#not sure about the logistics

[hils79]

As a heads up if/when Twitter crashes and burns I’m making my livetweeting of dramas a tumblr problem

[canisalbus]

If only Machete wasn't so distinctly white and waifish. Otherwise one could possibly use a lookalike to fake his death and just run away with vasco. But finding someone that resembles machete would be almost as hard as making the choice to end a life to save your own.

.

[cubbihue]

With fairies roughly being the size of a pencil, I gotta ask how ITTY BITTY was baby!peri? I need to know how TINY he was 🥺🥺🥺🥺

Here's a size comparison! Very tiny. About the size of the tip digit of your pointer finger!!!

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[moonwoodhollow]

Simblreen 2024

I will be participating in Simblreen for the first time and I'm really excited! So you're probably wondering what you might get... well only treats, no tricks! What kind of treats? 2 builds, one without cc and one with cc. When? I'm unsure about that yet, but I'll keep you updated! Definitely in the latter half of October though. Will you do a Witching Hour gift? Yes. My cc build will only be available during my Witching Hour. @simblreenofficial

[sandwichsapphic]

i might have went a little crazy this weekend but. derry-ifies your beloved english characters

bertie is perfect for the wee english fella role, obviously. the others don’t translate as simply but i don’t care i was sketching for fun and the concept of bertie in a girls catholic school is so stupid. i love his female friends so much i wish they got more time to hang out without the threat of matrimony, so this is teenage-them wish fulfilment

also they would meet jeeves at that FATB event. i just think it’s really funny if they can’t date still, not because of a class divide, but because he’s a prod

[bunnieswithknives]

Im sure you all know I love roleswap AUs by now. Anyways hero Spot AU cause I've seen spiderverse like 3 times now, mans finally put on some clothes ♥

[soath]

these guys love a third option but i do not think this is their final third option. they're going to need possibly a fourth or fifth option to really thread the needle on redefined relationship between the gods and exandria vs. avoiding calamity 2: electric boogaloo/imogen does not end up possessed by predathos for all time

[hoofpeet]

I miss making comics

[b33tlejules]

Memories of a simpler time (ft. @localcryptic 's Ripley having a normal time with Ricardo)

Avi keeps torturing me with visions so everyone else has to suffer with me

[cellarspider]

7/30 germs.

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We return to a movie that disrespects the archaeological importance of roads, Prometheus.

I am still not over that. I will never be over that.

This time, content warnings for continuing frat boy archaeology, cringeful application of racist terms to lily-white androids, me screeching about site contamination some more, and Apollo’s dodgeball striking this movie with a glancing blow about masking.

So, back in the theater in 2012, I had already lost sympathy for the cast. They were being set up as stock horror movie characters, they were doing their jobs in a way with a certain flair for the incompetent.

And one of them, I suspect, the movie intends to make into a “flawed but you feel for him” kind of guy. Or, I hope they intended to make him “the guy in the slasher movie who you hate and want to see die”. That’s Holloway, one of the two archaeologists. He’s robot racist.

Like, seriously robot racist. The whole crew is, David literally gets referred to as “boy” here, which isn’t so much a dogwhistle as a tornado siren. No wonder David is quietly starting to show his disdain for the human crew.

“They're making you guys pretty close [to human now], huh?”

“Not too close, I hope.”

One of the few themes the movie handles halfway competently is the parallel between the humans stumbling all over themselves as they rush to go meet their makers, while David is already experiencing the disappointment of actually meeting his, and finding out they’re a bunch of clueless assholes. Are we supposed to believe the same of the Engineers? I don’t know. They definitely think of humans as lesser, though. More to come on that later.

Because right now, an expedition is barrelling toward the alien structure–again, driving all over the FCKING ALIEN ROAD–and they’re doing it with only six hours of daylight left, because Holloway literally says “It's Christmas [...] and I want to open my presents.”

I cannot communicate how heinous this character felt. The actor did a perfectly fine job playing him, but if Charlie Holloway was real, his name would be said with the same venom as that of the man pictured below: Heinrich Schliemann, the man who found the real, actual city of Troy, and immediately dynamited a trench through the royal palace, destroying who knows how many artifacts from the period the Iliad was based off of. Yes, I picked out the most assholish-looking photo of him I could find on purpose.

Also, Holloway’s an anti-masker, apparently.

I’m going to step back for just one second and list the one practical, movie budget reason why characters might take their helmets off. The costume designers did an admirable job coming up with something that fits the general requirement of a helmet in major studio releases, prior to The Mandalorian: make the actor’s faces completely visible, because without actors with a strong sense of physical presence and voice acting, you’ll lose connection with the audience.

They did a great job with that. Unfortunately, shiny helmets are a bastard to digitally edit film crew out of. 

It’s not impossible to place lights and crew so that the audience won’t notice them. Alien certainly pulled it off. Clear plastic elements in helmets also mean other logistical challenges, though: fogging being the main one. This, and cooking your actors in a fishbowl under studio lights.

Both problems can be simultaneously combated by installing A/C fans within the helmets, but because these helmets are entirely clear, you’re limited to hiding them down near the neck, and anybody who’s done similar for a cosplay or suit will know that it’s potentially noisy and not always effective. You can actually see condensate on the helmets in the movie, though whether that’s from the actor’s breath or a deliberate choice, I don’t know.

All this adds up to increased time resetting actors (i.e. cleaning sweat off of them without disrupting their makeup), more exhaustion from said actors, and the worry that the highest-paid, plot-critical actors may decide they don’t want to do a sequel if the shooting experience is too physically unhealthy.

And then there’s also more time spent carefully arranging crew and lights to hide their reflections, or more time making some poor VFX artist erase a transparent, curved reflection from frame and replace it with something else, or make the actors more comfortable by adding the glass in later with CGI, at the potential loss of some realism. The average modern movie studio would choose one of these VFX-driven options and demand it done in a week, which is why VFX artists need to unionize.

So. I understand at least a few logistical reasons why you don’t tend to make actors wear helmets for too many shooting days. But it has to be balanced with the story. It has to feel believable. It has to fit the story. It has to not make your characters look like mud-witted morons.

As soon as they find liquid water and the oh-so-deadly CO2 levels start to drop, Holloway takes his helmet off.

“Don't be an idiot.”

“Don't be a skeptic.”

Flames on the side of my goddamn face.

Now, this is the moment a lot of people lost sympathy for the human characters, even back in 2012. It was a dumbass idea even then, in the pre-’rona years. Sadly, Millburn the biologist isn’t written smart enough to punch Holloway in the nuts over even thinking of doing this, because we have two problems with what Holloway’s doing here: Biology, and biology.

First, biology.

(https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/13-viruses-virus-3d-model/1071200)

Obviously, they don’t know if anything’s in the air. He could find out that humans are deathly allergic to alien dust mites. He could have just caught himself a case of space covid, which he and the lemmings that follow him can then transmit to the entire crew if he’s not kept in quarantine. They can sterilize the sealed suits, but they can’t sterilize the inside of his lungs. Yet.

Second, biology. 

Specifically, Earth biology. Do you know how carefully modern space agencies sterilize anything that’s headed for Mars, or anywhere else that might have a biosphere of its own? A lot! They sterilize everything a lot! Because microbes are hardy little bastards. We’ve never found extraterrestrial life, only precursor molecules that show the capacity for life to develop in other places. How are you going to verify you’ve found alien life, or even those precursors, if you can’t prove that your samples are uncontaminated? What happens if microbes from Earth manage to survive the trip and establish a foothold somewhere? What if they destroy native life?

This movie’s characters treat this with only a fraction of the gravitas that the cinematography does, which is part of why this remains so jarring throughout. The practical sets, the art direction, and the camerawork are all excellent. The editing continues to do its best, though it almost feels like things were cut very tight through this to speed things along and to give more time, unfortunately, to what the characters are doing. 

their crimes against my sanity are not done yet

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As a side note, rounding up some discussion from a previous entry: The most excellent artist @noordzee pointed out that the clashing artistic style of the moon and stars slapped onto the carving of Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I. In the previous post, I focused on the link between that carving and its use in ancient aliens conspiracy theories. But let's dig a bit into actual Maya iconography around celestial bodies instead.

Now, I am not an expert on Classical Maya stuff. Not in the slightest. And there is a lot of information on their art that is linguistically inaccessible to me, as a non-Spanish speaker. But out of the Maya art and writing that survived the book-burning conquistadors, we have some iconography for the moon and stars, and they don’t look like what’s in the movie.

I wasn’t able to find any specific pieces of art that contained stars, but I did find the glyph for star, ek’. 

I was only able to find depictions of a crescent moon in the context of the moon goddess, where she tends to be sitting on the crescent like a chair, or one part of it is shown behind her, almost like a tail (though I can’t be certain whether that’s due to chipped paint).

The moon by itself was somewhat harder to find. I couldn’t find any Maya depictions of it with my limited poking around of the spanish internet, but I did find a (much later) Mixtec depiction of the moon, complete with a lunar rabbit! Much like East Asian cultures, the darker markings on the moon are culturally interpreted as a rabbit shape.

Thanks again to nordzee for pointing out the dissonant art style, because the real mesoamerican art on this subject is phenomenal.

Next time, the movie will hurt me more, so if anybody else has fun facts to share or details to point out. PLEASE. Ease my pain.

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Alt text citations:

None this time. Many ramblings, though.

[kazz-brekker]

rotating the two spymasters of the dance of the dragons in my head like a pair of rotisserie chickens

[bed-of-ashes]

OKAY aphblr has allowed me to explain my silly little revamped version of Irene + Aphmau so you're all gonna have to suffer for it

I was an autistic little child who hated unforeshadowed plot twists (but also I was like 10 and only had so many literary analysis skills) and I have carried this grudge with me toward adulthood but. I really hated the Aphmau being amnesiac Irene plotline. I've tried remedying it several times over the years but I think the idea I've finally landed on and am now obsessed with is Aphmau being Irene's daughter.

First of all, it fits the whole matron theme, and second, it goes with that early season 1 lore that Irene had a family. It would make Aphmau's guilt really interesting when she thinks she isn't living up to her mother's legacy. The lore idea is that 1,000 years ago, when Shadow Knights/Shad came to kill Irene, she used the last of her power to place Aphmau in the staff. Hyria comes to the burnt wreckage of their home (hello! Remember how Aphmaus greatest fear was her village on fire!) to mourn and recognizes the staff for what it is, storing it until a Shadow Knight would protect Irene's daughter, making it safe enough for her to return.

But what if Irene had a second daughter? A younger one, who escaped the assassination and went on to live a normal life? We know Aphmau likes to name her kids + pets after people, so, for no reason at all in particular, let's say this girl's name is Alina. Magicks is a very uncertain area in MCD lore but I'd imagine it's to some extent genetic, so maybe when Irene's other daughter has a son, that son develops powerful magicks when he is far too young to control it. Maybe the Alina 1,000 years ago doesn't know how to help him and she sends him off with a tutor who promises he can reign in this boy's untamed magicks. Maybe that boy drove his tutor insane because the power of Irene ran in his veins, and his tutor pushed him off the balcony of a stony castle. Maybe his aunt finds him 1,000 years later and takes him in as her own.

[69slaysoulsister69]

What if buck kisses eddie in that helicopter. What then

[coquelicoq]

i am such a clown. decided to make stickers for my siblings even though i have ZERO design skills or knowledge of any programs that allow you to rotate text except for powerpoint. so i made them in powerpoint. (this took, mmmm, maybe 6-8 hours btw.) then had to find a website that would print and mail these stickers to me. no i don't want 50 stickers. i want one circle sticker and one rectangle sticker. oh that's not an option anybody wants to give me? okay then i guess i will buy 16 circle stickers (the least offered) and 50 rectangle stickers (the least offered. why not 16 also? a mystery). one of the designs is for my sibling's band, so if they like it theoretically they could use the stickers as merch or something lol. but i'm not holding my breath, on account of the aforementioned lack of design skills. i get away with a lot among my family because they're all so willing to react to my questionable creations with aww look, she Tried! but that probably doesn't work for strangers who are fans of my sibling's band. so i guess they will just have 49 extra stickers that they can idk stick to streetlight poles or something. not my problem.

[pinkfey]

i feel like every time a new game in a series is released people complain abt its lack of lasting player choice between games, act as if it’s ever been any other way in the video game industry, then forget about it so they can rinse and repeat their outrage next year

[dirtbra1n]

while I’m here Was looking at old pages and shirahama gave me pangs again. need to lock him in a grain silo