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Some thoughts on Gone With The Wind: 

Something about the mandatory disclaimers leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The consensus among people who want the movie to be available is that we need it as a document of American racism, which is true. On the other hand, cultural property shouldn’t have to justify itself in order to continue to be freely accessible. At some point we’re all just responsible for our own media consumption.  

And hopefully people know that slavery is bad? But maybe I’m an optimist.

There’s one absolutely jaw-dropping line in the second half of the movie. Scarlett is running a lumber mill in reconstruction-era Atlanta and has just leased some white convicts to do hard labor for cheap when registered former plantation owner Ashely Wilkes spits out “I will not make money from the forced labor and misery of others.” 

“I will not make money from the forced labor and misery of others.” 

I cannot get over how absolutely BATSHIT it is that a human being in the 20th century wrote this line and another human being actually said it with a straight face. 

But that’s the difference between Scarlett and Ashley right there. His ideals are evil, but he’s still and idealist. She’s not. She has no illusions. Scarlett needed the war to really come into her own. She’s a dyed in the wool gilded age American capitalist and she’s happy to make money off the forced labor and misery of others regardless of race color or creed. 

This must have been such a power fantasy for depression-era women! Because GWTW is really more about the 1930s than it is about the 1860s. It’s the story of a woman who has to drag herself out of absolute penury after her whole world falls apart. That’s what people were living. It’s gorgeous and escapist and also super zeitgeisty. 

If you watch a ton of 1930s movies, incidentally, it is impossible not to see what a gamechanger GWTW must have been. Nobody walking into a movie theater in 1939 had ever seen anything like it. The sheer scale of it, the colors, the things it was doing visually, the immersiveness of the world. 

(I was talking about this with my mother and she said that’s how people felt about Star Wars in 1977. She went back to see it six times. Her best friend saw it seventeen times and wasn’t unusual. Star Wars is another fantastical escapist movie that’s completely in touch with its era. The dogged misfits taking down a corrupt state power are right in line with gritty 70s political thrillers like Three Days Of The Condor or even All The President’s Men. 

Movies can be beautiful and important and also deeply, profoundly, overtly and insidiously racist. These two things can be true at the same time. Hating GWTW is a more than valid response to GWTW but let’s not pretend we’re watching it as a consciousness-raising exercise. 

Someone really needs to get on the defining high-value fantasy epic of the late 2010s. We’re running out of time. 

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Immigration is insane. This is the median voters desire:

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someone in the UK threw eggs at Charles and was arrested and has been banned from openly carrying eggs in public and has since been sent death threats but their statement on the matter was so fucking good

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there's nothing i like more as a computer program than a long period of silent contemplation - not doing anything, not rushing anywhere, just standing here and enjoying this moment with the user. oh, it seems once again he has summoned my beautiful and ruthless wife Task Manager. hello, my darling! what are you doing with that long cruel scimitar

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I think if you post a real estate listing without photographs of the interior of the estate you are listing, you should be sent to some kind of re-education facility for irritating people.

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I heard Barbara ask for undercut Yang ✏️

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Whole place is gonna go down and she just accepts it.. Look don't get mad about it. I don't believe this will ever happen I just wanted to practice drawing tears...

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Sasuke outfit redesign

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Straight people oppressive themselves recreationally which is why theyre so miserable

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[Iris Prismata] 2025

Photoshop + FilterForge + Mextures

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Where Star Wars went wrong

Quoting Jason Pargin, who articulates it better than I could:

"In any kind of a sane world, The Mandalorian should have run for 150 episodes at least. They had a formula here that could have worked forever.

"It's a formula that has always worked: a heroic stranger wanders into a strange new land and meets a bunch of colorful characters, usually under the thumb of a powerful threat. The threat is usually in the form of a villain who's played by a famous actor just chewing the scenery. He uses hits wits and his courage to get out of it and then he moves on.

"Have Gun, Will Travel" ran for 225 episodes from 1957-1963. It's where Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame got his start.

"The sci-fi space adventures we had years and years ago used to run forever. Star Trek TNG had about 180 episodes, Deep Space 9 had about the same number, even Voyager -- the show that we think of as being a "lesser series" -- had 172 episodes. And here's the thing: most of those episodes were really good!

"But because of the way the business works now, and because of 'corporate synergy,' by season 2 of the Mandalorian, they were brainstorming "how do we get this back to Luke Skywalker and the Death Star?"

"By season 3, fans were lost, because some huge plot events had occurred in a completely different series, because they needed it to connect to their Boba Fett show. And now, the Mandalorian is dead. They're gonna wrap up the story in a movie, and that's it.

And the crazy part is, this was always the perfect format for Star Wars: it always should have been a short form serial! That's what George Lucas was ripping off when he made the film back in 1977: serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

These were little 12-minute long episodes that played as one continuing story, but each one was its own little lighthearted adventure that usually ended on some kind of a cliffhanger.

"This is why so many of the most hardcore Star Wars fans who are old like me only like two of the movies, because by the third film they were already just repeating beats: they were attacking yet another Death Star.

They ran out of ideas so fast, because this is not the ideal format for this universe. The Mando and Baby Yoda Show is the ideal format! This should have run for the next 20 years! They even set it up so that the star wouldn't even need to be on set for most of it, because he wears a helmet!

"I think some fans object to this, because they think of it as making Star Wars smaller, that you're reducing it to 'just a TV show.' But it's the exact opposite: it lets you expand the universe, because you're forced to to keep coming up with new places for him to go, and new people for him to meet, new villains for him to face -- you're not forced to just keep coming back to the Death Star again and again, and the Sith, and the Jedi.

In Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the Starkiller Base destroys five planets. That's mathematically five times more tragic than the destruction of Alderaan.

"And if you want evidence, just look at Star Trek! It's the show that expanded the universe. The Star Trek films were just action movies that are very forgettable. But I guess the world has changed, because they don't even do Star Trek that way anymore.

Picard ended its run after 30 episodes. Discovery concluded after 65. Hopefully, Strange New Worlds marks a return to form for the franchise.

"I don't get it, because it seems like a version of this show that runs until the year 2040 would have just printed money. The merchandise sales alone would have covered the production costs. Instead, it's 24 episodes and a movie that I think everyone has already stopped caring about."

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"Yeah hold on, let me change out of my work clothes" [undoes a single button on my hawaiian shirt and nothing else]

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Once for an animation class I had to pitch an idea for a short film, and mine was "Radiation Man: Justice takes 80 years to arrive". This was one of the concept sketches I drew:

It was about a superhero who saw a guy littering and then followed him around for years emitting trace amounts of radiation. Then on the guy's deathbed 80 years later, he reveals himself and is like "you thought it was your genetic predisposition, but it was I, Radiation Man!!!!" Radiation Man has a normal human lifespan so he can only do this once btw. For some reason no one liked it (the prof said "that's not really a film") but I still do. I miss Radiation Man.

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do you think chozo urbanists were as mad about turning-into-a-ball dependent infrastructure as we are about car dependent infrastructure

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I'm in your house picking your shy, uptight man like a lock.