#*considering

[ninyard]

I haven’t even gotten to the opening ceremony yet

[plutosrobin]

avatrice fandom are we still kicking bc i may or may not be considering a new big fat AU for them…

[hebezunet]

yet again, thinkin about megaman 5!

[jessieren]

No idea which episode this is from but I love the snarkiness….

Plus whatever it is that he does with his mouth here sends me literally insane

Pretty sure the gif is by either @snappyjenkins or @endeavourlover but can’t remember which sorry

[of-swords-and-princes]

Happy Forever Love Day, travelers!

I've discovered that I enjoy sharing wips on here bc it motivates me to actually finish them... so pls enjoy this nureyev bartender au I've been working on with @scarlettrust + dahlia rose bc they kind of go together and they're red/pink for the holiday

[imaginal-ai]

"Man with Chrysanthemums" (0003)

(More of The Men with Guarded Hearts Series)

0002

0001

[doggyfood]

Ugh. Simps.

Anyway some more cat bloodmoon with a very changed design. I'm done with life rn and and

I'm fine tho, I'm not sick anymore:DD (mostly)

So

.

Yeah.

[zer0point5ive]

saw x if john drove to mexico with the apprentices

[ash-and-starlight]

ok i have other Posts brewing in my mind but rn the only thing i can focus on is like wow. esen really stopped his father from killing both ouyang and baoxiang in the span of like. a month

[themancorialist]

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

[niraa3]

I forgot my suffering and become thinking about your’s

[carolmunson]

thinking about older eddie, nothing hot but coming to your apartment where you’re mid clean listening to mariah christmas music in october and he just can’t DEAL with how bad he loves you so when you breathlessly turn around mid off tune belt he just pulls you in for a happy smiley kiss

anyway i have my period and feel sappy

[octarineblues]

donna's mum deserves a medal though. and the way she was portrayed too. she spent the entirety of the first special, as well as the previous fifteen years, stressed out of her mind that she's going to accidentally kill her daughter. she was visibly deeply afraid in that first episode, and the doctor did not explain anything (understandable, everybody was busy with uhh trying to not get killed and everything was moving very quickly and he was ALSO stressed out of his mind about donna), so she had no clue WHY he seemed somewhat callous about donna's life. she did her best to take donna's attention off the doctor, and she was clumsy about it, but she was also, again, deeply afraid for her daughter while also dealing with a life threatening situation. she really tried.

is she a perfect mother? no. she's overbearing, and we saw multiple little tensions between her and donna. but they are honest with each other, and support each other, and try very hard for each other.

she could have been made into a comedic relief, someone who "interrupts" the important plot, but she wasnt. we already knew that donna would survive seeing and interacting with the doctor, but she didnt! and it created problems. but she was treated seriously! this is a low bar, but im glad she wasnt shown as an annoyance or somebody who needs to calm down.

i am not really 'inside' the doctor who fandom anymore so i am probably repeating the conversations that already happened. but i felt so sad watching her. as audience we had more information than her and god, she couldnt do a lot, but she really tried to save her daughter.

[parab0mb]

If I had a nickel for every time I watched an AI character have an existential crisis after learning of the true nature of their existence, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's strange that it happened twice.

[wellntruly]

Some M*A*S*H laugh track thoughts (laugh talk), just because I'm having them.

The News, as it were, is that I’ve managed to push past my initial bounce right off no-laugh-track M*A*S*H, and have been catching some episodes without it as I was confirming my B-sides.

It is still true that I’ll get distracted in spots noticing that a scene is paced to something no longer there. This could, however, be an occupational hazard. It was once my actual job to pay attention to the rhythm of an edit of a TV episode, noting that we needed a bit longer of a beat here, or needed to tighten that cut there. But noticing this sort of thing is now mostly my curse—the rest of you don’t have to live like this.

It is also still true that particularly in those earlier days, where the laughter is almost always just ebbing and flowing around any non-operating scenes, to me it really functions much more like a score than anything. It was just part of the audio texture of the show, something I was just resting on, or kind of wrapped up in like a thick cozy blanket. That first episode I tried to watch without it, I felt like that blanket had been pulled off, leaving me feeling a little stark and cold.

However! It is also true, that some scenes? Do play quite different without a laugh track, play better. And in many different moods! I’ve seen characters reveal themselves in certain moments to have been funnier, needier, cuter, sadder. There was a scene of Radar selling Hawkeye shoes that had hardly registered with me with the laugh track underscoring it, that without it was suddenly so sweet and pathetic and lovable. Also, sometimes, scenes play worse! There it’s almost always that the characters feel more callous (that coldness, again). You also, of course, entirely lose the impact of the moments where the laughter goes away. Coldness in a different way (cold big good).

Toggling between the two sometimes reveals things about the actors’ performances as well, which I find really interesting. I only saw a couple from his era laugh-free, but I’m pretty sure Harry Morgan is funnier when the timing is all up to him. Loretta Swit is a fucking professional and built in so much space in the early days of her just making expressions and humph!-ing that she knew would play great with the track, suddenly making her deliveries feel oddly slow without it. Alan Alda, burlesque baby, is playing Hawkeye Pierce as someone who himself is also always waiting for the laugh, so his character feels entirely consistent across any form, which is fascinating and also makes me helplessly shove my hands into my hair. Silence around William Christopher’s Father Mulcahy feels awkward but it works, just a little differently; laughter version of the show is much fonder toward their chaplain.

Like how I feel about M*A*S*H in other ways, it drives me to distraction a little that I can’t have everything I like at once (later seasons Margaret, formally experimental episodes, Charles; early seasons rampant bisexuality, sharper anti-military sentiment, Henry). Sure I’m talking pie-in-the-sky, ‘give me this scene with the laugh track and then the next one without’ kind of dreams, but honestly mostly I mean on a technical level. The difference in picture quality between the restored & remastered edition on Hulu and the original broadcast version on the DVDs (as far as I can tell, the only source for the laugh-free cuts), can itself be almost laughable. Eye clarity in particular is really sapped by that low resolution, occasionally giving the Hulu version somewhat of an "unlocking the secret shrimp emotions" effect.

An interesting thing where at times the show can feel more real WITH the laughter in the background, because you can actually see into the faces of the people stuck in this tragicomic purgatory.

Then on the OTHER HAND, there’s really getting to hear the whoooole quality of Alan Alda’s voice in something like, say, this scene. (And oh my God.)

The nearest thing to like, a unified theory I’m probably gonna end up with, is that I wonder if M*A*S*H with laugh track and M*A*S*H without might be like film adaptations of books. This sets laugh-free M*A*S*H as "books," surely deeply pleasing the laugh-free M*A*S*H people who are going, correct, because the book is always better. Meanwhile the movie-first people are also nodding vigorously, with their belief that if you watch the movie first then read the novel after, you can love the movie itself, and then just get MORE and different material with the book later, picking and choosing from each to create your own personal whole of the art piece. And based on just, the very consistent anecdotes I've seen on this issue, I'm getting the feeling that similarly, starting with the laugh track version might be the surest way to love ALL the versions of M*A*S*H, every concurrently running story that this show was telling. Which, with a series this....surprisingly meta-textual, I sure want that.

[ellayuki]

no but like, the funniest thing to me, aside from the whole "SKK are idiots, who drops someone on their head 15 fucking times to wake them up?!?"?

this:

Past Bram & Fyodor at Bran Castle (which, y'know, Dracula's castle, in Romania)