#I've been doing a rewatch of moder family

[lesbiantoaster]

*before the class where they're going to be being sent off to another pocket dimension; The groups were mixed by Ms. Poppet; Pluto has been assigned to the group with Annabel and it's running late*

Annabel: ugh... I can't believe! We're going to be late and receive demerits because of this kid... *Screaming into the staircase* PLUTO!!!!! BE SO DEAR, AND GET YOURSELF DOWN HERE!!!... NOW!

Pluto *running down the stairs panting, wearing a thigh pants and what it looks like a crop top (because Prospero cut all of his clothes at night)*: S-sorry... I'm here... It's not going to happen again, I promise.

Annabel *with disapproval in her voice*: I hope it won't... and WOW. You are NOT wearing that outfit.

Pluto *visibly flustered but trying not making a big deal out of it*: w-what's wrong with it?

Annabel *titling her head in the direction of where's Lenore (doing some lats second reading before the task) but still maintaining eye contact with Pluto*: Pet! Do you have anything to say to your KID about their outfit?

Lenore *looking up from the book*: Sorry. Oh, yeah! It looks really cute sweetheart 😄

Annabel:...

Pluto: Thanks, dad 🥰🥰🥰

[dorihey]

Today is the birthday of the late Ed Asner. Many are familiar with him as the voices of Carl Fredricksen from Up, Santa from Elf, and Hudson from Gargoyles, as well as Lou Grant from the Mary Tyler Moore Show and the aptly named, Lou Grant (series).

Back in the mid 2000's, my family and I were staying at a very large expensive house that belonged to friends of my parents as guests. They had a larger cable package than we did back at home, and they had ToonDisney. I remember seeing Gargoyles while staying there, on the "Hangin' with the Heroes" block in the evening. I remember seeing this show very vaguely as a younger kid, but I must not have been older than 6 or 7 or so given the original air dates.

I was totally enamored with these characters almost instantly. I hopped on their upscale internet, and immediately perused various Disney media sites at the time and started going down the rabbit hole with what little material the internet had back in like 2004 about the show. I learned about the cast, Greg Weisman's blog Station 8, and somehow convinced my parents to upgrade our cable so I could watch it. I even made a Neopets Fanpage about the show, and I have no idea if it's still around.

I don't have a lot of specific memories about Hudson being my favorite, or even having a particularly verbose knowledge of the show back them, but I DO remember becoming familiar and fond of Ed Asner, seeing a teaser for Up, learning he was in it, and that detail making it NECESSARY for me to watch it on release day.

I remember the evening before watching Up, and enjoying it, but I rewatched it with my mom a few days later. I am not sure what was different here, but I became OBSESSED. I joined a Pixar fan site, became a highly active member, and began absolutely marathoning this film. I also spent 5 hours one evening with a mechanical pencil, very little drawing skill, and drew this. (apologies, the picture is 14 years old and washed out)

To be clear, this was EXTREMELY out of nowhere. I had never drawn anything remotely this detailed before. So I (quite ignorantly, but still strongly) decided to change college majors and pursue art. Still workin' on that one...

Down the line, I ultimately watched Up in theaters 50 times, held movie nights for the fansite over Skype, made multiple forum signatures for myself and other members, and even got invited to Pixar, and met a lot of Pixar leadership (albeit briefly for most).

At the center of this though, Ed Asner was responsible for me gravitating to these characters. I've been pretty consistently enamored with his brand of wholesome curmudgeonry.

(I just made up that word, and I like it, so it's real now)

In any case, I've always felt a bit odd for having an attachment to an actor that hit his acting stride while being middle-aged in the 70s, 20 years before I was even alive - like I'm the only person my age that even knows this guy existed.

I had never gotten to meet Ed, but I did make an attempt shortly before he passed. It didn't work out, but his son Matt runs a charity organization called The Ed Asner Family Center that focuses on supporting individuals and families with autism and neurodivergence. I was fortunate enough to join an early screening of Dug Days before it released on Disney + thanks to a fundraiser by the center, including a Zoom Q&A with Ed. The thing I noticed during the call is that Ed was so immensely quick-witted, absolutely hilarious, and would not leave his piece unsaid. He had an astoundingly magnetic personality. It wasn't open mic, but I managed to get a question through - "What was it that got you into acting?"

Jonas Rivera, the Producer of Up was moderating the call and Ed about verbally trampled the guy by the time he was getting the last few words out, and he knew exactly what he wanted to say.

I don't have the exact words, but it boiled down to "escapism" - which was a bit shocking to me. You've got a former president of SAG, who'd been acting for longer than I have been a living person, and he was immediately compelled to tell everyone that the reason he got into showbusiness is to run from the world and its problems. It was remarkably humble.

Ed passed away exactly a week later. I couldn't eat for 2 days, I was so distraught.

I highly recommend that folks check out a lot of the acting Ed has done. He's absolutely brilliant, and one of the most fun people to watch. He was intimidatingly witty, and yet seemed like the guy who would talk to just about anyone. And then make them laugh their sides off.

I haven't shared my deep admiration for Ed too often other than with folks closest to me, but Ed Asner was a precious gem of a human being, and embodies a lot of things I think the world - particularly folks of the male persuasion - should have a bit more of.

Here's to you, Ed. Have a happy birthday up there for us, big guy. We love ya. <3

(side note, the portrait at the top, I drew to commemorate his first birthday after he passed in 2021. The picture at the bottom was drawn, but not adequately finished imo, about 2 weeks before he left us. I need to give it a proper redo someday)

[nashaalya]

rewatched kathryn bigelow's near dark, a moderately famous vampire western set in rural oklahoma. spoilers ig

there's something quite timeless abt this film's uncompromising commitment to the contrast between civilised, sedentary pastoralists and barbaric, itinerant nomads. this is a film the romans could've made about the huns, and the han could've made about the xiongnu. i imagine this is a genre convention of westerns i'm not privy to; i'm only in here for the vampires, after all

unlike just about everyone else who's ever written a thinkpiece on this film, i don't mind caleb becoming human again at the end—i like to think of his time w the vampire family as a kind of long fever dream, and i suppose there's a kind of narrative consistency to ending the film w him 'waking up'. obviously you're meant to interpret it as the return of an obedient son home after an ephemeral encounter w what 'really' lays outside the confines of the patriarchal enclosure—except caleb got dragged into the vampiric lifestyle without his consent, and is shown enjoying his time w the vampires for a grand total of ten minutes. so there's no actual internal conflict going on here. fuck off bigelow

i do like the implications of mae being allowed to regain her humanity despite being an unrepentant murderer solely due to her being the subject of caleb's affections. though i suppose it's a more interesting (or, at least, less didactic) conclusion than her dying w the rest of the vampire family would've been

the lifestyle of the vampire family as presented in the film seems… pretty boring. how does one decide to spend eternity with no apparent hobbies other than murder? i appreciate the aesthetics of yokel vampires, but i'd like for them to enjoy some kind of cultural enrichment when they're not lighting corpses on fire

speaking of fire, i don't think i've ever seen a piece of vampire media depict what being burned alive feels like, or what effects fire leaves on those who manage to survive being burned. maybe i should do my part…

[munamania]

abelia, daffodil, camellia, jasmine, nutmeg, 3, 12, 21, 37, 49 go crazy

tehehe let's go

abelia ⇢ do you have a particular piece of jewelry you always wear or can’t part with?

i want to be that bitch but i hate having things touching me when they don't have to be. closest i got was a necklace i had on for several months but i snapped it over spring break :/ ig hopefully when i get a piercing i'll have that at least!

daffodil ⇢ do you have siblings? if yes, in what ways do you think you’re similar to or different from them?

yes i do! i have two older siblings. i've always been told i'm very similar to my brother, which i find sweet and heartbreaking cause he was in college before i was even like. conscious. i looked up to him so hard though so it makes sense. i have a similar like physicality to him too. i think we're all u know. a product of our upbringing. my brother has always been an artsy dude, always more of a radical thinker and funny and i've modeled my music taste after him for a large part of my life. he's a little more of a stiff now having like a family and a job but he is a freelancer so that's cool lol. my sister is hardcore like. she's disney adult not in an I can't forgive you way but it becomes a bit much very quickly. she and her husband are very Capitalism. she's also very much more likely to side with my dad on things or at least vouch for his perspective. so i think there's always been a bit more of a tough barrier between us. but i've still hung out with her and her husband a lot in the last several years

camellia ⇢ what were you like when you were younger? do you think you’ve changed a lot?

mm. i dont know that we wanna get into this <3 im the same im different every little girl i've ever been lives inside me idk who she was at the time idk if i know who she always was but we're all here and also i've changed so much in a year alone but i have a lot of the same um problems lol idk

jasmine ⇢ do you have a movie or book you loved but will never watch/read again?

i don't have a good answer for this other than i still havent rewatched dead poets society since november 2019.

nutmeg ⇢ how’s your room/home decorated? do you have a specific theme or style going on?

UGH um just once i would like to have a genuinely homey feeling room but something still feels off. i have some posters and i got lights but it still feels like. cold. idk!

3. do you leave the window open at night?

not rn but you know who does! peeta <3 during summer i like to yeah unless it's way too humid or something

12. what kind of day is it?

i was on a shoot today for someone's short film and it was really fun! i love working in film i love the crews i've worked with. i stepped in this GIANT puddle and my foot got so so so cold but luckily it was a moderately warm day out. otherwise im very tired and lacking motivation but um <3 we stay silly

21. something you’ve kept since childhood?

i have cards from when i was really little and a lot of notebooks and papers from like middle school containing plenty of bad fanfiction and notes passed between my friends and random written rps

37. someone in your life, other than a relative, you’ve known for 10+ years?

this one friend of mine who's like insane like i've almost cut her off several times. but we just don't talk a lot. and two of my other friends who are twins and are literally always a piece of my heart though it's been so long since we've really talked

49. can you skip rocks?

i used to be pretty okay at it as a kid now... idk i might flop <3 i'd still try though. sometimes i just liked to throw bigger rocks to see a splash

[ardendrifter]

My first thought is, I don't know how to Tumblr. 

My second thought is, I don't know how to social media.

My third thought is, I don't know how to be a human being.

And it's this last, unfortunately, that seems to stick with me.

So I take a bath and call my mom, because my relationship with my family's been doing better recently and I'm trying to talk to all of them regularly. Dad's a steadying force in my life so I try to get a few minutes with him every day; but Mom's always been better at fielding my existential dilemmas.

I ask her what she'd read, if I sat down to jot my thoughts down for a half hour every morning. Turned into a chatterbox at six months old and never really stopped, except for a brief period of moderate head trauma that made it oddly difficult to remember nouns and verbs--still kept most of my adjectives, for some reason, and prepositions were practically untouched. Swears safely tucked away in the reptilian depths responsible for grunts, growls, shouts of ecstasy or pain. 

So I ask my Mom, You've heard me yammer on for years. Which of my thoughts are the interesting ones?

And she said [...].

Well, that's the part that's hard to talk about. Do I remember what she said or not?

Start with the good advice, which I do remember. She sent me a meditation on insight timer and said, Try this for five minutes every morning while you're coffee's brewing. When you're feeling clearer, sit down with your coffee, set your timer for a half hour, and write whatever comes out. Don't worry about your audience. You'll find out something about who you are, and who's interested in knowing the real you.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

No idea what kind of conversations she's been having with my brother; but I just spent a week in his company, looking after you. I can't help thinking that maybe they didn't talk to each other at all, just spent time with me and noticed where the cracks were forming. They're both reasonably perspicacious, when it comes down to it.

And here's the part that's hard to talk about, the part I'm not sure happened.

She said--I *think* she said--that she and Dad rewatched "Girl, Interrupted" last week and there were ways the main character reminded her of me.

(I've never been diagnosed with a personality disorder. That's the truth. I've had no real reason for a Complex PTSD diagnosis, either. PTSD, yes. Depression, yes. A handful of anxiety disorders that change with the doctor prescribing the medication. A therapist tried to get me coded for DD-NOS, on account of the depersonalization and derealization issues, and I'm grateful to him still. But let's say I have PTSD. Let's say that no matter how much work I put into myself, that's the diagnosis that keeps coming back like a bad rash.)

I digress.

Here's what I think my mom said:

I think she said, You went through some things as a teenager here, and it's hard for you to always know who you are and what you want.

She said some other things, like that the one thing everyone in the family agreed on was that they wanted to support me in continuing to write fiction. She said she was happy I got to spend that week with my brother, because he was good for me and loves me fiercely, although he gets a little exasperated sometimes when he can't figure out how to help me. She said she wanted me to take the time to work out what I really wanted to do for work, whether it was nonprofit work or LGBT advocacy or coffee roasting or something else. She said if I only wanted to do it part time, so that I could keep writing, then that was not just alright, but something the whole family would support me with. She said I had a lot of life experiences, and that I'd experienced them deeply, and that I could do just about anything. 

I don't remember what all she said. I try to get it down in order and it tangles together with chit-chat about Grandma, and Dad off at band rehearsal, and the sewing class she's trying to take in her off-hours, and our respective forms of neurodivergence.

I try to write it down, though, because she's your grandmother and she adores you, and you should know what kind of woman she is.

I hope to document this year, River, because it is the year I transition. Thirty minutes every day, and maybe someday you'll read these words; or anyway, someone will.

I just put together my to-do list for starting that journey. I'm elated. I'm terrified. I'm thinking the list is probably lacking in granularity.

There are things I started to tell Mom about today. She broached the topic of my 10th grade experience for the first time in...years, probably. 

My brother asked me about it recently; it might have been the night of our cousin's funeral. Was it the next night? My sense of time remains uncertain. But we were sitting up late together, your parents and I, on the porch of the cabin by Lake Champlain where our cousins held the memorial service. I don't know if we'd had a frank conversation about my gender experience before--certainly not sober. But I told him I wanted to go on T, and that led other places, like the impact of the conversion therapy written into my IEP, that last year of public education. 

I had to explain what derealization was: I had no idea I'd never told him about all that. I have a vague memory of texting with him--perhaps once, perhaps twice--that year or two I was in therapy specifically for personality consolidation. I couldn't remember much about being fifteen, so I asked him what he remembered. He told me about what his life was like, and witnessing a few of my meltdowns at home. There were only two or three, I think. It wasn't a terribly dramatic breakdown that I had. Nothing was real, and then I was sleeping all the time, and then it got hard to get me out of bed in the mornings. But academically, I shone. My writing won awards.

There was just...no one in there at the time. I had a parent who pushed me and two parents who supported me as well as they knew how. I went to college two years early on a full scholarshop.

Only...I never entered another contest. Twenty-five years passed before I submitted another piece of writing for publication. 

I even stopped playing soccer. Competition made everything feel distant and strange, as though it were farther away than it looked.

What happened to get me into therapy--the story I told your father, my brother--was this:

I got a new GP. Same office, different doctor. A woman, this time. She took a fresh case history and bumped into the cardiac event I survived twenty-odd years before. And I told her, Conversion therapy was written into my IEP when I was fifteen.

She said, How long were your sessions?

And I said, No no, it was all day at school, and at the bus stop, and during extracurriculars. They calmed down a bit once I got a steady boyfriend. But it was still this constant surveillance--how I spoke, how I sat, how I raised my hand, what I read, what I talked about, how I walked, how I participated in class. It's one thing to fail at girlhood--every fifteen-year-old of that generation probably felt like they were failing at their assigned gender. It was the primary marketing tactic the Viacom-Industrial Complex used to sell us things.

But this was different.

I was failing at something nobody would explain, and all the adults around me were afraid, and nobody would explain what was happening or what I was doing wrong. I didn't know gay people existed. I didn't know a thing about transgender identities, except in little flashes here or there--the prophets Daniel and Nehemiah, who in all likelihood have no influence on your life, were castrati, and figures like Loki and Old Man Coyote switched back and forth from male to female. There was an older kid in school whose name I didn't know, whose gender I couldn't code by looking at them; but I took that to be a failing of my own, and I was too embarrassed to ever tell anyone. There was a sweet gentle kid I knew from my sixth grade class who never quite walked like a boy; and later, in seventh grade, he stopped coming to school. Some of the kids said he'd told someone he was a girl trapped in a boy's body, but almost everyone thought it was because he had a couple different learning disabilities, and acted more like a super-innocent third-grader, and spent most of his time playing games of make-believe by himself. And some of the kids said he shoplifted from a gas station so that he could go to juvie, because no matter how bad it was there it wasn't home and it wasn't our school.

I never knew the truth of any of those stories. I never connected them to my own experience of genderfluidity. Mom and Dad let me be what I was at home, and dress up however I liked for Halloween, and play any make-believe character I wanted. That's how it was. When I was in second grade, my class had more girls than boys, and when we split up by gender there were some girls--myself included--who would be honorary boys for the day. And other girls would ask me in the morning, Are you a girl or a boy today? And I'd feel into it and answer--but more often, I'd already be dressed as the gender I felt. So I learned something important about myself that year: I was a girl who was sometimes a boy. My best friend was a girl who was always a girl, and my brother was a boy who was always a boy, and my next-door neighbor was a girl who liked to pretend to be a boy, but woke up a girl every morning and remained a girl throughout the day, whether she played Peter Pan or Captain Hook or Smee. 

So until I was about nine, I used to tell other kids I could switch back and forth between being a girl and a boy, just like Loki, and sometimes I could choose which one I'd be but sometimes I'd just shift for a while, so they should ask which one I was. And that tapered off around fourth and fifth grade, but even in a conservative farming community none of the other kids acted like it was weird.

I was a girl who was sometimes a boy.

Simple, right?

In retrospect, given the culture wars of the 90's, it seems almost a miracle that I made it to fourteen before any of it came to a head.

And here's the truth: left to my own devices, I may have ended up vaguely butch, and bi, and probably some flavor of TERFy essentialist second-wave feminist. That's its own form or repression, in its way. 

But I wasn't left to my own devices, was I? 

The reality is that you can break down someone's gender expression and rebuild it in whatever image you like, but to make it stick you have to break down their gender identity too. And it's maybe the popular thing to claim that gender identity is immutable--that's certainly an experience people have, trans and cis alike. But believe me when I say that gender identity can be broken down like anything else about a person.

You have to break just about everything else about a person first, though, up to and including reality-testing.

And they did. They stripped away everything that made me a person--not just on purpose, but in planned, methodical fashion, with goals and dates and benchmarks. They kept meticulous notes on my progress. They did these things because they believed it was the right thing to do. And Humpty Dumpty never quite went back together again. I never felt like a girl or a boy or a man or a woman, and I never quite felt like a Something Else either. Gender was a rich subjective experience--a color to paint with, a way to play dress-up. On good days, it felt like a kind of spiritual attunement. It was a changing force for the rest of my life.

But I'm telling you a different story, I suppose. About my doctor.

I told her what happened. She was too professional to say, You know uh people die from that. But I wondered, then, if that's what she was thinking. It's something people said to me, and say to me, when they find out.

She was a consummate professional, but her eyes were all blank and she kept going for her pen to jot down notes, only she wasn't looking at her pen or her notepad and her hand kept missing.

I remember that part clearly. I remember it, but it might have been a different doctor, or maybe a therapist. It might have been a different time that that happened.

The clearest thing I remember--the last clear thing I remember--is that she asked, very matter-of-factly, whether I had experienced other abuse before the age of eighteen.

The next thing I remember is standing on a street in a strange part of the city. I could not have told you my name, how old I was, or what city I was in. I was sober in the strictest sense of the word--I had not imbibed any substances, prescription or otherwise--and I had a receipt in my pocket from a series of finished errands at the post office. I couldn't read anything properly, which is usually a sign that I'm dreaming. So I thought that's what was going on.

Worked it out eventually that I was standing in a crosswalk weeping, because a woman walking a golden retriever stopped and pointed out a cafe across the street, and the lettering on the sign was big enough I could read it. So I crossed to the corner and she asked if I could look after her dog for a few minutes while she stepped inside and bought herself a coffee, and I don't know if I said anything but I sat on an adirondack chair in front of a brilliant fire-truck-red cafe and petted a golden retriever for a while, and that was nice. I think I had some vague sense that I was being managed; but I was also petting a dog, so that was alright then. The woman came back out eventually and brought me a cup of coffee and I couldn't stop crying but I felt calmer. I don't remember anything about her--not her face, not her age, not her race, not the sound of her voice--but I remember her dog vividly.

Anyway. Drank my coffee. Third of the way through the cup when my pocket vibrated, and I discovered I had a phone stuffed in there. I went to Google and wrote, I am a conversion therapy survivor and I need help. And Google, quite helpfully, supplied the number of Seattle Counseling Service, which at the time was one of the oldest LGBT-centered mental health organizations in the city. And I got on the phone with a clinician who helped me navigate to the bus stop, and then to their offices. 

Here's another true thing: I don't know why I told you this story, unless it's to avoid telling you what I told my mom, which is to say your grandmother.

I don't really remember what I told her. Something about how growing up queer in that part of the world, during that particular era of the culture war, trained me to protect parts of myself--and more to the point, to protect myself by protecting information. To manage my life in terms of circles of privileged information.

(I lied to my brother last week about something painfully stupid: the platform that hosts my serial novel. I could have just asked him not to read it. I know him well enough to know he'd respect that boundary. I want to say I don't know why I did it, but that's not how it was at all. To tell him about my novel at all felt like heaving a boulder uphill, sometimes with more success than others. I could talk about the reader community all day--that part was effortless. But a dangerous detail like where to find the full text? I told him the closest thing to the truth I could bear. It's not deliberate dishonesty so much as a failed effort at honesty. He worked it out before I could heave the real answer out of my mouth. And then he confronted me, and I couldn't bring myself to talk about it.)

Circles of privileged information.

That's what Mom and I talked about today, a little. I told her that two things were true: the women who tried to craft me--whatever I was--into a straight submissive Christian girl did something deeply unethical and deeply harmful; and they did it because they believed with all their souls that they were doing the right thing. I told her I'd done a lot of work in therapy to let both of those things be true at once.

But that wasn't the important thing, was it? The important thing is that I got quiet for a few minutes.

When I go quiet and there are no words, just the feeling of heaving a boulder uphill. Maybe it's a successful push and I manage to say something true. Maybe my aim's off and I land on a near-truth instead, and if I remember I'll try to go back and correct myself later. If I manage it. If I can.

Fiction is simpler. The words flow like water and the details land faraway enough that I can bear to say the unspeakable things. And anyway, we all know it's supposed to be make-believe. We all know to trust the substance, and forget the details.

This? This is harder. But there's 566 anti-trans bills kicking about this stupid country; there are lawmakers trying to legislate childhoods exactly like my 10th grade year across whole states; there are children like the one I was standing in the crosshairs.

So I'm trying to write my own experience as a nonbinary human: messy, dangerous, yes; and yet our community has this love for one another that is incandescent. I learned the reality of love from fabulous queers. I'm trying to document a year in transition.

Know that I love you, kiddo. Know that I'm doing my best. Nothing has made me happier this year than learning to be your uncle.

See you soon.

[queen-of-my-goofball-army]

"Sometimes the first villain that we love when we're a kid will remain one of our favorite villains when we're an adult. It might also cement your archetype for how you prefer your villains to be (me preferring them rather goofy than threatening.)" (Me.)

How many of you remember the first villain that you loved when you were a kid? The one that changed the way that you saw as "different" from all the others? For me, I remember mine. He's been a major comfort character of mine since I was five when the show was airing and I watched it with both my mom and my babysitter Natalie. Kim Possible as most of the fans would say it's a very special show. It was different from everything that was on at the time and it dealt with the trails and tribulations of teenage-hood differently too. But we're not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about the villains on Kim Possible. The villains were all equally creative and unique in their own rights, most people would say that there favorite was Shego, but if I'm being entirely honest if somebody forced my hand and made me pick between her or her copartner I would ALWAYS pick Dr Drakken.

Ever since I was a kid I've always preferred villains that were more comedic than an actual threat on cartoons. The start of that for me was with Dr Drakken. Whenever he wasn't the main villain in an episode I was so upset. He was the best part of the show when I was a kid. For some reason he was always the thing that stood out to me because I could maybe I could see him in that episode. Part of it was because he was just this childish character always having temper tantrums. It led to my favorite running gag on the show whenever he would get so mad that he ceased to remember words. (The other one being that you never actually figured out how his skin turned blue in the first place. The best thing that we know as the audience is that it happened on a Tuesday before the ending theme interrupted him.)

When I went back and rewatched the show when I got a little bit older I found that it was better than just having Drakken as the main villain. I found that I had a soft spot for Ron as well. But that never meant that my favorite character had changed. Drakken was always special for me. I never really loved villains when I was a kid I always rooted for the heroes. But in the case of Kim Possible I just loved every second that he was on screen. Whether that be him interacting with Shego, him explaining his dastardly plan knowing what would happen afterwards but just not being able to help himself, or just the daily antics that he would get into. My favorite was on the day that Shego took a vacation day he spent the entire day trying to open a jar of pickles. The entire day. And that scene gets funnier every time that I watch it. Now whenever I can't open something and I take it to my dad, even if it isn't a jar of pickles I still call it Operation Gerken. He never watched the show with me and I think that one day somebody will understand that reference and I'll be funny.

I loved that Drakken was allowed to be not *entirely* evil. He had childish interests. From the cocoa moo incident, to the time that both him and Ron loved the same childish Christmas special. He wasn't just your typical evildoer. But then he'd come back the next week doing the same shtick. When you meet the rest of his family you find that he actually might be the smartest person there. I mean he had a ditzy mom and an idiot for a cousin so that's not really saying a lot. I like to think that when he was Drew he was autistic. It's just a little HC that I have that I have a soft spot for.

When we talk about voice acting in animation one of the few that I mention first is John DiMaggio. He's one of animations biggest talents and has a really long list of credentials that make him the fantastic powerhouse that he is. If you've ever watched Futurama he was Bender, if you watched Adventure Time or Jake Long American Dragon he was talking dogs in both of those as Jake and Fu. Growing up I heard him everywhere it cartoons because in the early 200s he was on the top of the world. The entertaining factor was that it was always something different. Ever since I was a kid though I've always loved Drakken the most out of all his other roles. It was the most different sounding from his natural way of speaking. I've had Futurama on my list because I'm also a moderate Billy West fan as well and I know that show is where he really shines. DiMaggio's voice for Drakken is something that I never really forgot. It's a voice that stuck with me as a child whether it be randomly remembering a line of dialogue or his shampoo rap it's a voice that stuck with me. Also, Drakken has one of my favorite villain laughs of all time. I love just how crazy it sounds and it's one of my favorite things that I could listen to on a loop.

I'm currently just starting to rewatch Kim Possible for the fourth time and every time that I come back and rewatch the series I remember how much I love Dr Drakken. It was why Dr Doofenshmirtz always sort of bugged me because it felt like they were low key taking from KP. I love both of them because they are unique in their own rights but the similarities weren't going over my head when I was growing up. Throughout my childhood Drakken was the only villain that I loved and that is still true to this day. While I have found other villains that I loved nobody has ever come close to touching the best of them all in my opinion Drew Lipski or Dr Drakken.

[k-s-morgan]

Hi! I've been rewatching hannibal again and i'm mindblown by how many things i missed. There are still things that i don't really understand tho. During the 1st season it seemed like hannibal was concerned with how hard jack was pushing will. He constantly told will and jack that things were becoming too much. At the same time hannibal was hiding the fact that will had encephalitis which was making will go mad. What is hannibal trying to do here and why? Could you help me understand this🙏🧠

Hello! Oh yes, this show has such a great re-watch value. S1 can be confusing in particular. 

First, about encephalitis (I’ll take some stuff from my older post). Hannibal wanted Will to Become. He viewed Will clinging to limitations and denying his true nature as something very harmful, so he tried to shatter these limitations by using encephalitis as an opportunity. The sicker Will was, the less control he had, and the more chances there were of him snapping, acting on his urges, and killing someone. In addition, by losing time, Will couldn’t confirm to himself that he hasn’t murdered anyone. I believe Hannibal was waiting for him to become fed up with all this and decide to go dark because it’s easier than fighting. We can see his doubts with Sutcliffe: Will is cleared of all charges at first, but he still feels uneasy about his murder, wondering if he could have done it. 

Hannibal tries to further push it forward by making it sound like Will killed Beth, Georgia’s friend - Will is quick to argue against it, but Hannibal’s goal is clear: he pushes Will to face his darkness from different angles. Jack might think that the problem is in Will’s empathy, but Will and Hannibal know that it’s about Will’s darkness and his attempts to fight it. That’s why Will is followed around by Hobbs, his first kill. Will knows his repression is the likeliest root of his problem, and Hannibal hopes that with enough pressure, he will grow weary of fighting, snapping and becoming reborn. 

Obviously, the plan was very dangerous, but the show has its own dream logic and Hannibal has confidence that borders on downright devilish. We are led to believe that he flawlessly controls Will’s state of encephalitis. That’s why he’s so insulted when Sutcliffe asks him if he’s going to let Will die. He’s equally offended when Gideon suggests that he doesn’t care about Will because of him having a seizure - he repeats, “I said it was mild.” So Hannibal is certain that Will is going to be fine. He has a great conversation with Bedelia that explains his train of thought about it.

Hannibal: I see myself in Will.

Bedelia: Do you see yourself in his madness?

Hannibal: Madness can be a medicine for the modern world. You take it in moderation, it’s beneficial.

Bedelia: You overdose and there are unfortunate side effects.

Hannibal: Side effects can be temporary. They can be a boost to our psychological immune systems to help fight the existential crises of normal life.

So, in Hannibal’s mind,  Will’s illness was a medicine: it was supposed to cure him of his stubborn clinging to normality.

There are several interpretations regarding Hannibal’s remarks about Jack. Hannibal wants Will to acknowledge that he keeps doing this work despite the pressure because he’s drawn to darkness, with saving lives being an excuse. That’s why he stays: his longing for darkness outweighs the risks and the discomfort he’s experiencing. Hannibal openly asks Will why he stays despite knowing what it does to him; he forcefully pushes the victim label on Will, expecting him to grow fed up and fight it off, embracing the predator he is.

Hannibal also wants Jack to acknowledge that Will is in a very dangerous state of mind. It is supposed to drive the wedge between the two and to make Will see that playing normal isn’t worth it - normal people don’t appreciate him. Though basically, all Hannibal does is just say the truth. Will is indeed getting more and more dangerous and untrustworthy. Jack is indeed being a bad friend to Will by keeping him employed despite seeing how his state deteriorates; Jack is also quite rude to him. He demands immediate results while doing little himself. The way he yelled at Will in E1, after Will barely spent a day working on a case, and the way he attacked Will in E5 for not being clear enough are good examples of it. 

So, Hannibal actually gives sound advice to both Will and Jack against each other, but he also follows his own agenda at the same time (which ends with a Murder Family). 

[the-maxrecords-blog]

where the wild things went

Vice: Hello Max. This is your first film in five years. What on earth have you been doing with your time?

Max: Just living, you know? Living, going to school, getting done with school.

Vice: Did you ever worry, "Hang on, what if I've forgotten how to act"?

Max: I didn't really think about it until the first day or two shooting then I was like, "What the fuck am I doing here?". For the first couple of days the learning curve was pretty steep again.

Vice: How does one even go about preparing to play a sociopath? Presumably it wasn't method acting.

Max: I kind of feel like there is no such thing as acting that isn't method to some degree because if you're not actually experiencing it, then you're a fucking liar. I was talking with Billy [O'Brien - director] about it and - I forget the word that he keeps using - but it's an intuitive process. You just kind of feel it out, you know? I was pretty miserable while we were shooting, just because you're in a super dark brain space all day. Especially living in a place like Minnesota where we were shooting, six days a week. You don't get the opportunity to turn it off, you know? And that's great as far as the actual creative process goes but it sucks as far as trying to be a person.

Vice: Have you ever done a psychopath test?

Max: I don't think so.

Vice: Would you like to do one?

Max: Yeah, let's do it! Is it legit or is it some Facebook nonsense?

Vice: Oh, Facebook nonsense probably.

Max: So you're not licensed?

Vice: We're not unlicensed.

Max: I'm pretty sure it's an either-or thing.

Vice: So there are eight statements. You either agree or disagree. First one: "You rarely catch me making any plans. I'm far too spontaneous".

Max: Yeah, absolutely.

Vice: "If I got a better offer, I wouldn't mind cancelling longstanding plans".

Max: Yeah, that's probably true.

Vice: "It would be fun to drive fast cars, ride rollercoasters or go skydiving".

Max: I've been skydiving. Fast cars are fun. I don't get the appeal of rollercoasters. I guess I haven't really done a true roller coaster. It feels artificial.

Vice: Shall we disagree?

Max: No, let's agree.

Vice: Alright. "I think it's okay to step over other people to achieve my ambitions".

Max: I don't know. I don't think you necessarily need to it. I can't think of many situations that I've been in where that's necessary, where there isn't some other course of action you could take. Let's disagree.

Vice: Do you have an ambition?

Max: In the broader context of my life, I just want to gain skills. Recently I was doing an outdoor programme back in the States through this thing called NOLS [National Outdoor Leadership School], so I was off doing that for a couple of months. Getting better at being outdoors and learning how the natural world works. And I love playing music so getting better at that. Just learning to be a better, more competent person. Trying to not be a dick.

Vice: It's a good motto. Okay: "I'm very persuasive and getting people to get what I want is a real talent of mine".

Max: Agree! I think I'm pretty good at that. I've been manipulating my parents for years.

Vice: The perks of being a child star... What was that whole experience like?

Max: Really awful! Especially for children, the film world is just terrible. You can't grow up in that world and still have a connection to reality. At least if you're, like, really in it. Especially the poor folks out there who have stage parents. It's just so sheltered. The creative aspect of acting is one of the more amazing things that I've gotten to experience but everything outside of that is pretty bizarre.

Vice: Was it enough to make you think you might not want to do it anymore?

Max: I think, probably, yeah. Especially once Where the Wild Things Are came out. And that was my first real acting role too. Being thrown in the deep end as a young, pretty vulnerable person. And then you have an experience like that and there's all this stigma around it, back in the "real world". I went to the same school since I was in second grade, through most of high school, and I knew all these kids and they were my friends before and after but there was, coming back, this weird stigma, these weird assumptions that if you're in a film, you're an asshole and you don't exist in a grounded real world way.

Vice: What are your memories of working on that film?

Max: It was really important to Spike that the set was conducive to a child. So we had a million kids on set. All the crew was kind of invited to bring their families. And as a way to kind of understand the vibe that Spike wanted to cultivate, there was always music on set. The Smiths, Cemetery Gates and Big Mouth Strikes Again, all those songs. I have really wonderful nine-year-old memories of romping around on set and that music playing.

Vice: How does one move past an experience like that and into the world of adult acting?

Max: I think you just grow up and learn to be a person. I think one of the biggest learning curves for me, as a result of those experiences and then applying that to the real world, was that it took me a long time to learn to take a compliment. From twelve through to however old, you just kind of shut down. There's this assumption of an agenda. But you grow up and you learn to be a person and you temper the experiences of working in the film world with what people are actually like and you balance that.

Vice: Is there one thing you know now that you wish you knew then?

Max: No, I don't think so. I am the person I am as a result of a lot of those experiences and I love the people that I met and especially those people that I have experiences with. It is what it is. Can't change the past!

Vice: Okay: "My ability to make quick decisions means that I would suit a dangerous job".

Max: [Takes long time to decide answer] I dunno... The idea of being a smokejumper appeals to me.

Vice: What's a smokejumper?

Max: It's a term for the folks in the US that are forest firefighters and jump out of airplanes. That appeals to me.

Vice: What do you think you'd be doing if you weren't acting?

Max: Working in outdoor education probably. Working with kids or being in the outdoors. Or both.

Vice: Do you have a desire to keep acting?

Max: Yeah. I mean, I like doing it and I think creatively it's really cool and the people you get the opportunities to work with are often really wonderful people. It allows me to do other things in my own life. My parents have kind of helped me gain this perspective of it, but I think it's best for me to view it as a hobby. I like acting but I don't think it's healthy to do films back to back.

Vice: What was it about this script?

Max: I love Billy and I love Nick Ryan, the producer. I love Robbie Ryan, our cinematographer and I think, aesthetically, just the, Midwest middle America vibe, that's really cool. And the humour of the script. It's genuine and it has real emotion embedded in it but it's funny! That Fargo humour really appeals to me.

Vice: Do you have a favourite movie?

Max: It changes periodically, of course. Birdman has been one of my favourite films ever. It came out a couple of years ago and I've watched it half a dozen times. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. I rewatched that pretty recently and remembered how good it was. People keep talking to me about Donnie Darko in relation to this film and I like that one quite a bit.

Vice:"When others are crumbling under pressure, I'm usually the one with a cool head". Agree or disagree?

Max: Yes. I think so.

Vice: When was was the last time you lost your cool?

Max: I've been working on that skill and I think I'm getting pretty good at it. It's been awhile since I've been genuinely, deeply upset about something. One of my favourite things in the world is this scar right here [shows us a fairly impressive scar on his knuckle]. I got it punching walls. It was like the perfect teenage angst motivation. The first time, I was really upset in my house because I had read something about the use of American drone warfare and just how upsetting it was and how a bunch of civilians had just been murdered somewhere in the world. And then the second time was me being upsetting at my parents.

Vice: Alright, last one: "I'm rarely to blame for things going wrong, it's usually the fault of the people around me".

Max: I mean, yeah. But I'll disagree.

Vice: Okay, let's see your results… You're 61% psychopath! "Though your conscience is in the right place, you have a pragmatic streak and generally aren't afraid to do your own dirty work".

Max: I'll take that.

Vice: There's more! "You're no shrinking violet but you're no daredevil either. You generally have a little trouble seeing things from other people's perspectives, but at the same time you're no pushover. Everything in moderation, including moderation, might sum up your approach to life".

Max: I like that. I'll take it!

Credits: Vice.com

Source: https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/topic/max-records