#It was this Wikipedia parody page

[cityoftheangelllls]

Last night I accidentally came across an uncensored GIF of Ronnie McNutt’s s**c*de.

I need to be wrapped like a burrito and snuggled ASAP.

#It was this Wikipedia parody page #And this gif was the HEADER IMAGE. the VERY FIRST thing you see when you open the page #Plus the article said that Ronnie was an “emo f-slur” and “pathetic loser” and all sorts of other horrible things #just FUCK YOU. FUCK. YOU. #As if it weren’t enough that this man’s suffering and death have been joked about and memed so many times #I wasn’t traumatized exactly but definitely shocked #Anyways rest in peace Ronnie #I’m sorry you couldn’t find peace in this fucked up world #Also PLEASE DO NOT MAKE MY MISTAKE AND GO TO THIS PAGE IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO GORE AND BLOOD!! #Tw suicide #Tw suicide mention #tw blood #tw gore #just to be safe #random thoughts from Angie

[robotpussy]

im watching that terrible king of the nerds show and this really does show how (white) nerds really do think of themselves as an oppressed class for being nerds

#the opening of the show being 'for centuries nerds have been a persecuted class' I get its a joke but some ppl def believe that #and seeing the attitudes some of them have esp in fandom spaces makes it so clear sjaknejwbr this is going to be more #insufferable than i thought! #all i remember from this show is one season had this astronomer I had a crush on cause she was very pretty and smart 🙏 #the white girl with pink hair being besties with the jovenshire from smosh games (couldn't believe he was on that show) #the jason derulo parody of talk dirty that one obnoxious white man with glasses that has a bunch of cringe compilations on youtube #and the one history teacher who is like. a all time jeopardy champion he has a Wikipedia page and everything #oh the astronomer is actually a planetary protection engineer anyways she works at NASA! #and the person who won was really good at rubiks cubes it was actually crazy to see

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

[ID: Two panels from the BSD manga. The first shows Fyodor, clear eyed with an open expression, asking "What year is it?". The second shows Dazai looking down at "Fyodor's" corpse, saying "Then who the hell is this?" End ID.]

You guys. You GUYS. I feel so vindicated - it was significant!

And also I'm bringing this potential reference back because I forgot about it until right now.

[ID: Part of a white book cover. The author is Dostoevsky. The title is The Double. End ID.]

"Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement."

"One critic wrote that The Double's main idea is that "the human will in its search for total freedom of expression becomes a self-destructive impulse"."

[ID: A screenshot of a paragraph from The Double's wikipedia page. The sections of note are highlighted: "The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works", "a parody of "The Overcoat"", "Dostoevsky alters and wholly repeats Gogol's phrases". End ID.]

...Nikolai, I'm so sorry buddy, but I think you're screwed.

#storyrambles #bsd #AAAAAAA #bsd spoilers #bsd meta #bsd chapter 114 #bsd fyodor #bsd nikolai #call me ace detective the way i am ace. and also a detective #<- using that tag again and you CAN'T STOP ME

[infamous-if]

I'm getting way too serious about my infamous MC that i started making a wikipedia page parody for her hahaha

I kind of want to ask you how the casts wiki would look like, but i know it'll have too much spoiler, so instead i just want to tell you that i've been daydreaming what the personal life section would look like for the poly or affair route and that got me excited for the route hehe

MC's wikipedia:

#inbox #infamous jokes #haha thats so cool that you're doing that! #I didn't like the last one felt a bit like minimizing it #betrayal seems more fitting pfft

[iconic-post-bracket]

Spiders Georg

Spoopy

Propaganda under the cut:

Spiders Georg: "Everyone knows spiders georg, even those not on tumblr! Its spawned many parodies of itself and its instantly recognizable with the beginning words. Its taught so many people what a statistical outlier is, has spread far and wide, and it also inspired my dnd characters pet spider (he is a cannibal). Truly this post is THE iconic tumblr post (to me)”

“Changed my lexicon forever. Also educated the masses on statistical bias"

"“average viral tumblr post has thousands of notes” factoid is actually a statistical error. The Spiders Georg post, which is uploaded since the beginning of the website & gets over 10,000 notes each day, is a statistical outlier adn should not have been counted”

“It has its own Wikipedia page"

Spoopy: "Because the misspellings have been adopted and spread; I saw people using 'spoopy' and 'creppy' YEARS before I saw the post and learned where they had come from.”

#round one #group b #poll

[brandtner]

I miss 2010... So here's My fav quotes from wikipedia parody pages about Balkans (translated poorly)

#<3 #sauce: wikipedia #sauce: en.uncyclopedia.co

[aleprouswitch]

One funny memory I have from high school: There was a day during lunch when a friend of mine and I were in the school library looking up random pages on Uncyclopedia (the Wikipedia parody site) and we decided to look at the page for Ray Charles - Ray as a movie had just come out so I guess Ray Charles was fresh on our minds.

In any case, we went to the Uncyclopedia page for Ray Charles and it stated that he was the founder of Jizz Music. We both start cracking up because we're teenagers and LOL it's the word "jizz". During our laughing fit, one of us said "Jiss Music" out loud and a girl from our class cluelessly and loudly asked "what's jizz?!". Literally the whole library heard her and now even more people were laughing.

Growing up in the early 2000s was really something else.

#dora shut up

[oneinathousand]

I'm halfway through Gravedale High and I think I get the gist of it, so here are my random thoughts about it:

Of all the celebrity cartoons, this is one of them. Joking aside, this probably is legitimately one of the better ones from this time period. I am not distracted by Rick Moranis's presence, and I'm glad he's not going full nerd as in his usual typecasting. I keep expecting to see a Ghostbusters or Little Shop of Horrors reference, since this show sure does love its pop culture references, but so far, they've had the restraint not to do it in a direct way except for one of the background characters in one episode looking like a terror dog, but that could be a coincidence. I guess I'll find out eventually if they actually do make a reference.

I can't watch a lot of it in one sitting because if I try, I know I'll be filled with homicidal rage at all the constant catchphrases and verbal tics and schticks that every character has.

Gotta love how the creativity of the main cast ranges from "Personifying the trope of zombies as commentaries for consumerism with a wealth-obsessed, literal mall zombie" to "what if creature from the black lagoon but surfer".

J.P. doesn't seem to be any kind of monster in particular, Peter Lorre parodies are just their own Halloween species lol

Vinnie may be the Fonz as a teenage vampire, but it was very big-brained of whoever the character designer was to give him black nail polish in 1989-90. For all this show's problems, the character design for the most part is not one of them, even with how dated many of them are fashion-wise they're still very charming.

Sure, I ship Vinnie and Reggie. Before I watched this show, I assumed it was just typical shipping of best friend characters, but when I got to the famous ear-scratching scene from episode four, I was like "yeah okay I can see where they're coming from".

Of the main cast, Sid is probably my favorite because everything about him is so hilariously dated above all the rest, which is saying something: The rapping, the baseball cap, the pattern on his shirt, the random impressions... he's so lame that he circles back around to being funny. And apart from the irony, an invisible kid becoming a class clown so people won't ignore him anymore is one of the more genuinely creative concepts here.

Oh, but speaking of Sid, who's voiced by Maurice LaMarche... It was pretty awkward to watch Sid whenever he talked about his dreams to become a stand-up comedian, knowing what I know about what happened with LaMarche's own desire to rise up in the stand-up world on the same month that Gravedale High coincidentally premiered in. I don't know if this is common knowledge, but I won't go into it here because this post is supposed to be about a silly cartoon. If you're curious and can handle emotional matters, go read about it on his Wikipedia page under the Career section and see the events leading up to him becoming a full-time voice actor after September 1990.

Anyway, this is one of those cartoons where you can see a lot of potential, but since this came before or at the same time as other more ground-breaking cartoons like Ren and Stimpy or Tiny Toons, you get the feeling Gravedale is still shackled by 80's cartoon trappings despite its occasional dark jokes and pop culture references. If I were to make a new version, with or without Moranis, I would go for something a little edgy to make it stand out from Monster High and other shows of its ilk, do for horror what Clone High does for teen shows, either in a PG or TV-14 way.

#gravedale high #90's cartoons #rick moranis

[enlightenedrobot]

May I ask, for the Betty Boop character free copyright, what versions of hers we can use? like if you don't mind be a little more specific for my dumbass self understands

Only if you don't mind ofc!

Wow, I never made a follow up clarifying the Betty Boop situation. So uh... the situation is complicated.

So like... to play things safe... Betty Boop actually *unambiguously* enters the public domain in 2 years. Which is to say the original version of Betty Boop as depicted in Dizzy Dishes will be free to use.

That said, I'm calling bull. There's dozens of variants of Betty Boop who don't look like the modern incarnation who have fallen into the public domain, and at times, it feels like there's more Betty Boop stuff in the domain than outside of it.

On top of that, the rights to Betty Boop are a complicated mess. From the wikipedia page:

Global Icons, btw, is the same company that also owns the rights to the images of serveral real life celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley... and like... that really sucks.

I'm not a legal expert by any means, but I think this all reads a bit familiar. Disney continues to claim ownership of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, even though that's a lie. The same can be said for DC and any of the Fawcett Comic characters.

What I can tell you is that there's definitely a single recognizable variant of Betty Boop who has fallen into the public domain, with one rather extreme deviation from most other versions of the character.

Betty Boop was a redhead for exactly one cartoon, and nobody talks about that. Poor Cinderella is a solid Betty Boop short, and it's free for anybody to use. And this version of Betty, at least to me, reads as a different incarnation of Betty not commonly used in modern merchandise.

Use her. Call her Cindy or just remove the "Boop" from her name. Put her next to her unambiguously Public Domain friends Bimbo and Koko the Clown. Have her meet Steamboat Willie Mickey and Minnie. Put her into the spiritual successor to Epic Mickey that everybody wants but nobody seems to know how to make.

But allow me to back up for a second.

Right now, as we speak, big AI companies are scraping the art of millions of artists without pay. Original stories aren't being picked up by big networks... everybody wants big IP and indie projects aren't allowed a spotlight. And none of this is going to change anytime soon.

Now more than ever, we are morally obligated to steal art. Not just pirate it. Steal it. Bend it to our whims. Make our own version. Take advantage of parody law and fair use and produce our own frankensteinian creations.

In the future, copyright should belong to the artist, not a corporation. Showrunners who pitch cartoons should own the cartoons they produce; there's no reason Rebecca Sugar and Dana Terrace should be denied royalties for the cartoons they came up with. And in the event of an artists death, the copyright for a character should only by the artists estate for a short amount of time.

I'm sick of Disney. I'm sick of the Marvin Gaye Estate. I'm sick of Global Icons. If they're gonna take advantage of our hard work as artists, then we're morally obligated to take advantage of their IP.

#Betty Boop #Disney #IP #Copyright #Public Domain #Poor CInderella #AI #Animation #Royalties #Copyleft

[thekatebridgerton]

not netflix suing the female composers of the unofficial bridgerton musical after the official bridgerton show AND the actors have acknowledged them in the past

here's the thing Anon...Netflix is kinda right.

And while I'm in no way a Shonda Rhimes or Netflix defender, I do draw the line at profiting of a writer's intellectual property. And you know who I really like? Julia Quinn as an author.

She wrote books I enjoy, as a person, she's a pretty nice lady, and everything derived of her intellectual property is something she should get paid for.

Here's the thing, usually when people do things like what Barlow and Bear did. Which was make music using material from other people's intellectual property, or something pretty famous, they actually need to specify that they're not getting paid to do it. Their profit comes in donations to their site accounts, or commissions to their own original music. Because that's the thing about fanworks, you do that, to get experience and build a platform so your own original work will be seen and talked about, in order for you to profit of things you have created. And be recognized for your own intelectual property.

It's okay to start out or get attention by doing covers of music created by other singers, or singigng about Twilight or Harry Potter. Fanworks are never actually supposed to charge for tickets or give paid performances unless they have permission to do it and that usually involves paying the creator a percentage. So fanworks? they're supposed to be non profit.

the actual profit? That's what original works are for.

The Hilliwood Show is a pretty good example of this. They sell Hilliwood Merch, with HIlliwood logo, and pictures of their actors doing cosplay, their profit also comes from the generous donation of their fans. So is A Very Potter Musical, they are very specifically parodies, they don't get sued because they never pretend to be associated with the work they're mimicking and making music and dances about. A very Potter Musical is an excellent parody. But it's also a non profit see according to the wikipedia page of A very Potter Musical...

Due to the nature of the musical, Team Starkid is allowed by Warner Brothers to host the musical on their channel and owns the rights to the songs and script, but as they do not own the rights to the Harry Potter characters they cannot make money off of the production, nor can they give the rights for the show to any other production company: the University of Michigan version is the only "official" production. This has not stopped unauthorized productions from being performed elsewhere, also done non-profit.

if you ever wonder why A very Potter Musical never made it to broadway? well that's the reason. Giving live performances and earning profit of someone else's intelectual work, would kinda defeat the purpose.

Barlow and Bear crossed the line when they started profiting out of something they didn't have permission to profit of.

Rolling Stone said:

"According to the lawsuit, Netflix had only given Barlow and Bear permission to create the album version of the musical and was to be “consulted before Barlow & Bear took steps beyond streaming their album online in audio-only format.”

and at the end of the article which I will Link there are also words from Julia Quinn.

Quinn adds: “Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear are wildly talented, and I was flattered and delighted when they began composing Bridgerton songs and sharing with other fans on TikTok. There is a difference, however, between composing on TikTok and recording and performing for commercial gain. I would hope that Barlow & Bear, who share my position as independent creative professionals, understand the need to protect other professionals’ intellectual property, including the characters and stories I created in the Bridgerton novels over twenty years ago.”

I think that in Julia's shoes, we would also feel the need to sue. I would hate it if I wrote a book and someone made a musical about it that doesn't recognize me as an author by both not asking for permission to commercialize it and also not paying me for it. Those books took Julia time, effort and creativity to write. Netflix is paying her for the right to take it to screen. And she has been consulted on how this is done.

I hate Netflix, but note that they only took action to sue once they crossed the line of staging paid performances. That's like me charging for you to read my fanfiction. Anne Rice sued for less.

there's definately a line, between admiring a content creator. Such as a Writer or Musician. And imitating them out of pure cult like happiness, to the point you write fanfiction, make music and even dress up as them to show your unadulterated support to them. AND being the person who wants to make money out of that person's creation without asking for permission or giving them a share of what you are earning.

the first instance, is a fan. the second is a jerk. And I think lots of people don't understand that. But AO3 runs as a non profit for a reason too. And It's exactly to defend fans against accusations like this.

and that's the tea.

here's the link to the rolling stones article

#I hate netflix as a corporation #But Julia Quinn is bae #netflix lawsuit #barlow and bear #bridgerton

[marzipanandminutiae]

My favourite fic you've written is a smaller one, but "The Cumberland Bluebeard (View Full Playlist)" for Crimson Peak is so clever and well-written. For a long time I've been fascinated by how the events of a story would be seen within its own universe, since the characters aren't the audience and don't know everything that happened in the story we saw.

Cumberland Bluebeard not only nails that, but is also an on-point parody of that kind of "makeup true crime" YouTubers who talk about real tragedies with tasteless jokes and sensationalism. It not only adds a layer of believability but also to what I love about this kinda story, since even if they do know some version of what happened, everyone has a different POV and their interpretations will be vastly different. It's not too far off from how real history is interpreted by us in the present.

(Also LOVE the joke of Del Toro making his Haunted Mansion movie instead of Crimson Peak in the Crimson Peak universe, I live for those kinds of clever easter eggs.)

Thank you!

I had a lot of fun writing it. Since I work with history, it's always interesting to imagine historical fiction characters' legacies in our time. How have they been imagined between now and then? How do people think of them today? What are their Wikipedia pages like?

Allerdale Hall Museum is a pet headcanon of mine. The staff there are soooo normal and nobody has Eleanor Vance vibes at all! :D :D :D

There are a lot of easter eggs in that story, actually- I kind of thread GDT's Buffalo movies into one universe. Enola Cushing's partner is Molly from Nightmare Alley, for instance, and the Sharpes' nanny is a relative of Dotty Wolmar from Lot 36. Lucille's previous host was Agatha the antique shop owner, see previous example, and Molly's and Enola's adopted son is Dr. Dreyfuss from Mama (2013). I've also written a oneshot on here somewhere where an elderly Enola was the person listening to Giles' story in The Shape of Water. GDT Cinematic Universe, singular, ftw.

(For anyone who's unaware, the joke re: The Haunted Mansion is that Del Toro was in talks to do a remake around 2010. That never came to fruition, and some speculate that Crimson Peak was his way of making a haunted house movie anyway, to replace it)

Thanks for reading!

The Cumberland Bluebeard (view full playlist)

#ask #anon #harryhenry1 #ask meme #ask game #fanfiction #my fics #fanfic ask

[sexygaywizard]

What’s Starkid? /genq

Team Starkid is a musical theater troupe that makes parody or otherwise comedic musicals. They made three very popular Harry Potter parody musicals but they are pretty rife with the kind of problematic comedy that was popular at the time, the second one having a prominent transphobic running joke throughout. If they've apologized for it or improved since then, I don't know, I haven't looked into them in near a decade now. But their "A Very Potter Musical" and its sequels are of the most noteworthy Harry Potter parodies, it even has its own Wikipedia page. Despite being a parody it's generally not critical of Harry Potter and the majority of its humor comes from lol random humor and making offensive jokes.

#i answer #harry potter

[kaasknot]

Hey! I have a paper on Buster Keaton coming up in my History of Film class? Would you be willing to info dump everything you know about him? I've only heard of this man through your blog and don't know where to start haha

bruh you're lucky you weren't standing next to me when i read this, my screech would have blown out your ears.

okay, buster keaton 101. he was one of the giants of the silent comedy era, alongside charlie chaplin and harold lloyd, and from the period of 1920 to 1929 he put out 19 short films and 10 feature length films under his own studio, plus two more silent films under MGM that can creditably be called his creations (i use his filmography page on wikipedia to keep it all straight). he also had the unique distinction of doing all his stunts himself, as well as doubling for many of his co-stars. most of these stunts have never been replicated, because honestly they'd probably kill people; his crew called him the "little iron man" because he was fearless and nigh indestructible. he was also a genius behind the camera, in ways that unfortunately i probably can't fully appreciate.

he was born october 4, 1895 in piqua, kansas, during a one-night stopover. his parents were working with a traveling medicine show at the time, to little acclaim, along with harry houdini before he got big. buster's first known stage appearance was as a toddler, interrupting his father's act. at first they tried to shoo him offstage, but his antics drew bigger laughs from the audience, so they decided to incorporate him into the act—leading to what would eventually be called, once they reached vaudeville, "the three keatons." buster said in interviews that his first salaried year was at 5 years of age, in 1899. that was when his family finally hit the big time—and he was almost single-handedly responsible for it.

their act is incredibly difficult to describe. the central conceit was: joe keaton threw little buster across the stage in a parody of strict parenting, while myra keaton played accompaniment on the saxophone. the best description i've found is biographer rudi blesh's, in his 1966 book, Keaton, on pp. 30–33 and 47–48. you can borrow a copy here. (be careful with this book; the author has a way with words, but he sets aside facts in favor of mythology more than once. for a rigorously researched and trustworthy biography, one with all the dates and weights, go for A Filmmaker's Life (2022) by james curtis.)

vaudeville was buster's early training ground, where he learned tumbling, comedic timing, improvisation, and how to construct a gag. most film comedians of the era got their start in vaudeville or comparable music halls, and many of the gags buster performed in his movies were adapted from vaudeville stage magic or repurposed from the family act. if there's one single book on buster keaton i'd recommend, it's Camera Man (2022) by dana stevens. it's not as dense or as thorough as the james curtis book, but it's an extremely good overview of the main events of his life AND the surrounding historical context—including vaudeville. it's also just a really fun read.

buster's vaudeville era ended in 1917, when he was forced to break up the family act over his father's worsening alcoholism. the official party line is that joe couldn't handle the fact that he was getting older, which i think is partly true, but i think a more true explanation is that he couldn't handle the fact that he was outshone by his own son (pretty much all sources agree that buster was the better comedian). he took his anger out on buster onstage during performances, and out on his wife offstage between performances, until myra finally had enough. she and buster ditched joe in los angeles when buster was 21 years old. here's an interesting paper that digs into buster's rough childhood and the impact it likely had on his films.

buster almost immediately found work as a solo act, but a chance encounter with an acquaintance introduced him to roscoe "fatty" arbuckle, then one of the highest-paid, most well-known comedians in film. it took one day on set—and one night disassembling a camera—to convince buster to abandon the stage for a film career. as a bonus, he and arbuckle became life-long friends. they spent the next three years working non-stop, making 14 short films together (plus a couple more buster wasn't involved in, during the 10-month period he was overseas for ww1). the grueling schedule wasn't without its downsides, and arbuckle, tired of making short films, decided to move to feature-length films, which had a slower, more relaxed pace. he left buster his entire studio and crew.

and that's when the real magic began. buster started (continued) with short films: 20 minute "2-reelers" that were played before a feature film, basically doing what looney tunes cartoons would do later. the best way to understand how different buster was from the dominant comedic idiom of the time is to watch a couple of arbuckle shorts ("coney island" and "the garage" are good choices), then watch a couple of buster's own ("one week" and "cops" are probably the best known). buster catered his humor to an older audience, and his gags were sophisticated, subtle, often cynical or ironic, and intricate to construct and film. "keaton made you laugh, then think" (blesh, xi).

in 1923, buster dropped short films in favor of feature-length films, starting with "three ages." he was a little behind the curve on this, but not through lack of trying; if he'd gotten his way, he'd have been the first major comedian to switch to feature-length films. unfortunately, studio contracts and his producer's cold feet held him back for a few more years, so chaplin and lloyd got there first. not that that slowed buster down; his output in the eight years he had creative control is virtually unmatched. despite getting married (in 1921, to natalie talmadge) and having two children (james, 1922, and robert, 1924), he continued filming at breakneck pace. to see what he could do with a camera, i'd recommend "sherlock jr." to see him at his cinematic best, i'd recommend "the general" "the cameraman" (i just committed cinematic heresy with that recommendation, but IN MY DEFENSE it was thee romcom training film for 20 years at MGM, well into the talkie era, so it's hardly a dud :p).

in 1928, buster's producer, joseph schenck, sold his contract to MGM. buster wasn't the owner of keaton studios, just an employee, so he didn't have much say in the matter. both chaplin and lloyd tried to talk him out of it, but in the end he signed the new contract anyway. later, he said it was the worst mistake of his career. denied the creative control he was accustomed to, he gradually descended into full-blown alcoholism, running away from his studio responsibilities and his disintegrating marriage alike. his final film for MGM, "what! no beer?", was an attempted buddy comedy with jimmy durante, and buster was visibly drunk or hungover in almost every scene. MGM fired him in 1932; his divorce, started in 1932, was finalized in 1933.

from there, buster had some dark years. he got married a second time, in 1934, to mae scriven (who mostly seems to have been a con artist), before they divorced in 1936. he was in and out of various rehabs, and nearly died at least once, before he managed to buck the odds and dry out. he spent the last years of the '30s working as a gag man and consultant for other comedians at MGM.

after that, things started to get better. he met his third wife, eleanor norris, in 1938 and they married in 1940. he had a couple high profile cameos in big movies, my favorite being the one in "sunset boulevard," where he played one of norma desmond's waxworks. then, a massively popular article by james agee, titled "comedy's greatest era," was published in LIFE magazine in 1949, kicking off a resurgence of interest in silent film as an art form and as a feature of cinematic history. agee paid special attention to buster, and that, combined with buster's own fascination with the up-and-coming technology of television, led to his comeback. he worked steadily and enthusiastically in television (and occasionally in movies) up until he died of lung cancer on february 1, 1966, living long enough to see his films receive the recognition they deserved. (also here, have this nice article i found while trying to find the one by james agee.)

i've never taken a film history class myself, so i can't begin to explain all the ways buster keaton advanced filmmaking. here's an article that analyzes the gag as a staple of film comedy; a book that analyzes buster's comic and directorial style chiefly through "the general"; and another article that explores gags, this time specifically mechanical gags, and has lots of nice things to say about buster. if this isn't enough and you decide to go whole chicken fried hog on buster like i have, hit up me, @spokir, or @busterkeatonsociety and we can connect you with all the material you could possibly want.

enjoy!!!

(colossal, chrysler building-sized thanks to spokir, who sourced most of these articles. seriously, talk to your local librarian, they WANT to find things for you.)

#buster keaton #askbox #smallfry15005

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PROPAGANDA

MIKAELA BANES (TRANSFORMERS)

1.) mikaela’s case is so egregious that i struggle to really properly word any propaganda beyond ‘just look at the movie. look at it.’ but congrats to mikaela banes for getting in! was thinking of submitting her along with my arcee but couldn’t even like. begin to describe it. agh.

best i can really say for her right now is ‘open her tfwiki article, open sam’s, look at the pictures, compare how they frame the two, you will see what i mean then and there.’ but i might do a rewatch of the bayverse transformers movies just to be able to get all my more complex thoughts in order to actually submit a breakdown of her. which is not something i want to do, but if anyone deserves it it’s mikaela. she deserved so much better.

2.) She was the female character played by Megan Fox, and Michael Bay wanted to make sure everyone watching knew this was a woman played by megan fox. She is the quintessential “not like other girls” (in fact, this is the second sentence of her wikipedia page - “She is differentiated from “typical” women in her age group, having inherited mechanical skills from her father”) who has guy interests, but is still hot and wears crop tops and jean shorts. I remember two things from that movie, Bumblebee and the scene where she is working on the car ~sexily~, which today genuinely seems like a parody, but was included entirely earnestly (I wasn’t going to add a picture from this scene, but it was literally the first and third pictures that showed up when i googled her)

3.) Mikaela is so sexualized it's unreal. Like, I feel I really just need to submit this screenshot:

Look at the way she's posed, the way she's dressed, the expression on her face. It's pure objectification, like the kind that should be in textbooks as easy examples. The way it emphasizes both her butt and her boobs but also shows her stomach is just astonishing. God it doesn't even show her FACE. This shot really amazes me, just good god.

And then there's also this famous shot:

It's so aggressively sexy, so much a pose and not at all a way a real human would position themselves. The way her ass is popped out, the way her hair is flipped, jesus christ. Someone needs to put Michael Bay in misogyny jail.

ABBIE MILLS (SLEEPY HOLLOW) (CW: Racism)

1.) Abbie starts out as one of the two protagonists of the show, only to get almost entirely sidelined as early as season 2, getting less and less screen time and allowed no relationships, either platonic or romantic, while the other lead Ichabod Crane has a seemingly infinite amount of them. It got bad enough that her actor wanted to leave the show, which they did by having her sacrifice her soul in the season 3 finale for the male lead to live, and then they ended the show after season 4 anyway, because guess what, it’s a bad idea to entirely sideline and eventually kill off one of your leads!

2.) She was killed by the narrative to advance her white male co-protagonist’s plotline and I’m still mad about it, Abbie deserved so much better. This is an example of racism in the narrative too and it extended to the production of the show, see news coverage:

3.) Look, I only watched the first season but they killed her off the show SHE was a co lead of!! Misogyny AND racism, all rolled into one. I remember seeing the fan reactions and I was so mad on their behalfs. They wrote her off her own show and from what I recall, gave her less and less screentime leading up to that. Truly, she deserved so much better and I will always be upset by this.

#polls #round 3 #week 6 #new #cw racism

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: Nothing Ever Happens

Author: William T. Vollmann

Rating: 1/5 stars

In the five years since this book was published, I've "tried" to read it twice, although that's probably not the right word -- what I mean is, I picked it up, was bored with the first few chapters, and then put it down, not bothering to force myself to get further in (which I've learned to do with even books I don't get along with). This time, though, the realization dawned on me that I'm not going to get it any better than the first time. The number of pages I've read isn't getting any higher. I've read 132 pages and I'm not going to read any more. Given that a book which holds my interest for the first 100 pages will usually hold it for 300 more, I think this is a pretty safe bet.

This is Vollmann's second book of the year (I've previously read his book on Rwanda, obviously), and his third book in just over a year (all of them are over 500 pages long), and as I'm writing this, he just came out with a brand new novel on the first of the year. It has been fascinating to watch this torrent of Vollmann's work, even if I am utterly unable to make heads or tails of any of it.

Vollmann is an experimentalist, and my general impression is that his experiments tend to work, or not to work, all at once. Nothing ever feels like it works all the way, but nothing ever fails all the way either. I don't say this in the sense that he's "very good at what he does," I say it in the sense that it's really hard to say what he's doing (and what he's up to) with any kind of clarity. "My book tells a story," is one of the sort of "tidy" statement an author might make in an attempt to summarize what their book is about. With Vollmann, it's much more like he's saying, "I'm making a giant mess of text, and you can read it if you want." Whatever you think of that may well depend on how you feel about messes of text, but it seems like a small step to moving from this to the kind of reaction that goes: "well, he's making a mess, so . . . "

So, let's make a mess. The first Vollmann book I tried was The Raking Concern, a fictional history of the rake tailored on the model of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or at least on that model's three volumes' worth of narrative information. The book opens with what is apparently a playable video game version of this fictional history, about 70 pages, and the novel proper opens with a 40-page scene that parodies standard conceptions of historical writing. Then we settle down into a 400-page retelling of English history that seems like it might be intended to be taken more or less seriously. However, the author seems to have some odd, wildly heterodox opinions about the period in question, and these keep intruding into the fictional material, and in fact the fiction sometimes appears to form a kind of mirror of the way history is being presented, and occasionally the very structure of the text reminds the reader that "this is a fiction," or at least reminds one that reality doesn't quite work the way Vollmann thinks it does -- when, for instance, all the characters sit around and read each other's thoughts, like the story is an Ayn Rand book, and also like the narrative voice is very insistent that Vollmann is not, in fact, writing an Ayn Rand book.

This may all sound like nonsense, but it does sound like it's intended to, and in any case the overall effect is irresistibly fun, a little bit silly but with actual stakes and seriousness of purpose, not quite like anything else (as one of the characters says at one point). There's a lot of Vollmann in there, a lot of characters and motifs and obsessions, and reading this kind of Vollmann feels like reading his Wikipedia article and scrolling down and down and down: you can't help but sense that Vollmann is a strange and amazing mind and his writing a strange and amazing thing, but it's hard to tell what's most important. (I got the sense that many people were startled that Rwanda wasn't all about him personally, and I can see how that'd be a lot of what's interesting about Vollmann, because so much of his work is about him personally, or at least tied to his life and experiences.)

So, now we've got a new Vollmann book. What the hell is this one supposed to be? Well, I think it's intended to be a fictionalized account of the author's own experiences growing up in San Francisco's Mission district, with a bunch of historical material about Venezuela and Nicaragua on the side.

And that's about it. Here is the blurb from the back of my copy:

"'I want to be the first nonfiction writer, the first eternal slave to the truth, to make a work of art out of nonfiction.' San Francisco, 1986. Willie, an eccentric white teenager, breaks up with his first girlfriend to sell crack in a school bathroom. So begins a violent initiation into youthful romantic idealism as it collides with prejudice, murder, violence, and the risk of a lifetime sentence to juvenile prison. After an obsession with prison causes Willie to develop an ability to be invisible, the dream turns to reality as he flees the Mission District and moves north to follow the legacy of his murdered father and an imaginary, mythical character, the human monster Zanella. This haunting and compulsively readable novel is a terrifying look at the future of a middle-class white childhood, a waking dream of forbidden romance, and a peek into the artistic world of William T. Vollmann."

That's it. That's all there is here. That's all I know about this book from reading it. You can do as much with this as you can do with the abstract idea of it, which is the kind of story that might be spun out of something like the abstract idea of Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. But will it live up to the abstract idea in its concrete form? ("Will he ever live up to the 'Hamilton' that lives inside his head? Will he succeed?" No, actually, is the answer to that.) Will Vollmann ever live up to this book?

It's a short sentence. Let's say the entire book is 50 pages long, as it was in the case of the video game and the "first 40 pages" of the book proper. That's a lot of Vollmann for a relatively short time commitment. 10 minutes per page of Vollmann, on average, which is almost an hour. It's at least 10 minutes, because some of that will be "filler" and some of it will have to be skimmed. It's over in a week. A lot of people have a lower standard for "good" and "bad" books than I do. There's some literature that I've read where I wasn't sure what to think and I had to think about it for a while before reaching any conclusions. Maybe this Vollmann will be that for me. It's certainly possible. And, well, we'll see.

[so-much-for-subtlety]

[Spoiler-free review] last night I finished watching Billions and in the final (7th) season they added Babak Tafti who is soooo fucking hot, but a still kinda unknown actor (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page?!). Just look at him👀🥺🥴

He also had a small role in Succession, although unusually for me I think he’s hotter without the beard (but still very very hot)

Anyway Billions was such a weird series. The plot got so formulaic and the characters behaviors sort of ended up parodying themselves but (I think) that was probably intentional because it kind of added a slapstick comedy to what would have otherwise been just a typical drama.

They also have the striking physical transformation of Paul Giamatti who lost a LOT of weight mid season when filming paused during pandemic/strikes (one of the most unbelievable scenes was a bunch of NYPD wearing masks lol) and they also had an interesting non binary and neurodivergent character join in season 2 and became a core/main character from S3 to end of series.

I won’t give specific spoilers, but the ending I think was pretty satisfying from a fan perspective.

Also shout out to Condola Rashad who played this badass bitch attorney and (IMO) had a great character arc.

I fuckin hate the billionaire class and government corruption and the plot sort of played to this, but it also ultimately casts them as heros which is gross but eh, it was still an entertaining watch.

A solid 7/10 bananas 🍌

#Billions #Babak Tafti #Paul Giamatti #Condola Rashad