#Jordans and Little Mans Too Budget

[mrcarmenile]

okay HI

MY THOUGHTS ON THE FINALE!!

HAZBIN HOTEL FINALE SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

holy fucking god do i have words to say

here’s some INCREDIBLY unorganized thoughts:

alastor losing his filter temporarily made my heart DROP dude. also is it just me or did he lose his accent too? like it just kind of sounded like amir to me lmao

angel with his “charlie said to live tonight however we wanted” JUMPSCARED ME and then when he said “so pour me a fresh one” i was like Oh

adam said some real knee slappers this episode i was laughing so hard. “SUCK MY HOLY LIGHT FUCKERS” “chill lute. fuck” “wow i didn’t see this giant fucking shield in front of me YOU DUMB BITCH NO SHIT” are my favorites

the whole “now i’m going to fuck you” gag had me ROLLING (angel’s little 🤨 and valentino’s “well this just got interesting” got me dude)

ALSO LUCIFER FUCKED EVE????? HUH?????

vox screaming at the tv also had me choking from laughter, especially the “NOOO FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!! PUSSY!!!” (that is absolutely me yelling at the tv ur not alone vox 🙏)

the “these fucking angels won’t stop coming” “HA!” scene was weirdly cute and i love it

ALSO CAN WE TALK ABOUT EVERYONE’S OUTFITS???? CHARLIE’S DRESS WAS FUCKING ADORABLE AND VAGGIE’S SUIT THING WAS BADASS AND ANGEL SERVED CUNT WITH THAT LOOK AND DON’T GET ME STARTED WITH CHERRI BOMB so many halloween costumes to choose from man

also lucifer’s hot

alastor and niffty was the cutest thing i love them so much why are they wholesome ☹️☹️ “i dub thee - king roach!!” and the little crown 🥺

LMAO THE SIR PENTIOUS AND CHERRI BOMB KISS WAS EPIC AND COMEDIC AS FUCK (“that was kinda hot..” had me rolling)

the last song nearly had me crying like i SCREECHED when lucifer started singing to the tune of happy day in hell and the fucking vox and val duet???? and velvette filming them dancing??? the vees are terrible fucking people why was that scene wholesome LET ME HATE THEM STOP GIVING VILLAINS DEPTH AND EMOTIONS AND REAL BONDS PLEASEEEE (/nsrs obviously well written villains are peak but I WANNA HATE THEM SO BAD) also alastor’s part gave me fr chills like. “great alastor, altruist, died for his friends” THE WAY AMIR TALAI SANG THAT LIKE HE WAS ON THE VERGE OF SNAPPING. ROUND OF FUCKING APPLAUSE. and the new hotel looks fucking fire i can’t wait to see the interior!!!

the end of the last song nearly brought me to tears it was such a perfect ending note

SPEAAAAKING OF SONGS. HOOLY SHIT. THE MORE THAN ANYTHING REPRISE??? shit made me shed a tear like. AND THE KISS???? finally we get the goddamn lesbians god bless 🙏🙏🙏

also can i just say vox and val making out with tongue at the end for 0.5 seconds SENT ME. i was caught so off guard that i laughed until i choked dude like that shit fr got me

“how’s mercy taste ya little bitch” is officially one of my favorite hazbin quotes cuz the way jeremy jordan said it was fucking hilarious

oh and the battle scenes were fucking crazy i can see where half the budget went lmfao the fight scenes ATE

also wtf lilith was in heaven this whole time? just chilling? idk what to think or say about thing honestly

and if lucifer fucked eve is she in hell too???? is SHE the one who has alastor on a leash?? what is her relation to lilith??? are they working together or are they enemies or is eve pretending to be lilith or do they have nothing to do with each other??? why did lilith leave hell??? why did they let her leave hell??? what did lute mean by “your deal is done”???? i need answers bro

ALSO I WONDER WHERE EVERYTHING’S GONNA GO NOW THAT PENTIOUS PROVED SOULS CAN BE REDEEMED. now that they’ve proved it is the main plot going to be actually redeeming people? or is heaven gonna hide it from them??? can angel dust be redeemed when valentino owns his soul??? does angel dust truly WANT to be redeemed? once they know that you have to die to be redeemed are they gonna be able to take that risk?? now that i think of it wtf will be the main focus of season 2?? we know the vees play a big role so maybe they’ll try to prevent souls from leaving (maybe valentino will make it really hard for angel to leave and that’ll be a big part?) idk i got a lot of questions man

and it seems like they’re setting alastor up to be the main villain at the end. it seems although his mysterious deal isn’t allowing him to unleash his full power, so when he’s free of the deal i can only imagine how feral he could go. (my guess is that he uses the favor charlie promised to help release him from the deal and then charlie regrets it later when he goes crazy)

anyways all in all the finale is crazy good and i will NOT be getting over it any time soon and i am not ready to wait another few years 🥲

#hazbin hotel #hellaverse #hazbin hotel finale #hazbin hotel episode 8 #hazbin hotel season 1 #hazbin hotel season finale #hazbin hotel spoilers #hazbin hotel the show must go on #the show must go on #hazbin hotel theory #hazbin hotel thoughts #hazbin

[peaceisadirtyword]

German Vikings Con🫶🏼

I wasn’t going to post these here because I don’t like how I look but I just love these pictures too much🥹❤️ Not only I was lucky enough to see Alex again, but I also met Jordan and he was the sweetest🥰

I first met Jordan for his autograph. I took my favourite pic of Ubbe so he could sign it and he was so sweet and nice to me! His smile was amazing😭 he asked me if he’d see me again and I said yes, so when I came to his photo op he was like “hello love! I was missing you” and I nearly cried (hence my face in the pic, because he hugged me and I was freaking out). I saw him a few times during the convention, and he was always smiling and being absolutely perfect and I just love him even more now❤️

(I’ll leave this pic here even though the quality is terrible because I want you guys to appreciate his smile🥲)

Alex was, as always, the main character of the story of my life. He recognised me (the memory that man has) and he gave me an amazing hug during the photo op. He always had a smile for me🫶🏼 the pic with him is absolutely perfect even though my face kind of ruins it but I don’t really care! During the Meet&Greet he was so close and open with us! And he talks a lot🥹 I never thought I’d meet someone that talks as much as I do, so it’s very nice. He described himself as a siberian husky and I can’t agree more with that😭❤️ I had some gifts for him for the autograph, so I couldn’t talk that much with him bc I had some autographs for other people :( but that’s okay because I’m seeing him again very soon🫶🏼 he greeted me with a “hey gorgeous” and a soft smile, he hugged me and I made him laugh, which is like the biggest accomplishment of my entire life. He was a delight, and I can’t wait to see him again🥰

I also had the chance to talk to Alexander. He was also very nice even though we all could see he was a bit tired (he spent days giving concerts around Germany🥺). When I thanked him for coming, he gave me the biggest smile and thanked me. He’s amazing, I’ve seen him in many projects besides Vikings since I was little so it was a dream getting to talk to him!

I saw Ida too! She’s the sweetest, and so cute🥺 also Ragga, who is even more beautiful in person! And Jasper, who was very nice to me even though we didn’t have much time! I would have loved to interact with more of the guests, especially John Kavanagh because both my mum and I are huge fans of his work, but unfortunately there wasn’t much time and I had a tight budget😅

It was an exhausting but amazing day. I also got to meet people I’ve been taking to for years and that became friends to me and that was fantastic too! I loved spending an entire day surrounded by people that love the same things I do. It’s like therapy❤️ I loved every single minute of it, even the stressful parts😂 they’re always worth it.

Next week I’ll travel to Paris to see Alex again and to finally meet my beloved Marco🫶🏼 I can’t even explain how thankful and excited I am when I think about it. The convention is one day before my birthday so I also get to spend my birthday in Paris with my family (I have family in France I haven’t seen in a while bc of the pandemic💔). It’s perfect🫶🏼

If you’ve read all of this, thank you❤️ I truly hope every single person in this fandom has the chance to enjoy days like this one. We deserve it🥰 and it helps to cope with reality when life becomes too much💖

#german vikings con #alex høgh andersen #jordan patrick smith #vikings #vikings cast #fangirling

[thejacksmit]

First Take: The Great Escaper - a quiet way for Sir Michael to bow out from cinema

SYNOPSIS: Bernard Jordan escapes from his care home to attend the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings in France.

It’s a true story so bonkers that two films are being made about it - one of them is a Pierce Brosnan lead vehicle, the other, is this one, one where two British icons bow out from respective careers - but emotions aside, The Great Escaper is a perfectly fine, if a little undercooked for what it is trying to do.

Oliver Parker is in charge of this 1 hour 36 minute film, and he seems to have become very well versed in war stories (having helmed the 2016 version of Dad’s Army), creating a film that gets the emotional bits relatively spot on, but struggles to find a properly coherent style - one minute it’s him on the journey, the next, it’s a flashback to some rather raunchy stuff for a 12 certificate. Where it ultimately falls a little short is William Ivory’s script - as much as this is a BBC Films production, it does feel a little too much like a TV movie for its own good, which is a shame as this is the man who wrote Made in Dagenham. Christopher Ross does a decent job behind the camera, and Craig Armstrong’s score is good enough for a mid-budget British film of this nature.

Now, the performances - arguably the key USP of this film - the final work for the late Glenda Jackson, and if he stays true to his word, the final film of Sir Michael Caine’s illustrious career before retirement. And when have these two ever put a bad performance in? Supporting them is Wolf Kahler, John Standing, Carlyss Peer, Danielle Vitalis, Laura Marcus and Will Fletcher, and together, this small cast do enough to take what was a pretty middle of the ground script and make it feel relatively wholesome (if not for an advert pre-film kind of spoiling a pivotal moment in the final act).

THE VERDICT

For a film billed as Sir Michael’s last before retirement, The Great Escaper may not be the greatest, but it just about gets the job done - and yes, we do get to hear him drop an F bomb in a pretty relaxed 12 certificate manner. Surely worth the price of admission on its own.

RATING: 3/5

#first takes #Youtube

[dead-by-daylight-cheatser0o]

Score Events - Official Dead by Daylight Wiki

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 News The Marvel star has signed up to play a secret agent who sets out to stop a terrorist cult from sparking an apocalypse. News "To see his character in the tone of She-Hulk is really fun". News Here's everything we know about Avengers: Secret Wars. News There's one strange area in the middle. News Several leaks later, Tactics Ogre: Reborn has been revealed. News Morty will be arriving a little later than expected. News Sorry Switch Pro hopefuls, there's always next fiscal year. News Legendary All Skulls On difficulty is no joke. News Blizzard says the eyebrow-raising survey was "entirely intended to better understand player preferences". News The whale who spent a fortune on Diablo Immortal microtransactions is back. Review Disney Home have brought out the nicest looking gaming chair I have ever laid my eyes on. Review The Logitech G Hyperion Fury is an older release, but with an ergonomic shape and grippy side textures it's still as comfortable as ever. Buying Guide We're rounding up the best gaming headsets going so no matter what your budget or platform of choice you'll find a quality set of audio givers right here. Upcoming All of the upcoming video game release dates, including DLC, updated every week. Feature WB Games Montreal on the importance of listening and responding to feedback — on Batgirl and more. Buying Guide We're rounding up the best Steam Deck dock that you can get for Valve's handheld system ahead of the official model later this year. Feature We sat down with Respawn to learn more about shifting design philosophy and the future of Apex Legends. Buying Guide We're rounding up the best cheap gaming headsets available in How To We're showing you how to build a gaming PC in our step-by-step illustrated guide. We go through all the components, and what you'll need to put together the rig of your dreams. Buying Guide Hunting for cheap gaming keyboard deals can be difficult considering the bloat of budget hardware available, but we're rounding up our top picks right here. News "We thought it was way too aggressive". Other versions of this page are available with specific content for the following regions:. Total Film. Latest News. News Seamless swinging. View all. Sam Loveridge Global Editor-in-Chief. Josh West Features Editor. Leon Hurley Senior Guides Co-ordinator. Tabitha Baker Managing Editor, Hardware. Ali Jones News Editor. Jack Shepherd Senior Entertainment Editor. Iain Harris Deputy News Editor. Alyssa Mercante Editor. Joe Donnelly Features Writer. Heather Wald Senior Staff Writer. Hope Bellingham News Writer. Austin Wood Staff Writer. Dustin Bailey Staff Writer. Jordan Gerblick Staff Writer. Hirun Cryer News Writer. Bradley Russell Senior Entertainment Writer. Molly Edwards Entertainment Writer. Fay Watson Entertainment Writer. Amy West Entertainment Writer. Emily Garbutt Entertainment Writer. Lauren Milici Senior Entertainment Writer. Iain Wilson Guides Editor. Joel Franey Guides Writer. Will Sawyer Guides Writer. Rob Dwiar Commissioning Editor, Hardware. Jasmine Mannan Hardware Editor. Star Wars Villainous review: "Impressive Razer Barracuda Pro review: "A quality one-and-done headset solution for multi-platform use". Prey review: "The best post-Arnie Predator movie". Bullet Train review: "Brad Pitt starrer is a zippy, enjoyable ride". Nope review: "A thrilled 'Yup! The Gray Man review: "Hangs some ace action on a threadbare plot". Thor: Love and Thunder review: "Unashamedly absurd and wildly entertaining". The Boys season 3, episode 8 review: "Not the fight we were promised". Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1, episode 10 review: "An ending that's pure heaven for fans of the original series". Marvel episode 5 review: "A brave, necessary story". Other versions of this page are available with specific content for the following regions: US Australia.

[fearsmagazine]

ESCAPE THE FIELD - Review

DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate

SYNOPSIS:  Sam is the first of six strangers we meet who suddenly awaken in a remote, endless cornfield. Stripped of their possessions, each is left with a single item on their person: one a gun with a single bullet, matches, a lantern, a knife, a compass, and a flask of water. As mysterious sirens blare in the distance and traps appear at every turn, the group realizes it’s been plunged into a cat-and-mouse game with an unseen evil, and survival depends upon solving a diabolical and deadly puzzle.

REVIEW: Emerson Moore’s ESCAPE THE FIELD is a thriller that plays into a viewer’s potential dread of cornfields. Some viewers might have encounters with corn mazes that appear in the fall, Moore taps into a more primal feel a person might encounter when driving through vast corn fields, or Stephen King tales that take advantage of such a setting.

The narrative is a hybrid blend of elements some I found reminiscent of films like “Saw,” “Escape Room,” and “Cube,” and even the series “Lost,” but from a literary view “Ten Little Indians” and “Children of the Corn,” of course. There is a nice balance of elements to keep[ one speculating as to the true nature of what is at p[lay here, as well as to what lurks in the field stalking this abductees. While there are more than five characters to the plot, the narrative stays focused on three central characters to sustain the viewer’s interest.  The narrative is structured as a puzzle. The story does not simply present answers to the mystery but provides clues for the viewer to put it together. The film’s climax and resolution don’t tie everything up neatly and deeper mysteries are left unresolved. Many of the character arcs come to an end, but there are a few that are left open. ESCAPE THE FIELD feels like a cinematic universe with a few more stories to tell.

There are some interesting aspects to the production designs that I would like to say more about but would be spoilers. The cinematography is nicely done. Combined with the visual effects adds a fine authenticity to this corn maze. The editing maintains a brisk pace and creates tension, suspense, and a few scares. It all comes together to create an intense thrill ride.

I was engaged by the performances. It’s a delightful ensemble cast. Jordan Claire Robbins, who you may recognize as Grace from “The Umbrella Academy,” is thrilling as the central character of the film, Sam. She is immersed in the action but also adds an element of logic and sophistication to the role. Actor Theo Rossi, who starred in such projects as “Luke Cage,” “Sons of Anarchy,” and “Army of the Dead'', takes on the role of Tyler. He creates a likable character that feels almost too nice, like he is trying to work an angle. His performance adds some contrast to the narrative. Shane West, a seasoned actor who began at the age of 15, creates a thinking man’s action hero, adding depth to the character. The supporting cast all add to the mystery and terror to this tale and are all charming in their own right.

Given the high standard of production values these days for episode series, ESCAPE THE FIELD feels a bit like a series pilot. Grant, there are no mind bending special effects you might find in a Marvel universe film, but the work here is solid and entertaining. The plotting of the mystery is spot on, and while I would easily compare it to an Agatha Christie novel, it’s no Dan Brown adventure. Filmmaker Emerson Moore clearly demonstrates he can achieve maximum thrillers for his budget and captures some engrossing performances from his actors. An impressive theatrical feature film I’m eager to see what he delivers next.

CAST: Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Tahirah Sharif, Julian Feder, Elena Juatco, and Shane West. CREW: Director/Screenplay/Producer - Emerson Moore; Screenplay - Joshua Dobkin & Sean Wathen; Producers - Andrew Davies Gans, Michael Philip, and Jason Moring; OFFICIAL: www.lionsgate.com/movies/escape-the-field FACEBOOK: N.A. TWITTER: N.A. TRAILER: RELEASE DATE: In Select Theaters, On Digital and On Demand on May 6, 2022.

**Until we can all head back into the theaters our “COVID Reel Value” will be similar to how you rate a film on digital platforms - 👍 (Like), 👌 (It’s just okay),  or 👎 (Dislike)

Reviewed by Joseph B Mauceri

#film review #movie review #escape the field #escapethefieldmovie #lionsgate #Emerson Moore #jordan claire robbins #theo rossi #shane west #horror #thriller #mystery #joseph mauceri #joseph b mauceri

[damnhotmsimmons]

Assuming the cm revival is still happening, here's a list of what I want in the revival and what would make it better:

Tara, Luke and Matt getting more screentime and decent characterization

No more Reid angst and unnecessary drama(*cough*15x06 & 15x10*cough*cough*)

Garcia being in the revival, whether she returns to the BAU or not, it would be nice to see what she’s up to whether it’s about her new job or date and relationship with Luke

Garvez, seeing the development of their relationship since the end of 15x10

Resolving the Garcia stalker storyline from 15x04, maybe Alexei Stanovich resurfaces and Garcia needs the BAU’s help to stop him. Maybe it’s also coincidental that he resurfaces the moment Garcia starts a relationship with Luke

Letting Paget go gray when playing Emily again. The crappy wig has got to go

Have the team struggle to adjust to Garcia’s departure, maybe a callback to 11x20 or 6x03 when Garcia walks past JJ and Morgan’s empty office. Maybe Emily, JJ or Reid walk past Garcia’s empty office, which was once filled with light and colors

Emily struggling to find a convenient replacement for Garcia, which is tough as Garcia is irreplaceable but the team are not able to complete cases without a technical analyst

Have a realistic timeskip, maybe a few years have passed since 15x10 and we see how much has changed since Garcia left and so much has changed

More friendship moments with the ladies(and yes, this also includes Tara)

More Luke and Tara friendship moments

Give Tara more to do, I mean she was the only one who didn’t have an episode in the final season and I felt that Aisha was underutilized in that season especially when she’s been on the show since season 11

Same thing also applies to Matt, sure he has gotten some focus in three episodes in the last season but he was still underutilized and characterization from cmbb was ignored. Kinda jarring especially when some of those writers came from cmbb

Assuming that the revival will continue and knowing that Daniel has commitments to another show, maybe give Matt a proper send-off, just don’t pull an NCIS. Leave it open ended incase he’s able to return

If they want to revisit past cases, maybe resolve the escaped prisoners storyline, the one with the Romani family in 4x13 or bring back the unsubs from Lo-Fi/Mayhem since we didn’t know much about them and their motives. The latter could also be beneficial for Tara, Luke and Matt since Tara can use her forensic psychology skills when it comes to profiling the unsubs, Luke being from the Bronx indicates that he has some familiarity with the streets in NY and Matt utilizing his tracking skills and connections

Since the revival will be on Paramount+, I’m hoping that means the revivial gets a decent budget. I’ve never seen any original series from Paramount+(CBS All Access then) but I notice from gifs and commercials that the quality of those shows look good and I’m hoping the same applies to the revival, which means better lighting and no more of that ugly yellow filter

I’m also hoping that means better quality in the writing, maybe get new writers that understand the characters and show well. Fire the writers who suggested Jeid

Better wardrobe, it seemed that the quality for the wardrobe aside from Garcia’s went downhill

Be more consistent and acknowledge the character’s ptsd. I hate how they have the characters act like things are suddenly alright after one episode

no more gross and creepy unsub like the guy seeing the goat man or cutting off faces like wtf?!

give the revival a tone similar to the early seasons. Use the early seasons as a reference

another episode like 15x04. Since the revival will focus on one case as opposed to the usual “case of the week” type, maybe there’s room for a breather episode, and we see the characters on their day off, a little break from whatever serious storyline 

Let Rossi retire, honestly, he’s way out of his prime and it’s getting obvious that he’s too old to be going on the field especially when he got ambushed by Everett Lynch who is much younger than him. Honestly, the finale should have ended with Rossi retiring, especially as he’s been in the BAU since the beginning and it make sense that it ends with him leaving and moving on while the rest of the team move on without him

unpopular opinion, I think the show can last without Rossi/Joe

More Willifer moments and Katt moments. I’d also like to see Matt and Kristy taking care of baby Rose. I’d also suggest JJ and Matt bonding with their kids but that seems uncertain since depending on when the revival will be greenlit for production, there’s a chance that the kids grow out of their roles(JJ’s kids might not be that affected but Matt’s kids definitely will). Unless they either recast the kids(which isn’t uncommon for some shows) or have a timeskip which explains the kids being a bit older than in s15

Fix JJ’s character, I hate how the writers ruined her by making Jeid happen. AJ is a great actress and she cares about the character. Maybe have her interact with the newer team members, build up more of her friendship with Tara and Matt. I’m not sure how the writers can fix her characterization but I wished they push the whole Jeid storyline out and focus on her as a character

I’d love Hotch and Morgan to be mentioned or acknowledged, making it clear that the team still keeps in touch with them even though they’re no longer working for the BAU. Cameos would be nice but that depends on Shemar’s availability due to commitments to SWAT and the whole situation with Thomas during filming of s12

Guest appearances from other former characters would be nice but also unlikely since Gideon and Stephen are dead, Kate is mostly forgotten(plus Jennifer is on 9-1-1), and while Elle returning as an unsub would make an interesting storyline, it’s clear that Lola has no intentions on returning to CM(based on her IG stories)

seems like Blake, Jordan and possibly Seaver are the only likely candidates that have a better chance of returning as a guest but that depends on the actresses decisions and if the story allows it

Maybe learn from 15x05 since it was the highest rated episode, and has more ratings than the finale. Maybe the writers can learn from this and realized maybe they shouldn’t focus too much on Reid and Reid angst. There’s seven other characters, make the revival focus on all of them 

An update of Reid’s personal life, if he and Max are still together, and no angst

Getting to see the new BAU Jet

More BAU family bonding moments, whether it’s them having drinks, eating dinner together or celebrating something like a Garvez engagement, Rossi’s retirement or Matt’s first book being published

Retaining the opening title sequence. It’s not CM without it

 I know I might get my hopes up for this and be all disappointed if this post was all for nothing. Still, a girl can dream

Tagging: @illegalcerebral, @dreatine, @marvelfanlife, @jaqren, @yeoldespacebuns, @ropoto. Feel free to add anything incase I missed something

#spencer reid #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss #david rossi #penelope garcia #luke alvez #tara lewis #matt simmons #criminal minds

[stylesnews]

HARRY STYLES wore a dress. You may well know that already even if you don’t follow fashion or music closely. Photos of the British singer in the custom Gucci frock—snapped for the cover of Vogue—swarmed the internet a few weeks ago, sending his brigade of fans into a tizzy. Scads of tweets and online articles recycled the images. And while most of the coverage lauded Mr. Styles for his beguiling, gender-bending outfit, some conservative pundits including Candace Owens predictably wrung their hands, interpreting the hubbub as a death knell for the so-called “manly man.” The cover itself was a landmark: Mr. Styles is the first man to grace the cover of Vogue solo. Think of the instantly collectible issue as a coronation of sorts, confirming that the 26-year-old singer is now officially style-royalty.

Mr. Styles, who rose to fame as a member of the boy band One Direction before going solo, has been a fashion provocateur for several years now. A muse to Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, he consistently wears the label’s rather unisex wares such as tapestry print trousers, lithe loafers and pussy-bow blouses. (Representatives for the artist did not respond to a request for comment for this story and, through a representative, his stylist Harry Lambert declined to comment.)

On Instagram, feverish fan accounts like @Hsfashionarchive (which has over 100,000 followers) vie to identify whatever Mr. Styles is photographed wearing, from whimsically wide floral pants by British designer Steven Stokey Daley to a candy-colored necklace by New York jewelers Eliou. This year Mr. Styles topped the “Power Dressers” list on Lyst, a fashion-focused search platform, reflecting the strong correlation between his clothing choices and what online shoppers seek. Camilla Clarkson, communications director at Lyst, noted that Mr. Styles’s “non-binary style” helps drive his popularity, particularly with a younger generation that liberally shops across gender lines.

Some older observers, however, regard Mr. Styles’s fashion choices through a “been there, seen that” lens. “It’s kind of like this year’s version of rock-star packaging or something,” said Vincent Boucher, 67, a lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York. As precursors, Mr. Boucher pointed to Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger and David Bowie, all of whom donned dresses decades ago, nimbly crossing gender lines. (I’d add to that list the lesser-known, openly gay disco singer Sylvester, who frequently vacillated between men’s and women’s clothing—see the video for his 1978 number-one hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”)

Mr. Styles’s Vogue cover elicited little more than “a shrug” from Andrew Groves, 52, a fashion professor at Westminster University in London. As Prof. Groves pointed out, when Bowie wore a dress in the early ‘70s, it was “really provocative because it was outside society’s norms.”

Even if Prof. Groves considers Mr. Styles’s floor-length dress unworthy of controversy, it did cause a several-day stir here in America that broke down largely along partisan lines. Alarmed conservative pundits tweeted lengthy screeds including Candace Owens, 31, a conservative voice who decried the “steady feminization of our men.”

Meanwhile, on her Instagram a few days later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Mr. Styles’s Vogue shoot “wonderful” and confronted the criticisms: “Perhaps for some people it provokes some anger or insecurity around masculinity/femininity/etc. If it does, then maybe that’s part of the point. Sit with that reaction and think about it, examine it, explore it, engage it, and grow with it.”

Most male stars still avoid the risks associated with dressing too fashionably. Days after Mr. Styles’s Vogue cover was released, George Clooney graced the cover of GQ Magazine. The ensuing social-media conversation focused not on his (strategically inoffensive) clothes but on the affable star’s anecdotes. Mr. Clooney, in his immaculate knit polo and Ray-Ban sunglasses, surely looked great to many men of a certain age. But his look was hardly innovative, unlike those embraced by Mr. Styles and other dynamic, contemporary style icons like A$AP Rocky, Tyler the Creator and Jaden Smith.

Thanks in part to the internet and social media, which have given him an arguably wider sphere of influence than earlier gender-bending-fashion icons like Bowie or Cobain, Mr. Styles is turning receptive fans onto novel ways of dressing. “He’s a pioneer, really,” said Jordan O’Brien, 28, of Penngrove, Calif. Mr. O’Brien creates men’s-fashion videos, one of which, titled, “Recreating Harry Styles Iconic Outfits,” has been viewed over 123,000 times on YouTube. It shows Mr. O’Brien loosely following in his idol’s footsteps by wearing outfits like a lavender suit with a mesh-shirt.

Mr. O’Brien and other admirers I spoke with can’t afford the big-ticket Gucci and Bode clothes Mr. Styles endorses. Nor are they really interested in adopting his most avant-garde outfits. Instead, they attempt to channel the essence of his style and his flexible attitude. “I love how he breaks the boundaries,” of men’s fashion and shows that “people can wear whatever they want,” said Mr. O’Brien.

Kyle Jordan, 23, a barista in Barrington, N.J., studies Pinterest pages dedicated to Mr. Styles’s outfits. He’s adopted the singer’s penchant for broader pants and boxy button-ups and now has his eye on a pearl necklace which has for years been Mr. Styles’s signature. Lyst’s Ms. Clarkson noted that whenever Mr. Styles wears a given item—be it pearls, or a blue suit, or a yellow bucket hat—her site registers a jump in search inquiries for comparable items.

A rainbow-patchworked J.W. Anderson cardigan that Mr. Styles wore on the “Today” show in February is probably the item his fans have tried most zealously to duplicate. The technicolor sweater became an internet sensation, shared particularly widely on TikTok. But at $1,560 it was well outside most fans’ budgets, its idiosyncrasy extreme enough that good facsimiles were hard to find. So, in a rare instance in which a luxury fashion label bowed to the masses, J.W. Anderson released the pattern online so fans could knit their own version; cardiganed Styles copycats began posting their homemade iterations en masse. As for the original sweater? It’s heading to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London—acknowledged as a piece of fashion history.

#harry styles #dec20 #wall streeet journal

[cherubcow]

“Invincible”, Season 1 (2021) Review

Somehow both very cool and very fucking stupid :D

About Created and written primarily by Robert Kirkman (principle writer for The Walking Dead comic and TV show), this Young Adult cartoon basically synthesizes a number of comic book characters (e.g., Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Hellboy, Wonder Woman, Gambit) and tries to balance their heroism with cynical twists and dark realities. It's an exercise like Brightburn (2019) in that it mirrors existing comic writing all too closely in order to make violent twists. The cool stuff arrives pretty much immediately. You can tell right away that the physics have some level of realism, and it quickly gets serious because of this. The easy comparison would be to The Boys (also by Amazon, also about violent heroes, and also very well-produced). So, if you like The Boys (2019–), you'll probably like Invincible only a little less.

(( Some spoilers but nothing too specific ))

Wrong Focus But, the stupid stuff comes from the same error that the Kick-Ass movie (2010) made: it focuses on the wrong person(s). In Kick-Ass, the error was focusing on.. well.. "Kick-Ass", an irredeemable loser and waste of screen time. Invincible makes the same mistake, focusing on.. well.. "Invincible", a (so far) irredeemable loser and waste of screen time. So, despite its virtues, this show cannot escape that it made the decision to go for the Young Adult viewing demographic. It reminds me of Alita: Battle Angel (2019) in that way too: some very cool adult concepts ruined by the dramatic devices of unrepentant teenage stupidity and irrelevance. I didn't even like that stuff when I was a teenager, though Jordan Catalano gets a pass.

Main Cast and Characters The supporting characters were also very stupid. The most annoying was definitely Amber Bennett (voiced by the otherwise cool Zazie Beetz from Deadpool 2 (2018) and Joker (2019)), 

who is supposed to be attractive somehow to Mark Grayson ("Invincible", voiced by Steven Yeun, who played Glenn on The Walking Dead) 

despite the fact that she constantly judges him, fails to understand him, often fails to give him any kind of benefit of the doubt, and continues to scowl at him and be hurtful towards him even when she has information that should change her outlook towards him. And because she is part of the love triangle shared between herself, Invincible/Mark, and "Atom Eve"/Samantha (voiced by the awesome Gillian Jacobs from Community (2009–2014)), 

audiences simply have to bear with it that Amber's annoying character will be present and wasting time until Mark can realize that Amber is in fact toxic and that Eve actually understands him and can improve him in more positive directions. That love triangle should have been a 20-minute distraction, but I'm guessing that it will eat up a season or two more, especially if the writers become cowardly and fail to change things for fear of messing up a perceived "winning" formula. In my ideal story line, they would skip ahead 10 years, drop the teen drama, the love triangle, and the stupid jokes and have Invincible and Eve paired in defense of Earth, with the main tension being from their worry that the other would be horribly gored in front of them during lethal fights against cosmic enemies ;)

Aside, I am aware of Amber’s motivation for being a bad person, I just think her justification is not based in understanding, empathy, and a regard for the gravity of Invincible’s situation. In a strict political sense, Invincible should not commit a lie of omission by keeping her in the dark about his identity — even if for the “noble lie” reason of protecting her — but in a real sense, he is a fucking teenager who just developed his super powers. For her to pretend that he should reveal his entire identity to her — a potentially transformative and even dangerous decision — after a few months of teenage romance paints an absurd portrait of her mind. It does, however, align her with Omni-Man, because where Omni-Man forces Invincible to become an adult in the fighting sense (pushing with full force early on), Amber forces Invincible to become an emotional adult by getting him to understand that toxic people such as herself need to be given boundaries — and he needs to learn to clearly delineate and communicate his real desires. By knowing that he does not want Amber, people who regiment his free time, or people who do not suit him, for instance, he can realize why Eve was an obvious decision: Eve understands, can make time when they have time, and will let him find his decisions. Part of a coming-of-age story tends to be realizing what one actually wants, and Invincible’s hesitation in telling Amber his identity shows that he does not truly want her. This separates Invincible from, say, Spider-Man, who avoided telling Mary Jane his identity not because he did not want her but because he wanted at all costs to protect her.

The next most annoying character has to be Debbie Grayson (voiced by TV-cancer Sandra Oh and who luckily was not animated to look like the real Sandra Oh and who should have been voiced instead by Bobby Lee due to Lee's successful MadTV parody of Sandra Oh). 

Debbie basically fills the role of Skyler in Breaking Bad, except that Debbie's character tends to be slightly more understanding before her inevitable and toxic Skyler-resentment and undermining behavior. Despite having an 8-episode arc of change, Debbie's character flips too quickly and lacks the empathy and Omni-Man motive-justifying that would make her interesting (the comic's development may vary). For instance, if she refused to believe that Omni-Man meant his own words, that would make her empathetic and perhaps virtuous even if misled, but instead she dropped their "20 years" of understanding after viewing Omni-Man in action, which makes her appear shallow, easily manipulated, and unsympathetic. That was a definite "Young Adult" genre move because it shows immaturity by the writers to break apart a bond of 20 years so quickly. Mediocre teens might accept such a fissure because their lives have not yet seen or may not comprehend that level of time, but adults know that even long-standing and problematic relationships (which, beyond the lie, Omni-Man's and Debbie's was not shown to be) take a lot of time to break — even with lies exposed.

Omni-Man The biggest show strength for me was of course Omni-Man, who in a success of casting was voiced by J.K. Simmons in a kind of reprisal of Simmons' role as Fletcher from Whiplash (2014). 

The Fletcher/Omni-Man parallel shows through their being incredibly harsh but extremely disciplined and principled, forcing people to become beyond even their own ideal selves (this via Omni-Man's tough-love teaching of Invincible — comically, Omni-Man was actually psychologically easier on Invincible than Fletcher was on Whiplash's Andrew character). Despite the show's attempts to villainize Omni-Man, he, like Fletcher and also like Breaking Bad's Walter White, becomes progressively more awesome, eventually representing a Spartan will, an unconquerable drive, and a realistic and martial understanding of a hero's role.

To the show's credit, while it wrote Omni-Man to be outright genocidal and from a culture of eugenicists (again, Spartan), they could not help but admire him and his "violence" and "naked force" (for a Starship Troopers reference), giving him a path to redemption. That redemption comes in part because — despite the show's attempt to be often realistic and violent — its decision to be directed at young adults via dumb jokes, petty relationship drama, the characters’ reckless lack of anonymity and security in their neighborhood (loudly taking off and landing right at the doorstep), and light indy music also made the portrayed violence far less literal. With a less literal violence, the real statement becomes not that Omni-Man really did kill so many people (though he certainly did kill those people within the show's plot) but that he was symbolically capable of terrible violence but could be reformed for good. That's the shortcoming with putting violence under demographic limitations. If it's a PG-13 Godzilla knocking down cities, the deaths in the many fallen skyscrapers don't matter so much (the audience will even forgive Godzilla for mass death if it happens mostly in removed spectacle), whereas if it's Cormac McCarthy envisioning a very realistic fiction, every death rides the edge of true trauma.

By showing light between the real and the symbolic, it is much easier to identify and agree with Omni-Man. For instance, when Robot (voiced by Zachary Quinto of Heroes and the newer Star Trek movies) 

shows too much empathy for the revealed weakness of "Monster Girl" (voiced by Grey Griffin), the audience may have thought, "Pathetic," even before Omni-Man himself said it. And this because Omni-Man knows that true and powerful enemies (including himself) will not hesitate to use ultra-violence against these avenues of weakness. "Invincible" can make his Spider-Man quips while in lethal battles, but he does so while riding the edge of death — something that Omni-Man has to teach Invincible by riding him to the brink of his own.

Other Cast/Characters and Amazon's Hidden Budget It was impressive how many big-name actors were thrown into this — a true hemorrhage of producer funding. Amazon has so far hidden the budget numbers, perhaps because they don't want people to know that the show (like many of its shows) represents a kind of loss-leader to jump-start its entertainment brand.

Aside from those already mentioned, the show borrows a number of actors from The Walking Dead (WD), including.. • Chad L. Coleman ("Martian Man"; "Tyreese" on WD),

• Khary Payton ("Black Samson"; "Ezekiel" on WD),

• Ross Marquand (several characters; "Aaron" on WD)

• Lauren Cohan ("War Woman"; "Maggie" on WD)

• Michael Cudlitz ("Red Rush"; "Abraham" on WD)

• Lennie James ("Darkwing"; "Morgan" on WD)

• Sonequa Martin-Green ("Green Ghost"; "Sasha" on WD) 

There were also connections to Rick and Morty and Community, not just with Gillian Jacobs but also with... • Justin Roiland ("Doug Cheston"), who voices both Rick and Morty in Rick and Morty,

• Jason Mantzoukas ("Rex"),

• Walton Goggins ("Cecil"),

• Chris Diamantopoulos (several characters),

• Clancy Brown ("Damien Darkblood"),

• Kevin Michael Richardson ("Mauler Twins"), and

• Ryan Ridley (writing)

That's a lot of overlap. They even had Michael Dorn from Star Trek: TNG (1987–1994) (there he played Worf) and Reginald VelJohnson from Family Matters (1989–1998) and Die Hard (1988), and even Mark Hamill. Pretty much everyone in the voice cast was significant and known. Maybe Amazon got a discount for COVID since the actors could all do voice-work from home? ;)

Overall Bad that it was for the Young Adult target demo but good for the infrequent adult themes and ultra-violence. Very high production value and a good watch for those who like dark superhero stories. I have heard that the comic gets progressively darker, which fits for Robert Kirkman, so it will likely be worth keeping up with this show.

#invincible #tv review #robert kirkman #invincible tv series #invincible tv show

[kinsey3furry300]

A very confused Star Wars Fan desperately tries to justify their belief that “Caravan of Courage” shows the way forward for the franchise. No, really.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved Star Wars. And I mean, all of it. The books, the games, the Lego, the spin-offs: I even enjoy the Holiday Special in a The Room so-bad-you-just-need-to-see-it sort of way.  But particularly the films. But here is when we run into the big problem: I’m just the wrong age. The original trilogy launched before I was born, the prequel trilogy hit cinemas when I was already a teen and while I went and saw them and enjoyed them, I was at that age where I was self-conscious about seeing a “kids” film, and hyper-aware of how silly and cringy those films were in parts. So my indoctrination, my inoculation with the Star Wars bug didn’t happen in the cinema, and it didn’t happen with any of the main franchise works. It happened on home video, on a skiing trip in the French Alps in the early 90’s. I’d have been about 6, and this was the first time I’d ever been abroad other than to see relatives in Ireland.  And I loved it: to this day I love skiing, but more than that, I have very, very fond childhood memories of this trip. This was shortly before I lost my biological mother to cancer, she’d have received her diagnosis just after we got back from the trip. This was when my younger sister stopped being an annoying screaming thing and became and became an actual person I could talk and play and share ideas with, this was before the combination my mothers long illness and my father having just launched his own IT start up meant I didn’t see him or her any more, despite the fact they were in the same house as me. This was this wonderful, nostalgic child-hood bubble when my family was intact, and nothing could ever go wrong. I skied all day with mum and dad, and would come back to the chalet in the evening. It was an English speaking chalet, I met my first real-life American there, and having grown up in the 90’s in the UK nothing was cooler than making friends with an actual American my own age. He had a hulk Hogan action figure with springs in the legs so if you put him on a hard surface and punched his head down, when you let go he’d jump really high in the air. We used to play with it together in the bath, back in that weird 90’s time-bubble when it was possible to convince two sets of parents that this kid you’d just met was you best friend in the world and of course shared bath time was, somehow, normal and appropriate. And fresh from bath time, tired from the day, the parents would give us some hot coco, dump us kids in front of the tv and grab the first shitty low-budget VHS they could find to keep us distracted while they went to the bar. In this particular time, in this particular place, that shitty low budget cartoon was the  complete set of the 1985 Lucasfilm/ABC Ewoks cartoon, plus the two spin off movies, and to this day that cheap, kitschy, kind of bad series has a special warm and cosy place in my heart. I remember being enthralled by the world, in love with the characters, applied by the bad guys and the injustice they caused (to this day I’m still irate about that time Wicket lost his set of beads documenting his progress towards becoming a full warrior and the older Ewoks basically said, tough, you need to re-earn all those merit badges from scratch. This struck me as exactly the sort of bullshit an adult would pull, and pissed me off) and on tenterhooks about what would happen to the characters.

It was also, by a coincidence, the first ever Star Wars media I was exposed to, and the above combination of events probably explains a lot about me.

So I was surprised, the other day, when scrolling Disney+, to find they’d added Caravan of Courage AND Battle for Endor to the roster in my region. Surely Disney wouldn’t want their slick, cool brand associated with this old trash? Surely there could be no place for this in the post-Mandalorian Star Wars cannon? Surely this is a horrible mistake some intern made, right?

Unless…. What if I’ve miss-remembered? What if it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, and it’s, in fact, secretly really, really good?

I rushed to my comfy chair, got a blanket, dimmed the lights, made some coco (with rum in it, because why the hell not?) and sat down to re-examine this lost gem.

And wow: it’s every bit as shit as you’d expect.

It has aged exactly as poorly as you’d expect a cheap, mid 80’s direct to video spin-off to age. Caravan of Courage? More like Caravan of Garbage, am I right?

And yet… I still enjoyed every moment.

And it was sitting there, in my pyjamas, watching a cheaply made direct to video cash-grab from just before I was born, seeing it again for the first time in nearly 30 years, and I realised something.

It doesn’t really matter if this film is bad, so long as I enjoy it. And if it doesn’t really mater if this is bad, then I, like many Star Wars fans, wasted a huge amount of time and emotional effort on being butthurt about stuff I didn’t like about the Rise of Skywalker and it’s ilk. Because somewhere, right now, a tired and frustrated parent is putting Disney+ on to keep their kids quiet for two hours. And they won’t think too hard about what they put on, so long as it keeps little Timmy busy for a bit. Somewhere, right now, a kid is watching Rise of Skywalker, and it’s the first Star Wars media they’ve ever seen.

And that’s okay. Because we don’t know what that kids home life is like. We don’t know if it’s good or bad. Maybe it’s great, maybe it’s about to take a dramatic plunge like mine did, and this moment here will be the cosy, warm memory they look back on in 30 years time, and that’s beautiful.  They’re getting introduced to a fun, wonderful fantasy world that could be with them all their lives, through good times and bad, and as fans we should be happy about that.

Star Wars will never, die: it’s too darn profitable, Disney will never let it. And while I hope they learn from their mistakes and make sure every future Star Wars is a timeless gem of story-telling, statistically, if you keep making enough films, some of them will be bad. And while I’d like them all to be great, it’s still okay if they’re bad.

Because nothing can take away my memories of that week in that chalet. Nothing can take-away my memories of when they put the original trilogy on in cinemas for the special edition and I had my jaw hit the floor with how good it was on the big screen, not knowing or caring who shot first. Nothing can take away you memories of the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, or the Clone Wars. Nothing can tarnish the bits of the sequil trilogy that you like, and there are good bits in there.

But wait, what about continuity? What about the sacred, perfect written time-line that used to exist?

Well, what about it? Have you seen any other big, epic fantasy universe before? They’re all a mess. A work of fiction, particularly fantasy, can be extensive, or tightly written, but not both. Harry Potter is only seven books, and the last two feel, tonally, like they’re from an entirely different series. I love them, but the grim-dark kicked in so fast you’ll get whiplash. The Hobbit is a perfect written self-contained novel, and LOTR is *The* big boy high-fantasy trilogy: fast forward 50 years, and Christopher Tolkien is desperately squeezing every last drop of money out of his father’s corpse by finishing and publishing every unfinished note JRR ever wrote right down to his shopping lists. Even Dune goes of the rails with sequels. I can only think of four fantasy works that are both extensive and consistently tightly written, Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time, Malazan: Book of the Fallen and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. And even then, the prequels and spin-offs mess with the timelines: the Dunk and Egg novella’s change some character’s canonical ages and timelines, Wheel of Time was going slowly off the rails even before the Jordan died, Forge of Darkness made what was a good metaphor for the creation of it’s world into a literal war deep in the past, and Sanderson’s first Novel Elantris got a re-write to bring it more in line with the rest of the shared universe. The MCU, oft held up as the modern example of tightly planned, well thought out ongoing storytelling, is a lie: it was never as pre-planned out as Disney wants us to think; the first Iron Man, apparently, barely had a script, with Downey ad-lib-ing most of his scenes. None of the MCU films are direct sequels to each-other other than Infinity war and Endgame. There are three Iron Man films, and Three Thor films, and none continue an ongoing story line across multiple films, and the Cap films barely continue an arc, but only where Cap’s relationship with Natasha and Bucky is involved.  Much like these, Star War’s cannon is a complete, nightmarish, confusing, tangled, illogical mess. And it has been since 1984, as Caravan of Courage proves. It was never consistent and well planned.

And that’s okay.

I used to care about plot holes. I used to care about which works were cannon in Star Wars lore. I’m over that now. I’m happy to imagine the books, films and games not as a blow-by-blow historical account of a galaxy far far away, but as campfire stories from within this fun, imaginative world that we’re all invited to listen to. Stories that are in-universe myth and folklore, that we can all snuggle up and listen to while drinking highly alcoholic rum and remembering better times, knowing that wherever the future throws at us, no matter how the world goes to hell around us, we’ll still have the memories, and the ability to make our own new stories in the wonderful Star Wars world we all share.

And that’s okay. No, more than that: that’s beautiful.

Also Star Wars is completely unambiguous on the fact we’re allowed to kill fascists no matter how many times they keep coming back with a new logo, so that’s timely I guess.

So, there’s my hot take two-years after everyone else stopped caring about this stuff, as per bloody usual. Tell me why I’m wrong below, and does anyone else have any truly awful spin-off shows that they kind of have a nostalgic soft spot for?

#star wars #ewoks #caravan of courage #Star wars universe #epic fantasy #MCU #tolkien #LOTR #malazan #song of ice and fire #wheel of time #brandon sanderson #Cosmere #dune #late opinions delivered badly #i'm wrong and i know it #seriously hot coco with rum #spin off #bad spin off #so bad it's good #I love the ewoks cartoon #but you don't have to thats okay too

[whitehotharlots]

Previewing the 2024 Democrat Primary

Within a couple weeks of his being sworn in, just about every person on earth will wish Joe Biden was no longer president. Sure, the few surviving John B. Anderson voters will be thrilled to see 4 years of crushing austerity and half-assed attempts at Keynesian stimulus. But most people will begin dreaming about a brighter future.

Good news! The 2024 Democratic primary field is going to contain dozens of options. Bad news! They are all going to be disgusting piles of shit. 

The “top tier”

While it’s too early to do any handicapping, these are the candidates the media will treat as having the most realistic chances of securing the nomination. 

Kamala Harris

Kamala did not win a single primary delegate in 2020. This is because she dropped out before the first primary, and that was because no one likes her. She has no base beyond a few thousand of twitter’s most violent psychos. Her disingenuousness approaches John Edwards levels: any halfway incredulous person can see immediately beyond her bullshit. She has no principles whatsoever, and while that may be par for the course for Democrats, she lacks even the basic politician’s ability to intuit anything that might, hypothetically, constitute a principle. 

Even better: she is an awful public speaker. She sounds like how a talking dog would speak if he were just caught stealing people food off the kitchen table. She communicates in weird grunts and faux sassy squeaks, which is how she imagines real black women sound like, but something about her is unable to sell the bit. She begins her sentences in halfhearted AAVE, stops and panics halfway through as she realizes that maybe this sounds fake and offensive, and then reminds herself oh wait, no, this is okay since I’m black. This doesn’t happen once or twice per speech. This is how every single sentence sounds. 

Kamala is like Nancy Pelosi in that no sketch show will ever impersonate her correctly, because anything that came close to authenticity would be considered far too cruel. This might benefit her in the primaries, as she exists in the minds of Democrats as someone and something she absolutely is not in reality. Nominating her would be like allowing your child’s imaginary friend to attempt to drive you to the store. 

Andrew Cuomo

Easily one of the 50 worst people alive, Cuomo has a solid chance because Democrats, same as Republicans, are unable to differentiate between electability and self-serving ruthlessness. Cuomo used the deadliest public health crisis in American history as a pretext for cutting Medicaid and firing 5,000 MTA workers, and his approval rating increased. New York Dems are little piggies who love eating shit. If we assume that the political media will continue their habit of refusing to discuss the legislative history of right wing Democrats, Cuomo might well cruise to the nomination and then lose to literally any human being the GOP nominates by an historic margin. 

Joe Biden

The party loves him because he is a right wing racist. “Progressives” tolerate him because black primary voters over 40 supported him, and their opinion is supposedly a magic window into god’s truth. Everyone else can tell he is manifestly senile. I don’t put it above the DNC to pick a candidate who is in horrible health, dying, or even dead--whatever the financial sector wants, they’ll get. But I would be shocked if his approval rating is above 39% by mid-2023, and by that point deep fake technology will be advanced enough they’ll put out a very lifelike video in which the Max Headroom version of Joe explains he’s proud of his accomplishments--that budget’s almost balanced already--but, man, I gotta abd--I gotta abdica--, uhh, I gotta, I, uhh, I gotta move down, man. 

Wild Cards

These candidates would have all have a chance if they ran, but they could all much more easily retire to Little Saint James off of kickbacks they’ve gotten from Citibank and I.G. Farben. 

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm is going to receive some hugely influential post in the Biden administration. Let’s say he becomes Secretary of Education. His signature achievement will be replacing all elementary school teachers with Amazon’s Alexa, which saved the taxpayers so much money we were able to quadruple the number of armed police officers we put into high schools. This will give him several thousand positive profiles on network news programs and the near-universal support of the Silicon Valley vampires who will own 99% of the country by the time Biden’s term ends. They will use their fancy mind control devices to convince geriatic primary voters that Rahm’s the one who will bring Decency back to the white house. His candidacy will be the paragon of wokeness, as expressing concern toward the fact that he covered up the police murder of a black guy will get you called a racist. 

Rahm has a bonus in that Jewish men are now Schrodeniger’s PoC. When they are decent human beings, they are basic, cis white men who are stealing attention from disabled trans candidates of color. When they love austerity and apartheid, they become the most vulnerable people of color on earth and criticizing them in any way is genocide. No one will be able to mention a single thing Rahm has ever done or said without opening themselves to accusations of antisemitism, and that gives him a strong edge against the rest of the field. The good news is that an Emmanuel candidacy would result in over 50% of black voters choosing the GOP candidate--which, I guess that’s not really good but it would certainly be funny. 

Gavin Newsom

Newsom is every bit as feckless as Cuomo, but he doesn’t put off the same “bad guy in an early Steven Segal movie” vibes. He will mention climate change 50 times per speech and no one will bother to mention how he keeps signing fracking contracts even though his state is now on fire 11 months of the year. If anything, this will be spun into an argument about how he’s actually the candidate best suited to handle all the water refugees gathering on the southern border. Look for his plan to curb emissions by 10% by the year 2150 to get high marks from Sierra Club nerds. He’s also a celebate librarian’s idea of what constitutes a handsome man, so he’ll have some support from the type of women who claim to hate all men. 

Larry Summers

I mean, why not? Larry, like most members of the Obama administration, has politics that are eerily similar to those of Jordan Peterson. In normal circumstances, this makes a person a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed. But if that person has a D next to their name this makes them a realistic pragmatist who has what it takes to bring suburban bankers into our tent. If current trends in Woke Phrenology continue apace, Larry’s belief that women are inherently bad at STEM will be liberal orthodoxy by 2023, and his dedication to the Laffer Curve could see him rake in massive donations. Seriously, I’m not kidding: cultural liberalism is now fully dedicated to identity essentialism and balanced budgets. Larry is their ideal candidate. If he were black and/or a woman, I’d put him in the very top tier. 

Jay Inslee

Unlike Newsom, Inslee’s attempt to crown himself the King of Global Warming won’t be immediately derailed, since his state is only on fire because of protestors. This, however, poses a different problem. He’s going to be a good test case for the Democrat’s uneasy peace with the ever increasing share of the electorate who become catatonic upon hearing a pronoun. On the one hand, you need to take their votes for granted. On the other hand, they’re not like black people or regular gays: most voters actively, consciously despise wokies, and associating yourself with them will ruin a campaign even in deep blue areas. There’s still gonna be riots in a year. Biden’s gonna announce the sale of all our nation’s potable water to the good folks at Nestle and some trans freak named Sasha-Malia DeBalzac is going to use that as an opportunity to sell their new pamphlet about how it’s fascist to not burn down small businesses. No matter what Inslee does in response, it’ll end his career. 

AOC

I’m not one of those “AOC is a secret conservative” weirdos, but I am aware enough of basic reality to know she has zero chance of coming close to the nomination. The right and the center both regard her as a literal demon. The party is already blaming her for the fact that a handful of faceless Reagan acolytes failed to flip their suburban districts even though they ran on sensible pragmatic proposals like euthanizing the homeless. The recriminations will only get more unhinged when the Dems eat shit in the 2022 midterms. She will be a Russian, she will be white male, she will be a communist, she will be a homophobe: any insult or conspiracy theory you can name, MSNBC will spend hours discussing. Her house seat challenger will receive a record amount of support from the DNC in 2024 and it’ll be all she can do to remain in congress.

Larry Hogan

Don’t be dissuaded by the fact that he’s a Republican. Larry is the DNC’s ideal candidate: a physically repulsive conservative who owes his entire career to appealing to the most spiteful desires of suburban white people. He’s an open racist in a material sense--if you’re old-school enough to think racism is a matter of beliefs and actions, rather than the presence of cultural signifiers--but his is the beloved “never Trump” style of racism that Dems covet. He’s also a Proven Leader who thinks the role of government should be to finance the construction of investment property and give police the resources they need to run successful drug trafficking operations. Few people embody the Democrat worldview more than Larry. 

The Losers Bracket

These people will have at least a small chance due solely to the fact that the Democrats love losing. They have lost in the past, and in the Democrat Mind that makes them especially qualified.

Joe Kennedy

The man looks like a mushroom-human hybrid from a JRPG. Trump proved that physical hideousness need not doom a presidential bid, but a candidate still needs some kind of charm or oratorical abilities or, god forbid, a decent platform. Joe aggressively lacks all of these things. A vanity campaign would be a good way to raise money and perhaps secure an MSNBC gig, so Joe might still run. 

Mayor Pete 

I am 100% convinced that Pete’s 2020 run was a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. I am also 100% aware that Democrats are dumb enough to enthusiastically support a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. If we have some sort of military or terror disaster between now and 2023 the Dems are sure to want a TROOP, and wait wait wait you’re telling me this one is a gay troop? Holy hell there’s no way that could lose!

Stacy Abrams

Never underestimate the power of white guilt. She lost the gubernatorial race to Gomer Pyle’s grandson, and her spiritual guidance of the Dems saw the party lose black voters in Georgia in 2020. Nonetheless, she is regarded as a magic font of fierceness within the DNC. She might stand a chance if she can establish herself as the most conservative non-white candidate in the field, but there’s going to be stiff competition for that honor.

Elizabeth Warren

Liz is probably angry that the party so shamelessly sold her out even after she was a good little girl and sabatoged Bernie’s campaign for them--yet another example of high ranking US government officials reneging on their promises to the Native American community. Smdh. The fact that this woman hasn’t been bankrupted a dozen times over by various Wallet Inspectors genuinely astounds me. So Liz is probably going to run again, and her campaign will be even sadder the second time around. 

It might surprise you to hear this if you don’t work at a college or NGO, but Liz diehards actually do exist. She’ll get even less support this time because there will be no viable leftist in the field for her to spoil, but she’ll still hang in long enough to make sure the very worst possible candidate beats out the second worst possible candidate. Maybe she’ll fabricate a rape accusation against Sherrod Brown. Maybe she’ll spend her entire allotted debate time doing a land acknowledgment. With Liz, anything is possible--so long as it ends in failure. 

Amy Klobuchar 

Amy was the most bloodthirsty of the 2020 also rans. She will double down on the unpopular failures of the Biden administration, explaining that if you weren’t such a selfish idiot you’d love the higher social security retirement age and oh my god are so such a moron you think you shouldn’t go bankrupt to get a COVID vaccine? There’s a non-unsubstantial segment of the Democratic base that’s self-hating enough to find this appealing, but it won’t be enough to make her viable. 

Martha Coakley

She lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a retarded man who was pretending to be even more retarded than he actually was. Then she lost a gubernatorial race to a guy who openly promised Massachusetts voters that he would punish them for electing him. Her record of failure is unparalleled, making her perhaps the ideal Democrat standard bearer for the twenty twenties. 

[for-peace-war]

No, really. Lovecraft Country sucks.

These are spoilers, but I also don’t give a shit because it’s a bad show and I hope you skim enough to fucking skip it.  I took a few days to decide if I hated it enough to write this and well, I do. 

I will try my best not to say “X is a bad actor,” but instead stick with the characters as they’re intended save for one particular issue.

The Story

It isn’t very Lovecraftian.  And don’t take this as me saying Lovecraft was some kind of master of his craft.  I think he was an absurd racist that used xenophobia as his guise for what truly horrified the sane mind. That being said, the element of the unknown is definitely the hallmark of his world and that in no way is represented in this show.  It could easily be called “Goosebumps: The Black Version” and it’d be just as authentic--if not more so, really.

The story deals with the Bible (?) and magic that comes from uh, knowing the names of things.  You speak a made up language and then you do some kind of confusing magic that has no real purpose or point.  I sound dismissive of this because I am, to be clear.  They could have just as easily had this language be something whites stole from Africans and then perverted into their own means of power (it’d be a pretty easy parralel to any number of imperialist issues left behind in Africa, huh.)

But anyway, it has a tentacle monster. I think we see a big scary octopus at one point.  But the monsters are often in your face and it’s probably less scary than Stranger Things S1.

Honestly, the characters repeat “autumnal equinox” so much that I felt I was going to have a fucking breakdown.  Just the writing is very empty and no one seems to really care about anyone else on the screen except for in a rare moment between the only two characters that make it far and matter. 

Characters

They aren’t very good.  There are tropes present, which isn’t bad at all, but the way the characters interact, speak, and in general move us through the story feels stilted, often nonsensical, and entirely reliant on the viewer assuming that the latest sentence spoken is the only one that matters.

Atticus “Tic” Freeman

A war criminal that derives his power from the white blood inside of him. Again, dismissive but true.  We see this man struggle to connect pieces to a puzzle and eventually he pays the price for it, but not in the way Lovecraft would have someone pay for endeavoring beyond their realm.  Rather, something about fate and a book. Look, honestly? Who gives a shit.  Tic murders a woman in coldblood and it’s never really touched on.  There’s a lot that could be said about militaries, oppression, etc, but we often see these characters enact violence and then the story skips merrily beyond it.  So yeah, he summarily executes a Korean woman and then is later shown torturing another, but it’s okay because he feels a little bad and fucks the Korean sex demon woman.  More on that later.   I felt nothing for him.  He didn’t have some deep animus over being a torturing war criminal.  He was just kind of moving through scenes and having confusing fights with his girlfriend/baby mama.

Letitia “Leti” Lewis

This is what empowerment shouldn’t look like. It amuses me that the show claimed to subvert some kind of norms when the primary love interest (and ultimate heroine) remains the lightest skinned sister in the room.  She is able to maintain the appeal of the ingenue while at the same time having the understood attractiveness of her complexion. As far as Leti is concerned as a character, she too seems to be a pretty shitty person.  We hear that she has “transactional” friendships and she seems pretty much all about self-survival and rarely if ever puts up where others do.  She’s a heroine in the sense that the story makes her be heroic, but it never addresses how her flaws are ultimately all self-inflicted and unnecessary.  She could just not be a shitty person.

Hippolyta Freeman

Well. Hidden Figures was an excellent film, and I think that’s where Hippolyta came from.  In a more serious series, perhaps she and her daughter could have had a very touching arc that would deal with survival and exceptionalism in a world that maligns you for your very being.  Unfortunately, in reality she just comes off as a character that’s quirky in a world that’s also quirky and she doesn’t get to harness her power. There’s an entire episode dedicated to how she discovers who she is and the result is well, her hair turns blue and she makes robots?  I think the character TYPE is great, but they misused her here in all ways.

George Freeman

Well, well.  If the series had remained about George, Tic, and Leti adventuring through America and encountering sundown towns and monsters both human and otherwise, I think it’d have been okay.  The issue is, they wrote this series by the numbers so George is immediately thrown away.  He’s a wise and circumspect guy that has his own flaws (he has patrarchical notions built around protecting/babying his genius wife, clearly), but the flaws he has are understandable and well reasoned. George dies early on.  Then he sort of doesn’t, I guess? But the fact he did was really the nail in the coffin for this series.  The moment they did that, the rest just became empty strokes.  A story where George witnessed the others dying and going back to his wife and daughter would have had so much more heart to it, but well.  Uncle George is literally one of the few bright spots.

Ruby Baptise

Much like her sister, Leti, Ruby is a terrible attempt at showing empowerent on the one hand, and a masterwork on the other.  The bad first: she’s a rapist.  I’ve been called a nigger before and while it didn’t feel great, I don’t think I’d have been justified in just sodomizing the person that did it.  That entire sequence was weird and they tried to hype it as her reclaiming something, when really it spoke to a disgusting and gratuitous tendency toward Ruby: she’s always too much. Ruby, IMO, should have been Tic’s love interest.  In a sense.  First, because Wunmi Mosaku was a very attractive woman with impressive acting chops (she’s where I’ll break my moratirum, sorry), but also because it wouldn’t be what you’d see in every other show now: light-skinned pretty sister, dark-skinned sexual eikon.  And that’s the issue with Ruby there: she’s always too much.  She’s sexual by existing and that isn’t necessarily to her benefit since Leti, the good one, is an actual virgin before her sudden period sex. So the narrative has already spoken as to how it views sex. Yet, because they tried to give Ruby these strange strokes, she comes out as an interesting character.  She has feelings, aspirations, and dreams that she’s kept from and that’s very real. In a story about the absurd, a sense of realness is a familiar handhold to gather your wits.  She’s all that, really.  It’s why she has the best relationships in the show, which is AGAIN an issue, but well. I’ll say Ruby was never bad to have on screen though I was disgusted with how often her blackess (and Blackness in general!) became the source of grotesque horror.

Christina Braithewaite

This is where I get annoyed.  My issue with Christina is that she should have easily been the most hated character, but they overplayed their hand with not showing how nefarious she was.  In fact? Christina and Ruby’s relationship is the only meaningful, real, and understandable one in the entire series.  I felt no joy during her downfall, because I didn’t really get to see her doing anything bad? Just, consider what the show is.  It’s about Lovecraft’s lore, ostensibly, which treats all non (specific types of) white men like dogs.  So Christina comes at it from the “white” but “woman” perspective and you know, she has moments of duality that you can say is she more white or woman here.  But they don’t execute on how sinister she should be.  She’s a little rude at times? Yet she is the only person to treat Ruby like she should be treated and she’s the only person that seems to have a goal outside of “the quest.” It really bothered me that she came out so well done, because either they needed to have her for two seasons and make her far more nefarious after the first, or to just make her less a force for good.  She saves the characters more than a few times and pays for it by being killed when she’s at her lowest.  Yeah, it’s... a weird take.  

Ji-Ah

What can I say?  There are depictions of sex in the series, and they’re all negative: most of Ji-Ah’s scenes, Montrose’s angry self-loathing sex with his boyfriend, Ruby’s morphic horror scenes.  In the case of most of those, there’s something being said.  Ji-Ah is a monster, literally, that could be seen as Lovecraftian in the sense she’s an exotic Asian woman that kills men that sleep with her.  So, HBO was like “we’ll blow our tits and ass budget on her,” and she exists for a series of sex scenes and vague, inscrutable... shit, maybe SHE is the most Lovecraft of all the characters! Anyway at some point she joins the party after confusing drama with Leti because they both fucked Tic.  It’s okay though, because Ji-Ah isn’t here for any of that now.  She’s the one who had the best friend that had her teeth yanked out by Tic, and also who was there when he shot her other friend in cold blood, but they get over that and she’s now their friendly red panda pal or some shit.  It’s fucking trash.   Much like the Freemans (sans Tic), I think she’d have done great in another show. But they rushed her story and it felt less Ghost Nation (Westworld) and more Masturbation (Jordan Peele).

Diana Freeman

Confusing.  A stock character (quirky kid that does art, is impetuous, and won’t take no for an answer) that is given a lot of screen time.  When she sort of hijacks an episode when two ragamuffin girls chase her down and infest her or something because racist cops.  Well, the story veers to her direction.  What can I say?  If you like 11 from Stranger Things but wanted her to have Mike’s attitude, well.  Here you go.

Montrose Freeman

He could have been a good character, I guess. He seemed unnecessary and often was there purely for an x-factor of “uh?”  Like, his infamous scene where he slits a two-spirit Native American’s throat after we learn that this indigenous person had just been restored after being raped by bad guys.  So there’s that.  Also I guess he was self-loathing so he beat his son (that may not be his son???) and also liked fucking dudes, which was I think where we were supposed to care about him. It’s like someone saw Omar was a gun-wielding desperado of drug theft and decided, “Well what made him okay is he’s gay!”  But it didn’t add much.  I get he was angsty but other than Tic calling him a “faggot” (one of the few good scenes between them in terms of emotion), it all seemed empty and kind of meandering. At no point does Montrose seem a part of the team.  He just half-mumbles, gets angry, cries, and falls apart.

Captain Seamus Lancaster

He’s barely a character, but I need to include him for another point. He’s the “bad guy.”  I guess?  He uses the bodies of black men to stay alive, which is actually a really smart reference to black bodies fueling the American system, but it comes off as cheesy because it just never comes up.  He’s cartoonishly bad in a way that he’s less sinister than a meme.  Compare him to say,   Ridgeway from Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. One’s a sinister representation of an oppressive system and the other’s well, a joke.

Racism

How could this not be a theme?  The issue, as was shown with Lancaster, is that it isn’t even remotely handled with seriousness.  The best scene of racism is in the first episode when Tic, George, and Leti are forced to leave a Sundown county before they’re lynched by the racist sheriff.  The anticipation and animosity lead to some serious anxiety and it was a nailbiter.

But after that?  White people say “nigger.”  Then they get, I don’t know, raped or spit on or who knows.  A lot of black people talk back to the cops anyway in the 50′s and that’s cool.

But the real monsters of the series are all black people.  Let’s go through it: 

Tic brutalized women in the Korean War.

Montrose killed the two-spirit person.

Ruby rapes the shop owner.

Diane crushes Christina’s throat.

Ruby literally sheds her flesh in repeatedly gratuitous acts of the grotesque.

Even Ji-Ah, who’s not black, is a monster in the literal sense.  We do see the doctor that experimented on black people, but that’s about 5 minutes at the end of an episode that has a baby’s head on a man’s body so I was too busy laughing at the absurdity to take any real meaning from it.

The truth is, in Lovecraft Country, white people always should do their best to kill or keep black people down.  It definitely doesn’t speak at all to any togetherness or what have you.  Just, well. Magical negroes doing bad stuff because nothing can stop them.

The show misses the chances to show real horror in race.  Hell, the Tulsa Riots are reduced to a backdrop for a confusing book scene.  But then again, Emmett Till becomes a kind of empty reference point that we then see a white woman act out... for some reason? 

Again, the only characters with any chemistry are Ruby and Christina, which is very unfortunate for any number of reasons. As far as a statement that racism is bad goes, I mean. I barely saw it.  If I was a racist I’d be like hell yeah, Lovecraft was right they are dangerous.

Even when people try to indicate the horrors of it like, “Oh, the Korean War scenes are bad because we see how men are forced into the military complex!”  We didn’t see a white officer say “Shoot her, boy,” it was just two black guys killing women with no care at all. And no compeuppance, so that’s cool.

The Music

Sucks.  Thanks Peaky Blinders for making modern music over gif sets a thing.

Conclusion

I sure as hell would never watch it again.  If I can get one other person not to, then maybe it’d be worth it. It’s not a good show.  It’s not “smart,” and there’s no secret subversion in it.  It’s just... bad.

I won’t post on it anymore.  Please, in true Lovecraft fashion, trust me when I say that this show is so bad it cannot be comprehended. 

#lovecraft country

[aion-rsa]

Superman & Lois Episode 5 Review: The Best of Smallville

https://ift.tt/3d3qbkS

This Superman & Lois review contains spoilers.

Superman and Lois Episode 5

This is the first episode of Superman & Lois that maybe felt like it was spinning its wheels a little. To be fair, this entire season has been unfolding at what can best be described as a deliberate pace. It’s an understandable decision since the entire concept of this show is meant to take fans of the Superman mythos pretty far out of their comfort zones, so there’s still a lot of heavy lifting that has to get done each week, especially as we get used to the Kent family, the Cushings, the history of Smallville, and more.

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That isn’t to say that “The Best of Smallville” is a bad episode, or a boring one, or even a rote one (it’s way too early for this show to have any kind of real episodic “formula,” other than those big reveals that it saves for the final moments each week). If anything, this shakes things up a little by adding flashbacks to Clark’s teenage years at key moments in the episode. And those, just like everything else relating to Clark’s history on this show, are handled with real care and reverence for everything that has come before. But I can’t help but feel that several of the beats we get in this episode, from Jonathan continuing to lose to the troubled home life of the Cushings, is stuff we’ve already been getting in previous episodes, all while the Morgan Edge story continues to just kind of lurk around the outskirts, just like the character himself.

Fortunately, this is Superman & Lois we’re talking about, and this show’s core four (not to mention its terrific supporting characters) make every moment worth watching. I have already written endlessly about how truly endearing Tyler Hoechlin’s Clark Kent is, and I’ll continue to do so. But there’s one thing Hoechlin does with Clark that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another Superman actor do quite as effectively, and that’s how he makes Clark’s uncoolness not a put-on or an affectation, but as a genuine component of the “real” Clark Kent.

It’s hard to explain, but hang with me for a minute. It’s generally assumed that any time Clark is being “uncool” or overly earnest about something, it’s part of his “disguise.” And with many actors, especially the legendarily perfect Christopher Reeve, that was absolutely the case. The key to a truly great Clark performance always seems to come in the moments when he lets his guard down, and you realize that this is the “real” person, not the “Clark who has to pretend he isn’t Superman” shine through. Hoechlin does this effortlessly, and as dad-cringe as his entire opening enthusiasm about the Smallville Harvest Festival is, it’s real. He doesn’t have to fake this for his family, it’s really who he is. It’s great and I don’t know how many other leading man types who have played this role over the last 20 years or so who could actually pull this off so easily.

Anyway, that was quite a digression. Sorry about that.

I singled out Jonathan’s struggles this episode for some mild criticism above, if only because we’ve been watching this kid’s life unravel pretty much since the first episode. It is, perhaps, a little TOO convenient that he gets dumped by phone the same moment his brother is setting up his first ever date. And maybe this is the kind of thing they could have saved another episode or so instead of letting it come so soon on the heels of his football struggles.

But both of these kids are just so damn good that it’s tough to fault it. Jordan Elsass makes Jonathan perhaps the most likeable character on this show, even when he should be (as Sarah points out) a completely insufferable jerk. I know there’s speculation out there that Jonathan will be driven to villainy by his pretty ordinary teenage struggles, and I just don’t see it happening. These are both good kids, and even when they screw up, it’s pretty clear that their heads are screwed on straight. I’d just like to see Jonathan catch a break soon, though.

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They’re definitely playing the long game with Jordan, too, and Alex Garfin manages to imbue him with the almost wild-eyed wonder of someone who really just can’t believe his good luck…all without either lording it over or condescending to his suddenly unlucky brother. I’ve always felt that empathy is a secret Kent superpower, and Jordan’s got that by the boatload.

Lois and Chrissy are a surprisingly delightful pairing, and so far this show has managed to resist the rest of the Arrowverse’s tendency to “do a journalism” here, even as we see these two starting to dig a little deeper into whatever Morgan Edge is up to. Still, the fact that Lois literally can’t even write for the Smallville Gazette at the moment isn’t doing my or anyone else’s misgivings that they’re sidelining her any favors. It’s great to see Lois in these other contexts, and Elizabeth Tulloch is nothing short of the best screen Lois this century, but I can’t help but think that there’s something being missed with her story so far. (That being said, her thoroughly annoyed “go faster” to the boys at the Harvest Festival was a terrific, and intimidating fun moment.)

Those flashback sequences, though! Just as I love it that Jon, Jordan, and Sarah are all actually believable as teenagers (coughSmallvillecough), I like that they fully leaned into awkward 15-16 year old beanpole Clark and not some already filled out heartthrob type. Clark leaving home THIS early feels like a slightly new wrinkle for the Superman mythos overall, and I’m especially interested in seeing if we’ll see how some of this developed down the road.

I look forward to seeing Wolé Parks’ Captain Luthor continue to develop, but it would be nice to see if they give him enough screen time soon to give us anything beyond “seething, barely contained rage.” I’m also very curious to see if there’s any nuance they can build into his Lois twist, so that she doesn’t just become another object of fixation for the character. Similarly, it’s time for this story to show us a little more of its hand with the Morgan Edge/X-Kryptonite stuff, because sometimes a slow burn is just a fizzle, y’know?

I appreciate this show’s commitment to its family drama first storytelling, and I get that if we show Superman in action too much it will a) not be as special and b) eat up the FX budget so the moments we DO get won’t look quite as good. But I’d like to see a little more, and I certainly hope that more of Superman’s rogues’ gallery becomes open for business at some point. Yes, I get it, so many of those were utilized on Supergirl already, and I don’t want this show to fall prey to the “villain of the week” tedium that The Flash occasionally slips in to. I’m sure there’s some middle ground that won’t lose what makes this show stand out from its peers.

Metropolis Mailbag

Right out of the gate in this episode we learn that Smallville was established in 1949. It certainly was! While it was clear early in the Superman mythos that he wasn’t from Metropolis, and had grown up on a farm, and Superboy was established as a character in 1945, it wasn’t until 1949 that Clark’s hometown actually got it’s name, in the pages of Superboy #2.

Martha Kent giving Clark the sunstone crystal is a new one. Usually, so much of Clark learning about his heritage is tied exclusively to his father(s). Either the crystal itself calls to him (in which case, it’s Jor-El) or it’s Jonathan telling him the story of how he was found. This is the first time I can think of where it’s Martha really speeding Clark along on his journey to becoming Superman, and it’s about damn time.

On that note, their conversation about Clark being “sent here for a reason” is very much a nod to Glenn Ford’s Pa Kent talking to Jeff East’s young Clark in Superman: The Movie.

I assume he’s leaving here because the sunstone crystal told him to head north so it can build the Fortress of Solitude, but let’s ALSO not forget that Supergirl established early on that Clark was a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the future, so…this might be the time!

Spot anything I missed with these Superman Easter eggs? Let me know in the comments!

The post Superman & Lois Episode 5 Review: The Best of Smallville appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[gifted-burnout-archive]

Jim’s Best Friend

Part Eight - 24 Hours Dedicated to Saint Valentine

Word Count: 2060

Author’s Note: As of last update, I have started a tag list! So, if you would like to be notified whenever this story updates, please let me know!

WARNING:

For previous chapters click here.

February, 2006.

It seemed like the entire office enjoyed Valentine's Day, except you. It had never been something you really looked forward to, Hell the year before you spent it travelling through Spain alone. In hind sight, it was a great idea.

But, the office loved it, especially Pam, and you all sent little notes and stuff to one another, Pam decorated especially, and with Michael out of the office for a corporate meeting in New York, it was at least nice to see everyone in the office happy.

You sat in the kitchen, running through your personal budgets for the month when Dwight appeared, taking a seat beside you. You did your best to ignore him, closing your eyes and counting in your head, trying to add up totals from the months before to guesstimate how to split your money.

"You have yet to receive a gift." He said, and the numbers in your head scrambled themselves up. You let out a sigh, and opened your eyes, looking over at the odd man beside you.

"I don't do Valentine's Day." You said with a strained smile, and looked up as Pam walked towards the kitchen, but seeing Dwight sat at your side she mouthed a 'Sorry' and turned quickly, heading over to Jim's desk to fill him in.

"Yes you do. The past three years you have received and given gifts." Dwight corrected, and you looked back at him.

"Wha- why do you know that? I wasn't even here last Valentine's Day."

"You still got a card." Dwight informed, and you raised an eyebrow. You hadn't been told about that at all.

"And where did it go?" You asked, and Dwight coughed.

"Well, you didn't claim the mail within the 28 days, so I gave it to Pam to shred." Dwight said, and you groaned, collecting your things.

"Dwight, if I wasn't present to see the card on my desk, how would I know I have one? And why are you bringing it up a year later?" You asked as your stood up.

"Well, I needed your help on gift picking, however with this new information, I'll talk to Pam." Dwight decided, and you nodded.

"Yeah, please! And don't shred my mail, maybe?" You suggested, marching out of the kitchen, rubbing the side of your temple. As you sat yourself back down, Jim smirked.

"Dwight really stresses you out." Jim commented, tossing you over a card. You rolled your eyes, opening it up.

Poker Game tonight at my place? Got some friends coming over, and I plan to take every penny I can. Jim xx

"How romantic, Halpert." You rolled your eyes, but you read it over again, hitting the card against your hand a few times as you thought. "Maybe. Trying to weigh out the options of getting laid or getting paid."

"Gatorade, always." Jim responded, just as seriously, and you cracked your first smile of the day. "Ah! There she is." He winked, and leaned over to dial a customer back. You knew what he was doing. The past few weeks had been nothing but Pam planning her wedding, and he needed a distraction. He had even phoned up Brenda, the girl from corporate that you had hooked up with, and gone on a date with her. You both agreed afterwards she was a bit too much to handle.

"Fine. I can help you set up." You agreed, and Jim held a thumbs up to you, and you quickly walked over to Pam.

Her usual cheery disposition was replaced with a face not unlike yours, and you pouted.

"You can't join the dark side, Pam. The trio needs a Valentine's Day fanatic or we'll be thrown off balance." You popped on of the sweets in your mouth, and she sighed.

"I've just had to sit here all day, watching Phyllis collect a garden and accompanying petting zoo without so much as a rose from Roy." She sighed, and you reached over, squeezing her hand.

"Maybe you'll get a secret admirer?" You wiggled your eyebrows, and she laughed a little. "Right, I've made you smile, my job is done. Three hours left Pam, then we can flee this place." You promised her, heading back to your seat and opening up your email, sending a quick message to Jim:

You need to be Pam's secret admirer... Do you know how to make paper flowers? Xx

You sent it over and picked up your phone as it rang. "Dunder Mifflin, this is Y/N speaking. How can I assist you today?" You nodded and started helping your customer when an email pinged through.

Not a clue... Help me????

You looked up and saw Jim giving you puppy dog eyes. You sighed and nodded in defeat, taking out a piece of paper and beginning to fold it the way Pam had taught you years ago. Jim wrote out a little card to accompany the 'rose' you had managed to make, and you even borrowed Phyllis' new rose perfume to spritz on the paper.

When Pam disappeared for a bathroom break right before the end of the day, you snatched the note from Jim and rushed over, placing the two items onto Pam's keyboard, quickly returning to your seat and starting back on an order confirmation.

The smile on her face when she got back was more than enough to keep you happy for the rest of the day, in spite of Dwight's banging on about being the new boss and the three rejected calls that happened in a row. Pam played with her paper flower until Roy walked in, saying something about 'the best sex of your life', and Pam left with a tired expression and look to you that just said everything.

You finished off an email, and glanced over at Jim. "Ready to go?" You asked, and he nodded, putting down the phone, the pair of you packing up very quickly.

"Where are you two rushing away?" Dwight asked, and if anyone else had said it, it would have come off as funny. But Dwight's face was expressionless, and his tone accusatory. "You realise that if you are in an Office relationship you have to disclose it to HR."

The remaining colleagues glanced over, and you and Jim shared a look before bursting out in laughter.

"Good one, Dwight. Man, didn't think you could be funny." You said through chuckles, pulling on your coat.

"I'm serious."

"Y/N and I have been carpooling for months Dwight. Why is it all of a sudden suspicious?" Jim raised an eyebrow.

"It's Valentine's Day, you are both single."

"Jim is having a poker night, I'm going along to help set up early. Goodnight Dwight." You said, spinning on your heel. The pair of you left the office and made it down to Jim's red Sedan, and you jumped in the front seat.

After a trip to the store to gather a few essentials, you finally turned to Jim in the car, taking a moment before speaking.

"Jim."

"Yes Y/N?" He asked, slowing down as you reached a red light.

"I should have asked earlier, but who is coming along tonight?" You questioned, shuffling through your handbag and lifting out a small black notebook. Jim looked over, and looked again.

"No... Is that..." Jim started, the light switching to green and he started driving again.

"Jim, please?" You begged, and he laughed.

"Why does it matter?" He teased, and you slumped back in your seat.

"Because I've slept with at least six of your friends..." You admitted, and Jim looked over. "Eyes on the road!" You squeaked, and Jim quickly turned his attention back to his driving, turning right and pulling in on a side road.

"Six?!" He said finally, more than surprised. "Last time it was two!" He laughed through his confusion. "I have like ten friends, Y/N. How have you slept with more than half of my social circle?"

—

"This..." you held a book up to the camera, a small black moleskin notebook. "This is The Notebook..." you sighed, and took a deep breath. "So, I want to say first  that I don't discuss my romantic escapades with the office, for obvious reasons... And second, that I do not do office romances. Never have, never will. They always end up with awkwardness and rumours and sides and I don't like it... But while I don't sleep with people I work with..." You say the book on your lap and looked up, fidgeting a little. "Look, when I was about a year into my time here, my mom passed away from cancer... And then my cat had to be put down two months later and friends moved away. Overall, it was a terrible time. And, within my grief, I ended up at a bar one night, bumped into Phyllis who was with some family, her nephew Jordan and her sister. We all got talking, and Phyllis left with Jordan's mom and well, long story short, I slept with Phyllis' nephew. And then, a few weeks later, Oscar's cousin who dropped by... And then Toby's brother..." you shivered, and ran a hand through your hair. "And then Jim and Pam joined the office and suddenly there were so many more people who were my age and..."

"I started The Notebook after I slept with two of Pam's friends and three of Jim's, I had started to lose track of everyone. So, in here is every romantic or sexual interaction I have had with anyone who knows people in the office. Hookups, makeouts, drunken kisses, proposed first dates, all of it. And in situations like these, I can remind myself about the people I am re-meeting, and be prepared to answer weird questions." You flicked through it as you spoke. "It keeps everything in order. No chances of repeat hookups, and 99% of the time, the next time I see them we are just friendly. Like... If Pam and Jim are the friend, I'm the benefit." You laughed, slipping the book away. You glanced up at the camera.

"Also, just want to point out Todd Packer is not on the list... Fucking hate that guy."

—

"Come on Jim, please?" You gave him the big puppy dog eyes, and he laughed a little more.

"Only if you tell me whether or not you've slept with them as we go." Jim offered, and you nodded in defeat. "Fine. Tom."

"Yes."

"Okay, Hugh."

"Yep."

"Arnold?"

"I made out with him, but nothing more."

"Right. Ewan?"

"Uh..." You scoured through the notebook. "He asked me out once, but no sex." You clarified, and Jim was watching you with a smirk on his face. "Anybody else?"

"Monica and Stacey too, and Patrick might turn up. And Mark too." Jim finished, and you nodded.

"Mark, yes. Stacey, no, she's straight. Monica, almost, and Patrick, twice." You confirmed, and Jim's eyes widened.

"You slept with my roommate? And Monica?" You Just kept blowing his mind. You giggled.

"Well, you know that barbecue you had like two years ago? I almost slept with Monica but Mark walked in, and then one thing led to another and I ended up sleeping with him... And Patrick..." You smiled when mentioning the last name, and Jim noticed.

"He's been asking about you... How did you end up sleeping with him twice?" Jim asked, smiling as you blushed a little.

"Nothing major... We slept together once before you came to the office, by chance... Then met at your birthday party and... yeah..."

"So, you've slept with almost all of my friends."

"Hey, I've slept with Pam's cousin, you don't get pity here. Family trumps friends." You defended, and Jim let out a chuckle, starting the car back up and finishing the drive to his house. After a few minutes of silence, Jim spoke up.

"It might be too soon, and I don't want to be forward, but Patrick broke up with a long term girlfriend recently, maybe you should try talking with him? He seems to be interested in you." Jim suggested, his eyes flicking over to gauge your reaction. The blush on your cheeks gave him his response, and he pulled into the driveway of his house with a smile on his face. "I know you hate Valentine's Day, but who knows? Maybe this one'll be good."

--

Tags: @imsuperawkward​

#au #jim halpert #michael scott #pam beesly #dwight schrute #the office #jim halpert x reader #jim x reader #office au #reader #reader insert #reader is female #romance #friendship #pam and jim #jim and pam #slow burn #from season 1 #fanfiction #fanfic #fandom #john krasinski #steve carell #jenna fischer #rainn wilson #jackryanplz #part eight

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