#i really want to be done with the theatrics and get a real job that pays well & i don't have to juggle with 4-5 classes of bullshit

[grungepoetica]

welcome to my regularly scheduled crisis over not knowing whether or not getting a college degree is worth it

[hotdaemondtargaryen]

TOM GLYNN-CARNEY INTERVIEWED FOR VESTAL MAGAZINE.

REFLECTING ON YOUR JOURNEY IN THE ACTING INDUSTRY, DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOMENT YOU REALIZED YOU REALIZED YOU WANTED TO PURSUE ACTING?

"The moment I realized I wanted to pursue acting was probably when I was around 12 years old, in high school."

"I was performing in a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Royal Exchange in Manchester."

"I saw older actors and wondered what their "proper" jobs were outside of the theater."

'When I asked one of them, they said': — "No, this is my proper job. This is what I do."

"I didn’t know people could do that."

"From that moment on, I knew that this is what I wanted to do as a career."

YOU'VE DONE MULTIPLE SHOWS AND MOVIES IN THE DRAMATIC GENRE. WOULD YOU EVER BE OPEN TO DOING OTHER GENRES?

"Absolutely, I'd love to explore new genres in the future."

"I'd love to give comedy a go."

"I think that would be a good challenge."

"It’s difficult because timing is crucial delivering a joke at the right time can feel almost mathematical."

"But I think that good comedy actors don't see it that way at all."

"It just comes naturally to them."

"I'd love to give it a shot."

"I'm also interested in doing biopics, bringing real-life stories to life."

"Chet Baker and Gene Kelly, in particular, would be fascinating characters to portray."

"But I'm open to any interesting projects that come my way."

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE THE ROLES YOU TAKE ON? ARE YOU DRAWN TO A PARTICULAR TYPE OF CHARACTER OR STORY?

"Honestly, I'm drawn to anything that makes me feel uncomfortable and pushes me out of my comfort zone."

"I seek out roles where the character feels distant and challenging."

"I like to test myself and see if I can bring such characters to life."

"If a role feels like something I might struggle with, that's exactly what I want to tackle."

"I often joke that these challenging roles might be my downfall someday." [laughs]

CAN YOU SHARE ANY INSIGHTS INTO HOW YOUR CHARACTER, AEGON II TARGARYEN, ENVOLVES IN THE UPCOMING SEASON?

"I found it fascinating to delve deeper into Aegon this season because there's so much more to uncover about him."

"In the first season, we saw quite a two-dimensional view of Aegon—not due to Ty Tennant's portrayal, which I thought was fantastic, bringing a lot of vulnerability and teenage angst to the character."

"When I took over, the time frame was too short to really explore Aegon's complexities."

"This time, I've had an extended period to sit with the character and dig into his deeper layers."

"Playing a character experiencing profound grief is always a challenge."

"I'm lucky enough that I've never gone through anything like that myself, so I had to imagine it as vividly as possible."

"This season, Aegon is shown as more of an empath than a psychopath."

"It becomes clear that he has the capacity to love, feel, and grieve."

"There are so many comparisons between Aegon and Richard II."

"People are saying Aegon is cold, calculated, and evil, and while he's certainly done horrible things—I'm not justifying any of those—it's important to note that, rather than being a straightforward villain, he's a crumbling tragedy."

HOW HAS YOUR APPROACH TO PORTRAYING AEGON II CHANGED FROM THE PREVIOUS SEASON TO THE NEW ONE?

"There’s definitely a continuation of the drama and theatricality from season one."

"It's huge, rousing, and intense."

"I've seen episodes one to four, and they are just unbelievable, especially the battle scenes — you can't get any bigger than that."

"This season, though, there’s also an element of humor."

"At some point, they called Aegon 'the Magnanimous,' and it was important to bring some levity to his character."

"Aegon has just stepped into the role of King and is trying to figure it all out."

"We're at a point where he’s found a spring in his step, enjoying this new responsibility and purpose."

"He’s also got a lot of power now."

"Power can go to people's heads and make them crazy."

"It was nice to explore his boyishness and playfulness, as it gives his character more depth and leaves room for growth."

WHAT WOULD YOU TELL PEOPLE TO GET THEM ON TEAM GREEN?

"I don’t think I need to persuade them—obviously, we’re the best."

"But if you really want to see why, this season is packed with surprises that will make it clear."

SINCE THE SHOW IS BASED ORIGINALLY ON BOOKS, IS THERE A SPECIFIC BOOK YOU'D LIKE TO SEE BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN AND FOR YOU TO BE A PART OF?

"I'd love to see a film adaptation of Douglas Stuart's book Shuggie Bain."

"Another great choice would be The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell."

"It’s a collection of beautiful and heart-wrenching short stories, and each one could make a compelling film."

"Looking at my bookshelf now, I see a lot of books on Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney—mostly singer-songwriters."

"I also have a lot of poetry. I'd love to see a biopic of Patti Smith."

"That would be incredible."

YOUR CAREER HAS TAKEN YOU TO VARIOUS FILMING LOCATIONS AROUND THE WORLD. IS THERE A SPECIFIC LOCATION YOU HAVEN'T BEEN TO YET AND WOULD LOVE TO BE THE BACKDROP FOR A POTENTIAL FUTURE PROYECT?

"Oh, that's a good question."

"I think somewhere that’s a hybrid between beautiful rolling countryside and the coast."

"A place that offers both stunning landscapes and the sea."

"On your days off, you could go for a swim or hike through the mountains."

"I’d love to work in a scenic and peaceful location like that."

SOMETIMES, ACTORS WHO PLAY 'VILLAINS' CAN GET AN ADVERSE REACTION FROM SOME FANS OF A SHOW. WHAT HAVE YOUR INTERACTIONS BEEN LIKE?

"I've been very lucky."

"Many people have approached me with kind words about my portrayal of Aegon."

"It's a challenging task to humanize someone so seemingly poisonous."

"Fortunately, I haven't had negative encounters with fans who can't differentiate between the character and the actor."

"I think we're in a different phase in society now."

"When Jack Gleeson played Joffrey, there was less social media presence, making it harder for audiences to separate the actor from the character."

"Today I think we are a more technologically advanced community, with more behind-the-scenes and a better understanding of the distinction between actor and character."

"I think people have copped on. I hope that's the case, anyway."

YOU'VE COLLABORATED WITH RENOWNED DIRECTORS LIKE CHRISTOPHER NOLAN. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM THESE EXPERIENCES?

"Doing Dunkirk was my first significant experience on a film set."

"I really didn't know where to start."

"The canvas was completely blank."

"And it was just such a gift, a pinch me moment that I was able to learn from some of, if not the best filmmaker in the world."

"It was overwhelming."

"And I had to remind myself to be present and soak in everything like a sponge."

"Chris's patience and the support from the rest of the cast were invaluable throughout."

"We were all in it together, especially us young lads who were new to such a big production."

"We learned and grew together during that incredible experience."

IN THE KING, YOU PORTRAYED A HISTORICAL FIGURE. HOW DID YOU APPROACH BRINGING THIS CHARACTER TO LIFE?

"When portraying a fictional character, there's often more freedom because there's no definitive blueprint to follow—even if they're written in a book, they're still fictional."

"You can infuse your own understanding and personality into the role."

"However, there’s added pressure when it comes to a historical figure because you're portraying someone real."

"I never let that pressure overwhelm or hinder the process."

"Instead, I took the character as presented and focused on doing my best with the role."

A NEW HUNGER GAMES MOVIE WAS JUST ANNOUNCED, SPECIFICALLY A PREQUEL FOCUSING ON HAYMITCH'S STORY, AND MANY FANS ARE EAGER TO SEE YOU IN THAT ROLE. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THAT?

"No way, that’s the first I’ve heard of it! But I'm incredibly flattered that people would like to see me on screen again."

"If all goes well, I'll fight for my life in the Hunger Games!" [laugh]

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE SHOWS DURING YOUR DOWNTIME?

"One show I watch repeatedly, and it never gets old for me, is the UK version of The Office."

"The humor is very relatable and comforting to me."

"I even laugh just thinking about it. It's one of those TV shows when it finishes, you're like: — “Oh no! What do I do with my life? I miss the characters already.” [laugh]

"I also enjoy the US version of The Office."

"Besides that, I'm fascinated by farming documentaries."

"Shows like This Farming Life on BBC are incredibly calming for me."

"And I have to mention The Great Pottery Throwdown — I'm a bit of a pottery nerd, and that show is brilliant!

WHO ARE SOME CREATIVES YOU WOULD LOVE TO WORK WITH IN THE FUTURE?

"The list is long."

"Firstly, there are directors I'd love to collaborate with again, like Chris Nolan and Sam Mendes, with whom I've had some of my best experiences and whom I consider friends."

"I'm eager to work with them again."

"Then there are filmmakers like Andrea Arnold, Yorgos Lanthimos, Greta Gerwig, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ruben Ostlund, all of whom I admire and would love to collaborate with."

"When it comes to actors, there are many I admire as well."

"I plan to work with individuals who challenge me, from whom I can learn, and who are dedicated to their craft."

"I appreciate those who find joy and humor in their work because life is short, and it’s important to enjoy what you do."

LASTLY, WHERE DO YOU HOPE YOUR CAREER WILL HEAD INTO THE FUTURE?

"It’s more of a feeling than a checklist of achievements that I aim for."

"I understand that feeling because I can almost sense it in advance."

"It’s difficult to articulate—it’s a mix of happiness, creative fulfillment, diversity in roles, consistent challenge, and pushing boundaries."

"I aspire to transform and lose myself in characters."

"Equally important to me is collaborating with inspiring individuals whom I can learn from and grow with."

"I also value the freedom to select projects that resonate with me personally."

[insanityclause]

“It must have been in about 1979, I was in New York on holiday. I was sitting up with a friend, and we were both stoned as owls.” Jane Wymark was retelling her brush with a piece of theatre history. She recalled the sound of a telephone cutting through the sour, rising smoke. Wymark answered. Distant and absurd on the other end of the line, a telegram message from her mother. “It said something like: ‘Wonderful job. Hamlet, please come home.’”

After several minutes of laughter, it occurred to Wymark that the call might not be a joke. “So I rung my mother up, and said ‘I’m really sorry if I’m waking you up in the middle of the night for no reason, but is this real?’ And she said, ‘Yes, come home right now, because they want you to play Ophelia.’”

Wymark was being parachuted into a production of Hamlet that was being talked about as among the best of the century. Derek Jacobi, a Shakespearean actor then in his forties and recently made famous by his star turn as the Roman emperor in the television series I, Claudius, was in the title role. In some quarters, Jacobi’s poetic, volatile performance was being talked about as the Hamlet of his generation.

A film of the production would be broadcast in America and viewed by more people at once than any in history. When The New York Times asked Jacobi how he felt knowing that a generation of viewers would come to consider his interpretation definitive, he replied: “That way lies madness.”

One night, Wymark recalled, the cast were taking their bows in the furnacelike auditorium. “By the time we got to the end of the show we were pouring sweat,” she said. “Well I wasn’t, because I’d been dead for a while, but Derek and the guy playing Laertes were just sopping. We’d done all the usual curtain calls and everything, and then Peter O’Toole comes wavering on to the stage.”

O’Toole, then almost 50 and skeletal-gaunt, was carrying in his hands a little red book. As the audience hushed he explained that the book was given to the actor who was considered the definitive Hamlet of his generation. When O’Toole had played the part in 1963, the actor Michael Redgrave had given him the book. Redgrave had been given it by someone else, a great actor of the previous generation, and now O’Toole was passing it on to Jacobi, who in turn could give it to whomever he pleased.

The notion that each generation has its definitive Hamlet is a critical will-o’-the-wisp that has dogged the play almost since it was written. The Edwardian essayist Max Beerbohm called Shakespeare’s most famous part “a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”, but only one actor in thousands gets to “give” his or her Hamlet in a professional production. “Everyone — great, good, bad or indifferent — wants to play Hamlet,” the actor Christopher Plummer once said.

Why? The question feels redundant. If you are someone who needs to perform, you are someone who needs to perform Hamlet. In Withnail and I, the 1987 cult comedy film about actors and their ambitions, the bloated, fey, lecherous character known as Uncle Monty has a short speech on the subject: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”

Earlier this year, I set out to find the red book.

As a trophy, a tradition, a secret succession, it seemed to embody some of the most romantic ideas about the part. I felt that in mapping its passage from player to player, I could trace a shadow history of the thing that has been driving the whole theatrical world for centuries: ambition.

This is what brought me to ask the retired Wymark about her encounter with the book. And this is how I eventually came to be standing outside a rambling, gabled cottage in north London, uncertain about whether to ring the bell until a vast Shakespearean sneeze told me I was at the right place. The door opened and I shook hands with a neat, elderly man who looked just like Derek Jacobi. The living room, decorated with antique furniture and hung with flower paintings, left an impression of a precisely chosen life. I said that I wanted to ask him about a red, leather-bound book, handed down from actor to actor, that had passed through his hands decades ago. I said he might be the oldest living actor to have held it in his hands. He furrowed an alpine brow and fixed his pale blue eyes on a tiny point just past my left eye. “Oh God,” he moaned, in an agony of remembrance. “It was a little copy of Hamlet . . . ”

Of course, there is no definitive Hamlet. This is true, and so obviously true that people have been saying it for hundreds of years. “There is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.” This is true! Hamlet is sour, obedient, suicidal, sarcastic, self-indulgent, flip and outright murderous before the end of his second scene. Modern scholarship has been wincingly keen to stress the heterogeneity of possible responses. As I once heard a professor say in a university seminar, should we be speaking of Hamlets, rather than Hamlet?

Perhaps. But we should also be honest: that sucks and we hate it. We also can’t ignore the genealogy of great Hamlets that exists, stretching all the way back to Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s star performer and business partner, for whom the role was written. That the character and the play are both radically unstable and look totally different in different hands seems to have made us more eager to pinpoint a single actor’s performance as the one. Producers, theatre managers, actors and journalists have connived to reinforce that idea.

Hamlet does offer an actor a scope and centrality that no other part does. “It’s the great personality role in Shakespeare,” Jacobi explained when we were sitting down, his hands conducting the silence around him as he spoke. He had settled in a winged leopard-print armchair, like a portrait of himself. On the side table was an Olivier Award, a small bronze sculpture of the great Laurence Olivier himself, the man who won both Best Actor and Best Picture for his 1948 film of Hamlet, and then launched the National Theatre in 1963 with a production of the play. “You use much more of your own personality as Hamlet,” Jacobi said, “rather than becoming Hamlet by going out and acquiring things. . . Hamlet will look how the actor looks, sound how he sounds, move how he moves. You play yourself as Hamlet.”

Jacobi first came to prominence as a teenage Hamlet, in an eye-catchingly serious schoolboy production at the Edinburgh festival fringe. In his early twenties he joined the germinal National Theatre and played opposite O’Toole’s Hamlet as Laertes. In his forties, he was given the red book by O’Toole, filmed in the role and toured the world. He was sworn to revenge under sheets of pelting rain outside the real Elsinore castle in Denmark. He soliloquised and played mad by the Egyptian Sphinx as the sun set.

A particular challenge of playing the part, Jacobi told me, is delivering lines so famous they risk breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief. In his production, the second act began with Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Unusually, it was played as a speech delivered to Ophelia, rather than on an empty stage. In Sydney, at the end of the tour, Jacobi was waiting nervously in the wings. “I thought, ‘This is probably the most famous line in all drama. What if I forgot it? What if I went on and my mind went blank?’ And I went on, and I started . . . 

“To be, or not to be, that is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or–

Or–

Or–

Or–”

Blinded to the astonishment of a thousand spectators by the force of the footlights, Jacobi realised he’d dried. Dried completely. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten the words. It was like he’d never known them. An entire minute of silence passed, until he was audibly given his line by Ophelia. Somehow, he got through the performance and the rest of the run. Afterwards, Jacobi didn’t go on stage again for two years. When I mentioned the incident, his eyes turned tight and hooded. He asked to talk about something else. Sensing my cue, I returned to the red book.

“Oh God. Rich!” he called into the next room. “Who did I give the book to?”

“You gave it to Ken Branagh,” called Richard Clifford, Jacobi’s partner, from offstage.

“Ken! I gave it to Ken,” said Jacobi. Then, calling back: “Who did Ken give the book to?”

“Tom Hiddleston!”

“Tom! He gave it to Tom.”

I asked how he had received the book himself and he went back into the trance of remembrance. “Now, I was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. And at the curtain call one night, Peter O’Toole came on to the stage with this book and gave it to me. And he had originally been given it by . . . Oh . . . ” He trailed off, unable to remember Redgrave.

“Oh!” cried Clifford from the kitchen.

“Oh!” cried Jacobi in the living room.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson. That was the name of the first owner of the red book. Forbes-Robertson was a legendary Victorian actor who played Hamlet into his sixties. The book itself was a Temple Shakespeare, a handsome reader’s edition of the play printed around the turn of the century and bound in red leather. He probably bought it in a West End bookshop, pacing around between rehearsals. Or so I’m told by Russell Jackson, an emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham. “It would have been instantly recognisable,” he told me. “You can hold it more or less in the palm of your hand.”

In 1996, Jackson was working as a script consultant on a film of Hamlet directed by Branagh, who was then in the middle of a hurtling, flame-tipped ascent to near-unprecedented eminence among Shakespearean actors. As a leading man who had run his own theatre company and could direct and star in internationally released film adaptations of the plays, there was no one to compare him to but Olivier. He was now at work on a princely four-hour fantasia, shot amid fake fallen snow at Blenheim Palace with himself in the starring role.

He had cast his old hero, Jacobi, as Hamlet’s murderous uncle Claudius. On his last day of shooting, after the traditional applause that follows a final take, Jacobi asked for silence. Jackson kept a diary at the time: “[Jacobi] holds up a red-bound copy of the play that successive actors have passed on to each other, with the condition that the recipient should give it in turn to the finest Hamlet of the next generation. It has come from Forbes-Robertson, a great Hamlet at the turn of the century, to Derek, via Henry Ainley, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole and others. Now he gives it to Ken.”

Hamlet had been a pivotal document in Branagh’s life. As a teenager in 1977, he had seen Jacobi play the role at the New Theatre in Oxford. In his memoir, he remembers it as one of the moments that inspired him to become an actor. “I didn’t understand it at all, but I was amazed by the power of it because it seemed to be affecting my body. I got the shakes at times.”

Two years later, Branagh went to interview Jacobi, who was then playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. “I got a note from someone called Ken Branagh, saying, could he interview me for Rada’s magazine?” Jacobi told me, referring to the prestigious London acting school Branagh attended. “He was a personable young man. He asked good questions. As he left, he said: ‘I’m going to be playing Hamlet one day, and you’re going to be in it.’”

“Ken,” Jacobi added with a smile, “wasn’t slow in coming forward.”

It was no secret that Branagh had set his sights on matching, even reanimating, Olivier’s career. With his movie of Hamlet, he was threatening to run away with the crown. But while the film won plaudits from some critics, it made back only around a quarter of its budget, and Branagh was nominated only for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, a curiously backhanded compliment for a Hamlet that advertised itself as the complete text.

Branagh held on to the book for more than 20 years, passing over several acclaimed Hamlets (David Tennant’s agonised spectre foremost among them) in that time. “I took special pains to make sure it was preserved,” said Branagh, who was reached with written questions via an agent and an aide during the shooting of his new film. “I felt the book was something rather treasured and private, and not something that you in any way crowed about. You were a temporary custodian.” In 2017, he finally handed the red book on to the actor sometimes thought of as his protégé, Hiddleston.

So there it was. Redgrave to O’Toole to Jacobi to Branagh to Hiddleston. But still, something wasn’t adding up. I began desperately ringing round old actors asking for snippets of information about the red book, and started reciting the list of names from Jackson’s diary entry: Forbes-Robertson, Ainley, Redgrave, O’Toole, Jacobi, among others. Every time I read the list, everyone said the same thing. Where the hell is Olivier?

Here is a story about Laurence Olivier. Once upon a time, in the early 1800s, there was a great Shakespearean actor called Edmund Kean. He was the Hamlet of the Romantics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that watching him was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Kean was also renowned for playing Shakespeare’s other great soliloquist, Richard III. As the hunchbacked villain, Kean would rage and swagger and strut about, swishing a great sword in his hand. That sword was passed to William Chippendale, a member of Kean’s company. Chippendale gave it to an actor called Henry Irving, who gave it to the great Ellen Terry who, we understand, gave it to her great nephew. His name was John Gielgud. Gielgud gave the sword to his contemporary, Olivier, telling him to pass it on to the great actor of the next generation. And Olivier kept it.

He is rumoured to have been buried with it. Certainly, the sword has not been seen since his death. (One of the last people to see it was Jacobi, who confirmed to me that Olivier still had it as a very old man.) Is Olivier really lying in his grave with no tongue between his teeth and Kean’s sword beside him? If he is, it feels like a little parable about the sharp, inward points of ambition. Here was a man who got everything and more from a life in the theatre. But he couldn’t bear to part with a prop sword.

The question of why Olivier never received the book becomes more pressing when you read the letters he received playing Hamlet from the Edwardian actor Henry Ainley, the book’s second owner. On opening night, January 5 1937, Ainley telegrammed Olivier in his dressing room: “THE READINESS IS ALL.” Later that night he wrote: “You, my sweet, are the Mecca . . . Pay no heed to the critics, they do not know. You are playing Hamlet; therefore you are a king [ . . . ] You rank, now among the great.”

Ainley’s hornily free-associating letters seem to imply a physical affair at times. “Larry darling, I have been tossing (now now) about at night thinking of you,” he writes in one of the letters, currently kept by the British Library.

“Well, you know what you did. I can’t walk [ . . . ] And the child has your eyes.” Yet it is Olivier’s fame that Ainley most obviously covets. “Soon you will be like [me],” he writes in another. “Your public, your following all gone, dear old boy! The harlequinade. We do not endure!” There is no mention in their correspondence of the red book. Whether Ainley had already given the book away, or felt compelled to hang on to it, or simply had forgotten it, remains a matter of speculation.

It’s not the only agonising gap in the archive. In 1963, an older Olivier cast Peter O’Toole in the production of Hamlet that would open the National Theatre. O’Toole had already played a wild, revelatory Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958, in which he famously climbed the proscenium arch mid-performance. It was an interpretation that harnessed the young actor’s modernity. “He’s a lean, lank, individualist Teddy Boy!” one reviewer enthused.

But in 1963, Olivier had other ideas. “It was very strange,” remembers Siân Phillips, O’Toole’s then wife, now aged 91. “Larry [Olivier] had talked him into this terrible costume. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy, with a Peter Pan collar and clean, beautifully cut dyed blond hair.”

Phillips thought Olivier seemed to want to trim the edges off her husband. “Larry had this new kind of concept of a very tidy Hamlet, which was the opposite of what [O’Toole] did best. But he had such regard for Larry, who was flattering him enormously. He just did everything asked of him.” Phillips had put her own starry career on hold to let O’Toole have the spotlight. She did his filing and kept track of gifts he had been given, making sure people were thanked, which was why she found it strange that she’d never heard of the red book.

Together, we wondered if the unhappy production had made it a sore point for her husband. “The thought did cross my mind once or twice that Olivier might be trying to sabotage him,” she said. “But how could he want to do that on the opening night of the National Theatre?” On the other end of the phone, I thought of Kean’s sword.

Perhaps this is harsh. Perhaps we can understand the desire to have and hold on to a physical token of fame, strength, adulation, applause, youth — the things that slip away from even the greatest artists. All performers live in fear of unemployment and redundancy, and even the successful ones are loved, fiercely and temporarily, for being someone they’re not. “Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing,” wrote William Hazlitt, the English essayist.

“British theatre has traditionally privileged innovation,” the Shakespearean scholar Michael Dobson told me. In France, he explained, you could see Phèdre performed with the same gestures, the same intonation, for hundreds of years. “The British are always inventing new things, like gas lighting and ways of doing ghosts with mirrors. It’s never the old, boring Hamlet your parents used to like. It’s always got this young, original, absolutely real actor in it, instead of those stylised old geezers.”

In which case, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories about great actors who fell from fashion. It was Burbage who first delivered Hamlet’s acting advice to the players: “O’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

Until the modern day, actors didn’t play big roles just once or twice in their careers, in a long run of performances. They performed them frequently. Even in Shakespeare’s time, actors became associated with certain parts in the minds of spectators. Burbage died in March 1619, and the funeral baked meats were hardly cold when he was replaced by another actor, Joseph Taylor.

An unreliable but enticing story has it that Burbage taught Taylor, and Taylor taught the next great Hamlet, Thomas Betterton. Betterton was the Hamlet of Restoration theatre, among the first to play opposite women. Confronting his father’s ghost, Betterton’s Hamlet could “turn his colour”, as though his face had drained of blood with fright. Betterton made his face “pale as his neck cloth”.

Betterton died in 1710, immortality assured. Within a few decades his reputation had been all but vaporised by the greatest actor of the century, David Garrick. Garrick was almost a religion among theatregoers. “That young man never had his equal as an actor, and will never have a rival,” was the poet and critic Alexander Pope’s verdict. Garrick was both a shameless showman and pioneering realist. He played Hamlet in a mechanical fright wig that made his hair stand on end when activated.

Garrick was replaced by John Philip Kemble, a severe and statuesque Hamlet. In the early 19th century, Kemble was outmoded by Kean, whose ascendant star was quickly selling out theatres. “Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got,” wrote Jane Austen, struggling to get seats. Out with the old. Next came Samuel Phelps, the actor-manager who first made a point of performing the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays. He was toppled by Henry Irving, a drawn and gothic actor. Irving was supposedly the inspiration for Dracula; his theatre manager was Bram Stoker.

Enter the melancholic, effeminate figure of Forbes-Robertson, the first owner of our red book. His Hamlet, first performed in 1897 and still being revived into his sixties, was in some ways the last definitive stage performance in this unofficial, highly debatable but surprisingly enduring tradition. “Nothing half so charming,” George Bernard Shaw wrote of his performance, “has been seen by this generation.” Orson Welles described one recording of Forbes-Robertson as the most beautiful Shakespearean verse-speaking he ever heard. You can still listen to it on YouTube, uploaded from an ancient LP.

“The next reference to the actor’s art,” creaks the old voice above the hiss of imperfectly transcribed sound, “is Hamlet’s advice to the players, written, obviously, by an actor who has complete command of his calling.” In a voice ponderous with time but still capable of lightness and precision, he begins the passage in which Hamlet gives notes to a theatrical troupe. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”

Forbes-Robertson would have seen more clearly than many of his successors how rapidly the galaxy of theatrical ambition was expanding. He was the first great Hamlet to play the part on film, in a lumpy silent production in 1913. If that film looks stagey and stylised to modern eyes, then looking back at these nested revolutions in realism, it’s also obvious that old actors have always looked that way in the eyes of their successors. Naturalism is just the style each era brings with it.

Hamlet’s advice was itself part of this reach towards the endlessly receding goal of the real. To an Elizabethan audience, the travelling troupe with their heroic verse and stagey couplets would have seemed obviously to belong to a previous generation of players, one playwrights like Shakespeare, and plays such as Hamlet, were making redundant. Hamlet says to the players what the theatre is always saying: be young, be modern, be new.

You can’t ask too much of very famous actors. Basic professionalism demands that they don’t tell you anything too interesting. They live like criminals, travelling under pseudonyms and booking the front seat on aeroplanes. We abhor in their personal lives the basic human latitude we praise in their work. “I am myself indifferent honest yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,” Hamlet says to Ophelia. “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth?”

I had hundreds of questions for Hiddleston, the 43-year-old star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and current holder of the red book. Unfortunately, Hiddleston is not an easy man to reach. As the man who plays Loki in the Marvel series (global gross about $30bn), he has been watched at his craft by an unimaginable number of human eyes. He does his work in green-screen and widescreen settings that would also have been unimaginable to 90 per cent of the people named in this article. Where Burbage played Hamlet without an interval, Hiddleston’s fame is a postmodern mosaic, put together in franchise films with an average shot length of two seconds. Given that he commands multimillion-dollar fees for these acts of cinematic pointillism, you may imagine his time is precious. I was able to reach him by phone for 15 minutes during press week for Loki season 2’s Emmy campaign. “Good morning,” he said, dialling in from Los Angeles. “I mean, sorry, good evening.”

Hiddleston played Hamlet in a fundraiser production for Rada directed by Branagh in 2017. He told me how he had left drama school and joined Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl theatre company, standing out as Cassio in a somewhat legendary modern Othello, in which Ewan McGregor played Iago opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead. Branagh saw the production and persuaded Marvel studios to let him cast this relative unknown in Thor, which then grossed almost half a billion dollars. Afterwards, they sat down for lunch and Branagh suggested Hamlet. “And I said, ‘I would absolutely love to do it with you. What an honour.’”

The production played for three weeks in Rada’s tiny theatre, with tickets that were won by lottery. Among the critics, Michael Billington, Britain’s most decorated theatre writer, was one of the few to have got a seat. “If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury,” Billington wrote in his review. On Saturdays, Hiddleston remembered, there were gala performances for graduates and theatrical somebodies. “I think at the first one almost everybody with the last name ‘Attenborough’ in the UK was in attendance.”

On one of these evenings, a glass was clinked with a spoon. Jacobi began to speak, explaining something about a book that had passed from actor to actor. “And then Ken was at the microphone, explaining that the responsibility of the keeper of the book is that they pass it on to the next generation. And suddenly Ken said, ‘I’d like to present it to Tom.’”

We were 10 minutes into our 15. I looked at my list of questions — on frontispieces, annotations, signatures, printing quirks — about the red book. Hiddleston was in LA. The book was in London. He was not contractually obliged to talk to me, as he was to the other journalists who were waiting on iPhones all over the world. All that was sustaining this conversation was the actor’s private enthusiasm for the kind of acting he is rarely, if ever, able to do anymore.

Hiddleston began to talk at length. He said the gift of playing the part was to be presented with the most beautiful, profound poetry written in English about the question of being alive, of death, of the possibility of spiritual life after death.

An email arrived saying our time was up. “It has the effect of making me feel more alive,” Hiddleston was saying. “Learning and internalising those great soliloquies, and having to perform them, there is no escaping those big questions of what it means to be alive,” he went on, the minutes ticking by. “And actually I find it very reassuring to ask those questions. I find it repetitively reassuring to say those words. Because it actually makes your life mean something.”

[flanaganfilm]

Mike, can you tell us your experience premiering Oculus at tiff 2013? I recently saw Perri Nemiroff’s interview with you (looking like a baby btw- so young) and it made me think about what your mindset must have been as in getting yo experience the launch of your career, post Absentia, at one of the most prestigious festivals.

Oh, I remember that very well... a lot changed in a very short amount of time. And I think I know the interview you're talking about, I keep trying to link to it here but it doesn't take...

So there are few things to point out about Oculus and about what was happening in my life at the time. When Oculus got greenlit, I was working full time as a reality television editor. I used to sneak out of my job at lunch to go to "doctor's appointments" whenever I had to come for production meetings or casting sessions (they started to think there was something really, really wrong with my health).

Making the movie was an amazing learning experience - it was my first "real" movie, and full of lessons. It was the first collaboration with people who would become pillars of my career moving forward, like producer Trevor Macy (who is now my partner at Intrepid Pictures and who has produced everything I've ever made since) and my DP Michael Fimognari, who is one of the most important collaborators of my life. It was also the first time I worked with a young actress named Kate Siegel, who played the spooky ghost in the mirror.

We went into TIFF with distribution already in place. FilmDistrict had committed to the project during the Cannes market before we shot the movie, so we thought we were set. It was going to be my big theatrical debut.

Just before we premiered at TIFF, FilmDistrict abruptly and bafflingly dropped the film. I still don't really know why. They had committed to a worldwide theatrical release for the movie, but for reasons that were never made entirely clear to me, they dropped us just before the festival. Suddenly the whole enterprise was in jeopardy, and I didn't know if anyone would pick the movie back up.

I was absolutely terrified.

Being my first "real" movie, I didn't really know how this world worked and couldn't understand why our distributor didn't want to release it. We'd made the movie they had been excited about, they seemed to really like it, and we'd done everything they asked - it was a shock to the system. So when we rolled into tiff, we were homeless and trying not to let FilmDistrict's abrupt change of heart poison our chances of another sale.

I had never been to TIFF before but heard about Midnight Madness, which had seen huge sales from Cabin Fever and Insidious. Bidding wars had broken out while the films were still screening. But being part of the program was absolutely no guarantee of distribution - in fact, this might be the highest this movie would ever rise.

Trevor Macy and I went to the world premiere of The Green Inferno, which was playing the night before we played, and the audience was ROWDY. Like, shouting and hollering throughout the movie. We looked at each other with wide, nervous eyes - if this was the Midnight Madness audience, they were going to hate our movie the next day. We were considerably slower, ponderous, and atmospheric in a room that seemed to demand visceral, overt entertainment. I left the screening feeling dejected and a little doomed. Trevor was more upbeat, citing conversations he'd had with the programmer, Colin Geddes, who assured us he'd put our movie in the best possible spot for its success.

Our screening was September 9th, 2013 at midnight. I was petrified, and we were sold out. I remember walking into the theater feeling like this was the most important screening of my life. I wasn't alone, thank goodness. Trevor Macy, Michael Fimognari, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, and James Lafferty were on hand. The film seemed to play well. It was the opposite of the screening the night before, which Colin had told us would happen - "watch," he had said. "The Saturday night slot is the big crazy one. You guys are Sunday, and it's going to be completely different. They'll plug right in."

He was right. You could hear a pin drop for most of the first half, and then there were moments of scattered applause that picked up as the film progressed. By the end, people were jumping in their seats and cheering for young Tim and Kaylee. There was an audible gasp when the anchor swung. And the applause at the credits seemed heartfelt and loud.

Most of that is a blur for me. I found this grainy pic from the Q&A after the film. I still had no idea how it had gone, or what was going to come out of it. I remember having hard time putting words together, and I vividly recall feeling like I sounded like an absolute moron whenever I talked, and trying to pass the microphone over to the actors as often as I could.

It's tough to see everyone in the pic, but from left to right it is Colin Geddes, Michael Fimognari, myself, Trevor Macy, Katee Sackhoff, Brenton Thwaites, Rory Cochrane, and James Lafferty.

When I stepped out of the theater, though, I became aware that everything had changed. I was immediately surrounded by people who had seen the film, suddenly shaking a ton of hands and realizing that it had been a hit. I walked into the theater by myself, utterly anonymous, and feeling every bit like an imposter. But everything was different when I walked out. I remember someone from the press talking about it years later, and saying "I was there that night - you walked into the theater with nothing, and walked out with a career."

People were asking me to sign stuff. That had never happened in my life. People wanted to get pictures. It was SO. FUCKING. WEIRD. Someone snapped a picture during that little whirlwind, and you can see it on my (young, skinny, hopelessly naive) face - an overall bewilderment, a gentle disbelief that this was happening:

I loved my experience at TIFF. And it absolutely started everything. Relativity, Blumhouse, and WWE Films joined forces to make an offer on the movie at the festival, and we left with a theatrical distribution deal. My career had officially begun. Now, I wouldn't feel like it had for several more years - I remained in fight/flight/survival mode well through Gerald's Game - but in retrospect, yes, that's when it happened.

Thank you for asking this question, it's been a while since I've looked back at this period of my life. It kinda makes me want to watch that movie again. It has been a LONG time, and I owe it a lot.

Maybe everything.

[felidrae]

With the recent released episode I went back & binge watched the previous episodes. There are many things I could talk about that I want to see more of (example if Penny introduced her daughter to the rest of the crew- I feel Steve would be utterly devoted to her since he’s a clown & has a soft spot for kids as seen from that one customer interaction)

BUT I’m bias and have a fascination in examining possibly veiled relationships & going into the speculative deeper details/interpretations. So I’ll start w/ that.

The topic: Cesare & Doctor (Allen)

Cesare & Doctor seem to have a deeper relationship than how Cesare has one w/ the rest of the employees.

Firstly, from what we’ve seen Cesare seems to only see his employees as just that- employees. He has no inclination to form a bond since we haven’t seen him hang out w/ them outside of work nor use their real names (unlike Steve) but instead uses their costume titles; this is so he doesn’t get attached. Cesare is a man on the job & once the job is done he will finally rest- no need to get attached when he’s dead already.

While Cesare is full of energy, theatrics & is just all over the place in general he doesn’t really seem to take nonsense from his employees nor engage in peer discussions; when he DOES interact it’s limited & mainly snapping:

- Frances asking him to try the bad food & he immediately shuts it down by saying he doesn’t eat food. While I understand where he’s coming from as a zombie there’s no real reason to not at least try it- Not eating something thats no longer needed doesn’t mean he can’t humor her.

- Conrad asking him how old he is. He could’ve lied but instead tells him to never ask him that; then again this could’ve been a “asking someone how old they are is rude” type of thing

- Conrad asking if he’s been to a FTC before & he says “no, I’m a virgin around here” then immediately goes straight back to business “I’m sure my reputation proceeds me however”

- Conrad asking to take lens off is immediately shut down cause Zombie man needs to stay hidden

(Notably, the only time Cesare snaps at Doctor is when he tries to negotiate w/ Cesare over the costumes.)

As stated his interactions with them are mainly orders or stopping them from revealing “ brand secrets” / asking questions. Even they (Conrad & Frances) have no internal familiarity w/ him since they call him “Boss”. It’s all strictly business.

The only people we have seen him fully interact w/ that isn’t a quick remake is Steve & Doctor; Steve makes sense- he’s a long term target who’s foiled his attempted captures time & time again. They got history/beef. Doctor however is just a regular human who’s employed by him- there shouldn’t be any history between the two that would establish the amount of interaction that aren’t simply orders (then again the interactions they do have is also related to business.) as well as treat Doctor more fairly from the rest YET Casare uses a nickname for him which is something we haven’t seen him do w/ the others, dramatically worries about Doctor when he’s down, is more abrasive towards him and counts on him w/ tasks such as gathering information whilst being impressed by him; Doctor is his right hand man.

Doctor in turn does something the rest don’t do- he calls Cesare by his name. This is significant. Why script it to where Frances/Conrad only call him “Boss” but Doctor frequently uses his actual name; this is a personal/friendly undertone. Cesare seems to have no issues with this either which if you go based on Cesare’s character & view on his employees would seem unusual. The only time we see him calling Cesare “Boss” is when he’s shocked/unsure about him.

Overall Cesare displays traits that would suggest he’s slightly more fond towards Doctor (I believe he enjoyed his time with the other employees- he’s just a blockhead & wants no strings attached) & Doctor in return reciprocates. Heck, Doctor is listed as a “Morality Pet” trope though it’s downplayed in the series- so far.

Secondly, the question is why is this specific relationship different from the rest? Well, another thing that’s good to note is the parallel between the two Foodtrucks:

- both have extravagant themes to hide the identities of the employers

-both have three employees that are human

-both sell bad burgers

- both are employers who came out of the ground & aren’t human

From what we’ve seen from the latest episode Steve was in the Earth’s core unconscious until he woke up & dug himself out; causing Tim to be the first to find him. Tim is also arguably Steve’s right hand man since he wears a chef’s hat & in “Down” he is the only one from Bigtop that exclaims a sentence of shock when everything is revealed.

Now this is where the speculation(or delulu) comes into play: both Tim/Doctor are right hand men & both exclaimed in shock at the revelation; so what if like Tim, Doctor was the first to find Cesare? We don’t know exactly how the recruitment happened but Cesare is aware they are all theatre majors (interestingly he specifically mentions puppets when saying this- marionettes are puppets) so either he went out of his way to a theatre group & found them OR Doctor was his first employee who brought his friends along since the pay is nice whilst they get to perform.

If Doctor was the first to find Cesare he took enough interest to make the proposal. This could be for many reasons however given the context of the story it would make more sense if Doctor reminded him of when Cesare was alive- Cesare is a performer & it would make sense he would reminisce about it causing it to make decisions for him.

Personally I would find it fitting if like Cesare, Doctor enjoys puppets- his voice would be perfect for it. (But that is a headcannon & not speculation.)

In conclusion, the relationship between the two is noticeable different from the rest for a Zombie who was using them as a means to an end & learning more on the why would be desirable to see as well as flashbacks about how Zomburger & the relationship dynamics began; seeing how they’re all (Bigtop & Zomburger) handling the revelation that their bosses weren’t human is definitely something we will be seeing.

That’s mainly it- it’s a bit of a rant but I’d like to hear your thoughts/headcannons

Bonus photo:

[xjulixred45x]

WISH: the power of Wishes (RE-IMAGINATION)

okay, I know that many people have already done this, but I want to make my own version of this and above all do my bit for Magnífico Stands (the only salvageable character in the entire movie) and instead of just using the original concepts of the work (which is great) i wanted to mix both the concepts that i liked from the final work and the discarded concepts. we'll see.

First of all, Magnifico would not be the villain, nor would Queen Amaya. Is it simply too much to ask for a king/queen who truly cares about their people in a sincere way and does not want to harm them? although there would be a fixed villain. But I'll leave it for later. Asha and her family remain the same, except that Asha never really considered the stories her father told her about the stars as something real and thought it was another way of referring to the Magnificent King's wishes. which encouraged more fanaticism for him. I think Asha would be more studious, not exactly a book eater, but someone who has many hyper fixations and wants to know absolutely everything about those topics that she is passionate about. which causes some distance between her and boys her age. I mean, his clumsiness is a little more justified (maybe he's even neuro divergent? but I'll leave it ambiguous). Thanks to this and her somewhat more theatrical personality (which we see at the beginning of the movie), Asha participates in various activities to help the inhabitants of Rosas. In this way we would be introduced to the utopian way of life of the kingdom and perhaps even to Asha's few friends. I think that of his group of friends the only relevant ones would be Daliah and MAYBE Simon. Daliah would have a disability that makes her use a crutch (as in one of the old concepts) and she is like a book worm, she and Asha probably met because they had many hyperfixations in common. Simon dreams of being a knight of the kingdom, so he and Asha bond by having similar goals and helping each other achieve them. (Asha and Daliah even help Simón train and encourage him 😭Simon helps Asha get jobs). In general they are a fairly united group. then the main plot of the movie begins, Asha wanting to be Magnífico's apprentice, BUT not because of her Grandpa! But she genuinely wants to use magic to make her family's life easier by being just her and her mother (they're not going to put a 90-year-old man to work) and take better care of them. message about family in your face. The entire At All Costs sequence occurs but with a different context, not only does Magnífico open up to Asha but she also opens up and tells the above, that since her father died she feels that she has to do something to improve the life of her family, take care of them as best you can. generating not only empathy on our part but also on Magnifico. thus becoming his official apprentice. (no, here there is no problem with returning the wishes or anything else, because probably having removed the filling it could be explained in more detail why several dangerous wishes should not be fulfilled.

As an extra fact: I like to think that desires can also disappear on their own when they are fulfilled without the need for Magnifico, simply to give it a little more weight)

Asha and her acquaintances are obviously very happy, and proceed to have certain interactions with Queen Amaya, perhaps just giving more lore about her and Magnifico (God knows we needed it) and even about the founding of Rosas itself and the Magic sistem.

I like to thing wish Sistem of Magic is a mix between The Owl House and Harry Potter.

This would be where the villain would be mentioned for the first time (mention, not appearance), who would be the one who destroyed the Old Village of Magnífico. For now I'll just call him Morgan (like, Morgan Le fay). and then there is the matter of the star. It seems to me that both Magnifico and Asha would be interested in this type of magic to prove ancient myths about stars, so they spend several weeks working on ways to "bring" a star to Magnifico's laboratory. First they study in depth Astronomy, alchemy, traditional magic and then they go to the attempts. **funny sequence of all the failed attempts to lower the star from the sky** I think there would come a time where Asha would even stay the night in the castle to be able to investigate Magnífico's books because her attempts failed and they are both super sleepless. There may even be a cute moment where Asha falls asleep in the castle so Amaya and Magnifico give her a blanket and pillow to make her comfortable (these two are so cute, I can't----) and Magnifico, searching for more books, ends up coming across the forbidden book. the book he took from his old town... that belonged to Morgan. Now, I imagined a whole Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde-like sequence with this(this was so long i'm sorry) Magnífico tempted to use the book, but as soon as he remembers everything that that same book provoked, what that book TOOK FROM him, it goes away, but he starts to reflect, if it is really good to keep that reminder, that constant nightmare, if he does well. and then (perhaps due to lack of sleep or a materialization of the book) Morgan appears. mocking him, laughing at him, like do you really think you will ever be free from what HE did? from all the damage he caused? He will NEVER be free of it. and Magnifico obviously denies this! Morgan should be dead now, this is just a bad dream. but "Morgan" lets him know that as long as he lives he will always be "there." Magnifico only sees it as all the damage he caused, he lets him know, that when he can completely get rid of his book, there will be no trace of it. That he'll be forgotten. Morgan makes it clear that he will never leave him, THAT HE WILL STAY no matter what he says while he struggles with Magnifico for the book.

AND WHEN MAGNIFICO HAS THE BOOK IN HIS HANDS HE SEE IN HIS REFLECTION THAT HE HAS GREEN EYES WHILE MORGAN SAYS THAT HE WILL BLOOM LONG AFTER HE IS GONE IF HE DECIDES TO FOLLOW HIS PATH (use dangerous magic, the star)... Magnificent knows Morgan well, he needs him to survive, he is a PARASITE, he may not be able to control him, but he will definitely rejoice when he knows that Morgan took his last breath. TRAUMA TIME, "Morgan" showing Magnífico a hallucination of how he destroys 1- the kingdom of roses 2- its inhabitants and 3- AMAYA. f for Magnifico. Magnificent, he's had enough of this, he just curses Morgan one last time, sending him to hell and throwing his book into the fire, which rises above his castle with a green flame... MEANWHILE Asha, still half asleep, settles in as she thinks about her failure with the star again, as she looks out the window at the northern stars, and JUST out of habit, she wishes she wished she could have one of those, so she could help people. and ZASSS! Before she realizes it, a great light appears in the room that almost blinds her and when she regains her composure she is a small creature! What a magic dust! A funny moment that my sister came up with for the inclusion of Star Boy is that Asha gave the star a simple nickname "little guy" and the star decided to change shape back into His kind of human boy😅 In any case, Magnífico hears the confusion and, with his adrenaline high, runs to see Asha and discovers a fucking star boy in his palace. He's shocked, obviously, but now he's much more cautious than before (lack of sleep + ptsd). I think it would take a moment with Amaya to calm down a little, remind him that he is not Morgan and that he would never use magic to hurt its habitants, and to get some sleep (another Amaya moment x Magnifico YEY!) Anyway, Asha, Amaya and Magnifico trying to teach Star boy the basics of human culture while figuring out how exactly it works without being too invasive.

But Star Boy dosen't make it easy, being kind of a knew-it-all(a little arrogant?), messing up some of the tries of Magnífico and Asha of get test material. Things like that.

I don't Even think he knows how frágile humans are at the Start, so it would take a little...incident to make him realize that. But definitely flying dust would be something fun 😝 I think Asha would have several moments with Star Boy showing her the kingdom of Rosas, just trying to use his magic for good and teach him human things.

But at the same time is hard with Someone who's never been with humans before, so when he tries to do something that Asha thinks is "good for the people" Star Boy misunderstand and end up doing something wrong, like grouwing too much the tries to the point the people can't reach them to get fruit, turn the water in ice for fun, etc. Her friends join in! but at the same time I think that some (especially Dalilah) would feel half done by having a new new person in the group (who is literally from another world).

Daliah Even Starts ti believe that Star Boy could be kind of dangerous, specially if she ever sees him mad, he literally is making a disaster without intention, what would happen if he DOES have intention?

But Asha tries to ressur her that Star Boy is not malicous, but just naive, and unexpefienced, and he's trying to learn! Trying to be better.

It would be Even better if Someone endup hurt or Asha almost gets hurt so Star Boy Star to realize, well, MORTALITY, and tries to make up what he did wrong And control better His own Magic. With the proper support ofc. which causes Daliah to distance herself a little while Asha and Star boy have their well-deserved romance (at all cost reprise? at all cost reprise) and Simon continues training hard to be a knight.

Daliah feels insecure around Star Boy, even if he is more careful and empathetic now, she definitely got the impression that his magic is dangerous, but does she feel guilty for distrusting Asha like that, for feeling jealous? so he is going to reflect alone.. That's when he runs into Morgan, probably while on the outskirts of Rosas. and in a certain way when they meet they have some worrying interactions. Morgan gets Daliah to tell him that she feels insecure about her friendship with someone and the whole thing, that she feels like someone is dangerous but they don't believe her, etc. Morgan, with a master's degree in Manipulation, tells her something personal to gain her trust, how he used to be seen as similar to where he came from, how he took refuge and distanced himself from everyone because he didn't fit in, how he had to find his own way of standing out, like her. It sounds like a very Evil Like me moment to me. I mean, Morgan manipulating Dalilah in an emotional moment by being passive aggressive and at the same time being "empathetic." You may even not only try to convince him to see his friends differently, but also his desires. Doesn't that seem archaic to you? Don't you think that having someone who fulfills your desires is something horribly selfish? Like? Are people going to learn if there is no pain involved? (a philosophy...valid, but taken to the extreme) Thanks to this, Daliah begins to hang out with her friends less, but with Star Boy around, they don't realize it at first. Star Boy and Asha do some experiments with their magic for Rosas' benefit, with good results, Magnifico is even being friendlier with him and not as tense. everything seems to be going well... but then Magnifico notices that some wishes have... disappeared. and in the distance, you can see a light on the outskirts of Rosas... a green light... oh no, no no no no- it has to be a mistake- a coincidence- The scene is made where help is sought from the town to find the traitor who stole the wishes, the people are worried, and they are attentive. Asha and Star Boy are confused: why would someone steal the wishes if only Magnifico can fulfill them? There is no way to know who it was? How could he get into the palace? Daliah seems especially distressed, it almost seems like she wants to approach Queen Amaya to tell her something. but at the last moment he decides not to and runs away. Asha and Star Boy get worried and go after her, following her through Rosas until they reach the outskirts of the kingdom. and that's when they see it. Morgan. He has his mirror scepter, Daliah is in front of him, tired from running.

Morgan has several orbs around him, stained and withered, it takes Asha a second to realize they are WISHES. THE LOST WISHES, HE WAS INFECTING THEM..

Now, two possible ways this could end. one attached to the film, another more of my own interpretation. The one attached to the movie is that, Morgan uses his powers augmented by wishes and manages to temporarily absorb Star Boy, and with his powers he manages to keep the entire kingdom of Rosas under his thumb. even Mangifico (maybe controlling it and only true love's kiss can break it?). but Asha, using what Magnifico taught her, manages to make a collective spell to summon the star and thus weaken Morgan, allowing the wishes to leave him and Star Boy using his powers/Magnifico to lock him in the mirror of his scepter. My own interpretation would be that Morgan would rather use people's fears, using their Wishes as a base, infecting them and in a certain way controlling them (and taking away vitality from the people of Rosas). that is the source of the power of evil, fear and ignorance. Then the people of Rosas, seeing that they are all weakened and that the wishes make Morgan stronger, decide to give the remaining wishes to Magnifico and Asha, so that they can recover and be able to face Morgan. Just saying that not only do they not need the physical desire for it to be fulfilled, but they will work to make it happen all together, now the COLLECTIVE desire is to defeat the villain. and thus they manage to give a Power Up to both Asha and Magnifico to fight with Morgan and thus free Star Boy, who similarly ends up locking Morgan in the mirror forever. In the end there is almost no wish left intact, Rosas is a mess, but now they have a new aura of optimism, of desire to try, to work to improve, the people decide to help with their own hands instead of just using magic. There could be a time skip for when Rosas is completely rebuilt, there could be more equity in magical and non-magical users, people no longer depend so much on their desires and work as a team with the few sorcerers there are to make everything better. Asha is Magnifico's official successor, so she is crowned princess of Rosas. while Amaya and Mangifico teach new, younger magic users. Simon is a guard, Dahlia found a way to feel complete in her own way (maybe working with Asha's mom) Star Boy and Asha together, as well as Amaya and Magnifico. In general the message would be that there are dreams that are selfish and that can lead to destruction, that should not be pursued. While there are dreams that are sincere but you have to work for them, everything you can, even if you need help to fulfill them, it is up to YOU to make it happen. and like that, this story is over. END

Shares, reglogs and comments are very welcome!

This was by long shot the LARGEST work i Ever done, but i hope You guys like it.

[mooifyourecows]

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks...

Sure! (given in no particular order)

1. Daichi from Haikyuu, of course.. I just love everything about him. He's a great captain and he has a big appetite and he's so down to earth and masculine in the best ways, what a man!!! I want a tattoo of him on my body!

2. Pam Poovey from Archer. It's hard to stand out in a show where nearly every character is the single most interesting person in the world but I really do think that Pam takes the cake. She's a real one. She stays true to herself no matter how much everyone else begs her to stop and I RESPECT THAT. Also she's a fat character who isn't limited to being the Fat Character. While her weight does come up, often in insulting jokes or bits, she has so much else to her that it feels like such a small part of her character.

3. Princess Carolyn from Bojack Horseman. Out of all the insanely good character arcs in Bojack Horseman, Princess Carolyn's is my favorite. Usually the hardworking career woman character who wants a baby winds up the most disappointing character for me because she always gives up her career to be a mom but NOT MY GIRL PRINCESS CAROLYN. She said I want to be a badass boss lady AND a mom and I don't need no man to get what I want! And she did that shit. She deserves it.

4. Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers. I aspire to be like Linda. She's fun, she's extroverted, she is just so excited to live her modest life with a struggling burger business, a husband she actually enjoys spending time with, and 3 kids she adores with every fiber of her being. She sings and dances at any given opportunity and doesnt let embarrassment faze her. What an icon.

5. Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings. Every time I think of him I wanna cry. He's just so.... perfect.... and wonderful.... He is the sweetest, bravest man to ever exist and NOBODY CAN ARGUE. The original Ride or Die. We all need a Samwise Gamgee in our lives. 🖤

6. Usopp from One Piece. That's my boy! He's so funny and relatable. I love characters who are brave while being terrified. Despite his wacky goofy personality, he's complex and insecure but he stands by his guns and isn't afraid to challenge even his best friend/captain to defend what he believes and GOSH what a stand up guy ammiright?

7. Eleanor Shellstrop from The Good Place. I love a disaster of a woman. She's a selfish bisexual with zero shame, what's more to love? I just can't help it. I'm weak for women who are just The Worst ™️.

8. Manny from Swiss Army Man. I mean... He's dead, he teaches us what it means to be alive, and he's played by Daniel Radcliffe. He's basically the perfect character, right? Listen, Swiss Army Man is my all time favorite movie and I want everyone else to like it too. I can't even talk much on it because it's so much better when you watch it yourself. Especially if you love amazing soundtracks, beautiful visuals, and queer revelations.

9. Hal from Malcolm in the Middle. I'm such a sucker for husbands who are obsessed with their wives and men in touch with their emotions and Hal is the epitome of both those things! I watched this show while growing up and I truly think that Bryan Cranston's portrayal of Hal taught me how men are supposed to act, especially in regards to their romantic partners. And now my own partner is basically a less theatrical version of him so it paid off ya know?

10. Judas Iscariot from Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). This is mainly based on performance. Carl Anderson did such an AMAZING job playing Judas that he literally stole the show, imo. Jesus who? You mean Judas's boyfriend? It's not JUST his performance though, the way the character is written is so well done that I feel like Judas is the real main character. Yeah, this is the story about Jesus but he ain't the star, ya dig? He's a basic bitch in comparison to the complexity and emotional turmoil of Judas. Also they're gay and in love, what a tragedy! This is cinema!

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

I have jumbled thoughts on WISH looking to fall short of industry projections, its low CinemaScore grade, its low chances at scoring a great multiplier that helps it climb, and Disney's overall bad film year - on their centennial no less.

The success of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, the excellent legs ELEMENTAL scored after such a poor opening weekend, and how well THE LITTLE MERMAID did domestically tells me everything I need to know, I feel.

GUARDIANS VOL. 3 had a solid opening for an MCU sequel, down a bit from what VOL. 2 pulled in back in 2017, but still good. Legs carried it past $350m+ domestically, and it made over $845m worldwide. It's probably my favorite MCU movie in a while, and it resonated for a lot of other people, too. Can't say the same about MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS, LOVE AND THUNDER, QUANTUMANIA, and THE MARVELS. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is now a mess of rushed movies that are either homework or you have to do homework in order to keep up with them, GUARDIANS VOL. 3 not so much. I extend this to last autumn's BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER as well.

ELEMENTAL, like most of the recent films overseen by current Pixar leader Pete Docter, told a personal story in a fun, appealing, and visually stunning way. Despite existing next to other family films in a crowded June/July, ELEMENTAL grew some serious legs and did really good overseas. I'm confident LUCA and TURNING RED, had they been released theatrically in a world where COVID-19 never happened, would've done pretty darn well. LIGHTYEAR is the anomaly here, the rare Pixar film that audiences just didn't take a liking to. But I can't hold it against Pixar, Docter lets these filmmakers make the movie they see fit, and sometimes in the world of the arts... It's not going to sit well with everybody. Luckily, ELEMENTAL had a real rebound and nearly made 2 1/2x its posted budget.

THE LITTLE MERMAID got by on being almost beat for beat a redo of a beloved animated feature in Disney's library, and it also helps that some of the actors did a pretty solid job. (I haven't seen the film, only bits and pieces at my movie theater job. I'm not into these remakes.) While this movie couldn't cover its costs worldwide, as it had a hard time in certain large markets, it still did pretty great here.

But I think Marvel, Disney Studios (as in the end that does all the live-action and CG tech demo movies), and Walt Disney Animation Studios are in need of some course correction. I get the sense that the latter two arms of Disney's massive film machine aren't really letting filmmakers make the movies they want to make... But rather making the films for them, and someone steps in to do the job. That's also pretty much the case with Marvel, but sometimes they let a director do what they want. Sometimes. James Gunn got more freedom on VOL. 3, and Ryan Coogler got a lot of say on WAKANDA FOREVER.

Pixar feels the most free of the divisions to me, outside of 20th Century Studios and Searchlight. I feel their recent animated offerings have more of a voice and a personality, they feel like their filmmakers' own creations. Everything from LUCA to ELEMENTAL, all these post-Lasseter movies. I'm not really getting this kind of thing from the Disney Animation films made under Jennifer Lee's leadership, and given how audiences reacted to STRANGE WORLD and WISH (as in, those who actually saw them), I suspect audiences aren't, either. Are their movies being noted to death by upper management? That FROZEN II documentary did reveal that these films are test screened for toddlers, and then stuff is cut out to make things less intense. As if they are sanding off the edges of a perfectly fine piece of furniture.

Maybe it's not villains and such that people missed in Disney animated films of late. Maybe they weren't upset at twists or whatever...

... but rather, they were not too fond of writing that feels like it got doctored relentlessly into being FROZEN 6.0, and also the lack of bite and that classic sense of danger that complimented the magic and "warm fuzzies" quite nicely in the more beloved Disney animated movies. You think Walt Disney gave two craps about the angry letters he got from parents over the frightening moments in SNOW WHITE and PINOCCHIO? If a Disney film has to be a little scary and intense, it should be. I don't understand this new thing where they hold back. Look at how warmly received DreamWorks' PUSS IN BOOTS sequel was last year; a good helping of some scary stuff for the kids in the audience should only help it do better, so long as everything else adds up.

(Note: "Warm fuzzies" was something a friend of mine, a fellow Disney enthusiast named Jim Miles came up with, and I use that phrasing quite a lot!)

The horizon for both studios is curious. Pixar's next is a guaranteed hit with INSIDE OUT 2, it's ELIO that's the more curious one. It'll be Pixar's 2nd-ever post-outbreak theatrical release of an original animated movie. WDAS' next is unknown, and they have ZOOTOPIA 2 and FROZEN III on the horizon, both of which sure to cover any recent losses. Maybe WDAS-2024 shows a change in direction, maybe it's another round of what STRANGE WORLD and WISH had to offer. Maybe it'll be taken back and retooled if WISH comes up short? There will likely be a much needed strike for animation when the Animation Guild can make that happen in mid-2024, so maybe we won't be seeing that very film next year. Stuff will likely be pushed back again, for a strike that NEEDED to happen. Maybe some self-reflection and strikes will do this studio good, they seem to be in a funk.

And in live-action land, you would think a new HAUNTED MANSION movie with that kind of cast (well, except for Jared Leto, yuck) and a rare-for-Disney PG-13 rating would be an all-timer, right? Big flop. Massive budget, probably noted to death, too. If not, then... Decisions were made, and audiences just didn't care for them unfortunately. The remakes, even the ones that make good money at the box office, are largely agreed to be stinkers. Audiences may have flocked to most of them, but if they weren't based on beloved movies... How would they have done? And what's next? A LION KING prequel that I'm certain won't make much of a stir, a delayed and iffy-looking SNOW WHITE remake that I feel will also have trouble at the box office... And more animated movie-based pictures, and some theme park ones maybe. They've run out of classics to remake, so now they're trying theme parks again. They keep trying to get this TRON-in-name-only movie off the ground that's not a sequel to TRON: LEGACY and doesn't involve anyone from the previous two films. And they're doing sequels/prequels to the remakes. But as we saw with ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS and MALEFICENT 2, that's not a guarantee. People came to see the car they loved with a new coat of paint, not a similar car made afterwards.

So, I think Marvel, Disney Studios, and WDAS are at a similar point to where the Disney enterprise was in the early-to-mid 1970s. Maybe even into the early 1980s...

Above: This logo, for the enterprise's 50th anniversary in 1973, would show up before the films released that year... Presumably, the Buena Vista distribution title card would follow. It does not appear on home video editions of the Disney films released that year. i.e. ROBIN HOOD, CHARLEY AND THE ANGEL, etc.

I think this is all telling me that some audiences aren't necessarily upset at what kinds of stories Disney is choosing to tell, but are instead a bit unsatisfied with the way they are telling those stories. That merely the reliance on brand names and what worked a decade ago is not enough anymore:

I think about where Disney was by around 1975-76, inching up on a decade without Walt Disney, and a few years after Roy O. Disney's passing... And it looks as if Walt Disney Productions at the time were delivering what was guaranteed to be successful... In 1965...

You had cheaply-made kid-friendly comedies starring TV mainstays and often times they co-starred an animal (THE BAREFOOT EXECUTIVE, MILLION DOLLAR DUCK, GUS, take your pick), you had standard adventure movies (such as TREASURE OF MATECUMBE and THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD), you had the occasional long live-action musical with animated scenes in them (BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS, PETE'S DRAGON), and the occasional animated feature film that was always directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and had that same lazy vibe that he'd been employing since THE SWORD IN THE STONE a decade ago...

You look at what Disney had to offer on the movie front from around 1969-1976, and it's like backwash from the early 1960s, and what worked back then... Interestingly, it was the animated movies that continued to do well during that period, contrary to popular belief. But nothing was a massive blockbuster domestically, on the level of 101 DALMATIANS or THE JUNGLE BOOK...

So, again, I think of Disney's output roughly 1967-1979... And I see what's coming out now as backwash from 2013-16. Guaranteed smash hit movies - Marvel superhero spectacles, remakes of animated classics, FROZEN-esque family movies... no longer foolproof. Pixar looks to be weathering this just fine, even if this timeline did not see LUCA and TURNING RED hit theaters nationwide. I still reckon those would've been big, big hits in a not-COVID world. How ELEMENTAL did tells me everything.

There was one lucky arm of Disney that somewhat avoided all of this... STAR WARS...

STAR WARS is largely just streaming shows now. There hasn't been a feature film since THE RISE OF SKYWALKER back in 2019. SOLO was the first movie in the whole franchise to actually lose money at the box office, the lowest-grossing film remains that very cheap CLONE WARS theatrical pilot movie. I feel SOLO lost money simply because the director change and subsequent refilming of almost the whole damn thing ballooned the budget, and there's only so many people you can drag to a Han Solo origin movie when a Wikipedia article is right there. Releasing it so soon after THE LAST JEDI didn't help, either. STAR WARS movies aren't MCU movies, I think you kinda need to let those sit for a little while. SOLO, I think, would've probably done better if it had been a Christmas 2018 release. Not the May right after LAST JEDI's December 2017 bow. Disney plans to release two new STAR WARS features in 2026, and well... Good luck with that. The new STAR WARS movies will be a test, to see if audiences will keep showing up for these movies. They aren't even entries in a new trilogy, so there's that.

Lucasfilm did do a new INDIANA JONES movie that did disastrously. Maybe audiences just weren't down for another adventure with Indy, maybe the market was a little too crowded, maybe those who saw it just didn't take to a Spielberg-less Indy movie. (Not a dig on James Mangold, but maybe audiences felt his absence?) Maybe it just cost too fucking much... Lucasfilm seems to just be "Star Wars Studios" now. They lost the rights to the book CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE, which they were supposed to adapt. They've barely made any live-action movies that *aren't* STAR WARS or INDIANA JONES on a consistent basis since RADIOLAND MURDERS all the way back in 1994. Like, what did they make between '94 and now that wasn't part of those huge franchises? RED TAILS, and an animated movie called STRANGE MAGIC. Both of which bombed... But I will be fair to Lucasfilm, a good chunk of the not-SW/Indy movies of the late '80s/early '90s also flopped.

Speaking of that... I also feel that Disney should probably invest in lower budget movies again? Not necessarily "cheap" stuff, but lower budget stuff that's more experimental and more creative? Not the kinds of movies that they can send straight to streaming, but small little movies that do okay in theaters and sorta help build a back catalogue for them. Why wasn't something like CRATER a theatrical release?

One of Disney's biggest live-action successes, a looooong time ago, was HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS. Produced for $18m, grossed over $200m worldwide and spawned some sequels. Did you know that movie actually outgrossed THE LITTLE MERMAID that same year? That's right, in 1989, HONEY made more money than MERMAID... Which film do you think is better remembered?

Anyways, what ended up happening after Disney's weird era after Walt's passing? In the late '70s and early '80s, they genuinely tried to experiment and redefine what a "Disney movie" could be, but a lot of it went south. TRON was probably the most successful of these experiments, but even that didn't measure up to expectations. Touchstone was set up, and they hit the ground running with SPLASH in 1984, and had quite a few successes into the late '80s... Films like THREE MEN AND A BABY and GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM. But that was Touchstone... Mainline Disney was where things needed to be happenin'...

And they weren't really... THE BLACK CAULDRON, THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN, ONE MAGIC CHRISTMAS, they were all coming up short. The little bit of respite came from efforts like FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR and THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, smaller-budget productions that made their money back.

Eventually, the tides changed, and it was time to make movies that took the audience by surprise.

While it was released under the Touchstone banner in 1988, I'd say WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT was the movie that really got the ball rolling... And then that would be followed by OLIVER & COMPANY, HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS, THE LITTLE MERMAID, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, etc. All of which reversed course for the studio's film output. You couldn't convince anyone over the age of 12 to check out a "Disney" movie in theaters five years earlier in 1983, but by the beginning of the '90s, you had all the demographics showing up to some of their films...

Maybe that's what Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures will discover again in this weird post-outbreak, post-streaming world. They've hit this wall before, and they've gotten over it...

Maybe it's time for them to take a daring leap and make a proverbial new ROGER RABBIT-type movie that makes a Disney movie neat and worth checking out in the theaters again...

AND ALSO, TO TREAT THEIR FILMMAKERS AND STAFF BETTER, but that's another story.

[nono-bunny]

I knew Brooklyn and Malibu are probably the second biggest ship after Malibu and Ken, but before watching Big City Big Dreams I had no real frame of reference to who Brooklyn is as a person and what their dynamic is like, but after watching it... Istg literally every single time they're on screen together there's just a completely unmissable romantic undertone???

We KNOW the Barbie staff is capable of writing platonic relationships, because Malibu has tons of platonic friends! So I literally just cannot imagine that this wasn't meant to be gay??? Istg at times the symbolism and chemistry was better than with Ken, and?? I'm genuinely really confused by the whole thing because if they're capable of writing this sort of romantic tension without making it awkward (ugh "do you want to dance?") then why not put that effort towards what is very obviously gonna be the endgame couple? I love Ken, he's great, but things were kinda awkward and a bit cringe before BCBD when it comes to those two, and then they turn around and deliver this flawless romance devoid of any implicit depiction even though I feel like it's unmissable and.. Why was this not done with Ken?

I like Brooklyn well enough, I loved her a lot by the middle of the movie but the way she so easily got played and needed "proof" to believe in Malibu, as if they weren't all goofing off and she had other friends to verify it was an accident even without a video... Like, that was NOT a good look for her, and the movie in general really suffered from just like... Being a movie, actually- it would've made for an amazing series with room to let things develop more, which the staff working on it obviously realized given that there are two seasons of a Double Barbie show, but! My god was the pace here suboptimal lol

Also whatttt the fuck in regards to Emmie's dad, he's AWFUL and that never got resolved and I'm hoping to god that storyline gets continued and that Emmie and Rafa don't get dropped in the sequels/spin offs

Rafa felt off in a way I couldn't put my finger for a while, but I think it's that he just looks way older in comparison to the other three lol. I don't really have any particular feelings towards him otherwise but I'd like it if he could stay relevant and become more than a gay coded fashionista with a dog. For example, he clearly has some theatrical skills and I'd love to see them maybe expand on that rather than chalk it up to this being a musical, because that one song he sang had me more invested in his character than all of his other scenes combined lol, like I was SURE he wasn't gonna take part but then he did and it was great and I kinda want an in universe explanation for that??

Anyway the ending left me feeling like it was very rushed and with a lot of unanswered questions and I'm hoping that the follow-ups to this are good! The beginning/middle parts of the movie were really good but the ending kinda really tanked it. For a movie that did a surprisingly good job with its montages, it still failed to have them in some places where they were SORELY needed and it left it as a weaker story as a result... But it's no big deal to me so long as they manage to make up for the stuff they missed in the sequels, so... Here's to hoping!

[majorplayer]

so the "brain" of a cog is basically just machinery right. that means they could, probably easily, change into a new body by having their disk drive (?), ram, etc, basically their Brain Parts, transferred to a new shell.

personally i think that's the best explanation for what happens to dave. he straight up explodes in front of you, just like any other cog. he's all about showmanship and theatrics, but not magic tricks, so the explosion has to be real. he has some behind-the-scenes stagehand quickly sort through his bits and pieces to find the Important Parts That Make Dave Be Dave, ensure they're not broken, and transfer them into an identical backup shell elsewhere in the facility, which is why he comes back in through the elevator for phase 2. it would have to be done quickly, but i can see it because none of the audience members are surprised about it happening like they are later when dave Caresses A Toon; like, it's dave, of course he would make EXPLODING be part of his routine act. he probably has some stuff installed to make his explosions more controlled for better recovery odds.

it's why the override put on chip works. there's some kind of remote-access machinery installed on him, hence the. well, you know. the All That. the device receives input through the signals on either side of his head and is connected directly to his Brain Parts to manipulate his behavior.

but what confuses me is how, according to the canon lore, the managers already have their current appearances before they ever got hired for their positions at COGS inc, and their appearances are directly relevant to their jobs!! i know the probable explanation is simply to make it the lore easier to follow, but it really raises some questions for me. you would think that a cog would just have their Brain Parts transferred into the appropriate shell for the job they were hired to do, but they already look like that... augh.

do baby/young cogs grow up wanting a specific job and get a shell that goes with it before they ever get the job? did young flint think to himself, "i want to be a firestarter someday, so i'm going to buy a good shell for it for when i grow up"????? i call him "flint", but like, the same principle applies to their names: what the hell were their names was before they were hired at COGS inc??? if they always LOOKED and were NAMED perfectly for the positions they were RECENTLY HIRED FOR, is there predestination in toontown? is there Calvinism in fucking toontown?

you know, i GUESS that it can be explained by assuming that cogs always have the same job they were made to be suited/named for, just at different companies, since COGS inc is only one company of presumably many. for example, misty is one of many rainmaker cogs who has been manufactured out there, and she always has served the position of a rainmaker, but she was just working at another company before COGS inc. BUT THAT'S NO FUN.

i want to see more about the separation between a cog's "mind" and their shell. or indeed the opposite: the relationship that some cogs surely have with their shells, how they have attachments and preferences. like, fuck it, genderfluid cogs who pick a certain shell depending on how gender they feel that day when they wake up. you know? i WANT to explore the idea of cogs having unique personalities, then choosing what careers to go into as adults, and how they leave behind their original names and shells in order to have their brains transferred into a shell appropriate for their profession, becoming that profession.

yknow, the most canon/lore-compliant explanation (there being many of a specific kind of cog who will always hold that job, just at different companies, aka my rainmaker example) is almost like the gems in steven universe. gems of the same type are manufactured to be exactly the same as each other, but they still end up having unique personalities despite all higher-up efforts against individuality. i desperately want to see this explored in clash lore.

chip is obviously the most likely candidate for this exploration. being the chainsaw consultant of COGS inc (or A chainsaw consultant, of many in the world at different companies) seems to be more his job than who he is as a sentient being with a unique personality, which i'm sure many people reading this relate to. sure, most of this disconnect comes from the agony, shame, and isolation wrought from the override he was forcibly(?) fitted with, but his experiences have surely caused a great deal of depersonalization from who he was before, or who he thought he was before. chip, being manufactured specifically for this employment, no longer feeling like it's who he is. he just wants out of it all because he's his own person; he doesn't feel like a chainsaw consultant anymore.

Really, i feel like chip's override could easily serve as a metaphor for this entire process of cogs being manufactured for a specific job and subsequently being expected to fill that role until the day they either explode or are decommissioned. it's clear that all the cogs (the managers, at least) have unique personalities. do you really think that every single major player ever created, working for any company, would have dave's whole Morally Ambiguous schtick where he dances with toons (or any enemies) and caresses their faces???

like, no, of course not; cogs are created for a specific purpose/role/job, but the personalities mature sentient beings grow into are far larger than any initial, manufactured purpose. their personalities spill out over the too-small mold. chip's override causes him confusion in understanding who he is. in the same way, misty's feelings about toons are surely atypical for rainmakers. misty surely struggles with her feelings about herself, her purpose. she's a rainmaker--THE rainmaker for COGS inc--but she's... not like the other ones. she's not like the friends, her fellow rainmakers, she made on the assembly line as they were manufactured. who is she, if not misty? but who is a rainmaker, because she is not so?

i want to see cogs like chip and misty get a happy ending where they transfer shells. where they're able to escape the purposes for which they were manufactured and pre-programmed, because their personalities ended up being incompatible with them. the stuff which COGS inc would certainly chalk up to "hardware failures" or "bad fuses" or otherwise "imperfections" in their Brain Parts. i want to see chip free from the override and its signals, transferred into a more personally-enjoyable shell that does not cause fear in others. i want to see misty in a friendlier-looking shell so she can make friends with toons more easily. maybe they keep their names, maybe they don't.

[signalwatch]

Veronica Lake at 100

Today marks the 100th Birthday of Veronica Lake, actor, singer and performer.  

Though her career in Hollywood was brief, and - by all accounts - something she was never all that interested in, Lake starred in and helped make a handful of films that are considered canon of Hollywood classics, including Sullivan's Travels, I Married a Witch, This Gun for Hire, The Blue Dahlia, The Glass Key and others.  

It's highly likely that even if you never saw any of those movies, you've seen Veronica Lake's picture included in some constellation of 1940's-era Hollywood stars or mentioned here or there.  Or recall that Kim Basinger was supposed to resemble her closely in the film LA Confidential (ymmv whether tis is accurate).  You may only know the swooping blonde wave that was her trademark, partially obscuring her face, which has become a curious and continuing symbol of sexiness that's endured well past Lake as household name.  I mean, of the Voltron-like assemblage of 1940's sex and glam ideas that informed Jessica Rabbit, that swoop was there.  

In the films in which I've seen Lake (all of those lifted above) you immediately understand how she became a star.  Physically, she's the combination of beautiful and striking that the camera tends to love and say something about a character the moment they appear on screen.  There's not really a thread for you to say "oh, that's a real Veronica Lake-type role", but the sly smarts she brings to each character, and wise-to-the-world knowingness works exceedingly well in her noir appearances.  In the two comedies, she's absolutely game for some heavy lifting to get the job done.  

For a brief time, Lake was very popular.  So much so that the government asked her to change her hairstyle to encourage young women to follow suit as - and as far as I know this is true - they were getting their hair caught in the machinery they were now working as part of the WWII industrial machine.  

Lake's life was deeply complicated by virtue of a controlling mother and the studio trying to run her life.  The best way to hear about it is via the You Must Remember This episode on the the topic.  After leaving Hollywood, she disappeared into obscurity only to be re-discovered by an intrepid reporter who found her working as a cocktail waitress.  Following this, she did see an uptick in public sentiment and was promoting her memoirs when she was diagnosed with issues stemming from her years of alcoholism and passed in 1973, at about 51 years of age.  

Some talent want the Hollywood life and stardom, some want to work as much and hard as they can, and some wind up in front of the camera seemingly by mistake and indifferent to the whole affair.  And all of them can be amazing on screen, and all of them can vanish on different timelines and a variety of reasons.  I don't think there's any particular motivation or background that matters much once the klieg lights are thrown on and the camera is in focus.  In the case of Lake, everyone but her may have wanted to see her on screen.  But once there, she had the charisma to make up for anything she lacked in theatrical training and the natural energy that the audiences adored.  

Anyway, we'll be watching one of her first big roles on Friday with The Gun For Hire, her first of several pairings with Alan Ladd, and a great crime film.  

https://ift.tt/oltGIHf

from The Signal Watch https://ift.tt/GoJi7j0

[greypetrel]

doing a pinky swear

For the Touching ask prompts, character of your choice :)

Thank you! :D

Pulling a Hawke/Merrill because I’m in a Merrill mood.

(Note: since I couldn’t choose for the fic one of my current two Hawkes, I kept them both. Garrett’s one year younger, a Spirit Healer and Blood Mage -Merrill in the house… He was curious and learnt some things. Also, Merribela is canon, tell me what you want, I romanced them both and nobody stopped me and so they’re all three together in my head, can’t convince me otherwise, Isabela just didn’t move in.)

And I’m definitely not procrastinating a chapter I’m finding difficult to pull out, noooo, who, me?

31. Doing a pinky swear

“Ouch!”

“It wouldn’t hurt if you stayed still!”

A thousand and one thing could be said about Merrill as a mage -she was insanely talented, she was resourceful and had a brilliant mind she never gave herself credit for-, but one thing she wasn’t. She wasn’t a healer. And it was painfully evident as she was trying to patch a nasty cut on her side up without magic, fumbling with alcohol rubbed too roughly and in too much quantity -it trickled down her bare side, making her shiver- and touching the wound too much. Thankfully, Garrett had noticed it and had taken all sewing tools away from where she knew to look for the healing tools when he wasn’t at home, like now.

But, she knows it’s her way of worrying and of dealing with the worry -and that bloody bastard hit cut her deep, it has stopped bleeding recently. So, she let the elf have a go, pushing hard in applying a piece of clean cloth on the wound and hissing when she moved it and it scraped, gritting her teeth.

“For such a fierce warrior, you’re really delicate.” She giggles, picking a roll of fresh, cleaned bandages from the casket and starting to wind it around her.

It’s not the first time she did it, and Hawke knew she would have either gone too loose or too tight. So, she gently turned -wincing when the movement pulled at the wound-, and stopped her with a hand gently on her wrist. She could be gentle, when she wanted, and with Merrill, she always did.

“Let me.” She just told her, with half a smile met with another and a not of her head.

She made a quick work of it, equally used to do the job by herself by now to be quick about it. Not that she was more delicate than Merrill has been, but at least she knew when to expect pain. She exhaled loudly when she was done, letting her back fall on the mattress, theatrically, bouncing once with an exaggerated sigh.

“Alas, and I didn’t even get a kiss where it hurts! How, HOW will I survive my current predicament without one?” She declared, with just the right amount of emphasis to make clear that it was just for show.

As on clue and wanted, the elf giggled at it, bending down towards her face. Hawke looked at her, peeking between her eyelashes, and pursed out her lips in a clear invitation. She was met with a finger in the middle, tho, pressing slightly.

She opened one eye, questioningly, to find the Dalish looming over her with a pout on her face that was too adorable to incute any real fear, but she learnt long time ago not to underestimate the other. Even if she really looked like an angry fluffy kitten, as Bela called her, she saw her taking down the worst thugs and Qunari seasoned warriors as it was nothing. So, she didn’t point her finger at how cute she looked and how much she wanted to kiss her, right now. And just, pursed back her lips and opened her second eye, sighing and resting both hands on her stomach.

“You shouldn’t go around and attack random people. Not now.”

Merrill scolded her, and Raina knew she was right. She still had her finger on her lips, so she didn’t reply.

“I know you’re still feeling horrible and guilty about your mother.”

“I’m not-” She protested, furrowing. She moped around the house for three days and listened to Isabela who told her to just… Mope around for a bit. Grieve. Throw a tantrum if she needed. Eat her weight in cake. She did mope around and got ugly and ate nothing but cake, one day, cozying up with Garrett and Beowoof before the fireplace. It was good, Bela was right, and now she was fine.

“You are. You have this faraway, restless look in your eyes sometimes, your leg starts to bounce and you fidget, and then you get your armour on, take your daggers and rush to Lowtown. I thought Fenris was having a stroke, once, before I realized he was just worried about you.”

She furrowed back at her. She knew Merrill wasn’t finished, but she made clear that she didn’t agree with all that. She rushed to Lowtown because there was always something to do, some bandit to clear out, and everyone in town would have asked her anyway, so why waiting. Fenris could have all the strokes he wanted, if he and her idiot of a brother wanted to tag along, they should have not taken so long to get ready.

“What I mean, venhan, is… I’m worried. You’re acting reckless and getting hurt, and with the situation with the Templars… Meredith knows of your brother, you shouldn’t get so much attention.”

 As scolding as the elf was trying to be, there was real worry in her voice -she never could mask her emotions and she loved her for that. And she hated how easily Merrill make her unfurl by creeping right behind her walls and defenses, making her notice things she would have liked to keep buried down and never look at again.

She raised a hand, cupping the elf’s cheek and stroking her cheekbone with the thumb.

“I would never let anyone happen to you or my brother, you know that?”

“I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about you, silly.”

“I’m not a mage, what could Meredith do?”

“No, but she could imprison you for housing two blood mages. We would be killed on sight if we can’t run away, but you? I don’t know if she’ll spare you the same courtesy.”

Raina sighed, slipping her hand to the back of Merrill’s neck to drag her down and get the kiss she had wanted from the start. That she really needed, right now. The elf put her hand right on a big bruise, but she soldiered on, circling her waist with the other arm to keep her flush against her. She dragged the kiss for long, nibbing at her lower lip and licking her palate. Bodhan had baked blueberry cake and didn’t tell her? After… Well, after, she’ll go right down and act offended.

When Merrill moved back to breath, she was deliciously flushed, lips reddened and plump. Beautiful. She smirked at her, satisfied of her work. For now, at least. But Merrill evidently still wasn’t done in reprimanding her. She could get used to that, even if usually the controlling one was always Isabela, between them three. Raina didn’t mind at all, found the idea of a Merrill in full control positively tantalising, and couldn’t stop smiling, smugly no doubt.

“I’m serious. No more rushing? Talk to me first?”

“If you ask it this nicely…”

“Pinky promise?”

And indeed she raised her hand to offer her her pinky. Which took Raina a little aback. She didn’t want to giggle at her, she really didn’t. But she couldn’t help it.

“Pinky promise? Seriously, Mer?”

“Laugh all you like!” She batted the other hand on her shoulder, playfully, which made Hawke laugh more and had the elf start giggling as well. “It worked with Bela, you see.”

“Did it.”

“She hasn’t stolen any other precious relic in three years!”

More laughter, boisterously now, that earned her another bat on the shoulder and another feat of giggles.

“Laugh all you want, it worked!”

“Ok, ok, I got it... Let me... There.” She yielded, chest still shaking in laughter and a stupid smile that didn’t want to fall from her face, as she twined her own pinky with Merrill’s, waving their hands about left and right. “Pinky promise. But on one condition.”

“What, venhan?”

Hawke smirked as the only foreshadowing, kicking up the bed and flipping them over, trapping Merrill under her -with a loud squeal- , their hands still joined by their pinkies between them, and pecking her on the lips.

“A kiss where it hurts?”

[the-firebird69]

Seal - Crazy (Official Music Video) [HD]

We're not fighting those on the ships yet but we would be shortly and we do see it that's how the empire takes stuff and he says it this is what they're going to do and our foreigners don't really like this too much and we will be fighting pseudo empire so we're not really sure what the foreigners are going to do it looks like we do end up getting dragged into the fight and they were all fighting them including Stan and it is a big fight but not that big our friend says and it's true and it's in movies if it's not this gigantic fight and it's true the pseudo empire is getting smaller and real soon it's going to be a lot smaller by area and the size of their army and both sides are going to disappear I feel it is glorious fight to try and get rid of our race that's what's going to turn into and he said that the empire is taking over areas we had to fight him on it and foreigners too they don't necessarily what the empire to take over the islands but the foreigners don't want us there in Africa we are Shunned. Then again everyone is so hard to see you what's up to but they don't want Madagascar is not true they don't want the empire to have it but when you're stuck in the middle like in the Ukraine you end up getting hammered by both sides and that's what's happening there so we do see that that's an example. And I think I know what I was thinking about it's the same thing as Becca and it's crazy I have to try and use creatures and it's going to be hell

Seal AKA Garth and kiss by the rose from the grave would be the order of the Rose

Here's what it's like we're fighting each other and it's wrong and we're going to disappear and it's terrible and we don't have much time we do understand it's wrong and we can't stop it

Mike tew

And it was kind of a weird thing to do but really this is terrible I don't think that they don't complain this to happen from our side and you guys are horrible for not fixing things and bja you're a nutcase and you're wrong and everybody knows it but you things are going very badly these guys are killing each other and it's going after all of my army with poor army it was and I won't have anything left and my little nephew is in a war with a humongous Force that I've been fighting my whole life and he needs assistance and you guys are not doing it and he is called and called now it's going to use you in theatrical roles this is what you like doing anyways to expose stuff to have people stop the max and I guess I'm going to have to do that I've done it before and it works and yeah we ran the circus because of stuff like this and he's doing the job and but he needs funding so he can move around and I suppose that will come after you warlock get kicked out and I see it now you get beat up by us in the tunnels you probably involve the clones and we push them out and you get pushed out something like that you get really poor in California and places like that and you're fighting us to get off your Islands pretty much you won't and you somehow enlist minority more along and begin fighting them but you still can't get him out but the minority morlock would for some reason engage us. We here we're still at about 7 billion you don't lose a ton of people on the attacks of bunkers but we need a place to go and these areas like Florida are not really that huge and we probably pick New Zealand and they say people are taking it over and they're not and we will take over we think that the minority morlocks might hang up on Australia they do it from Asia because they're trying to take over there shipping and other they do it to the other Islands too that makes sense and that would happen before we get involved but that makes sense that we push the ship out and you would be pushed out and you would have a war trying to get here and you go elsewhere and start in with your minority warlock because we'd let you go there and you'd start trouble and you'd have both parties trying to move him from here because it'll be our headquarters sort of and we'd have a couple superpowers three superpowers kind of in a lock of sorts and it would be like New England and that's what I set up there.

So then you're going to try and get j out like you were in New England and you send for the coach so a really big car it's a small car and it's like a small SUV but those things can move out and they can fit stuff in them and he tries to start businesses I think with Ken and Ken doesn't want to do anything eventually I think he starts doing this balloon thing and we think that you abandoned though you abandoned the place the car repair shop and I think I take it over and they pay renter and he says no probably just work there I see what you're saying this show up and gets the keys somehow and pays the electric bill when I'm starting to say please might show up that way and he'll take it over and can't pay rent and start a business up we make pennies on the dollar and I get that so it's probably the process of trying to take over the property for rent's little part of it and there is a side part that might work more easily and he'll be driving up and it'll be the same old crew and we'll be fighting the clones still and it's their area kind of and that really makes sense it's got this little car and he deliver balloons all over the place for cash and ken has this idea it's kind of a Shriner. You think that they attack these Shriners and that they set them up to look like one

Mac daddy

Assinine

Olympus

Hahaha his comments back are employee it's so hard to be a spy out here LOL it's not really making it harder but it's funny

Mac daddy

To begin the attacks of the shrine is shortly to get some support from them

And yeah we're getting ready now

Thor Freya

[falsebooles123]

Confessions of a Recovering Genrephobic 2/17/2024

Hey Whores,

Don't really have a lot to say about this week. Been getting some stuff done. Namely Taxes. Been spending some money investing in myself. And realizing that I really need to kick my ass in high gear and start applying for new jobs.

Carnival of Clockwork (2015) - The Cog is Dead

Genre: Various, Steampunk Length: 47:14 (14 tracks)

I don't have a lot to say about this album. Mostly because i am a silly billy tired boy. Look do you like steampunk stuff with the storys and the cogs and the aestetics. Your'll like this.

I wasn't expecting the album to have such an eclectic sound to it but overall it has been a really nice time.

4/5

Sorry For Party Rocking (2011) - LMFAO

Genre: Pop Rap, Electro Length: 37:15 (10 Tracks)

So we have all heard LMFAO right? Sorry for Party Rocking, Shots, Everyday I'm Shuffling. Right?

(God I love Francine. This isn't even the specific scene I was trying to reference)

LMFAO is like the ultimate 2000s party music. It has a dub-step adjacent sound, the lyrics are fun and stupid. And its just hot and stupid and fun. Its like if Marshmellow and Lil John had like Gay sex while piss drunk on Johhny Walker and Lemon Drops and then had a child that somehow was the epitome of straight party bros but like in a nice wholesome way.

There is a surprisingly amount of variety in this album. Besides the more remembered singles there are tracks on here which are just explicetly EDM with sparse vocals and we love that for them.

5/5 (partialy for the nostaglia)

Pink Friday 2 (2023) - Nikki Minaj

Genre: Hip Hop Length: 70:14 (22 Tracks)

OOOH GURL. We don't stan.

So first of off the real critics criticize this album for being overally long and yeah bitch this is 22 FUCKING SONGS. GIRL WHY DO I NEED TO HERE 22 SONGS IN A GODDaMN ROW> WHO IS SHE WHO SI THIS PERSON THAT SO MUCH OF A BARB THAT WE WANT TO HEAR 22 SONGS IN A ROW>

She ain't here girl all I'm saying. Not to belabor the point but I literally thought the album had ending and that I was listening to autoplay for the last 20 minutes.

There songs are fine? Its a lot of samples and vagualy etheral sounding production. It sounds like I'm listening to someone sample a "Now this what I call Music '83" while I'm Stuck in the bottom of a well. Nikki be spitting verse but I can't say that it has much of the same stopping power as like any of her other music.

This just wasn't for me and the length makes it harder for me to appreciate the individual tracks.

2/5

Prelude to Ecstasy (2024) - The Last Dinner Party

Genre: Rock, Baroque Pop Length: 41:16 (12 Tracks)

ok this was just a lovely fucking time for a rainy day. Imagine a kinda 80s pop ballad band, mix it with light rock, and a florence-adjacent voculist and you got The Last Dinner Party. I'm gonna play one song for you and if this doesn't do anything for you then I'm sorry baby.

There non-singles are a lot more esoteric in the sound. They trade the catchy pop rock structure for something quite a bit more layered, baroque, and theatrical? orchestral? surreal? Baby girl, baby boy, baby zem you know I'm not good at discribing music.

Its like the perfect album for a rainy day. Meloncholic, evocative, and just almost purient in feeling. Its like wet chiffon against the skin in a summer rain.

4/5

[unnursvanablog]

Only Murders in the Building, s3 / review.

This is pretty much a spoiler free opinion on the the third season of Only Murders in the Building

Only Murders in the Building can applaud itself for giving us a fun ride of yet another quircky little murder mystery to follow that's handled with a lot of good humor and quite a lot of heart. It mostly gives us what we want, and what we expect from the shows at this point with a few twists and turns along the way. But as always, it's more about the journey of the three characters than the destination they end up at in the end. It's not a murder mystery that really tests you mind a lot, but it still usually manages to stay one step ahead of you.

The shows feels even more theatrical, and it still manages to be full of life and like they don't take themselves too seriously even three seasons in, unlike a lot of murder mysteries. There is a bit of an old-fashioned feel to it. And there is this kind of lightness despite the places and the events that the characters find themselves in, which still makes these episodes a really fun and an easy watch that you can binge on in no time. And all the actors seem like they're having fun with it, and the characters are all colorful and interesting in their own little way.

However, it is not really the murder mystery that holds it all together or is really what the story is about. The character and all the odd ways and personality traits and backstories that are revealed and help us on the way to the end of the mystery is the real heart of it all. The second season struggled to mesh it all together, at least in my opinion, but the third season does a pretty decent job at it even though all of the main characters are pretty distracted by other life things for a good portion of the time, making the pacing is a bit slow, but the episodes still manage to sprinkle in enough familiarity that you don't get bored.

Even as all the traumas of the past, backstories and other things take a much better hold on the story here and the murder mystery is very well done, the plot works tighter but slower, the dynamic between all the main characters felt slightly lacking. For the longest time, they were just too separate - something that the characters talk about themselves a bit in the episodes so it feels as if it's done on purpose, to highlight changes or even goodbyes. But the show's charm is these three main characters and their relationship, so it was a bit choppy at times.

It is still a fun and quirky little mystery but the commentary on these crime podcasts for example as well as the theme of these are people who meet over common interests and then become more than just acquaintances seems to be a bit lost on the plot as we move further on from the first series. Season three works a bit like a small test to see if and how the episodes could work out outside that original framework. And I would have liked a bit more of it.

The plot here was a bit slow and it certainly took a lot of time to explain all the possible culprits and the little clues hidden along the way, but was things started to happen there is no stopping them and it was fun. It gave me what I wanted. And if this is the end, I think they managed to pull it off well and communicate the separation of the characters and the audiance seperation from the show all of to the viewers well within the narrative.

The writing is as always clever, but it tends to go in few circles at times, but I feel like it's made up for the humor. And it's kind of like if the actors are having fun, so are we. It's a homely show. The story is wholesome and a little comforting despite all the murders, the theatrics are used really well and the characters are so lovable that you can't help but care about them that the show just kinda works. They always deliver on that promise. The whole thing is and feels like a happy accident and we are lucky that we have gotten this far.

[repelished]

sorry i cried at the union exec contract ratification meeting and other apologies...

... is perhaps a silly title i could use for some silly book/memoir on over-apologizing. it's not actually good or creative lol but the situation is kind of funny, from afar. i didn't mean to cry so hard at the meeting. i just couldn't stop at all once i started and i was talking and saying so much. i'm sure no one expected it and i hope it wasn't too theatrical. people were so kind. maybe some people thought it was a bit much, and that's fair. i think i've been overdue for a long, genuine cry.

in another reality, another life, maybe i stay on the union exec for longer. finish my phd. maybe i'd become closer with some of the other exec members, perhaps i'd have done more since i wouldn't have been so checked out, knowing about my move and balancing a few jobs and feeling the responsibility of getting as much done around here before i leave.

it's so easy to think of things in a positive and nostalgic way. i've been second guessing my decision to leave my phd since i told my supervisor about it. she was kind, along with everyone else, telling me that it's good to make a decision for yourself, that it's not for everyone and no one should be forced into staying. but still, i feel like a bit of a failure. like i'll never have anything impressive. i know i can go back to it, but i probably won't. starting over feels massive. and obviously since i just quit, it wouldn't be too soon. and i don't know that i actually want to. obviously i can look back to some things with fondness, but i know i wasn't happy for much of my phd. i hated stats, my last course. other courses weren't as bad but kind of bored me. the comps i did were kind of fun and exciting, though stressful, and i wasn't excited for my second set of comps at all. i couldn't bring myself to read at that point. so it probably was a good decision. but it doesn't always feel like one. especially not after spending 3 weeks with masters and phd students passionate about their theses and research. and it doesn't matter that it's not for everyone (not for me) because maybe i could have done it. now it's like. what will i do? i'm not so ambitious. i'm not so impressive. i don't care who says you don't have to be. i'm surrounded by a lot of people with genuine skills, really good at their jobs or hobbies. it's hard not to compare yourself.

it's just crazy that in one life there's so many decisions and by making one you null the possibility of so many others. and while i'm definitely already bad at making decisions, big and small, i think i'm worse at feeling comfortable with a lot of them. i almost always think what if about having done the opposite thing. i think deep down i know that sticking with the phd would have been a stressful decision, on myself, my relationship, and honestly on any sort of aspect of my life. and as much as i'll miss my time at the union and being on campus in general, it's probably for the best. but the what if persists.

i'm not disappointed with my decision to move. i think once i do it i'll be happy. it's just the lead up that is stressful and difficult. i think i regret that i only have one life to experience and a limited amount of time to make these decisions. if i had more time then maybe i'd finish my phd, put off a move. i'd still have a lot of time to do it one day. or i'd have time to go back to my phd one day later on. anyway. that obviously doesn't matter, and it's not real or possible, no matter how much i want to will an eternal life into existence. everything is just so scary. and a lot of things are sad too and i'm scared that i'll be lowkey sad forever no matter what i do.