#it is glib and cheap
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lucy-moderatz · 7 months ago
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This conversation never happened. You're dismissed.
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teh-kittykat · 2 years ago
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Ĥ̸̟̮o̴͎̲͌̎ẉ̵͊̐ ̵̟̒̈́v̷͕͓̀e̴̝͝ŕ̵̝̪ỳ̴̻̫ ̸̠͔͆g̴̻͚͆l̴͖̖͑͘ḭ̷̄̚b̴̩̏̕
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sashayed · 3 months ago
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What He Thought
for Fabbio Doplicher We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what's a cheap date, they asked us; what's flat drink). Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib—and there was one administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked                                              "What's poetry?" Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone.                      And poetry—                                         (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)—                   poetry is what he thought, but did not say.
Heather McHugh Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1994
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pumpumdemsugah · 2 years ago
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I just finished Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde few weeks ago and this book was one of the best Feminist books I've ever read (and I have read many feminists books through the years lol). But something that really makes me feel sad is how Audre Lorde isn't viewed as an important activist who had great insights on plenty of complex debates we're still struggling to this day(her perspective on how race, sex, class, sexuality etc create an intricated system of oppression is something few theorists really got) but a cheap token that promotes the dehumanization of black women while pretending to care about us.
People mention Audre Lorde just to mention her. It's a pattern I've noticed with how Black female scholarship is treated. No one actually engages with what those women have to say or think, it's a diversity tick. You don't see people pouring over what Black female academics think or respecting it or people would know what intersectionality is. I've seen people bring up intersectionality as a stand in for diversity and inclusion and it's not that. The OG piece is not that long. The Black women they love are the ones playing attack dog running around gleefully telling other Black women " you're barely considered a woman" as if they don't sound fucking crazy and they're not cooning
You reminded me I need to reread sister outsider ( I might have read it and I'm confusing the contents with another book she wrote but title I can't remember which is why I need to read it again )
When you look at the way people engage with Black women online, it's clear the ones that manage to " win " at the game of social media either suffer being misinterpreted because when do white people and non-blacks treats us like we're intellectual peers? or they just say what non-Black lib gen Z and millennials expect them to say and it can never be that deep because god forbid a Black woman produces something that requires active engagement. The more self loathing with lib language a Black woman can come across the more these people love her. They don't like Black women who see ourselves as normal people and normal women
The age of the mass consumption of content slop, it's hostile if you have thoughts that aren't glib and require previous reading
These people will scream " listen to Black women" and the only listening they manage is a retweet or video " essay "
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troublesomecousin · 3 months ago
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List of Negative Character Traits
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A: abusive, accident-prone, addicted, afraid to take risks, affected, affected by peer pressure, afraid of change, aggressive, aloof, annoying, anti-social, anxious, argumentative, arrogant, artless, attention seeker, authoritarian, avaricious, awkward
B: backstabbing, badgering, barks orders, base, belligerent, belittling, blames everyone else, boring, bossy, bovine, brags, brutal, bully, bumbling
C: callous, catty, caustic, chauvinistic, cheap, cheats, cheerless, childish, clumsy, cocky, cold, cold-hearted, combative, competitive, complacent, complainer, conceited, confrontational, confused, conniving, controlling, corrects others constantly, corrupt, covetous, coward, critical, cruel, cynic
D:  deceitful, defeating, delusional, demanding, denial, deranged, destructive, directed by externals, directionless, disagreeable, discourteous, dishonest, disorganized, disrespectful, dissatisfied, distant, does everything by the book, does what is convenient, doesn’t listen, doesn’t think things through, dogmatic, dominating, domineering, doubtful, dour, downer, draconian, drags people down, drama queen, drinker, drugs, dull, dysfunctional
E: easily aggravated, easily fooled, easily offended, easily threatened, egoist, embarrassing, emotionless, envious, erratic, evasive, exacting, excessive, exhibitionistic, extravagant
F: facetious, faded, false, false bravado, fanatical, fawning, fearful, feels superior to others, fickle, fidgety, finicky, finishes sentences for others, flippant, follower, foolish, forgetful, frantic, fraudulent, furtive, fussy
G: gives up easily, glares often, glib, gold-digging, goody-goody, gossiper, greedy, grim, grumpy, guarded, gullible
H: harasses, hard, harsh, hateful, heartless, high-handed, hogs spotlight, holier-than-thou, hostile, hot-tempered, humorous, hyper
I: ignorant, ill-behaved, ill-bred, ill-will, immature, immodest, impatient, imperious, impolite, impractical, impulsive, inactive, inarticulate, inconsiderate, inconsistent, indecisive, indifferent, indulgent, inefficient, infantile, inflexible, inhibited, insane, insecure, insensitive, insincere, inspires guilt, interrupts, irresponsible, intimidator, intolerant, irritable, isolated
J: jealous, jittery, judgemental
K: kept-back, killjoy, know-it-all
L: lacking conscience, lack of effort, lack of self-confidence, lack of stamina, lazy, liar, life stinks attitude, lonely, low energy, lordly, loud, low drive, low self-esteem
M: macho, mad, makes fun of people, makes others uneasy, malicious, manipulative, martyr attitude, materialistic, mean, meek, melodramatic, merciless, messianic, messy, misanthropic, miserable, miserly, mistrusting, monosyllabic, moody, mopey, morbid, misogynistic
N: nagging, naïve, narcissistic, narrow-minded, naughty, needling, negative, negligent, never happy unless miserable, non engaging, noisy, nosy
O: oblivious, obnoxious, one-dimensional, opinionated, ostentatious, outrageous, outspoken, overbearing, overly emotional/excitable, overly flirtatious, overly polite, overly proper, overly sensitive, overly serious, overwrought
P: panicky, paranoid, passive, pathetic, pessimist, petty, petulant, phony, pigheaded, pitiful, plotting, pompous, poor judgment, posturing, power-hungry, predatory, predictable, prejudiced, pretentious, prim, prissy, procrastinate, promiscuous, proud, prudish, puritanical
Q: quarrelsome, quixotic, quitter, quick tempered
R: radical, random, rash, rebellious, recalcitrant, reckless, rejects change, reluctant, remote, repressed, repulsive, reserved, rigid, rude, ruled by peer pressure, rules with an iron fist, ruthless
S: sanctimonious, sarcastic, sardonic, scathing, scatterbrained, schemer, scornful, sadistic, second-guessing, secretive, sees bad in everything, self-centered, self-conscious, selfish, self-righteous, self-satisfied, self-serving, severe, sexist, shallow, shameless, shifty, short-sighted, show off, shy, short-fused, slanderer, sloppy, slovenly, small goals, smug, sneaky, snobby, social approval required, sociopathic, soft, somber, sophomoric behavior, speaks in monotone, spendthrift, spiteful, squeamish, static, stalker, starchy, stick-in-the-mud, stingy, stoic, stony-faced, stubborn, stuck up, sullen, suspicious, swaggering
T:  taciturn, tacky, taker, take over, talker, talks over people, tattletale, temper, temperamental, terse, thinks everyone is stupid, thin-skinned, thoughtless, timid, tiresome, touchy, trivial, troubled, two-faced, typical
U: unable to relax, unappreciative, uncaring, uncompassionate, uncommitted, uncommunicative, uncooperative, uncouth, uncreative, undemonstrative, undependable, undisciplined, unethical, unexpressive, unfeeling, unfocused, unforgiving, unfriendly, ungrateful, unhappy, unhelpful, unkempt, unimaginative, unmotivated, underhanded, unorganized, unpolished, unprincipled, unproductive, unrealistic, unreceptive, unreliable, unresourceful, unresponsive, unrestrained, unruly, unscrupulous, unsmiling, unsophisticated, unsure, unsympathetic, uptight, untrustworthy, user
V: vacant, vague, vain, vengeful, venomous, vindictive, violent, visionless, volatile, vulgar, vicious
W: wary, wasteful, weak, wears drab clothes, weird, weary, wet blanket, whimsical, whines, willful, wily, wise-assed, wishy-washy,  womanizing, worrier, wretched
X: N/A
Y: yellow-bellied
Z:  zealot
Tagged By: Taken from an old blog Tagging: Do what feels right, man
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ribstongrowback · 1 year ago
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What Tabletop Games would you say most inspired the ones you make?
Off the top of my head-
Lamentations of the Flame Princess - A bad game made by arsewipe, but it is the first OSR gameI played, and I make OSR games now. While its game design is fairly unimaginative, it does have some interesting tidbits in there, and back when Raggi was interested in being actually weird rather than just making stuff for cheap shock value he wrote some genuinely interesting modules, like the God That Crawls
Esoteric Enterprises - and @cavegirlpoems's work in general, but Esoten was the game that made me actually realise the possibilities of OSR. I didn't find myself in the more FKR side of things. Rulings not rules is a fine principle but it's not for me, as a game designer I want to weave a world together and Esoten does just that. Also yknow els is my gf so there' that. I wrote a couple of supps for it.
Yazeba's Bed And Breakfast - and @jdragsky's work in general were foundational to my appreciation of more fiction first game. Jay does a really good work of finding the things that are left for players to kind of figure out on their own in the more narrative-driven side of gaming and codifying it into the rules to make it more approachable. We often harp on the fact that the actual DnD that people play and enjoy is just an oral tradition passed down from "good gm to good gm" but this is a sin that other games carry as well. Jay's focus on leaving nothing to chance and making sure players know what they can do to have a good time is a great inspiration to me.
Sapphicworld - and @darlingdemoneclipse's work in general made me realise I should own being a horny tranny faggot and that it is vital that ttrpgs get weirder. This is not a joke, nor am I being glib, I geuinely think that it is urgent that we get weirder. Assimilationist queers are tearing this community appart and being horny on main is not just honest, it's an act of rebellion. We do whatever we want and no one should stop us. Eclipses' game design is great for using that principle and weaving it into mechanics.
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bloomfish · 1 year ago
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i'll have you know i do really think about what i post on here and how i interact with people. i was just about to reblog a post saying 'thank god for men with long hair' with some snarky comment about what have those men contributed to society apart from headlice. but whats the point? do i need to be glib and mocking towards some random person for a cheap laugh? i say let op live in their fantasy world a little longer its none of my business
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sansterreurnivertu · 1 year ago
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I think the reason LRF was made from a Dantonist approach was to justify Camille's actions and choices as the protagonist. The filmmakers didn't want to show him as a fool or couldn't have him curse Danton when they executed like Przybyszewska did (very interesting, but not a historical fact). In my opinion, Danton in LRF is not always portrayed as a praiseworthy character. His desperation, opportunism, glib tongue and cheap sentimentality sometimes irritate me. I doubt that he really believed in the Revolution. I think he was only interested in himself, Gabrielle and Camille. If he is glorified, it is probably because he is Camille's friend until the death. (So it is inexplicable why the movie ends with Danton's monologue. Shouldn't they have let Camille (or someone else, like Gabrielle or Lucile) read it?)
Still, I think Brandauer's Danton is a enough sympathetic and lovable person. It's much better than Wajda. I don't understand how critics can consider Depardieu's Danton, that stupid influencer and attention-seeking monster, a "humane and patriotic hero".
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readingsquotes · 9 months ago
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So I want to explain exactly what it is that I think makes The Atlantic terrible and why I think we’d all be better off if it stopped publishing. My basic criticism is that while it presents itself as a magazine of ideas—which makes readers feel as if they are engaging intelligently with important issues—it in fact covers those issues in such a superficial and slipshod way that people are liable to be left with a worse understanding of the issue than when they went in, though they may be wrongly convinced that they have learned something. I do think that the ideological suppositions that predominate (with exceptions) in The Atlantic’s pages are dangerous and wrongheaded, but my critique of the magazine’s glib carelessness with ideas would be valid even if I was not also annoyed by its tendency to publish aggressive criticism of my fellow leftists and a never-ending sequence of cheap swipes at protesters.
....
When The Atlantic casts doubt on Palestinian death statistics, for instance, it gives people license to think that the destruction of Gaza is not as bad as it actually is. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a doctor who worked in Gaza and who has a master’s degree in public health, said he was “shocked to see the sloppiness with which The Atlantic reported this story” and disturbed when a friend told him that The Atlantic is their go-to source for “serious news” on Israel-Palestine. (Likewise, I have been sent Montefiore’s article by several people who have told me it seemed fair and intelligent, when in fact it is egregiously dishonest and misleading.) Sidhwa notes that he received no response from the Atlantic’s editors when he submitted a letter correcting the article. (His first-person accounts of the reality in Gaza, written with Dr. Mark Perlmutter, are essential reading for anyone who is actually interested in “serious news” about the conflict.) Under editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, a former IDF prison guard, the magazine has a distinct bias against Palestinians, whose voices rarely show up in its pages. 
The drumbeat for war is constantly pounded in the pages of the Atlantic by hawkish contributors like Eliot Cohen, Anne Applebaum (hired despite a history of openly advocating war crimes, which was perhaps considered a qualification rather than a red flag), and David Frum (whose execrable Atlantic writing on immigration I have debunked before). The contributors tell us not to be squeamish about supporting large-scale killing, because “Insisting that the Israelis find a humane way of destroying an enemy, without collateral damage, is absurd” and “it is possible to kill children legally.” Cohen tells us that “Iran Cannot Be Conciliated,” and we must use “Chicago rules” against our enemies, meaning ruthless mobster amorality, and we must certainly not try to end wars with diplomatic negotiation. With recent new evidence of the horrors of the U.S. Marines’ 2005 Haditha massacre, it’s worth remembering that the Atlantic saw fit to publish the headline “Why We Should Be Glad the Haditha Massacre Marine Got No Jail Time.” (That article made the extraordinary claim that “preserving the fairness and impartiality of the American legal system” necessitated giving light sentences to Marines who were “almost certainly guilty of war crimes.”) 
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not-souleaterpost · 1 year ago
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The double edge of a dull, toothless movie
So a few days ago I watched a movie that someone picked from some list (red flag in retrospect lol) and it was just bad, in a empty, boring, sacharine and formulaic way.
But, I tried to look at the positive of such experience:
I thought "Hehe, now I feel better about my own story, because atleast it cant be worse than this!"
Or if it is, atleast I didnt have a hundred million budget and whole theme of writters and producers that should have known better.
It gave me confidence in doing work, cause either I am good enough or others are too stupid to see what is real quality so why care?
Well, thats what I wanted to think.
In reallity doubts started to enter - is the glib condescension I feel about the surface level morals and platitudes, the unconvincing conversions and "changings of worlds", the contrivances and cliches and reheated feel-goodisms valid?
Is it just a way to avoid my own realisation of how my own writting sucks, how it revolves around wish fulfillment, easy solutions and a sophomoric childish view of the world? Am I just exchanging mass apeal for personal theraphy and self affirmation - both as self obssessed as the other, as twins that laugh at each other crooked nose?
In a way it even went deeper than that - was any non-cynical thought as braindead as this movie, or worse, because the movie atleast used it for cheap gain and fame for the author and actors all the same, while I'm too clueless to even play the game?
I would say - I don't know... But nah I do, and yeah I do now better - I atleast now that the movie sucks, that my stuff atleast sucks in a way that is more interesting, as someone who eats a chuppa chupps stick-in first.
And in a way the blade cuts this doubt too - arogance is needed otherwise one just sinks into this shitty sacharine "well maybe you are just as bad" - I rather be worse, not lukewarm like this shit that gets spat out and put on netflix (also why you should allways pirate)
Maybe this is the true porpuse of negativity, of the ranting youtuber who cant even light his own set better than 12 year old lego stop motion animators?
Cause politness is not the full story - iron sharpe s iron - a platitude as true as some even in that shitty movie where - so one needs the doubt as they need the dick, even if this sounds gross, maybe thats why people truely like dysfunctional couples?
So I may be making a soap opera - but even a self parodying telenovella full of jumpcuts and betrayals is more memorable than whatever a soulless movie is, so don't let yourself be soul eaten.
Yeah...Sorry
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serialjune · 1 year ago
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The Betty Boop Continuum, ch. 1
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George
    Sandra twisted my mind in no way any woman ever had before. She'd torment me, hardly speaking, barely moving, her face concealing the bad news. There's only one woman like that in every man's life and possibly only one woman, period, Sandra. I suppose you can't be yourself all the time and, at one point or another, the adversary is going to capitalize on that inconsistency, making a fool of you for the ages. I always thought history had such a soft-hearted and coy way of putting social rejection: left out in the rain, beaten away with a broom, cartoon acts of glib violence and a parable featured at the end. There's nothing soft hearted about Quartown. A couple of romances here and there, the vanishing voice of a Cuban enchantress, a secret shared only by the ends of the Earth, where the Atlantic meets the Pacific. And I always have to ask, embracing the sea in this romantic mode, would I go back to that place? Where seashores yearned for inexperience, that lust for life, mythically our own, but never really. Neither ancestors, either.
    I wanted to get away, by night, where I could join the descendents who might take me from this cruel place. I needed some benign fool to warm my saucer with the tender rays of mutual acceptance. If that meant deforming into a sack of skin, I wouldn't mind. Conquistadors before me would, at times, keel to their own cruelty and settle for a savage, only to learn that the savage, too, cannot digest stupidity any more than his own kin might. The priestly elder, coat of arms, no more kindly when he taps the staff of exile. I took a skinny bitch in shades, from the tanning booth, to be the hallmark of decadence both my grandpa and myself could take euphoria from: beauty for an age, eclipsed by a moment's desire. Evil, all evil, not mine, but someone else's: how it is all like a game of hot potato, taken to the bitter end, where the can goes rattling down the line.
    Lately my anxiety had grown like a mazey vine of tangles, right out of my seat, a fire down under. All these girls, even before Sandra, had this remarkably cheap way of applying mascara and it somehow made them look like Goddesses. Not Greek. Polynesian, maybe. Babylonian. A cascading yellow face illuminated by the bronze emission of a city bus: unconventional, but pretty. The universal smell of wine and beer, especially where it does not belong... she'd come from the wreckage looking pure, untouched by her own environmental conditioning. Such scenes, such racoon looking smears of makeup, all tribute to the one and only lost soul, the orchid, the phony. Why did everyone love beer so much? Disarray, disorder, aesthetics of contradiction and disgusting portraiture. I know that's the ticket for me, but for everyone else, too? Just never thought the old working stiffs had it in them, maybe we weren't sharing the same drink... somehow always reminding me of her. I raced to drunkenness, raping her with the very presence of my disfigured mind. She always saw right through me like an x-ray. To lose it all in one gesture of over-confidence. I never was the type to lose my head, in love or peace time, but for her, I'd not go gently into that good night... And now bathrobes and chintzy leather, braids and robotic forms of masculinity shuffle around the corridor, as I wallow dead in my failure to organize a plan. 
Sandra
    So then we watched Adventure Time for four seasons straight, refusing to eat and drunk on love to the point of hangover. Hey, it's embarrassing, but it's what really happened. Oh, love, that relapse of the animalian will. 
    Teagan (who's name really sounded more like "Teenager") manage to save two bong rips over the course of six hours, all night. Every tiny bump startled him to the point of jumping. It looked remarkably silly, to see a man with a beard that Paul Bunyan could have only dreamed of, afraid like a little boy. The beadiness of those black eyes caused me to frantically worry about things his alter-ego might do, if suddenly enabled by a switch. As a woman, I knew to keep my panic hushed and plan for my escape later. 
    On a scale of 1-100 (with 100 being "party planet" and 1 being "sometimes I still see my neighbour", I'd say the present year of 202x was at about 50%). I was having good thoughts for an alarming amount of time, then my dad walked in and ruined the chill vibes immediately. He came at me, saying all this about,  
 "I play the fool just to build you up into playing the seer. Young people cannot see how lucky they are, if not for this one fact: parents act as step ladders for their minds," 
    And my brain tried its hardest to reject that thought. It was like KFC, Skittles and Pepsi, during the Superbowl, were electrocuting my mind with their rainbow crest of intrusion. In that moment, I could have told you that I wanted it all in me. Yet how little that was to ask, Pepsi, KFC and Skittles. Corruption is a part of getting older, after all. Maybe believing that for so long led me here, amongst the beer stains and bong water debris. This living room was a temple to the devil, an unbearable chamber of death to any person not "in" on the filthiness. I'd joke around, thinking about a maid coming into this and neatly feather dusting as if she didn't see a thing. People could not believe my dad taught us to drink at 14. He had deeply Catholic suspicions.
    And then there was George. He'd walk in the door at about 11, or so, and his onlookers would hysterically ask of his present state, worrying to no end that he might be in trouble. I believe this challenged his patience to some degree. Sometimes he'd arrive at 2am and no one would bat an eye. He'd take off his blue Northface, take a bath, and the calm he felt was enviable. No one knew why he rented a room here, but that's like so many autistic adults. My theory is that "the machine" mistakes them for pot smoking, metaphysical detective burnouts. The truth couldn't be any more ambiguous.
    I used this moment to make my escape. I could not stop thinking about the country life and how much I missed and adored that old world. All countries are the same country anyways, and I miss mine as much as Wordsworth's (a "friend" of my dad.) The return to the country, that would solve everything. All this would end. No more thought, no more worry. Those trees could do the heavy thinking for me, absorbing it all. I missed the countryside so much, so much. Friendly aliens and untouched night crystals, so unlike human terrain. It made me cry to imagine. Slyvia Plath was an idiot for sticking her head in the oven and not the lilacs.
Teegan
    I remember thinking how extremely hot Sandra looked with that wire frame. She could have been a mommy from the start, all right. I bought chocolates that looked like seashells and left them out for her. I was going to show her, tonight, how to catch a firefly, then sneak in for the perfect kiss. Instead, George and I got stoned and he seemed instantly freaked out. I put mushrooms in our joints, but mostly his. I didn't think that it was wrong, or anything. He clearly was a bit of a badass. His lack of concern made it so. Blowing his mind one more time wouldn't hurt. Five minutes in, he said it tasted like dirt and that the dirt in the ground was making him accept the dirtiness of all things around him. It's these kinds of things that made me think this guy was the best, the kind of guy you have to take to a party. He yelled at me like Patton when he was angry and I respected that. We watched Blade, with Wesley Snipes, and one of our sparks flew so far that no one could see where it ended up. Dave Holster (Sandra's dad) would have believed me if I told him that the spark travelled to a different dimension. Dave watched drone footage of UFOs and recorded the videos to his iMac, where he'd show the equipment to a church home group. I never went or anything, I just borrowed his microphone from time to time. Our new band, "Eeyore's Sorry", was about to make a tribute album to our friend who's mom was raped by her dad to make her into an embryo. Dave told me that God makes solid on his promises, sooner or later, and that his daughter playing PS5, without bitching, was an example of a modern miracle, as well.
    So George left, I think stoned off the mushroom surprise. Feeling good, he'd gone to get soda from the 50 cent machines outside Safeway. The dude was told to go get pickles and I think it was a fool's errand, put on by the girls. The same girls couldn't wait for Giorgio Armani to release their new line of eyelash extensions (at midnight) and I wonder if any of them, except for the two Chloes really, truly cared. I left a note, expressing this, under their door and snuck off like a vampire. When George came back, they told him he needed to get Cumberland's pickles. I don't know what gives them such a hard-on for "Cumberland's Pickles". They were going to subject him to this errand, with no explanation! Those two girls I mentioned a moment ago insisted. Stuff like this makes me want to pour gasoline and light a fire... I wouldn't even try and do it for the insurance.
    George looked like Wittgenstein, wearing his cuffed up blazer. His frazzled moustache made him out to be the most straggely, poetic stoner possible. The guy huffed and puffed traffic fumes and dreamed of living in the mall's scaffolds. His room had knife marks all over the walls and the door, I think he couldn't find a dart board online that he felt like spending money on. While he was out to get pickles, the guy left his phone on dead and, unable to tell the time, made it to the store late. I think he DoorDashed the pickles from a gas station, right to the store, and then came home late with Grandma's Fresh (not Cumberland). He told me that he had impulsively bought a whole tray of pre-cooked chicken and left 3/4ths of it at somebody's apartment complex, murmuring something about,
"A waste of $15..."
Natya
    I was living with my boyfriend for what felt like several months by now. He was the barfly and I was his bartender. We'd put on this charade of two people, cordial as hell, taking up the world stage. There was no temptation. It was wonderful in a completely unsustainable way. Minestrone soup sat on the counter top with a bone hemmed into the skin. The epic orchestration from, "The Fox and the Hound," seeped into the kitchen stench and the sogginess of this bun reminded me of the work sponsored luncheons of the past. I hated work with the force of flaming arrows and only ever wanted it to exist in relation to when my parents got home from their jobs.
    The truth is, with or without my boyfriend, my life had been going on like this, well, since it started. The harsh winds and unforgiving tundra of reality was bogging me down and my mood had gone downhill since I was a baby. It says, once, in the Book of Mark, that Jesus cursed a fig tree after it refused to make figs for him, and that says it all. My job was to play old reels of Loreal shampoo commercials for new shareholders. I would typically light a cigarette and babysit and wait as they watched the same old films. If a setting or a nob needed fixing, the eyebrows on the old geezers' faces would tarnish and convey sudden outrage. I hated my life and I began to spend every cent of my savings on makeup and accessories I didn't deserve. I was hastening to become just like my mother and my habits were just as peculiar-seeming. I found a master tape for the "waiting in line" music, shared by all Sanderson & Son corporation sub-companies. This became my driving music almost every day. My soul felt exhumed and stretched beyond the corners, diving so far and so fast into the months that passed like hours. My kids were once very happy just to watch TV. They'd watch so much TV and I'd grow so old. If I died of a fever, they'd still be watching TV. I just wanted to skip it all. Skipping and skipping and skipping.
    I saw the ideal life as a sterilized and tidied space. My boyfriend saw it more as a tangled outgrowth of spontaneous elixirs. My father saw it as fathoming the insignificance of it all so that one could be truly free. Last New Year's, I stayed at a YA hostel and watched all the couples come together (just to break apart again). Soon, everything would be the "same as ever", and all the "goodness" that Christmas wasn't would leave out the door, just as the couples had. My only friends, now, are the tracings of the lost souls I encountered over the years. My only solace: the vastness of my mouth and how I could live inside it, like a shellfish. Tomorrow was supposed to be one degree warmer out. Was my life a curse or was this really the last stop?
    My boyfriend watched with eyes like needle nose plyers. He would think, similarly, about the glacial melting of grand father figures, things slowly breaking up. Knowing everyone would leave him in the end, he'd oscillate between pure kindness and the positive desire to shoot everyone, like a proud Leninist. If everyone was dead, the memories he had of everyone would live. There was always Teegan's place, but I felt above group homes, trap houses, whatever you wanted to call them. I was invited one night to hang out for the Armani sales event, because the one sister, who was probably into crack, decided ovular sunglasses would be her salvation. I guess, maybe, I wasn't so different, in allowing myself to sharply dive into fate, like this.
George, March 13 [in real time]
    You know that floorboard in old houses that feels like mulch? That texture was the scene around here: fibrously connected, damp and simple. Anyone could come in and be anyone. I once listened to this guy, Jason, talk about driving major sized HEMIs off three storey ramps set on the highway. At the same time, Jason's brother would be strung out, not even listening, as Jason lied about him in the story. This band called Chrome played and a sales agent named Tracey kept trying to knock on the door. Just to fuck with her, I told her I was the land lady and she'd have to undo my bathrobe to confirm the sex. I'd never seen anyone so persistent to sell a house, she completely ignored my joke and continued trying to ram her services through the door. I guess the landlord had been trying to sell the place, this group home where all sorts of randoms and fandoms coalesced. If there was ever a sudden eviction notice, nobody cared or paid much attention. It made sense that our Chinese landlord, Ching, wouldn't consult everyone beforehand. I guess this meant we'd need to be packing our stuff. Teegan had his clothes and furniture in garbage bags, at the curb already. That dude was like a Ho Chi Minh of moving between places. Nevermind you, the garbage bags were protruded with sharp edges and panelling, metal from the TV stand to the pipes he installed in the rooftop (he'd be taking them, as they were, "technically his"). The kid came from one of those small lake towns, outrageous hillbilly. I could hear him, right now, recording snaps of himself, saying,
"Don't touch my ass when you come over baby?!"
    And it was unreal enough for my great grandmother to have a laugh. My great grandmother lived in Okinawa for many years and was a transient in the Garden Scene for twenty years. After she left, her slogan became, "Love is All You Need," and a dilapidated shelving unit, with the words inscribed, proved it. Truth is, she was an influence on my neo-Catholic identity. I rejected sex, love and all the rest and found truth in becoming a zealot behind the scenes. The more I smoked, the more I became the cigarette and it turns out no one outsmarts the cigarette.
    Sandra had moved out years ago, Jason started a new life running a pumpkin patch (but I may have missed the sarcasm when he originally said that.) The more and more my greatest and truest and realist friends fled from the scene, the more this house became a sty. I read House of Leaves and couldn't get through 100 pages before realizing that this wasn't about me. I looked out the window of Natya's "second room" (she claimed a second, after Dylan moved) and thought I saw a turkey sandwich outside, out there. A few moments passed and I decided to retrieve it.
    I couldn't stop overthinking about the contents of my pockets. I shuffled, readjusted and gained control, before finally leaving the door, secure and one person. In the wild, twisted twilight, I knew that the war was over. I went over to the sandwich and a giant dog zoomed at me. I couldn't believe what was happening (maybe because of my ADD), but I thought he just wanted the sandwich. When I came to my senses, after many moments I would rather forget, hitting and kicking, I had a painful scar on my head and could feel an angel looking after me, like I was a small babe in the world. All this was easy to rub off. What wasn't was the inevitability of losing control like that in a serious situation. I could go off like a gun, join the infantry, and yet all this fiery dispassion never made sense in the context of my very tepid grasp on life. 
    Inside, everyone was watching old Japanese commercials and wearing overblown lounge wear, one of the newer roomies even in a golf polo. These guys would one day be my best friends, but that's another story for another time.
Natya, same day
    My mother had bought Christmas presents for three of her friends the year before and I had somehow wound up with all three of them. Actually, I took them for myself rather thoughtlessly. One was a "rocket notebook" and I had this romantic vision that I'd become an accounting assistant overnight with it. I felt embarrassed, now, seeing all the entries about, "butt still tight after workout" (who'd I think I was, Anne Charlotte Robertson?). I had a tab left open asking me if I wanted to continue applying for the role of "Cake Decorator".
(The night I wrote down my workout at the reception area at the Hyatt, a man approached me and asked if I knew who Chantel Ackerman was. As I hesitated to recite just one of her films, y'know, the famous one, he screamed an inch from my face and said I had to be on it. I thought that was a ridiculous gesture, but I took it seriously by pretending he was a Maltese who'd been through it all).
    Anyhow, dispensable as it were, nothing could change last night and how I got married and basically saw my entire future in one molly excursion. While I fumbled around the haphazardly named "Broadway St.," it was like I could have actually been in New York. I had no sense of whether I would miss my job and I didn't care either. I was growing up way too fast and the little pinion of my heart had to make it slow down. I did not fear missing out, I did not even fear turning into a late-Cookie Mueller. My impulsive decision to get married was part of a project to let go and play with the elements of my life like a fingerprinting. Somehow I felt too embarrassed to really preach it, but my shiny shoes, buckling together, knew the secret, all too well.
    This little village of houses on Emerald Grove sang out, and I could hear the patchwork of people, now living, in that choir. I remember fiddling around, for the first two hours of the trip, with a ballerina in a music box and, oh, how it spoke to me... The bijou fragility, the possibility that I could be on top of the silver globe like that. The neighbours' screaming baby was the reminder that all this would end and there was nowhere to go anyway. I was rolling by myself and George was playing something on the Wii, where the Miis would clap and spectators would slowly drop out. I felt so stupid watching him with the biggest, twisted smile on my face. Yet, I felt cute, knowing I was cute. He could have been my bigger brother, my first crush, the president and all he had to do was swing that Wiimote that he, truly, wanted nothing to do with. All was an object of my attraction, written in an arcane universe, just for me. 
    When I called home, to see if my dad would notice me, they were watching Ed Sullivan re-runs and I could hear through the tube,
"Tonight... We have a very special announcement. Now, I want everyone to hear this and I want no one backing out. It's extremely important that everybody in America year this message...,"
    And I could hear my mom whispering,
"Yessss," at the end of Ed's sentences. I didn't even understand what they were watching, quite, but I knew her hands were raised up and all of them, in there, would be shooting at the red scare, soon enough.
    I asked my dad for one inspirational quote that would summarize his life's teachings and, with his old farmer's face, he spoke,
"Eat your peas," shaking. And I thought,
"Oh dad, how could you give into whatever that is..."
    Love had long passed me by and was now whirring around the subway system at supersonic intervals, turning 'round Giza and passing through Bombay, and again. As these very thoughts gargled around in my head a while, I felt like an old lady, knitting away. The way it was: the way it had been. Out of time, out of sight. I was going to be very late for work. Think they'd fire me? I asked the boy sitting next to me and he looked sternly in his ill-fitting headphones. People I loved kept messaging me on Facebook messenger and I rudely swiped away the notifications. Love was all around, the jittery and empty city meant nothing. Everything was yoga and I always had myself to do a twirl, if ever in doubt that anyone would be around. Alison by Slowdive kept scrobbling on my phone despite the fact I was listening to Nephilim.
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tallest-marij-reblog · 6 months ago
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I love every single part of this discussion; every word. 😊
Also Rolando purposefully using his revolting glib charm is exactly what did it for me. Dude's "trying" to sell you snake oil, but is really just in it for the fun of it all; selling the snake oil doesn't matter, it's about the game and reactions he can get from you. He'd still be having a ball if you screached that he's a lying, scheming, full of shit cheap scammer.
I think a lot of it is also just how much fun he is having throughout the episode. Every part of it is a blast for (or he act like), up until he's actually worn himself out.
Dude absolutely know how to read a room, and how to make you feel whatever he wabts you to feel - and that was before he ever got up from his desk.
As was already said, his desings are epic. I like both his human and demon forms. He is the epitome of unconventionally attractive, and my god is he attractive!
Also, he could totally sell me snake oil. 🤷🏻
As soon as I saw the guy in the new Helluva Boss episode, I went "Oh I bet people on Tumblr are trying to fuck him right now. He has the charm of a guy who is trying to sell you snake oil and is failing miserably. Or a really sleazy used car salesman who hasn't made a single deal." And then I went on your blog and behold hdhdjjddn.
To be fair I am also not immune to the good old "guy who definitely sells snake oil but hasn't made a single sale" character design and I do like sea themed monsters. So yeah.
oh Ira, you know me and the demographic of this website incredibly well 🥴🥴🥴
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honestly i'm delighted that so many people are down bad for Rolando because i thought i was gonna be fighting for my life about him!! but i underestimated the high-simpage capabilities of this fandom, and how many of us were starved for a real freak 👉👈
it's even funnier that he has all of this revolting glib charm and it's completely on purpose!!! more like trying to sell you snake oil and loving the fact that he can't 😂i do wonder whether all Infestor demons have a more 'creepy' appearance, because in the cast of Sexypeople in the Hellaverse, Rolando's design stands out in a fantastic way...they ought to lean into it more often 🙈💖💖 dfgfds oh god yeah you are so right!!! i'll be real, i'd be exactly as down bad as i am now if Rolando only had his human form and that was his perpetual look, but fuuuuck we lucked out on the demon design!!! it's one of the coolest anthros i've ever seen!!!! i think Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel resonate with so many people because they tap into the joy of character creation so much 🥺🥺
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disappointingyet · 2 years ago
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Hit Man 
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Director Richard Linklater Stars Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Retta USA 2023 Language English 1hr 53mins Colour
A load more fun than your average Nietzsche-quoting movie 
There’s a bunch of people in the media who reckon Glen Powell is on the verge of proper movie stardom. I learned long ago that I have no talent for picking winners, so I won’t offer an opinion on that, but he’s certainly co-written himself a blinder of a role here.
Gary Johnson (Powell) is a geeky lecturer in philosophy and psychology in New Orleans. As his students point out in the opening scene, there’s a huge gap between his full-throttle philosophical positions and his meek lifestyle. 
But Gary has an improbable side hustle (and, as it happens, there was a real Gary Johnson who did both these jobs.) He helps the police with stings on people who are trying to hire a hit man. Initially, he’s one of the crew listening in in the van, but then there’s an an emergency and he gets ‘promoted’ to the person playing the killer for hire. And, to everyone’s surprise, it turns out he has a flair for acting and improv.
For a guy currently best known for appearing in Top Gun: Maverick, the chance to go full Peter Sellers and do a wild variety of looks and accents must have been pretty irresistible. Of course, that can be a recipe for something truly terrible but, fortunately, Powell is very good and very funny in these scenes.  
One of the tricky bits for a movie like this is settling down from a series of entertaining set pieces into a main plot that has to keep us interested. So often, the need to tell a conventional story makes everything very plodding. I won’t spoil what happens in this one but Richard Linklater manages the transition smoothly, aided by the chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona.
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Beyond that, nailing the tone in a crime comedy is something that trips up filmmakers all the time. Is it OK to be silly when murder is a possibility? How do you balance a feeling of peril with good jokes? When is something dark comedy and when is it just sadistic? The post-Tarantino 1990s, in particular, were rife with films that got that balance horribly wrong and ended up both glib and nasty.
Linklater has made some of my favourite movies, but he likes to try a lot of things and doesn’t always succeed. His last three films are generally considered to be not up to scratch. The two I’ve seen have been disappointing but in very different ways.
With Hit Man, though, he’s got it absolutely right: it’s the good kind of daft but with some interesting ideas being discussed, the casting is great (from Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s police colleagues to all people trying to hire a cheap assassin) and it rattles along.
Powell has actually been around for a very long time – he first worked with (his fellow Texan) Richard Linklater way back in 2006* – but if his time in the spotlight has come, this film makes an extremely good case for him.
*I first remember him from Linklater’s 2016 movie Everybody Wants Some!!, but the first thing I would have seen him on screen in was 2005’s The Wendell Baker Story. That film – which I think was unfairly dismissed – was made by the Wilson brothers, and Powell certainly has a touch of both Owen and Luke in Hit Man.
I saw Hit Man at the  BFI London Film Festival 2023
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Dictionary
dejection (n): a sad or depressed state
rigmarole (n): a long and complicated process that is annoying and seems unnecessary
forlorn (a): appearing lonely and unhappy
to boast (v): to talk in a way that shows you are too proud of something that you have or can do
meretricious (a): ​seeming attractive, but in fact having no real value
poignant (a): having a strong effect on your feelings, especially in a way that makes you feel sad
killjoy (n): a person who likes to stop other people from having fun
tawdry (a): intended to be bright and attractive but cheap and of low quality
to wince (v): (at something) to suddenly make an expression with your face that shows that you are embarrassed or feeling pain
to be on tenterhooks (i): very anxious or excited while you are waiting to find out something or see what will happen
scrupulosity (a): careful about paying attention to every detail
to doze off (pv): to fall asleep especially for a short period of time
foreboding (n): a strong feeling that something unpleasant or dangerous is going to happen. But, as she knew by foreboding, that would come to an end; had a foreboding of the hopelessness of her affair
foreboding joy
glib (adj): fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow
chatterbox
gently speculative eyes; eyes to whom life appears musical, mysterious;
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Dear Heart
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I have a strange relationship with Geraldine Page’s work. I like her best in the material for which she has the least respect. Put her in a mindless comedy or melodrama, and she delivers a wonderful performance, often much more fleshed out than what was in the script. And I delighted in her deft playing of Alan Ayckbourn’s farce ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR on Broadway. Put her in Tennessee Williams or Woody Allen at his most serious or, goddess help us, Chekhov, and after five minutes I want to step out for a smoke. I’ve never smoked. I hate smoking. But I’d take it up to get away from those self-conscious, mannered performances. Between her on-screen bouts with Williams and Chekhov, Page was cast in Delbert Mann’s romantic comedy DEAR HEART (1964, TCM), and she’s a delight. You can see echoes of her more serious work — the fussiness she brought to Alma Winemiller and a gesture she would slow down to an almost glacial pace in INTERIORS (1978) — but here it all serves to make the character more endearing and dimensional. As a single woman of a certain age attending a post master’s convention in New York, she’s like the new Jean Arthur. Her Evie Jackson comes off the train from Ohio at the start and knows the names of all her fellow passengers and the porters. She leaves messages for herself at the hotel desk or has herself paged just to feel somebody cares. Then she meets Glenn Ford’s womanizing greeting card salesman, who’s about to move into an office job and marriage to “that tomato from Altoona” (Angela Lansbury), and something magical happens. Her fussy, detailed acting and his proficient, studio-trained mining of personality meet and make something beautiful. There’s a scene in which he shows her the apartment he’s just rented for himself and Lansbury that’s a gorgeous acting duet, and they have a fully dressed scene in Page’s hotel room that’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen. You half expect them to light cigarettes when it’s over. Tad Mosel adapted the script from his TV play. When he’s writing for the adults it’s spot on. The early scenes for Lansbury’s son (Michael Anderson, Jr.) appear to have been written by somebody with no understanding of young people, and Anderson comes off almost unbearably glib (he settles in later). Lansbury is very good as Ford’s fiancée, and the supporting cast also includes Barbara Nichols as another of her cheap blondes (but this one is funnier than she is irritating), Richard Deacon as the convention’s manager and a glorious trio of cranky old women played by Ruth McDevitt, Mary Wickes and Alice Pearce (I’m always amazed at how much nuance she can bring to roles like this). The Henry Mancini-Jay Livingston-Ray Evans theme song — the producers liked it so much they named the film for it — was more successful than the movie, but I think the film is ripe for rediscovery along with some of Delbert Mann’s other late works.
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isakglaser · 26 days ago
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I'm of two minds about this
Firstly, I'd disagree: there's a certain cheapness to death being a revolving door for main characters, to me, that both makes the setting feel wholly distant from our real world in a glib, self-indulgent way and takes away stakes; it also makes it feel strange that death then matters to all these "little characters", the people on the margins of story. It breaks a kind of verisimilitude, to me, and I think that's why the Buffy writers at least tried to pay tribute to the idea that it came with some costliness, so the grim reality of death can be maintained.
But OTOH there is also the same problem as Protecting the Timeline as a metaphor (bear with me): time travel is impossible. It doesn't work. It breaks causality. So what are we really saying with all of these stories about how we can't break the timeline, not change one inch? All of these stories, again and again. Well, in a lot of cases, what ends up being said is: the status quo must be preserved. Not one inch changed. History shouldn't change, and neither should the present, is often the subtext of many time-travel stories, intended or not.
But, again, time travel isn't real. This isn't a real problem. So it can be a metaphor for anything really, including stuff that means breaking the timeline or changing it.*
Now, resurrections are obviously realer than time-travel: Buffy itself has a more or less realistic version of that in Prophecy Girl. There are real debates about reviving somebody who will be brain-dead if you revive them. But resurrecting somebody months after they've died and decomposed: now that's getting into the same territory as time-travel. That's not a real problem anymore: now it is a fictional one, and can be a metaphor for a real problem.
Which is one of the reasons I really liked your take a while back that Willow bringing Buffy back can be seen as analogous to bringing somebody back from suicide, with all the possible resentments and complex feelings that brings up, which matches so closely to what that season is doing as well. But then of course, once Buffy has affirmed her desire to live, it becomes wonky and weird to bring in plot mechanism centered on the fact that she shouldn't.
So I think I disagree that these two things can't be combined, or maybe, I think people feel the need to combine the two because the mechanism of death in plot feels inseparable from the reality of death. I think the desire for long-term consequences comes in part because of that quest for a kind of verisimilitude.
Not that Buffy season 7 is a good example of that attempt.
*I am paraphrasing/interpreting El Sandifer's Tardis Eruditorum from memory here
You can write stories about the grim reality that sometimes people you care about enormously die and there's nothing you can do about it but mourn them and move on with your life. And you can write stories set in fictional universes where it's possible to magically bring back the dead with essentially no long term consequences to them or you or anybody else. Both kinds of stories have obvious value and appeal and you can do interesting and thoughtful and emotionally affecting things with either of them..
But what you cannot do with any shred of credibility is try to tell both those stories at the same time. If somebody dies in a setting where they can be magically resurrected it simply does not make sense for the narrative to act as though a person capable of resurrecting them should just pretend they can't for some reason.
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