#possessive shane

[philosophers-shwag]

Hey. I’m so sorry

[theghoulboysblog]

i think about these pictures from the buzzfeed exorcism video literally every day because even through the uncomfortability and awkwardness that was that video, shane was still right there making ryan laugh, and i think that’s so nice :)

the only besties that matter i fear! :)

[toomanywatchers]

[marksandrec]

Marks and Rec: Misc #2487

Sara's staying out of it. (#incorrectquotes)

[ostensiblynone]

Shane: Is that scary? Ryan: Well, it was scary until you turned and went, 'Is that scary?' [both laugh]

The Chilling Labyrinth of the Winchester Haunted Mansion • Ghost Files Jun 30, 2023

[ask-shane]

charlie is in my rob list

what could you possibly want from her? she’s a goddamn chicken with an ear of corn to her name.

[cloudcrimeart]

my wife

[bogwaterman]

Ryan’s laugh in this clip was scarier than anything in this episode

[nessa007]

this fucking doll

[geniepuppet]

So, with the build of Genie talk at the end of the last ep (S5E5), I've been thinking about the whole scenario of wishes

Genies typically grant 3 wishes in folklore. This also works with the theme of 3's we have running

Asmodeus has 3 heads

Infinitiger has 3 eyes

3 different versions of The Professor (original, Holo, Dino)

Professor's dino-family of 3

God, Death, and the Devil being afterlife representatives (though this could be 4 if you count Asmodeus)

The Substitute/Holo-Professor plans to wish for:

A soul,

All food to be turned into jellybeans, and

All living things to be turned into puppets

[The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon (S5E5)]

So we can reasonably assume that this Genie is a 3-wish granter

So, if we think back to the REAL Professor, it seems there's only been 2 wishes made:

For something to be made into a time machine, allowing him to time travel, and

To be zapped into the Cretaceous Period (against his will via Asmodeus)

[1-2: The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party (S2E8)]

[3: The Great Molasses Flood (S3E6)]

[The Demonic Possessions of Loudon (S4E6)]

I have to wonder what his third and final wish will be if that's the case

HOWEVER!

The Professor (by means of Asmodeus) was also shown to RESCIND his previous wishes of time travel and meeting Whoopi Goldberg (removing 2 wishes) before wishing himself to the Cretaceous (and thus using 1 wish)

So he may still have 2 wishes yet! We'll just have to wait and see what he uses them on...

Update: not in Season 5! However, we never saw the Substitute's body...

[dustedmagazine]

Jonathan Shaw's Year in Review: Another year of pissed-off music (and some that’s somehow not so pissed), for the freaks, and the lovers, and the ghosts

2023 threatened for some months to be a marginally less awful mess than the several years before it, but then came autumn, and the Cop28 Conference turned into a massive lobbying event for the fossil fuels industry; and Geert Wilders pulled off his dismaying political success in the Netherlands; and the paranoid style in American politics was further entrenched (witness MTG’s juice as a figure of national political import and Mike Johnson holding the House gavel); and Gaza was reduced to blood-soaked rubble; and there is the ever-increasing, mind-flaying certainty that yes, 2024 will be dominated in the States by a presidential race between two completely unacceptable choices: a frail Boomer largely coasting on the fact that he is not his principal rival for the office, and that principal rival, whose absurdity increases in direct proportion to the hazard of his petulant, narcissistic rage.

No wonder much of the music on this list is so steeped in fury, contempt and sorrow for the continuing idiocy and grinding horror of the human condition. Some of that music is memorably grim, or ferocious, or both. See the records below by Gravesend, Lucifixion and Spirit Possession, all of which cut viscerally violent paths through your senses. Eardrums are subjected to scorched-earth treatment. I dig it.

But those aren’t the only feeling tones available on records I listened to a lot this year (still the dominant metric for how records get on this list: How often did I play them?). On “Bananas,” a great song from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, Will Oldham’s gentle strumming and the song’s duet of hushed vocals dramatize lovemaking, to achingly gorgeous effect. On “Quiet World,” the best track on Home Front’s excellent Games of Power, the band commits to the sad-boy, New Romantic postpunk that some of their other songs flirt with a good deal less certainly. And while no one would ever wish to accuse the Sleaford Mods of anything other than sardonic smarts, “The Rhythms of Class” may be as close to pop music as the band has ever gotten, and it’s a terrific tune.

So maybe that’s why Gel’s Only Constant got so much play in my world this year: it’s “hardcore for fucking freaks,” as the band likes to insist, and it rips. But that’s not its only tone. The songs are also affirming, like the hand on your back at the edge of the pit that doesn’t shove but seeks to steady you on your pins. You can hear plenty of anger in the songs, but it’s not the sort that sends you out to score coke or oxy (more likely it'll mostly be fentanyl—careful out there, kids) or prompts you to set fire to random objects in the public square. It’s music to dance to, along with the other freaks, and to gather and sing in support of something you believe in. And thank goodness there is still great punk rock that wants us to feel that.

So Only Constant is presented below, first, as the album I am most grateful for this year, and all the other records are alphabetical by artist.

Gel—Only Constant (Convulse Records)

What’s better than those first 50 seconds of “Honed Blade”? To my ears, this year, nothing.

BIG|BRAVE—nature morte (Thrill Jockey)

Noisy, beautiful and idiosyncratic songs of love, desperation and death. The band finds new ways to create shapes with sound, and tunes out of those shapes.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (Drag City)

Simultaneously spare and lush, poetical and direct, wooden and fleshed. It’s the best record he’s made in some years.

Gravesend—Gowanus Death Stomp (20 Buck Spin)

Like a dip in the Gowanus Canal, this record is cold, corrosive and really, really bad for you. Not all of Brooklyn is for hipsters.

Home Front—Games of Power (La Vida Es un Mus)

Synth-rich postpunk meets the macho multi-voiced choruses of Oi! and the unthinkable happens: the songs are really, really good.

Lucifixion—Trisect Joys of Pierced Hearts (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Icy, satanic black metal that’ll strip you down to the bones, and it’ll grin while doing so. Weirdly, you may grin, too.

Retirement—Buyer’s Remorse (Iron Lung Records)

Overly adventurous consumers might have some buyer’s remorse if this record slips impulsively into their carts on a Bandcamp Friday, but smart punks sure won’t. Fast, nasty, hammering, anti-capitalist hardcore.

Sleaford Mods—UK Grim (Rough Trade)

More songs slagging Idles, Brexit, Tories and Labour, but as ever, the Mods make it all sound fresh. Angry, exhausted and jaded, but still fresh. Neat trick. Good record.

Spectral Lore—11 Days (I, Voidhanger)

Originally released as a straight-to-digital charity fundraiser, 11 Days has been packaged as a CD by I, Voidhanger and put back into circulation. Unusually political for Spectral Lore, the record sonically represents the journey thousands of migrants have taken across the Mediterranean, only to face the current racism and ethno-nationalisms proliferating through Europe. It’s harrowing stuff.

Spirit Possession—…Of the Sign (Profound Lore)

Utterly nutty, memorably antic, acid-drenched black metal. Like a bad trip, but you’ll be sort of disappointed when it ends.

Special shout-out to Mitski for “My Love Mine All Mine,” a great song that is, as a friend pointed out to me, both pop and the real thing—in spite of which the broader culture has embraced it. And also this:

They’re both gone now, but we still have their songs, and memories of them like this one. O’Connor’s weird, inbent charisma is hugely effective here, and she is so, so lovely. But it’s MacGowan’s song, and while he wrote it a bit earlier (when he and Cait O’Riordan were both still in the Pogues; she sings on the excellent version of the tune that made it onto Sid and Nancy’s soundtrack), it’s bittersweet that the last great song he ever recorded and released was a love song. A song in which the power of love is registered by the extent to which one is “haunted” by its “ghost,” and hence also by its death—that’s MacGowan to the core, and we’ll never get another songwriter like him.

Down with fascism, smash all nationalisms, turn the music up.

Jonathan Shaw

[doyoueverstopandthink]

umbrella academy as shane and ryan quotes (part 3?):

luther: "snoopy, it was so bad. it was so bad."

diego: "[lila], sometimes we argue, but i've never wanted to murder you!"

allison: "look, man, cousins are weird. how come they aren't your siblings?"

klaus: "come on. i think it would be a great gesture for this new leaf we've turned over. come on and give me a hug."

five: "i like people who don't like other people... does that make sense?"

ben: "i thought this was gonna be a harder pitch. but you were like, 'hey, come inside me'"

viktor: "hey, dipshit. are you scared?"

lila: "[diego] and i are actually not friends"

[bayofwolves]

Having some thoughts about the Great Battle, the one to end the First Devourer War.

I like the idea that Kovo, Gerathon and the Four Fallen were so massive that they couldn't help but destroy some of their own allies amidst the fighting. Especially the two traitors, because we know their soldiers were disposable to them, but the Four Fallen as well. As Uraza tangles with Gerathon, her claws rake through scores of Greencloaks. As Briggan and Kovo lunge for each other's throats, Greencloak and Conqueror and animal alike are crushed into oblivion beneath the two giants' feet. Adding to the senseless horror of it all.

I wish the Four Fallen had grievously wounded Kovo or Gerathon (or perhaps both), in such a way that the results are visible in the time of the Second Devourer War and strike fear in the hearts of their soldiers. I just think it would be cool if the two traitors, despite having survived the event that eliminated the Four, are permanently disfigured and only dull echoes of their former glory. Can you imagine if Gerathon's hood was torn to shreds by Uraza, her once beautiful scales marred by claw wounds that Tellun cursed to fester and rot? Or if part of Kovo's face was mutilated by Briggan's fangs and covered in scar tissue, with Essix's talon marks stretching across his shoulders, bare where the fur never grew back? They lived, but at the cost of being forever marked by the brethren they slew.

It would have been awesome if a Great Beast can only be killed by another Great Beast and they explained the Fall of the Four this way. Gerathon killed Uraza and Jhi with her venomous bite, Kovo ripped Briggan and Essix apart with his bare hands. No human blade could have felled them -- it was going against two of their own that resulted in their downfall. The fact it came to this is a great tragedy. Once, Briggan, Uraza, Jhi and Essix lived peacefully, even happily, with Kovo and Gerathon. They were brethren, forged by the same catastrophe; survivors who found comfort in one another (or so I like to believe). They would have walked beside each other for eons. They should never have met in battle. And when they did, they discovered they could destroy one another. This could be one reason as to why the remaining Great Beasts retreated into isolation and did not commune for hundreds of years -- perhaps, for the first time, they were afraid of each other.

In The Book of Shane, Shane reveals that Feliandor's grave is only symbolic because "when the Greencloaks had finished with him, there hadn't been enough left of him to bury". This might be one of the most haunting sentences in the series. In my canon, they dismembered him and paraded his head around, then burned him to ash. Some say Tembo kept the skull and hid it somewhere in the newly built Greenhaven, but Tembo himself denied these claims. (Meilin once searched the castle for the skull, to no avail.)

I personally would have liked to know more about the genocide of Stetriol (if it truly happened) and who took over as ruler after Feliandor. All my thinking about it led me to draft some plans for a short special edition, set in the universe of my rewrite, about Feliandor's successor and what happened in Stetriol after the defeat of the Conquerors. His name is Lysander. He is the cousin of Feliandor and the direct ancestor of the present-day royal family, including Shane. I'm still figuring him out, but I think y'all will like him.

I also think now would be the proper time to mention that in my rewrite of Tales of the Great Beasts, Essix gets a longer chapter where she bonds with a human like the other three. I haven't decided on the boy's name, but he is Amayan and has a jackrabbit spirit animal. He is bright, spirited and adventurous. The eldest son of the chief, but all of 16 at the war's end, he successfully convinces Essix to fight on the side of the Marked resistance. He is full of wonder and respect for nature, Essix most of all, and she finds herself warming up to him. She likes him enough to let him ride on her back and see the world he so loves from miles above, delighting in the way he spreads his arms and whoops into the wind. Essix, who is able to read souls, looks at him and sees something special in him. He is destined to do great things. This future of his is dashed when he dies in the Great Battle, though, cut down by some nameless soldier, just a boy with all the life and hope gone out of his eyes as Essix cradles him in her talons. She mourns him for a moment, then steels her heart and renews the charge.

[marksandrec]

Marks and Rec: Misc #2444

(Ol' "Ulterior Motives" Bergara...) (Dialogue from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.)

[hamantha]

I foresee Ryan Bergara with bright teal hair in the near future

[luraharenose]

Getting ready for the spooky season with some Possessed Shane 😈

Monstober commissions like this opens up tomorrow, so keep an eye out!! 👀