watched the film, it isn't celebrating him! It shows all the things he did wrong" and I have to say... that's... still... missing the point of the criticism.

Oppenheimer occupies the same space as all the war films--like Dunkirk--that say "War is hell." While these films could and do skew towards "War is bad, let's avoid it," they still often... really end up saying "War is hell but let's pity the warriors and maybe consider the ways in which it was worth it."

The "war is hell" films end up completely missing the "anti war" mark because they choose to focus on the people waging the war, painting them in a sympathetic or at least humanizing light even when they're in the wrong. You feel bad when a soldier has to kill a kid on the other side--even if the kid is unarmed or begging for their life--because it's sooo sad that the soldier was driven to that point. And because... well, what else could they have done?

A much more effective "war is hell" film would be focused on the people whose land is ravaged by bombs. The civilians. The families. The people who lose their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their lives. Not in waging war but just in happening to live where war is happening. THEY are the real victims. They are not victimizers who might come to regret it (like warriors, like Oppenheimer) but like... actual victims.

In choosing to make a film about Oppenheimer and not about his victims--the people of New Mexico, the people of Japan, people forced into internment camps on US soil, and broader even then--you are saying "This man is responsible for great evil but let's humanize him too. Let's recognize that he didn't really have a choice or that maybe he felt bad about it. It was out of his hands."

Beyond humanizing him, it gives this history an element of inevitability. He HAD to do it. This HAD to happen. It's horrible that it happened but it was always going to happen.

If you focus instead on all the people victimized, you see all the reasons why it didn't have to happen.

And if Christopher Nolan isn't equipped to tell the story of New Mexican civilians who weren't given protective gear when the only jobs they had left were at all the labs or the stories of what a Japanese child does when his family is ravaged by American war crimes... he doesn't have to tell that story. The option isn't "Tell Oppenheimer or tell an intimate story he can't at all relate to." He could just... not tell this story.

Some stories really are not meant to have entertainment value. Some stories are not meant to be human stories but rather just facts on paper. Or told from the other human side. Sort of how like documentaries on serial killers often get it wrong but the fictionalized tv shows exploring ~what made them serial killers are ALWAYS wrong.

Some perspectives don't really need to be explored, is what I'm saying. Oppenheimer shouldn't be a grey or even dark protagonist. Some atrocities do not need to be humanized in any way, even if the humanity mostly culminates into "He was still wrong, though."

There are more efficient, less troubling ways to explore the motivation (the greed, the nationalism, the racism, the hatred, the warmongernig) behind bombings and wars like this. That would be better tools at realizing how we are repeating history, right now, in 2023.

That don't involve having to paint atrocities and the people behind them as grey or human or pathetic or pitiable.

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🎃HAPPY HALLOWEEN! STAY SAFE!🎃

A  face detail preview of my WIP Ink project. 

I am obsessed with Stefano and it is fun to draw him.

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Mushrooms

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Club Nintendo (México), 36831 - ‘Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’ Cover.

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xvi. Dark Mage.

xvii. Perpetual Fatigue.

xviii. Makeshift Priestess.

xix. Hidden Heart.

xx. Fortitude.

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yagedan.png

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The ending and opening screens for X-Men on the Sega Genesis

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