#I read/watch something

[random-thought-depository]

This old movie called Night Tide was on TV tonight, I tuned in partway through and watched part of it. Reading the summary of it on the TV guide site (obscure old horror movie about a mermaid) I was expecting it to be goofy and mediocre, but it's actually really good! Very effectively atmospheric!

It's about a young man who's in love with a woman named Mora, Mora might be a mermaid/siren who was adopted while immature and raised by a human. I think mermaids/sirens are supposed to be shapeshifting predators that prey on humans if they're real in this setting. There's a twist at the end I don't want to spoil which makes things a lot more ambiguous, but in the early-to-middle parts of the movie it was like...

... OK, family secrets, sea + beach + decay imagery, clear setting up of implications that Mora is a Creature and has killed multiple people and is kind of like a reverse Chirin (i.e. that Mora is a predator raised by her natural prey who wants to have positive relationships with members of the species that raised her but can't stop following her instincts to occasionally eat one of them), mysterious strange older woman who's implied to be a siren/mermaid in human form and who I get an idea might be Mora's birth mom, Mora's implied relationship with her own species feels very "The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them ... shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses ... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever..."

... This feels a lot like Lovecraft writing about Deep Ones, but at the same time wonderfully different from that (for one thing, I cannot remember Lovecraft ever giving the kind of significance and empathy to a woman character that this movie gives to Mora). It feels like a fundamentally and profoundly different yet parallel project to The Litany of the Earth.

@who-canceled-roger-rabbit, there's a scene where the protagonist has a dream where Mora turns into a mermaid and then a giant octopus and attacks him that reminds me of an idea you shared with me on Discord (I think the implication was supposed to be predation, but it could be read as your idea pretty easily!) and in general I think you might like this movie a lot!

[spitblaze]

[guy who doesnt watch shows voice] yeah ive been meaning to watch that show

[coddda]

I wish we could have met in some other way.

Lawlight Week Day 2: Soulmates

If you saw me repost and re-edit this several times uh No you didn't </3

Still frames/Individual gifs:

If you know what every frame is from you get a free cookie. by the way

[aarchimedes]

for context: I read the hobbit first over the course of two years when I was like 13, but I'm only now starting to read lotr. having a blast tho!

anyways, reblog if you feel like it 🙌🏻

[bophamet]

actually i think sony should take their sweet fucking time with beyond the spiderverse cuz even with the time they took with atsv it wasn't enough for the animators to have proper working conditions. like take ten years i don't fucking care, people can bitch and moan but i would rather know the employees aren't working 8hours a day plus overtime for 7 days a fucking week to get a movie about spiderman done cuz "waah waaaah i wanna see it" people won't shut up and sony demands their film be made for the profit of it all

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[drabsyo]

me? shipping another rare pair wlw in a fandom i'm 16 yrs late to? just another tuesday

[grey-viridian]

DTIYS for @tizeline

Congrats on 10k!!! (love your artstyle btw sooo soft and beautiful i wanna look at your art all day!)

The original outfit was perfect but I still felt like something was missing...

[sugarcoatednightshade]

thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.

[gothra]

I’ll never forget when I was arguing with a person in favor of total prison abolition and I asked them “what about violent offenders?” And they said “Well, in a world where prisons have been abolished, we’ll have leveled the playing field and everyone will have their basic needs met, and crime won’t be as much of an issue.” And then I was like “okay. But…no. Because rich people also rape and murder, so it isn’t just a poor person thing. So what will we do about that?” And I don’t think they answered me after that. I’m ashamed to say I continued to think that the problem was that I simply didn’t understand prison abolitionists enough and that their point was right in front of me, and it would click once I finally let myself understand it. It took me a long time to realize that if something is going to make sense, it needs to make sense. If you want to turn theory into Praxis (I’m using that word right don’t correct me I’ll vomit) everyone needs to be on board, which mean it all needs to click and it needs to click fast and fucking clear. You need to turn a complex idea into something both digestible and flexible enough to be expanded upon. Every time I ask a prison abolitionist what they actually intend to do about violent crime, I get directed to a summer reading list and a BreadTuber. It’s like a sleight-of-hand trick. Where’s the answer to my question. There it is. No wait, there it is. It’s under this cup. No it isn’t. “There’s theory that can explain this better than I can.” As if most theory isn’t just a collection of essays meant to be absorbed and discussed by academics, not the average skeptic. “Read this book.” And the book won’t even answer the question. The book tells you to go ask someone else. “Oh, watch this so-and-so, she totally explains it better than me.” Why can’t you explain it at all? Why did you even bring it up if you were going to point me to someone else to give me the basics that you should probably already know? Maybe I’m just one of those crazy people who thinks that some people need to be kept away from the public for everyone’s good. Maybe that just makes me insane. Maybe not believing that pervasive systemic misogyny could be solved with a UBI and a prayer circle makes me a bad guy. But it’s not like women’s safety is a priority anyway. It’s not like there is an objective claim to be made that re-releasing violent offenders or simply not locking them up is deadly.

[doctorsiren]

found a really cute picture in my Pinterest folder of a guy and a kid clinking glasses of milk and decided to draw it as Reigen and little Mob

[random-thought-depository]

Watching an X-Files episode I otherwise liked and that otherwise grew on me the more I thought about it and at the end a guy who's been prolonging his own life by killing other people is like "aging is a disease and I've found a cure" and Mulder and Scully respond with some casual deathism/use of the naturalistic fallacy ("aging isn't a disease, it's a natural process") and I'm just like...

... Yeah, reminder that "involuntary death is actually bad, not wanting to die and wanting to restore the physical health and vigor lost to aging is a rational and sympathetic and good motivation, the problem with obtaining immortality by a process that involves killing other people is 0% the wanting immortality part and 100% the killing other people to get it part" is actually kind of radical, I guess.

I otherwise really liked the episode and thought it was very intelligent though (it was "Nothing Lasts Forever"), I thought it did a really good job skewering a certain kind of Californian upper class culture:

The differences between how the male doctor who came up with the vampiric anti-aging treatment and the female cult leader he serves talk about what they're doing, reflecting the shitty gendered mid twentieth century "glamor job" socialization of the latter. The doctor talks about it as aging being a disease that comes with physically disabling symptoms and the vampirism as a cure. The female cult leader talks about it entirely in terms of desire to be beautiful and fear of being ugly. The doctor is afraid of aging because it will make him disabled and then kill him, the cult leader is afraid of aging because it lowers her social status in the only social world she's ever known, one in which a woman is valued largely for her decorativeness and fuckability, and she's totally internalized that toxic value system and therefore sees that loss of status as deserved.

The way the doctor is explaining to the cult leader how she shouldn't literally eat her own followers because she'll get more benefit from vampirically consuming them in a different way and her entire murder cult is set up to enable him and her to do that and he ends this statement in a way that sounds like he's shilling some new anti-wrinkle cream or something.

The #girlboss energy of her interrupting him telling her that to tell him he shouldn't condescend to her because he's a scientist and she isn't.

The cutesy euphemism for vampiric cannibalism.

When the cult leader makes a show of bestowing some small kindness to one of her followers in exchange for him literally giving his life for her, but even then it's really obvious that she's mostly interested in the exercise as an opportunity to express her narcissism. Like, not only do her actions implicitly communicate that she thinks her singing a forgettable pop song at him is a fair recompense for him literally dying for her and letting her eat him (though that's horrific enough!), but, like a bad lover who insists on doing something ostensibly to please you that's actually all about their own desires and fantasies and self-image, she makes even this ostensible small kindness fundamentally about her own nostalgia and self-love.

The cult leader getting confronted by Mulder and Scully, who expect to find an 85 year old woman, and if she was smart she'd lie and claim to be a younger relative or something, but no, she just straight-up tells them who she is, and I think it's cause she can't resist the urge to brag about her awesome beauty routine.

This cult leader is basically a much more malignant version of Norma Desmond, and specifically noted as having gotten her start as a child star. She's like this because she was suckled on that elitist youth-worshipping beauty-obsessed sexist value system like mother's milk. She's so awful, and yet at the same time so clearly that way because other people made her that way.

Also, one thing I liked about this episode that I also noticed as something I liked in Teliko was communicating that the vampire lives in fear of hunger; their existence is precarious.

[greatstrangerdinosaur]

They're cute

[weirdglassthing]

ouaw doodle dump!!

[pyralart]

I've always thought he acted like a child...

Also killing him isn't enough, I want to see him break down and cry.

I made a part two!

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Sally is the real neighborhood Rizzler... you all know i'm right...