#movies discovered in 2023

[vertigoartgore]

Top 30 Movies that I discovered in 2023 (but not released in 2023) :

Pandora and The Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, UK, 1951)

Summertime (David Lean, USA/UK, 1955)

Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1956)

Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, USA, 1958)

Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, USA, 1964)

Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, Japan, 1967)

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (John D. Hancock, USA, 1971)

The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, USA, 1971)

The effect of Gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds (Paul Newman, USA, 1972)

Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver, USA, 1979)

Being There (Hal Ashby, USA, 1979)

El Sur (Víctor Erice, Spain, 1983)

El Norte (Gregory Nava, UK/USA, 1983)

Vigil (Vincent Ward, New Zealand, 1984)

Choose Me (Alan Rudolph, USA, 1984)

Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, USA, 1985)

Anguish (Bigas Luna, Espagne, 1987)

The Vanishing (George Sluizer, France/Netherlands,1988)

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., USA, 1989)

Proof (Jocelyn Moorhouse, Australia, 1991) 

Ninja Scroll (Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Japan, 1993)

Suture (Scott McGehee & David Siegel, USA, 1993)

What Happened Was... (Tom Noonan, USA, 1994)

Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, USA, 1995)

August in the Water (Sogo Ishii, Japan, 1995)

Shall We Dance ? (Masayuki Suo, Japan, 1996)

Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong, 1997)

Bullets Over Summer (Wilson Yip, Hong-Kong, 1999)

To the Left of the Father (Luiz Fernando Carvalho, Brazil, 2001)

Dead End (Jean-Baptiste Andrea & Fabrice Capepa, France/USA, 2003)

[lifeiskentastic]

Ken tastes Real World ice cream with gn!Reader

Gif by @chriswevans

A/N: It just occurred to me while I was eating my ice cream.)

Summary: Ken tastes Real World ice cream for the first time (and he really likes it);

Song: I know this fanfic is too short to even contain songs, but... I really need to recommend Ice Cream Man by Van Halen, i love it too much (why are all ice cream songs so raunchy, it's just ice cream, ppl😭😭)

Word count: 305 words;

Nice reading!

Ken gazed with genuine amazement at the tall cone filled with scoops of ice cream.

"You have to eat it, otherwise it will melt."

"So it will disappear?"

You nodded, seeing that Ken had absolutely no idea how something could melt, evaporate and just disappear without a trace. But this is not surprising, considering that until this moment he believed that all food was invisible.

It wasn't hard to see the grimace on Ken's face as he gingerly stuck his tongue out and touched the ice cream. However, as soon as the tip of his tongue touched the scoop of vanilla ice cream, his eyes widened, eyebrows furrowed, and he looked like he had made some new Nobel discovery.

"It's… It's so much better than at Barbieland."

Given that the ice cream in Barbieland was imaginary, even the most ordinary vanilla cone will seem like a delicacy. However, Ken was so mesmerized and started eating his dessert with such enthusiasm that you didn't dare say it out loud.

After a while, all that was left of the once large overflowing ice cream cone were traces of melted vanilla on Ken's cheeks and nose. You giggled softly as you reached up to Ken's soiled but satisfied face.

"Come here!"

You wiped the leftover ice cream from Ken's big smile, the tip of his nose, his cheeks and even his chin as his eyes gazed gently into yours.

"Looks like I'm going to need some more ice cream to learn how to eat it more neatly."

You smiled, knowing perfectly well that he only needed it to enjoy it even more. However, this was exactly the purpose of your mission to "Put Ken on Human Treats".

"As you wish."

And during that day, you were simply forced to try every possible (and impossible) flavor of ice cream.

***

P.S. How many times have I written "ice cream" in the entire fic?

[french-vanilla-in-the-clouds]

𝓜𝓪𝓴𝓮 𝓲𝓽 𝓟𝓲𝓷𝓴...

𝐎𝐤𝐚𝐲, 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫... 𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 "𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐛𝐢𝐞" 𝐨𝐫 "𝐫𝐲𝐚𝐧 𝐠𝐨𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠", 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐛𝐢𝐞 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐬!!

𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐥𝐞𝐬! 🌸

[elenatria]

I just looooove how Alexey acts all coy around Henk throughout the first part of Tetris, "Mr Rogers, I'm not for sale" and "I have car" and "Mr Rogers, I don't need small talk". And yet he secretly sneaks glances at him whenever Henk's not looking, checking him out, his gaze betraying a wide range of moods, from harmless curiosity to fascination to pure admiration.

[stickers-on-a-laptop]

deeply mediocre media you keep rewatching >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[thermodynamic-comedian]

im so genuinely upset that so many men don't realize one of the main points of the barbie movie. it's that men shouldn't define themselves based on women, nobody should define themself based on someone else. you think that treating women like shit makes you more of a man, and that being "more of a man" is the point of your life, but it isn't. you don't have to do that. you don't have to do any of that. you are kenough.

[1smolbean]

“certain movies are based on a product and their existence is in part to advertise that product” and “when people are walking into a movie theater to see Barbie they are aware that they are walking into a movie that is inextricably tied to Barbie and Mattel” and “a movie based on a product and tied to that product can still be a damn good movie regardless” are takes that should be able to coexist

[psychicbluebirdmiracle]

YALL YALL YALL BARBIE IS EVERYTHING!!! I LOVE IT SO MUCH AND I CANT WAIT TO SEE IT AGAIN TOMORROW

[thequeereview]

NewFest Pride Summer Film Series returns to New York with sizzling five-day lineup

The third annual NewFest Pride Summer Film Series, running June 1st – 5th, 2023 in New York, will kick off Pride month in the city in style, featuring a mix of exclusive in-person premieres and panels, virtual screenings, and social events. Fairyland. Courtesy of NewFest. Among the nine feature films being shown, is the opening night selection Fairyland—receiving its New York premiere—written…

[s0fter-sin]

finally figured out the reason it’s been difficult to get back into reading books after reading fic for so long is so many fantasy books are just self inserts and the mc has no personality beyond the bare minimum

[queerdiscowing]

I feel like one thing people didnt get about the barbie movie is that Ken is a girl

[prettieinpink]

NEW YEAR, NEW ME

( A collab with thee lovely lele @bloombabydoll )

If you want to reinvent and rebrand yourself, or just continue to make positive improvements in 2024, the first thing is to evaluate your current year. 

EVALUATION

Reflect on how things went for you. Was there continuous growth? Were there many difficult times? Did you discover anything major about yourself and so on. Try to summarise your year in (a) paragraph(s) at least. 

Oversee your goals. Which ones you didn’t, did achieve, difficult ones, easy ones and the impacts it had on your life. 

Compare your dream girl then and now. Is your visualisation of your life currently different to the one you have now and why? 

List any major losses or successes you’ve had in your life, and how they have helped you or why it matters to you. 

This evaluation can be as detailed or simple as you like, but as long as you have a decent outline of your year. 

PREPARING & PLANNING

To prepare for 2024, you want to know what you want life to be like in 2024. Something realistic to a point, but still is a growth journey. 

Think of something that you can associate with 2024. This can be a word, a symbol, art, a song, a book, a movie, a place, or even just all of these things. When you think about your goals and your journey, this is your theme. This is something that should relate to your goals or your dream girl somehow. 

For me, I chose a word and a song. My word is growth because, for me, 2023 was a year for just being able to shed my old self which I did achieve however I just felt there wasn’t much growth as an actual person and not just in my environment. 

For my song, it is Mayflowers by Proleters and Taskrok. This song is the epitome of what I would imagine, is the most polished mindset. I would say perfect, but having a perfect mindset is near impossible. I want to have a mindset glow up because I’ve just been hard on myself lately which has caused my confidence to plummet. 

Before we get into the fun part of the preparation stage, we have to do some organisation in our life. I want you to take a look at your daily lifestyle and your habits, and be completely unashamed about this. 

Then categorise these habits into two sections; Leave and Leap. Leave habits are habits that you are leaving behind in 2023, leap habits are habits that are leaping into 2024 with you. 

Any habits that are self-destructive, addictive or generally harmful are leave habits. Beneficial habits and self-building are leaping with you into the new year.

I want you to do the same for people in your life, all environments (school, work, online etc) and anything else you believe needs to be sorted out. 

This works better if you can reason with yourself why it is a leaping or leaving habit, but don’t try to convince yourself a bad habit is good or vice versa. 

Now, I want you to document an honest paragraph about who you are right now. List your bad and good habits, your strengths and weaknesses and your behaviours. This one requires a bit more detail. 

Then, write a paragraph about who you will be in 2024, your dream girl. List her habits, lifestyle, behaviours, mindset, strengths and anything else extra. I’ll explain later but do not include materialistic desires in this your dream girl. Once again, this one also requires details. 

Stemming from those paragraphs, I want you to create specific and achievable goals. SMART goals are best, but I want to introduce you to how I set goals. 

I divide my year into quarters. For each 3 months, I have 3-5 goals for those months. Usually, it’s one from each area of my life. Then, I break down these goals. 

Questions and How They Help 

Why do I want to do this goal - For motivation and commitment. 

How it’ll benefit me - For the sake of improvement. 

How can I involve myself in this goal - To achieve your goal.  

I prefer this method because it is a lot simpler for me, as I am just a young girl and my bigger goals are more in the future in which I’ll utilise SMART goals. 

To create good goals; Make sure they align with your current values and life principles first. Try to avoid creating goals that you have just taken from the internet. Those goals just aren’t it and you most likely won’t follow through with it. 

Be specific. Don’t say you want to eat more healthily, instead say you want to include (a certain group of veggies/fruits) in your diet and reduce the intake of ( food/drink). 

E.g using eating healthy example

I want to eat healthy -> I want to start including foods that boost my immunity system and support my skin while reducing those that have the opposite effect. 

Then break down those quarterly goals into monthly, weekly and daily goals. Make these habits that you can establish in your lifestyle and have a way in which you can refer back to your progress. 

EXAMPLE GOAL BREAKDOWN

Quarterly Goal - Read 6 books.  

Monthly Goal - Finish 2 books.

Weekly Goal - Be or near half way of one book.

Daily Goal - 20 minutes of reading per day. 

AREAS TO SET GOALS IN YOUR LIFE

Academics

Spiritual

Fitness/sport

Health and wellbeing

Mental health

Personal life

Relationships

Hobbies and recreation

Now for the best part- vision boards! Collect all of your favourite images that embody your quarters or the whole year, then put them in one place where you can see them regularly!

Some ideas are a scrapbook, Pinterest boards, mood boards, playlists etc. 

Choose your theme; It can be your healthy girl era, your academic come back or whatever you want. You can have more than two btw.

Use quotes! Then actually say them in your daily life as a way to shift your mindset to reflect said quote.

Include inspirational people. It doesn't even have to be a millionaire or a very well established person, it could be your friends or someone on the internet.

Be imaginative. Your vision board doesn't have to realistic in my opinion, as the whole point of it to me is that viewing it daily and considering it to be part of your life one day allows for you to open up to those opportunities.

Materialistic Wants

I feel obligated to make this a separate section. This section is practically tangible objects that you want.

However, when choosing this said object that you want, mindfully think about why you want that thing specifically.

It doesn’t have to be meaningful, but as long as each thing on that list has got a purpose to you, and will serve you, I think it’s all good!

Conclusion

If you want, you can definitely start implementing habits before January. However, I believe that as long as you go into 2024 at least knowing who you want to be and shedding away any limiting beliefs, you’ll be fine.

Make sure to incorporate some self care rituals into your daily life as well✨

To end this, I hope everyone has a very merry Christmas! And that 2024 they will achieve to close that gap with their current selves and their dream girl selves! 💖🙏

[neil-gaiman]

(I send a question about this but I didnt explain very well, sorry english isnt my first language)

Here in Brasil a lot of people said "the reason why wont exist a sequence from Coraline its because the creator sold the stop motion figures", I know the reason Coraline doesnt have a sequence its because the story already ended, but I passes my whole childhood thinking that you (an evil person) sold the "dolls" of the movie

So I ask: DID YOU SOLD THE POOR DOLLS??

I think you're saying that you've been told that we can't do a sequel to Coraline because I sold off all the Coraline puppets. And no, that's not true.

There were 28 Coraline stop-motion puppets. They are all now about 16 years old, and are mostly too old now and fragile to be used for stop motion. If we were to make another animated Coraline film, then another set of Coralines, and any other puppets would be made. It would be part of the budget of the film.

If you'd like to see Coraline puppets and sets, along with other Laika characters, Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture has an exhibition on from the 18th of March 2023 until the Summer of 2024.

[walks-the-ages]

OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir) novels and essays on being transgender:

Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:

Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:

Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:

Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:

Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:

(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)

Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)

EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !

annnnnd in light of the web archive losing it's court case, here's a backup of both PDFs and generated epubs a friend made:

5/26/2023: hello! I am adding on yet another book of queer history, this time the autobiography of Karl Baer, a Jewish, intersex trans man who was born in 1884! Please signal boost this version, and remember to check the notes whenever this crosses your dash for any new updates :)

6/24/2023:

Two links to share!

Someone made an Epub version of Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, which you can find Here , as a more accessible version than a pdf of a scanned book if you're like me and need larger text size for reading--

And from another post I reblogged earlier today, I discovered the existence of "TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism", which has 10 issues from 1993-1995, and includes multiple interviews with Leslie Feinburg and other queer feminists / activists of the 90s!

Here's a link to all 10 issues of TransSisters, plus a 1996 "look back at" by one of the writers after the journal ended, you can find all 10 issues on the Internet Archive Here !

------

8/28/2023:

"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out", can be found on the web archive Here, for the 25th Anniversary Edition from 2015,

and also Here, for the original 1991 version.

Each of the above can be borrowed for one hour at a time as long as a copy is available :D

This is a living post that receives sporadic updates on the original, if you are seeing this on your dash, click Here to see the latest version of the post to make sure you're reblogging the most up to date one :)

------------

October, 25th 2023:

"I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without peo-ple, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured ears with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people. The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine. So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself. That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops in uniforms and plainclothes surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's. The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life! Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met..." Transgender Warriors (1996) Leslie Feinberg

[hashtagloveloses]

The headline is pretty awful but this is one of those things that gets worse as you read it:

The 14-page petition, filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

"Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys."

Oher was a rising high school senior when he signed the conservatorship papers, and he has written that the Tuohys told him that there was essentially no difference between adoption and conservatorship. "They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as 'adoptive parents,' but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account," Oher wrote in his 2011 best-selling memoir "I Beat the Odds."

But there are some important legal distinctions. If Oher had been adopted by the Tuohys, he would have been a legal member of their family, and he would have retained power to handle his own financial affairs. Under the conservatorship, Oher surrendered that authority to the Tuohys, even though he was a legal adult with no known physical or psychological disabilities.

While the [movie] deal allowed the Tuohys to profit from the film, the petition alleges, a separate 2007 contract purportedly signed by Oher appears to "give away" to 20th Century Fox Studios the life rights to his story "without any payment whatsoever." The filing says Oher has no recollection of signing that contract, and even if he did, no one explained its implications to him.

The [movie] deal lists all four Tuohy family members as having the same representative at Creative Artists Agency, the petition says. But Oher's agent, who would receive movie contract and payment notices, is listed as Debra Branan, a close family friend of the Tuohys and the same lawyer who filed the 2004 conservatorship petition, the petition alleges. Branan did not return a call to her law office on Monday.

"Mike's relationship with the Tuohy family started to decline when he discovered that he was portrayed in the movie as unintelligent," Stranch said. "Their relationship continued to deteriorate as he learned that he was the only member of the family not receiving royalty checks from the movie, and it was permanently fractured when he realized he wasn't adopted and a part of the family."

For years, Oher has chafed at how "The Blind Side" depicted him, saying it hurt his football career and clouded how people view him. He has said that based on the film, some NFL decision-makers assumed he was mentally slow or lacked leadership skills.

"People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie," Oher told ESPN in 2015. "They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am."

"Beyond the details of the deal, the politics, and the money behind the book and movie, it was the principle of the choices some people made that cut me the deepest."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt