#but i also know that the UK government will just be dicks and shoot down any progressive welsh legislation

[reimu-enjoyer]

i hate england so much, transphobes here are getting more and more bold to such a degree that they’re being little shits on our internal workplace messageboard.  like these mfs are being bigots with their full ass names and stores they work at in their user info. they’re risking disciplinary just to punch down at us. this is genuinely fucked up.

[slovakbabe]

omg okay so i saw the worst fucking twitter post ever. this conservative in the UK said that he wants to ban cell phones in schools. there’s many things to unpack here but, a, children are taught from a young age that they’re responsible for their own behavior and not anyone else. b, if the youth wish to rebel, they’re going to find ways to push boundaries and find loopholes etc; especially if they think authority figures are too strict. because that’s what children do, especially once they hit middle school and high school. i also saw that a school in the carolina’s took down the mirrors in the bathrooms because too many kids were ditching to make tiktoks. at a certain point, it’s not on the teachers to govern their behavior if a child leaves their class to go fuck around. i think the burden is unnecessarily being placed on teachers for something outside of their control. i also wanna note that with the rise of school shootings, id generally prefer my students have their phone on them, even if it causes a distraction in class. two children survived the uvalde shooting because one let their mom know and she was more effective than the cops who stood around with their dicks in their hands. idk man public officials just need to stay out of schooling period bc they’re not teachers

[seeksredempticn]

Hey this is genuinely just curiosity, I'm not looking to fight, but what do you have against Tony Stark? Is it just mcu Tony?

Hey! Thanks for being so polite! I only hate MCU Tony, because I dont really know any other version of him - except for some amazing roleplayers. Well, I think the whole Peter thing is a shitshow. Tony takes a 16-year-old boy who just discovered his powers to another country to fight Captain America, without ever giving him any explanation to what was happening (also breaking the Accords he was so fussy over), and what they were fighting over. I didn’t watch SM:H, but I’ve seen a lot of people saying Tony seemed neglectful towards Peter, installed a fucking kill mode in his damn suit, and had a lovely line about how he couldn’t have Peter’s death on his consciousness - which feels like the problem wasn’t Peter dying, but Peter dying and it being Tony’s fault. Tony rarely seems to care about things until they directly affect him. You can’t tell me he didnt know what his weapons were being used for before he witnessed it and felt bad about it. Same thing with CA:CW. I doubt he would have been pro-Accords if that lady hadn’t shoved her son’s death into his face. Going back a little, I hate how condescending and mocking he always is, how every time he’s sharing a scene with a woman, he’s leering. Bonus points for the rape joke in AoU. In AoU, well, he makes Ultron. “Oh, but Wanda-” yeah, she did that with everyone, and nobody reacted like that. Tony deliberately doesn’t tell anyone, exactly because he knows they’ll stop him. In CACW, or, as I call it, Iron Man 4, it’s a shitshow from start to finish. It’s naive to trust the UN to actually put people over the interests of state, and the G5 countries rule it anyway - aka Germany, France, UK, USA, Russia. The UN fails every time it’s needed, usually because money, and poorer/developing countries pay the price inevitably. Our governments suck. And I bet Tony “I have 3 PhDs” knows this. Also, the whole amendments suggestion? Can’t be done, because no Avenger was part of creating the Accords. Furthermore, signing the Accords won’t stop destruction, won’t stop innocent people from getting killed. Tony just wants to have the excuse of just be “following orders” so he won’t feel bad. (Oh, he also calls Wanda a WMD. Good one, buddy.)I won’t even get started in how registering people for being different is the first step to genocide, and there’s enough hatred against mutants and enhanced people in the MCU. Then there’s the airport scene. Tony - and the whole team - flat-out refuse to listen to Steve, only delaying them from stopping the real villain of the movie. He also shoots Sam close-range in the chest for… nothing, I guess, because all Sam did was dodge a blast that would have definitely killed him, if the fall was high enough to paralyze this super-protected Rhodey (who’s only paralyzed for further Tony’s manpain.)When Tony visits the Raft, he talks to Clint like it’s Clint’s fault that he’s there. Sure, he broke the Accords, to stop Zemo. What did he want, for everyone to stay still and wait for their passports so they could go to Siberia? Oh, he leaves everyone there to rot, too, when he could have broken everyone out with a snap of his fingers. Then there’s Siberia (aka, Tony breaking the Accords the moment he needed to). He sees the video of his parents being murdered, and doesn’t immediately attack Bucky. Instead, he talks to Steve first. Attacking Bucky isn’t his gut reaction, so this is further evidence to what the directors say about the scene: that Tony is trying to kill Bucky partially to get back at Steve. To quote the directors: “You like this thing so much? I’m gonna take it away from you.”He also doesn’t care that it wasnt Bucky’s fault. After Steve tells him Bucky wasn’t in control and that killing him won’t change what happened, Tony just says “I don’t care. He killed my mom.”“Oh, but Evie, everyone would have reacted the same!” In that same movie, we see that no, not everyone. The woman from the beginning of the movie looks the man responsible for the death of her son in the eye and doesn’t even raise her voice. T'Challa hasn’t had any time to grieve from seeing his father die in front of him like 3 days ago, and when he learns who’s the real murderer, he stops Zemo from killing himself. Meanwhile, Tony blows Bucky’s arm off and shoots him in the back when he was pretty much already down for the count, and later, when Tony’s got Steve cornered, Bucky taps Tony’s foot to distract him and Tony kicks him in the face with his metal-clad foot. That’s not a fight, that’s just good ole’ cowardice and, as the directors confirmed it, “he wants to see Bucky suffer. That’s why he asks him if he remembers killing his parents.”Basically, Tony doesn’t think shit through. He reacts with his feelings without caring how is it gonna harm others, or if it’s fair, or anything. He’s a self-centered dick who has the most annoying fanbase I’ve ever seen. Also, I’m just really tired of everything in the MCU revolving about his feelings. And theres enough Rich White Billionaire Manpain in the real world. I want to see a hero.

[ihortensia-blog]

Syria, or why I’m scared and pissed off

So, Trump has ordered airstrikes on Syria. Specifically, about 60 Tomahawk missiles from two destroyers to the Shayrat air base, which supposedly has chemical weapons.

This was widely praised both domestically and abroad, with bipartisan support at home and many nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, France, Italy, the UK and Israel expressing support.

Looks great, right? The chemical attacks were utterly brutal and horrific so we, being the kind-hearted Big Brother policeman of the world, rah rah USA, we just jumped into another conflict in the Middle East!

Hey, Hillary Clinton, my candidate of choice, just suggested this earlier today, that the US needed to “take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them."

Well, firstly, just because I trust an adult driving a car on the freeway doesn’t mean I’m not gonna freak the fuck out seeing a toddler behind the wheel on any roadway. I don’t think I need to state this again, but Trump has no foreign policy or political experience AND has repeatedly ignored and sparred with the intelligence community.

Okay, so maybe he’s grown up and learned now, it’s been a few months and you learn on the job BUT FUCKING LESS THAN A FEW HOURS BEFORE THE STRIKE Trump’s Sec of State, Rex Tilly, made a ho-hum statement about an international community effort to defeat ISIS and boot out Assad.

The State Department, where we put all our diplomats and Middle East experts should fucking know about A MAJOR FOREIGN POLICY DECISION. I don’t know how to state this any clearer, but we dropped a SHITTON OF BOMBS ON SYRIA. That is gonna affect our relations with Syria, Russia, the Middle East, Europe and the international community at large to say the least and we are telling our experts AFTER we decide to shoot. But, hey, Tilly Rex, former oil CEO, I mean, expert businessman with ZERO foreign policy experience, is gonna put down ISIS and remove Assad!!! 

But surely, the President gets intelligence reports and has the discretion to call for military action! Sure, I mean, it’s not like we’ve had incidents with made-up intel where we rushed headlong into a bad situation screaming LIBERTY and VICTORY and declaring Mission Accomplished! before the fact . I would like to point to Bush and Dick as why we don’t rush into war without a plan. IN FACT, in Iraq, ISIS still has Mosul (almost three years now) and just killed 22 people on April 6, 2017. It’s been 14 years since the American invasion of Iraq, I’m sorry, the Iraqi War and they are still struggling to root out ISIS.

I would not mind a thoughtful, well-planned, unified effort with our allies to create a solid plan to ensure the removal of the Assad regime and facilitate the peaceful transition of power to a non-radical government in Syria even if it requires American military. This is not fucking it.

No other government has volunteered to help with this war, and if you think Donald and Rex can convince other nations to do so, well, I have a business plan for you!

Russia says it is suspending deal with United States to prevent mid-air incidents over Syria in response to U.S. strike and Russian military says it will help Syria strengthen its air defenses after US strike. Plus, there’s a Russian missile-armed ship heading for Syria.

Also, the Trump administration has already proven they are willing to risk lives and they give zero fucks about civilian casualties (at least 23 civilians dead in one Yemen raid)  and March 2016 has seen the highest amount of civilian casualties by US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in a single month since August 2014.

Also, I hate to bash anyone’s hopes but apparently Syria was warned in time enough to move some of their planes. So the airstrikes might have been worthless in terms of damaging Assad’s weapons and supplies.

Here are some organizations to help Syrian refugees. I cannot even begin to imagine the fear of Syrians living in the midst of a civil war with two nations waging a war by proxy as well. There are no easy solutions and history offers neither clarity nor comfort for any war-torn regions right now. Please remember the people caught up in this. 

[moviefixes]

The Mummy Review & Fix

Let me rant at you for a couple of minutes.

I went to see The Mummy last night.  I’d been warned that it was a horror film as opposed to the 1999 adventure film.  But, hey, I like horror.

Warning: Tom Cruise is just bizarre looking. There’s a scene where he’s PG-13 naked in the morgue, and it looks like his head has been poorly photoshopped onto the body of a bodice-ripper cover model.

One thing the movie (almost) got right: Set is the evil god instead of Anubis (if you want a decent portrayal of Anubis look to Mr. Jacquel from American Gods). However, Set is not the god of death--he’s the god of disorder, violence, the red desert.  

That out of the way, let’s talk what sucked and how I’d re-write it. So many spoilers under the cut.

Our “hero” (Tom Cruise’s character) is Nick Morton.  He’s supposed to be advanced recon for the US Army in Iraq, but he’s mainly a thief who spends his time in the desert looking for ancient artifacts to loot instead of insurgents.  His military commander, Greenway, thinks he’s a thieving ass.  He’s not wrong.  The only one who Nick seems give a shit about (besides himself) is his partner-in-crime, Chris Vail.

(The movie can’t seem to make up its mind if Vail is a corporal or a sergeant, so I’m going to refer to him as “Vail”, especially since I didn’t know he had a first name until I looked on IMDB.)  

Their opening scene where they fail to sneak into a ruined village filled with insurgents to grab some gold is one of the best parts of the movie.  They bicker like an old married couple as they get shot at and have a building blasted out from under them.  Vail calls in an airstrike against Nick’s wishes...which reveals a giant pit with a creepy ass Egyptian statue.

At this point, Greenway shows up to chew them out for their many transgressions.  He also brings Jenny Halsey, a beautiful blonde archaeologist with whom Nick had a one-night stand in Baghdad.  She’s not ashamed that she had a hook up, but she loathes him since he stole a map from her that led him here in search of treasure.  Greenway orders Nick and Vail into the hole with her.  Instead of finding a tomb full of artifacts to outfit the occupant in the afterlife, the tomb is designed to contain an evil spirit for eternity.  There’s a LOT of mercury, which Wikipedia is telling me wasn’t uncommon in Egyptian tombs, though maybe not in these quantities.  Because Nick is a dick, he shoots one of the ropes keeping the sarcophagus suspended in the pool of mercury, causing it to be lifted out. To quote Ardeth Bey: “You have started a chain reaction that could bring about the next apocalypse!”  Because the sarcophagus contains Ahmanet, a New Kingdom Egyptian princess who was mummified and buried alive after going on a murder spree and then trying to bring Set into the mortal world in the body of her “Chosen”.  Nick then becomes her new Chosen.

Like The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns, there are multiple swarms of creepy crawlies.  At one point, Nick is completely overwhelmed by rats.  Unfortunately, they do not eat him.  When they are still in the tomb, there’s a swarm of giant spiders.  I was practically bouncing in my seat going “please be camel spiders...please be camel spiders”.  And they were!  However, one bites Vail and injects him with venom that allows Ahmanet to take control of him. *rolls eyes* Camel spiders do not have venom.

They take the  sarcophagus and flee ahead of a giant sandstorm on what I’m pretty sure is a C-130 (my heavy-lift aircraft obsession, let me show you it).  Ahmanet crashes it over England because Crusaders brought her evil knife back with them to the UK and hid it.  Ok, Mummy, you do you.  In the crashing, Nick manages to save Jenny by getting her into what turns out to be the only parachute and shoving her out the giant hole in the side of the plane.  

He dies, Ahmanet resurrects him, and we have the naked scene in the morgue, which we could have all done without.  

One of the great strengths of the 1999 Mummy was Rick and Evie’s romance. It is one of the few OTPs I have because it is that good.  And it makes sense.  Yes, they don’t get off to a great start (see: the prison scene), but you watch them first realize “oh, shit, he’s hot” / “wow, I don’t think I’m going to trade her for a camel after all”.  

They have several conversations over the course of the film where they get to know each other: on the boat where’s he’s cleaning his weapons, in Hamunaptra where she gives her famous drunken “I am a librarian!” speech.  This isn’t love at first sight; this is love that grows.  And when we see them 10 years later in The Mummy Returns and they are still fucking in love, it makes sense because the kind of relationship they developed in the first movie is sustainable.  It's not stress-fueled passion.

In contrast, Nick and Jenny start out antagonistically--he stole from her--and their bickering never seems to come across as flirting. She’s constantly, rightfully, calling him out as a garbage human being until suddenly, she’s not.   When she tries to convince Nick that he’s a good man based on the evidence of giving her the last parachute, he straight up tells her that he thought there was another one.  And maybe it was supposed to be him trying to protect his fragile feelings...

...but the way Cruise says it makes me think he’s sincere.

It turns out that Jenny works for a secret organization, the Prodigium, whose mission is to stamp out supernatural threats.  It’s headed by Dr. Jekyll. (I did not realize that this film is the start of a grim!dark League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series), who wants to stop Ahmanet’s plan to release Set by killing the Chosen One, i.e. Nick.  There is talk of dissection. Because Jenny is not an awful human being, this bothers her, and she sets about trying to rescue Nick from her Prodigium buddies.

This is where we get the Easter egg that confirms that, unfortunately, this is supposed to be a sequel to the 1999 Mummy when Jenny uses the gold Book of Amun-Ra to smack Malik around during her rescue attempt.

And somewhere in here, Nick and Jenny decide that they are in love and spend the rest of the movie running from one danger to another, screaming each others' names. At the very end, Nick risks destroying the world to stab himself in the chest to possibly be able to resurrect Jenny.  Because this movie doesn't even attempt to do its homework, the romance is nonsensical.  

Normally, I would recommend dropping the romance altogether.  It worked well for the first Avengers movie ("There's no time for romance. We've got shit to avenge!") and Power Rangers, but Nick needs something to make him give a shit about anything other than himself.  I mean, at the beginning of the movie, he's running around Iraq stealing stuff.  He's not motivated by patriotism or wanting to protect innocent people from insurgents.  The movie doesn't even show him saving a kid or petting a dog as a trite way to reveal that, hey, maybe he's a good man under that greed.  Instead, we get nothing to make us think he's a person who would sacrifice himself to save the world.  He can't even quite pull off “BECAUSE I'M ONE OF THE IDIOTS WHO LIVES IN IT!” since what Ahmanet is initially offering is wealth and sex, two things he's shown serious interest in.  Being possessed by Set, yes, is a turn-off, but I think he'd be more likely to try and save his skin by fleeing from her and the Prodigium than stay and fight.

In fact, the only thing he is shown to care about other than treasure and himself, is Vail.  Their banter is the only that comes close to the banter in the 1999 Mummy and The Mummy Returns.  On the plane, when Vail is possessed by Ahmanet and starts stabbing people, Nick steps in between him and the soldiers and grabs a soldier's sidearm right out of his hands to hold them off.  When Nick shoots Vail the first time, it doesn't look like he actually intended to pull the trigger.  Instead of holding the gun in front of him, he has it up by his ear and sort of sideways.  When Vail keeps advancing, Nick is still trying to get him to stand down.  He doesn't look any more in control with the second shot, and "the third one was unnecessary. You freaked me out; I panicked".  The movie ends with Nick abandoning Jenny in the tunnels and then going to resurrect Vail and ride off into the desert with him, seeking adventure.

So I propose, what if the archeologist who comes to the tomb is a goofy little dude who is bitten by the camel spider (grrrr) and is possessed and starts stabbing people on the plane and then dies?  What if it's Vail who manages to get hold of the parachute and put it on before realizing there's not another one?  And he and Nick are screaming at each other--Vail isn't going to go until Nick finds a way out and Nick isn't going to let them both die, so he pulls the ripcord on the parachute and Vail gets sucked out and survives.

Then Jenny shows up in the morgue as a secretive agent of an unknown, possibly government group (the Prodigium), but before she can whisk him away to Jekyll's secret lair under the Natural History Museum (formerly the British Museum...hi, Return of the Mummy reference), Vail sneaks Nick out to the pub.  Nick is hallucinating rat swarms and Ahmanet, and Vail drags him into the bathroom, and they're yelling at each other about mercury poisoning and Jenny's hot but can they trust her?  At some point, a group of women try to come in, and they realize they're in the ladies' room.

(Jenny in the secret agent role would probably result in her being recast or Annabelle Wallis having to dye her hair brown because Hollywood is weird like that.)

When Ahmanet lures Nick to the church where evil knife was hidden by the Crusaders, Vail follows. "What the hell are we doing, man?"  Jenny reappears when they flip the ambulance as the leader of the Prodigium crew who capture Ahmanet.  Nick and Vail have the conversation about the last parachute, but when Nick says he thought there was another one, Vail just snorts.  "You just keep telling yourself that, Morton."

Vail is 110% against Jekyll's plan to summon Set and then kill him when the god is in Nick's body.  When Nick accidentally frees Mr. Hyde and the Prodigium security guards drag Vail out of the room, he runs around and ends up fighting Malik and throwing himself against the Hyde-proof glass.  The two men make a break for it while Ahmanet escapes.  Jenny leads them into the subway tunnels, trying to herd Nick towards Ahmanet and the completed dagger in order to enact Jekyll's plan.  They all get separated, Ahmanet drowns Vail, and, after attempting CPR, Nick brings forth Set to try and save Vail, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The movie ends with Jekyll and Jenny discussing what Nick's fate will be now that he's fused with Set, and then Nick and Vail ride off into the desert.  Exactly like the film as it stands.

Ta-da!  Follows the same plot of the movie, but with motivations that make sense!

The only thing I added was a disposable archaeologist in the first act.