#or watch each movie four times in a row with a different commentary each time

[earnestly-endlessly]

Could you please rec cherik fics where they still have powers but being mutant is well accepted? (Kind of like the Daycare Verse by brillingspoons) THANK U SO MUCH YOURE INCREDIBLE

Hi anon, of course I have a list for you. I am so sorry for the delay. I have been super busy lately with work and home renovations, but I’m back and I have a looong list for you. Now, the nature of x-men as a parallel of the very real fight of minority groups for civil rights makes it pretty hard to find fics where everyone accepts mutants.That’s actually why I love the x-men, because they represent the fight of those who are ostracised. So, some of these might have some social commentary, but the main focus does not lie there. Also, if you love the Daycare Verse check out pocky_slash’s fics (who actually wrote the majority of the Daycare Verse). 

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Cherik ´Still Have Powers Modern AU´ Fic Recs

irreconcilable differences (make for surprisingly good bedfellows) – pocky_slash

Summary: Tonight on The Evening Report with Malcolm Stevens, noted geneticist and mutant equality proponent Dr. Charles Xavier faces off with the infamous mutant rights activist Magneto in a live televised debate over the Genetic Nondiscrimination Act.

(At least, if they can stop flirting long enough to stay on topic.)

Words and Pictures – pocky_slash

Summary: When Lorna's powers manifest early, Charles Xavier's mutant picture books are the perfect teaching tool. Erik just hadn't expected the author to be so young. Or attractive. Or available.

For the Record – endingthemes

Summary: As prominent figures in the mutant rights movement, activists Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr are pretty much household names. When a romance scandal between them breaks, their celebrity reaches new heights, and though the increased exposure is great, there’s a big problem -- the two of them are just friends.

Too bad no one believes them.

Runs in the Family – Anonysquirrel (chibirisuchan)

Summary: Alex knew his own reputation. Hell, he'd started some of his own reputation, because it kept some of the smarter thugs off his back. Everyone knew Alex's reputation. There was no way Hank didn't know his reputation, but he'd brought Alex into a house with some really expensive things and a lot of innocent little kids and his too-friendly, too-harmless dad.

But clearly Hank hadn't told his family anything about Alex, just like he hadn't told Alex anything about his family. At least, not about the brain-breaking parts of his family.

"I didn't know where to start," Hank said, for the dozenth time.

Featuring mpreg!Charles in a Kiss The Cook apron, overprotective!Erik in wet black leather, and baked goods. Lots and lots of baked goods.

(Another segment of this series is posted under the Cookie Cutter fic collection - thanks again, Takmarierah!)

Impulse Decisions – listerinezero

Summary: Erik wakes up in Las Vegas with a hell of a hangover, a telepath in his bed, and a ring on his finger. Now what?

You Show Me Yours - endingthemes

Summary: When Erik receives nudes in the middle of the night from an unknown number, he's confused and mildly amused. He doesn't expect it to turn into an actual conversation...with feelings.

As if that's not baffling enough, his friend's brother ends up crashing at his place, further complicating everything.

Some Such Place (The Big Screen Classics Remix) - Pocky_Slash

Summary: Erik's spent the last eighteen months having lengthy socio-political conversations and casual sex with Charles Xavier after seeing Monday matinees at a dingy little independent movie theatre in the Village. That doesn't mean they're friends. Or that Erik should have any say in what Charles is going to do with his future.

(At least, that's what Erik keeps telling himself.)

Into Your Tar, Honey  - tomato_greens

Summary: Really, Alex doesn’t know why he’s in the damn class.

(Or, the one in which Charles teaches an online Introduction to Biology course, and Alex reads more than he expected to.)

Heli Cases - Black_Betty

Summary: "Heli Cases" is a program on PBS whose aim is to educate on the rapidly increasing occurrence of genetic mutation in the general populous by breaking the complex science down into palatable, easy to digest pieces.

It is also the only thing that helps Erik get his fussy daughter to fall asleep.

(Featuring Dadneto, baby Lorna and the struggles of single fatherhood, and Charles as the host of a late night show about genetics.)

Bound - FuryRed

Summary: Is there anything worse than someone else’s wedding? Well, perhaps your sister’s wedding- where the groom just has to invite his boss and that man just happens to be your ex-boyfriend; a person you had an extremely passionate and tumultuous relationship with that ended badly.

Charles hadn’t seen Erik for a year by the time Raven had told him about the wedding. He wasn’t looking forward to the occasion, particularly when Raven explained that they would be celebrating the event with a two-week extravaganza at a luxury hotel, meaning that Charles would be forced to spend a whole fortnight with the man who he’d given everything to; the man who had ultimately broken his heart…

An Exercise in Frustration – ikeracity

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr's latest critically-acclaimed film Shame features a full-frontal nudity scene. His long-suffering husband Charles is really very peeved about it.

Eyes on Fire - Black_Betty

Summary: Every once in a while, fashion tycoon Emma Frost invites her favourite male models over to entertain her. And by "entertain", I mean she makes them have kinky consensual sex in front of her....Emma never touches herself when she watches, but she always has a glass of wine with her. Emma likes it best when they eventually forget that she's watching.

Charles and Erik meet each other through Emma...

(I've taken some liberties with the prompt, but all the sex is still there, and it's wholly consensual...and gradually, becomes more than just sex...)

Order Up - ikeracity

Summary: Charles has a terrible habit of multitasking, and that is probably why he absentmindedly tells the pizza man that he loves him when hanging up.

Then the pizza man says it back. And Charles is pretty much smitten from there.

Some Assembly Required - manic_intent

Summary: "Alex and Hank were two teenagers who frequently fight in school. One fight got so bad that the principal called in their fathers (as both came from single-parent families)/ guardians for a conference. This was how Charles and Erik meet."

Limited Release - rageprufrock

Summary: When Alex Summers broke out of supermax to rescue his stupid kid brother, he had no idea it was going to be so fucking complicated.

Math Reasons – pearl_o, pocky_slash

Summary: "Mom says Erik always knows what he wants, it just sometimes takes him a little while to actually realize it," Ruth said.

Charles fell in love with Erik the first night they met, the first week of freshman year. Two years of friendship, adventures, arguments, hijinks, secrets, and summer visits later, Erik is starting to catch up.

It’s kind of our whole thing – pearl_o, pocky_slash

Summary: After two years of best friendship, Charles and Erik thought they knew everything there was to know about each other. They're surprised, then, when their first summer as a couple reveals that they have a lot to learn about each other and themselves.

PART 2 of Math Reasons

A Nice Boy (The Family Matters Edition) – pocky_slash

Summary: Erik's not sure whether the problem is that he doesn't want his parents to meet Charles or that he doesn't want Charles to meet his parents. Either way, he never invites Charles to brunch. Why should he? It's not like they're dating.

apple season – pocky_slash

Summary: "You know," Charles says while they're sitting around the kitchen table reading the paper, "You should take Anya apple picking."

"Don't you mean 'we?'" Erik responds. The silence that follows is enough to make him re-examine his own apple picking memories a little more closely. Uneven ground littered with apples, tree roots, holes, and narrow passage between rows of orchard trees. "Oh," he says.

rooms/shares – pocky_slash

Summary: Erik is single, working a cube job he hates, letting his master's degree in mutant studies collect dust, and living on his best friend's couch. When she kicks him out, he's forced to trawl Craigslist for the least-offensive rooming option within his meagre budget. He never expects a response from the persnickety, high maintenance ad he replies to as a joke, but it's possible this too-nice apartment and mysteriously absent roommate might be the answer to all four of his problems.

Continue firm and constant – aesc

Summary: Moira hasn't seen her old partner in saving the world from threats human and intergalactic, Erik Lehnsherr, for a few years. When she finally does see him again, she finds a man different from the one who's been with her down in the dark and the dirt and the blood... or maybe he isn't so different after all.

Tough little baby telepath – aesc, pearl_o

Five Part Series

Summary: Teenage telepath Charles Xavier takes a job as a consultant, working with prickly police detective Erik Lehnsherr. Charles is used to being on his own and taking care of himself; he has no reason to think that his relationship with this stern, icy man is going to change any of that.

Frosted hearts – aesc, palalife

Summary: Emma Frost has 99 problems, but a date ain't one. Specifically, she has no time to play the dating game--which is fine with her, because she'd much rather run it instead. From a set of sleek, silver and white offices on Fifth Avenue and with her trusty, stylish, and silent partner Janos Quested, Emma has built Frosted Hearts into New York City's premiere dating service, built on the principle that money, and a sufficiently rigorous psionic scan, can, in fact, buy you love.

Somewhere in Frosted Hearts's server is one Charles Xavier, genius and geneticist, with the kind of nicely-starched good looks that sell well on brochures for New England prep schools. He's also a telepath who's decided to give up pursuing serious relationships and instead spend his thirties doing what he should have done as a teenager: have a lot of sex with random people. Fortunately for him, Erik Lehnsherr, metallokinetic and engineering executive, has absolutely no time in his heart or his schedule for anything more serious than... well, absolutely nothing romantic at all.

Mercy of the Fallen (the AirDrop Security Update 2.0) – pocky_slash

Summary: Erik Lehnsherr feels defined by his past sins and after years of acting against his own moral compass, he's finally struck out on his own. He's his own boss now, and determined to work hard to help the mutant community and make up for years of doing someone else's dirty work.

Complicating this is Charles Xavier, mutant advocate, genetics professor, unfairly attractive telepath, and owner of the coffee shop below Erik's office. Erik may not think he deserves to be a part of the community he's thrown himself into helping, but Charles has other ideas on the matter, and he's determined to do everything in his power to make Erik see himself as a force for good.

you follow and i’ll lead – pearl_o, pocky_slash

Summary: When Charles discovers how frustrated and self-conscious his best friend Erik is about his ignorance about sex, he's eager to volunteer to help teach him and practice. Charles might not have any more direct experience than Erik, but he does have a telepath's mind full of accidentally picked-up fantasies and memories, as well as knowledge of a few dirty books - and more importantly, he's been madly in love with Erik for years. This seems like a brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he can't pass up.

Now he just needs to manage to keep his feelings in check, and not ruin their friendship forever.

Snail Mail – pocky_slash

Summary: Alex isn't thrilled when his boss, Erik, starts sending him to hand deliver notes to Erik's husband up at the university--that is, until he sees the Professor's hot new TA, and suddenly, the notes can't come fast enough. If only Alex could work up the guts to ask him out....

this is life (and everything’s all right) – pocky_slash

Summary: Edie Lehnsherr came into Charles' life long before he ever heard Erik Lehnsherr's name, and her death left a gaping hole in the lives of everyone in Charles' family. As the first Purim without her approaches, he begins to get creative in his efforts to bring everyone out of their grief. Kitchen creativity, however, is not quite his strength....

Watching the Detectives – Clocks

Summary: Detectives Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr are good friends and colleagues. However, when they go undercover at a Christmas party to nab a prime suspect, Erik keeps reminding himself to stay professional and ignore feelings of unexpected jealousy.

Student/Teacher Relations – PoorMedea

Summary: As a TA, Charles knows he can't get involved in all his students' lives. He needs to keep professional boundaries, to make sure that he's an authority figure. But when he accidentally finds out how complicated Erik Lehnsherr's home life is, he suddenly finds that distance hard to maintain.

Fill for the prompt: Erik is the teen dad of adorable baby!Lorna. I just want teen!Erik being a dad, with adorable interactions between him and his baby. Angst is good too since there's always going to be some in such situations, but mainly I want to see teen dad Erik being an awesome dad who loves the hell out of his daughter despite whatever else may be going on.

Conspiracy of Kisses – Alaceron

Summary: Seven-year-old Erik needs to keep his telepathic best friend Charles from finding out that he wants to kiss him. But that's okay, because he has a plan - he'll put on a tinfoil hat.

Favorite Mistake – endingthemes

Summary: Charles Xavier doesn’t think anything of it when he sneaks out without even saying goodbye to his latest one-night stand. What he doesn’t expect is to walk into his new position in the Xavier Industries marketing department and find that his latest hook-up is now his new boss.

Never Take Biology for Granite – ikeracity, pangea

Summary: Charles is an internet celebrity who garners his fame from posting educational, in-depth videos about a different animal every week, though for some reason his viewers are always more interested in his sex life with his geologist husband, Erik, who happens to frown heavily upon all living things.

Except for Charles, of course, whom he's missed these past couple days while attending a geologic convention--though considering the subject material of Charles' newest video, he's wishing he would've stayed away longer.

This Is Not Comedy – baehj2915

Summary: Written for amarriageoftrueminds' prompt for a Cherik version of Louis CK's tangent about the fuckability of Ewan McGregor.

Naturally the similarities end there. I made this about Erik's full on public lust-filled gay revelation, and the chaos that spirals from there.

Snowed In – dedkake

Summary: Charles and Erik have a one night stand, but a blizzard traps them in Erik's apartment afterward.

#cherik fic recs #fic recs #still have powers AU #cherik #asks #earnestly answers #as always I can't make short lists #sorry about that #long post

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on The Witness

[no spoilers... this game would be nearly impossible to spoil in text]

Where do I even start?

I guess one thing to know about The Witness is that you can watch the famous 9-minute tracking shot from Nostalghia - where Oleg Yankovsky tries to walk a candle from one end of a drained pool to the other without extinguishing it - in its entirety. (I think it’s the entirety, I left before the clip was over; yeah, Jon, I get it.)

How do we interpret this? I haven’t watched Nostalghia, but I know that scene. Every film major knows that scene. Tony Zhou cited it in discussing lateral tracking shots, how they emphasize environment and create emotional distance from humans in the frame, and how Tarkovsky uses this to make the sequence lonely and arduous. Kyle Kallgren cited it in discussing how YouTube makes critique of certain types of art difficult, and Content ID essentially decides for us what film as a medium is even for.

Jon Blow plays the clip in full with no commentary - or, rather, the game itself is the commentary. There’s a sequence in Indie Game: The Movie where Jon Blow expresses some pain about how his game Braid was received, how he felt no one who played it ever really understood everything he was trying to say with it. That feeling might be ameliorated if he weren’t such a constituionally obtuse motherfucker.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between Yankovsky’s dedication to a task that is simple yet difficult and the game’s puzzles, built, as they are, around complexity-through-simplicity. Except, Yankovsky’s Andrei has a personal investment carrying this candle, one Tarkovsky has spent the entire film setting up. I was about five hours into The Witness when I found this clip - more than twice the duration of Nostalghia - and I still didn’t know why I was solving the game’s puzzles or what they were trying to communicate.

Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between the patience it encourages in its audience and the calm, meditative mode all The Witness’ allusions to Buddhism are seemingly on about, to give yourself over to the time investment the game demands of you. Except, Nostalghia asks you to spend nine minutes thinking about one thing; zen Buddhism encourages you to think of nothing; The Witness asks you to spend between fifteen and forty hours thinking about a zillion things. It is not a game about clearing your mind, it’s about filling your mind up. There is little continuity between the thoughtless peace of meditation or Yankovsky’s emotional collapse and the game’s intended “aha” moments.

But the ambiguity, the contextlessness of the scene’s inclusion, means you can’t be sure whether it’s contradictory. If we assume it’s about dedication, and we find a flaw in that worldview, maybe the problem is that we didn’t assume it was about meditation. And vice versa. If it fails to communicate, maybe the problem is us.

The only thing this scene communicates for sure is that Jon Blow wants me to know he watches Tarkovsky.

Jon Blow wants you to trust he knows what he’s doing. That the game is saying something. He also never, ever wants to tell you what it is. (If he could just tell you, he wouldn’t have spent eight years making it into a game, I suppose.) But this operates on completely opposite rules to the puzzles. Puzzles in The Witness are maze-drawing panels with increasing numbers of rules, all conveying their rules nonverbally, through gameplay. You see a symbol you don’t recognize, or a shape you don’t know how to draw, and you try things out, you make assumptions, you fail repeatedly, and then something works, the panel lights up, and you know you got it right. Now you understand what the symbol means.

The theming doesn’t work that way. Whatever theory you have as to what the game’s about, there will be no moment of clarification. Blow has an incredible talent, in fact, for constructing imagery that is hilariously blunt yet still ambiguous. As with Braid, where he crammed a straightforward narrative about memory and regret with allusions to quantum physics and the atomic bomb, The Witness references Einstein, the Buddha, Richard Feynman, romantic poetry, tech culture, game design, and - most of all - itself.

I realize I’m dancing around the subject here, because what the gameplay is (or isn’t) in service of is far easier to talk about than the gameplay itself. The Witness is a big island full of touch screens where you draw lines on grids. That’s it. The island is dense with structures and biomes, impossibly having a desert, a swamp, and three different kinds of forest which appear to be in four different seasons. What it doesn’t have is any reason why you’re there or a justification for solving ~600 line-drawing puzzles other than because Jon Blow wants you to. I was wrong in my video from 2015 to call The Witness narrative-based; the game contains narrative but it is not a narrative game. The island is very pretty, meticulously crafted, and not trying in the slightest to look like a real place. It is Myst minus everything people like about Myst.

Absent a reason for my character - if I’m even playing a “character” - to solve the puzzles, why am I, the player, solving them? The short answer is, “Because they’re there. You knew what you were buying. You solve the puzzles because it’s a puzzle game, do I gotta draw you a diagram?” (No, you need me to draw 600 diagrams.) That is unsatisfactory because the island is clearly more than an elaborate menu system.

Do I solve them because they’re interesting? I mean, they’re not bad, if you’re into Sudoku or, like... cereal boxes. In and of themselves, they’re not my cuppa. People told me about a repeated sense of epiphany the game provoked for them, but that’s not the way I experienced it. Every puzzle is so carefully tutorialized that I never felt I was making an intuitive leap. There is no lateral thinking in The Witness, it is strictly longitudinal. You get a row of puzzle panels, and you take them one by one (you are, in fact, prevented from jumping ahead), each one building on what it taught you. And they get hard, certainly, but each is the logical progression of the one before. And each is a marvel of nonverbal communication, but that’s more Jon being clever than it is me. This is not to judge people who did get a feeling of discovery; one person’s “aha” moment is another’s “yeah, Jon, I get it.”

(Aside: I did get a proper “aha” moment when I came to a panel that could be solved two ways. It controlled a moving platform; draw one line, the platform moves right, draw the other and it moves left. And I thought, “Huh, I guess I get it, but those shapes seem kind of arbitrary.” But then, while it was moving, I realized the platform itself mirrored what I had drawn; the two designs were what shape the platform would take when connected with each endpoint! And I went “oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s clever, that‘s really clever.” My first epiphany. It was the most Myst-like the game got, it was clearly not the kind of experience Jon Blow was interested in recreating much, and it took place 7 hours in.)

Do I solve them because I’m compelled? In the first play sessions, I asked myself several times, “Do I even like this?” The game is often tedious and frustrating and I regularly muttered “fuck off, Jon.” But I kept playing. I got annoyed when people interrupted me. I got a hideous case of Tetris effect. They’re not the kind of puzzles you can spend the day thinking through, like you would with Myst or Riven; they’re too abstract to visualize without them right in front of you. And the world is pretty but it’s not a place I wish I could visit, like I would with, again, Myst or Riven. But I kept going back. I solved puzzles less because I found pleasure in finishing them than I found displeasure in them being unfinished. Jon Blow has given talks on how game design focused on being “addictive” is basically evil - his word, not mine. And yet... it felt more like I was playing his game because I was hooked than because I was enjoying myself.

Do I solve them because I trust Jon Blow? Because I believe this will all amount to something? Jon certainly expects me to trust him. The game blares PROFUNDITY AHEAD constantly. (I remind you it quotes the Buddha.) But, in the years since Braid, I have grown less impressed with Jon Blow’s “art game genius” shtick. One fun bit about playing The Witness so late is finally reading all the discourse, and, well before finishing the game, I had read the thoughts of Andrew Plotkin, and Liz Ryerson, and Andi McClure - all of whom are brilliant - so I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. What’s surprised me is, having gotten to the first ending - not the secret ending - what the game is up to still isn’t clear. There are enough allusions to heady ideas that you can infer some stuff, but the default ending - while pretty enough - adds nothing and reveals nothing. And getting the True Ending means completing the In the Hall of the Mountain King section, something many will never find and precious few will ever complete. (Debating whether I’m going to even try.) If Jon Blow wants you to trust that he’s going somewhere with this, he makes you wait a long time before finding out if it’s worth it. [EDIT: turns out the secret ending comes after a different set of obscure puzzles than Hall of the Mountain King.]

Which leads me back to my original conclusion: I am solving the puzzles because Jon Blow told me to.

I suspect the arc Jon wants is for me to begin solving puzzles because I want to know what they’re in service of, what point Jon is trying to make, and then spend so long on them that I forget about the destination and just wrap myself up in the work, and, after dozens of hours on the hardest of the hard puzzles, Jon will finally reveal that the point he was making was about the labor I have just done. That he couldn’t tell me what it was for until I’d already done it. That the labor was its own reward. And how much you like The Witness is going to depend on whether or not you feel ripped off.

The overall impression The Witness left me with was less of meditation than discipline. (I have joked that playing The Witness feels like being in a D/s relationship with Jon Blow and not knowing the safe word.) Jon presents a simple concept and then expects you to solve every. single. permutation. of that concept. You do the work to find out what it’s about, and then what it’s about is the work. That game is about itself. The subject of The Witness is solving The Witness. It’s about purity of design, about simplicity, about slowly mastering a set of skills. (That these skills are neither inherently pleasurable to perform nor applicable in any other context seems not to matter; the point is, you learned them.) It’s hard not to read a game fixated on the beauty of its own design as all kinds of smug.

I allowed myself to be spoiled on the True Ending, and it seems, in the eleventh hour, if you draw lines til your fingers bleed, the game makes room for self-critique, questioning whether all this dedication to design actually is, in any way, meaningful or useful to us. Which, just a little bit, smacks of an artist spending two years making a sculpture of himself, chiseled to make him look a perfect Olympian beauty, only to label it “EGOISM.” Ooo. Make you think.

I suspect, in the end, I played it to (partial) completion because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily buy Jon Blow’s hype, but his hype is intriguing. As a portrait of a certain mindset, a monomaniacal obsession with design for design’s sake, the folk-religion of salvation through technology, and the critique of same, it is fascinating. I know people - smart people - who genuinely love this game, and, if the above is any indication, I clearly love talking about it. I have no regrets.

But, word of advice: if you don’t a) love the puzzles, or b) love the discourse, just walk away. Everything will be fine.

#capsule review #Adventure Games #the witness

[politicalprof]

2019 in books:

David McCullough, 1776: A highly accessible, if somewhat naive, depiction of the year that defined the prospects for American independence. I wouldn’t go there for deep, critical analysis. But for a story of a year, it is well done.

Michael Palin, Erebus: HMS Erebus was a British naval vessel that spent much of its career in Arctic and Antarctic exploration. If you are interested in Victorian era explorations of hard places, a fascinating read.

Emilio Corsetti III, 35 Miles from Shore: The story of an airline crash in the early 1970s in the Caribbean. What happened, why, how, who survived and what we learned. Interesting if not brilliant.

Raymond Thorp, Crow Killer: Old-fashioned tale of the inspiration behind the Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson. As much fantasy as history. But it offers a flavor of a time and a subgroup few Americans would know.

James Corey, Caliban’s War: The second book of “The Expanse” series. The protomolecule is working its mojo, and Earth, Mars and the Belters are none too happy with one another. A fun read of a massive space opera.

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing: Set in the context of the collapsing Eastern Front during WWII, this story proceeds from the fractured point of view of the Germans who are about to be turned into refugees fleeing oncoming Soviet forces. The book, notably, does not make these Germans sources of sympathy: the mood is dissonant and disordered. A real piece of literature.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: Because who doesn’t want a point-of-view account of a key counselor to Henry VIII, one who rose to extraordinary wealth and power despite his humble birth and then managed the, how shall we say, removal of Kathrine as Queen? Replaced by Anne Boleyn? Who wouldn’t want to read it? It’s excellent, by the way.

James Corey, Abaddon’s Gate: Book three of The Expanse, and the protomolecule has remade humanity’s relationship to the universe. But we’ll probably screw that up, too. Another good story, filled with actual thought about the problems of space travel and space living.

MIchael Krondl, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice: Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam each in their turn dominated the global spice trade -- a trade that was one of the main stimuli for early colonialism and imperial conquest, and which strongly influenced the rise of the modern corporation as a linch-pin of global capitalism. The book is not as good as it should be, but the story is one that few people know, but should.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies: Hey, it’s time to get rid of Anne Boleyn everyone! Or, at least, to separate her head from her body. And let’s manage the English Reformation, too ... all just a few years before losing our own head. Welcome to the early/middle 1500s in England everyone!

Leigh Perry, A Skeleton in the Family: Who doesn’t have a skeleton living in their house who helps solve mysteries. I mean, who doesn’t?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: So my son has started reading Harry Potter. So I have started reading Harry Potter. I liked this book: it’s tight, it’s focused, it’s a fun read. I see the appeal.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The answer to the questions: “What if the angels and demons charged with over-seeing Earth as humans go from the Garden of Eden to Armageddon decide that they like Earth and don’t want Armageddon to happen (even if their allies do)? And what if the Anti-Christ were raised in a perfectly mundane family in a perfectly mundane English village? How might it all turn out?” To delightful and funny effect.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Meh. Okay. Not as good as book one. But still a good story.

Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America: A broad pastiche of events surrounding one of the many civil rights cases of the 1940s and 50s: the abuses and murders of several African American men accused of raping a white woman in Lakeland, FL, in 1949. With a whole lot of associated discussions of other cases, the NAACP, corrupt and criminal law enforcement, race riots, and the like. A good read. And how can it be that the bastard George HW Bush, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to fill a seat once held by the staggering legal figure that was Thurgood Marshall. Shameful is the only word.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Certainly better than the Chamber of Secrets. A darker turn. But beginning to get padded as readers demanded “more” if not “better.”

James Corey, Cibola Burn: Book 4 of The Expanse ... and I didn’t like it. It seemed like filler, a book written to a contract deadline. Maybe it will pay off in the end. But another one like that and I’m not going to care.

Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up: Did you know our oldest known ancestor, Lucy, probably died by falling out of a tree? If stories about how people have messed things up, have suffered both intentional and unintentional consequences, turn you on, do I ever have the book for you. Schadenfreude much?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Dear lord is this book long. Why? No doubt because the fans wanted it to be. But it is as gratuitously padded as any book I have ever read. It’s okay. But I wasn’t particularly impressed. Perhaps another six Quidditch matches would have helped ....

Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: Thought the HBO miniseries was scary? It was tame. I mean: the Soviets, with their level of “technical prowess” and their industrial “quality control checks” ran the facility. Heck, Chernobyl wasn’t even their first disaster. Let’s just put it this way: the actual fuel piles in each of the FOUR Chernobyl reactors were so big that: 1) different sections had different characteristics, and didn’t all operate at the same rates or temperatures; and 2) the monitoring equipment couldn’t record how all of the pile was operating at any time. Happy now? Russia still has 10 Chernobyl-style reactors in operation. Enjoy your good night’s sleep everyone!

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Yes, yes: I know. This isn’t Order of the Phoenix. Well, I read Order of the Phoenix many years ago, and thought it was deeply annoying. A pile of words with little point. A way to keep the audience happy with long passages about very little.

Meanwhile, I, like my son, roared through Half-Blood Prince. A ripping good tale. Much tighter than the last several of the series.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A fine read. A bit slow getting going: let’s go here! Let’s go there! Let’s recap the plot! But after the first 1/3 or so, the story got moving and I enjoyed it. Didn’t expect great literature; didn’t get great literature. But then again, I deeply appreciate how much pleasure my son got from this, and how excited my daughter is to engage with it. If it hadn’t been conceived and written, it seems like there’d be a Harry Potter sized hole in the universe.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods: In all honesty, I didn’t really like the first 2/3 of this book: too many tangents; too many sub-stories for the sake of sub-stories. And I’m still not sure I think it was a great book. But I really enjoyed the last third of it, and there were moments, vignettes, and sentences that truly blew me away. So I am glad I stayed with it.

Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade: A sci fi story of soldiers apparently engaged in a war with Mars who are transported to the battlefield as beams of light. One gets unhinged from time. I am not sure it was worth the work, and I came to understand it was based on a short story and so, at times, it seemed a bit one-trick pony-ish. But it had its share of moments.

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: A bit slow going at first, but it grows more compelling as it moved forward. This is the story of the 1936 crew (rowing) team at the University of Washington that went to Berlin and won the gold medal as Adolf Hitler watched. An interesting story about crew as a sport (about which I knew basically nothing), and life in Depression-era Washington state -- with a little, somewhat gratuitous, commentary about life in Nazi Germany layered in. One takeaway? The actor Hugh Laurie’s father was the lead oarsman on the British crew at Berlin in 1936. Hugh Laurie rowed crew at Cambridge as well.

James Corey, Nemesis Games: The next in the Expanse series. Much more enjoyable than the last one, but still a bit strained. One heck of a plot “twist.” A perfectly lovely way to relax; didn’t change my life. Some interesting character twists. But also a lot of “here are some giant developments (a lot of giant stuff) that give us lots of things to write about going forward!”

Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons: the story of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Interesting behind the scenes look at how the mission got funded, planned and implemented. Accessible in terms of the explanations; thick with bureaucratic story-telling and summary. It turns out this stuff is really, really hard. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.

And to end the year, I am reading: Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal: What if 13 year old Jesus had a buddy who, 2000 years later, wrote a gospel that filled in those missing years of Joshua’s (as Biff calls Jesus) life? Well, here’s your answer.

[meggannn]

the itsv commentary is so full of great facts and bts info so i wanted to write down all my favorite parts, but i just ended up writing down anything that was interesting, which was honestly most of it. four thousand words later i ended up with their commentary on practically half the movie. i’ve put the interesting or funny bits that i jotted down behind a cut if anyone is interested.

this commentary audio had Phil Lord (co-writer, producer), Chris Miller (producer), Bob Persichetti (co-director), Peter Ramsay (co-director), Rodney Rothman (co-director, co-writer), but it was kind of difficult to tell who was talking most of the time, so i didn’t include names on who said what, unless I knew for certain who was talking.

The first Miles sticker in the film is a “glitch” flashing on the Sony Pictures Animation logo. “Already putting his stamp on the movie.”

RIPeter is meant to be an amalgamation of all the Spider-Man we know, “good and bad” (as the dance happens, someone corrects him:) “Good and GREAT.”

(“I’ve got an excellent theme song, and a... so-so popsicle.”)

“That joke saved the movie.” “The dance move or the popsicle?” “The dance move. I resisted that dance joke and Rodney pushed hard for it (…) It told the audience what movie they were watching.”

“It was Rodney who was really pushing for him to be in this relatable idea of [Miles] not knowing the lyrics to this song but singing along.” “We started animating before the song was finished. It was really easy to not know the words then.”

“There are three very long shots that introduce Miles.” (The shot at home, the shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle, the shot of him entering Visions.) “That was a deliberate choice, to open with a big crazy Spider-Man montage, and then with Miles, start a different pace, long shots, and just watch him and how he is, and don’t get too fancy with it. Although ironically these shots are really fancy.” The shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle and the one of him walking into Visions are meant to directly contradict each other: his comfort zone vs him out of place in new surroundings. (Megan’s note: My take is that with these shots they might have been trying to represent his home, his past, and his future.)

“Everything [in this scene from color to sound] is meant to go from a very heightened experience with Peter to a very naturalistic experience with Miles.”

For the scene in the car, Shameik and Brian sat in chairs to set up in a car, with microphones and a rearview mirror. “Brian might have even been a little annoyed at Shameik a couple of times, and I think you can feel it in here, in a really wonderful way.”

(Talking about the chromatic aberration) “Sometimes it looks like you’re watching a 3D movie without the glasses on.” “That was on purpose.” “Every frame is supposed to feel like a piece of printed art.”

“On the cover of Great Expectations, there’s an image of Magwitch grabbing Pip’s shoulder in a cemetery.” “Foreshadowing!”

A side character named “Smiley Kid” is in several shots of miscellaneous Visions students. “Because he’s not a real person, I think we can say he is our least favorite person.” “I think he comes around. He’s great, then he’s bad, then he’s great again.” “He’s like the extra in every live action who worms his way to the front of every shot.” “He just almost always looks in the camera.”

Miles’s expression when the teacher calls him out at trying to fail was “completely ripped off of President Barack Obama.”

Benson Avenue was meant to call back to where one of their fathers grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

(“Hypnotize” by Notorious BIG playing on Aaron’s stereo) “Biggie Smalls in an animated Spider-Man movie. In what universe?” “This is the ideal timeline that we’re living in.”

(This comment is said as Miles presses his face on the glass:) “That changed people’s perceptions of the movie. When we had this in, it really lit people up.” (To be honest, I can’t tell if this comment was made in response to Biggie Smalls, or to Miles pressing his face on the glass.)

They all loved Mahershala Ali. “The shoulder touch would work if your voice sounded like Mahershala’s.” Everyone was in awe every time they recorded with him. “He makes you want to be a better person when you’re around him.” “He’s got a high bar.” “Then he goes away and it kinda wears off.”

The subway Aaron brings Miles to was a place he and Jeff used to paint in when they were young, which adds another layer to him talking about/missing Jeff when he mentions it to Miles. The age difference probably means Aaron was younger than Jeff, and now he’s the older one with Miles here.

There’s a bigger history between Jeff and Aaron that’s only hinted at, and part of it is the reason why Miles has his mother’s last name, not his father’s. It’s implied Jeff was worried his bad history would follow Miles if he took his last name. Also because “then he would be named Miles Davis.”

They were excited to depict a spider-man experiencing spider-sense for the first time.

“We did the most expensive thing. In all choices.”

“People ask, How does Miles with a cop and nurse parents afford Jordans? And the answer is, they were a gift from his uncle.”

(On Kingpin’s animation possibilities.) “We always had this idea that he was the living expression of a black hole. The right for him is this floating head on a body that we could scale up and down depending on the shot with hands at the end of arms.” “While creating a black hole, he is a black hole.”

Someone felt very passionate about including the dimensional map showing the other universes the collider was connecting with. “It felt so important to me.”

(Paraphrasing this one) “Once Phil and Lord gave the MO to push convention, the gauntlet had been thrown, we started getting crazy stuff back. And a lot of the time our art direction would just be like, ‘Yeah! COOL!' ‘Do more of that!’”

(Peter rolls his eyes as the Prowler menacingly steps forward) “I like that [RIPeter] is exhausted at the idea of being killed.”

“The Prowler chase sequence was the first sequence that went through the whole pipeline.” (This and the cemetery scene were the first.)

(The burst card of Miles jumping over the subway tracks) Bob Persichetti: “I had such high hopes to do a lot of burst cards, I think that’s the only one I actually did.”

(as Rio comforts Miles in Spanish) “We never translated on screen (…) The idea being, this is the fabric of Miles’s life.” “This was inspired obviously by Brian Michael Bendis” (co-creator of Miles Morales and his longtime writer) “and Miles’ bicultural background. But also Phil Lord grew up in a bilingual house.” “And I took Spanish in high school.”

(Stan Lee cameo) “[Stan is] the only performer in the movie who we went to. Everyone else came into recording studios, but Stan Lee, we dispatched the microphone to him.” “Everybody wanted to animate Stan.” “If you hit pause any time a train goes by, because everyone wanted to animate Stan, he’s in almost every single train.” “He’s an extra in a lot.”

(Miles reading comics before jumping off the building) “If you notice in that comic book, it’s True Life Tales of Spider-Man, and to keep his cover, his name is not Peter Parker. In the comic book, his name is Billy Barker.” “Great.” “Who could ever figure that out, right?”

A bunch of drawings around the grave of Peter Parker’s tombstone were all done by different kids of people on the show.

They mention the cemetery scenes was one of the first ones finalized. When they were still trying to figure out how to bring Miles to life, “you can see that his performance evolved from this [cemetery] scene.” “It’s super expressive.”

There was lots of debate on how much paunch should be on Peter B’s stomach. There are something like 3-5 different body models used throughout the movie.

They all loved the scenes of Peter B in his apartment: the cut to him crying in the shower, to pinned to the bed with his butt out, to his pose on the futon flipping through channels. Someone really liked “[his] little quivering [spidey] eyes on the seahorse shot.”

The comic book page-flipping device was a “late breaking” realization of how to transition between flashbacks and present day.

Chris Miller did the voice of the cop dispatcher on the radio saying the “Child dressed like Spider-Man dragging a homeless corpse behind a train” line. “The role I was born to play.”

In the walk-and-talk scene in the alley, they felt inspired to take a lot of crazy shots. “We were passionate that a Spider-Man movie needed to be shot from their point of view, where every surface can be the ground.”

“Because of questions on the internet, we took of one of Miles’s shoes. Just in case anybody wanted to know why he was sticking.” “Another thing that I was passionate about but nobody cared about but me.”

“One of the big tricks of this sequence and of this relationship was to let you believe that Peter was a good guy even though he was being a real… turkey… to Miles.” (Peter saying “No, does it look like it’s working? No! No, it’s not…”) “This was one of the few moments that we added kind of late just to know that he was a sweet pea underneath it all.” “Finding the right level for his not caring about Miles, and then learning to care about Miles, finding the right level from the beginning all the way through to the end, was something that took a lot of nuance.”

The interrogation/alley and burger scenes probably went through the most amount of reworks and rewriting than any others, because there was so much exposition and “you got tired” watching two heavy information scenes in a row. And given how often they said “this scene went through so many iterations” in this commentary, these two scenes must have been a LOT of rewrites. (Some of the alternate burger scenes can be seen in the film’s trailers and alternate universe cut.)

“I still kind of miss the unfinished version of this shot, where his feet… He had no toes for a really long time for some reason.” “You had to say like fifty times, ‘We’re gonna add toes right?’” “‘We’re gonna get his toes on there, right?’”

“One of the things about Kingpin is that he just magically appears outside of the car. Because there’s no way he could get actually get through the doorway.” “Maybe in the future where you guys are watching this ten years from now, someone will have figured out how to animate that. But in 2018 it’s still impossible.”

(Miles finding Peter in the vents) “These moments were really when you started to feel the relationship between the two of them develop.” “I love that Miles has to fight to occupy the same space and become an equal to Peter.”

(Peter mockingly blah-blahing as Doc Ock explains the danger of the collider, then saying afterward “Oh nevermind, that is bad.”) “For the sake of a laugh, we undercut the stakes, and then immediately had to buy the stakes back.”

“We went through probably 70 different version of what Miles would look like while invisible … and I like how how he comes in and out of invisibility was stylized to some degree.”

They say the Doc Ock/Peter scene was “really really bad at one point” and now it’s “one of the most wonderful surprises.”

Ock’s computer is based off of Phil Lord’s actual desktop. Some files are cut off the edges of the screen because they just dragged things off of the internet.

(Peter glitching in the chair) “I’m remembering all of the conversations that determined that it was funniest if you left Peter’s head unglitched.”

It was Justin Thompson’s idea to use soft robotics for this version of Dock Ock’s tentacles.

Everyone, from animation to the sound team, saw Doc Ock’s tentacles about 3 months before completion, went (exasperated) “Oh THAT’S what they look like? We’ll have to redo X Y Z whole thing…”

You can tell they loved the monitor joke. “Very silly things happening around very cool things.”

The Bagel! text was added last minute. “That was a joke pitch by Justin that was taken seriously.”

“Everyone felt empowered to pitch crazy ideas, and that’s why it felt so rich and deep.”

“It’s no understatement to say that this look in the forest is one of the hardest things in a movie like this. To make something look realistic is something we know how to do pretty well. But to make it look graphic and illustrative is almost impossible.” “Especially when you’re close and far to trees within the same shot at times.” “We had so many conversations with Danny, our V Effects supervisor, like, ‘But, you guys, we’re going to be in a forest, you really don’t want the leaves to rustle in the wind?' ‘No, we’ll be okay!’” (Later, when Peter and Miles swing off together, the leaves rustle:) “See, the leaves can move, guys!” “We just CHOSE for them not to.” “It was an absolute creative choice.”

“This is another moment in the story when we really open this beat up to let Peter and Miles have a victory together and cement their bond, that you really were rooting for their relationship. We breezed through this quickly and you didn’t have the same connection with the two of them.” “One of the things in the screenplay that we discovered really late is that you needed to have a lot of smaller, positive accomplishments throughout the center of the movie to have it work right.” “(…) This middle section of the movie is about Peter and Miles learning to fall for each other, basically.”

(During Gwen’s intro) “We give just enough to hopefully tease you guys into being really into each one of these characters’ origin story.”

“One week of days and nights just passed in that one shot.” “She hit a time anomaly on her way to this dimension.”

“She vibes with Miles after he had been bitten by the spider, and she purposefully bumped into him there, in case you didn’t catch that.”

“We were trying to make Ock such an intelligent and socially awkward person that then turns into this really formidable equal to Kingpin.”

(When Peter thwips May’s doorbell and then exhales with his hands on his hips.) “One of my favorite poses in the movie.” “That pose gets a laugh all by itself.”

“‘You look tired’ is a thing my mom says to me every time I see her.” “It’s accurate.”

“I fought hard to have (May) kick that door open.” “I tried to cut that and then you uncut it, correctly.” “Let’s be honest, she’s not treating her house very well.”

(In the Spidey Lair) “Lots of Easter eggs here.” “We should’ve put an actual Easter egg in this shot.”

They debated for a long time putting the B-team spiders in the picture at all, knowing it would be more work, wanting to make their characters worth being in the picture without taking away from Miles. “Nothing worked in the movie until it had something to do with Miles and his story.”

(On the spider team testing Miles:) This angle was “late-breaking, on the backside”: “This made it feel like they all cared about Miles, even though they maybe didn’t believe in him.” “Just Peter going ‘Cool it.’ For the longest time we didn’t have something like that.”

(Pretty sure this is Peter Ramsay) “When you’re making a movie it’s like you’re building an emotion machine. You’ve gotta have all the parts calibrated the right way, make sure it’s properly oiled, cause if it isn’t, the gears are gonna stick, and you’re not gonna feel right.”

The Prowler Sound™ is not a jaguar or cat, but an elephant. “We only did the dark scenes first cause they were easier to light.” (Some of those scenes they mention are Miles running from the Prowler, the cemetery scene, Miles writing the note in Aaron’s apartment.)

They tried about a million songs for Peni while she makes a new goober. (The song used is not in the soundtrack, but it’s “Want It Here” by Xenia Pax.)

(On Peni’s Heelies) “This shot’s not long enough to get her from the kitchen to the couch.” “Is that why?!” “That’s one hundred percent why. Just put those little wheelies on here!”

In the first draft, there was an idea there RIPeter was a grad student under tutelage of male Doc Ock so that’s how Liv and Ock knew each other.

“The table pushing into Miles. That was something my older brother, when we would fight when we were kids, he would do that to me.”

(When Aaron closes his eyes, refusing to kill Miles:) “That little look. ‘Cause he knows what’s coming.”

(They’re all quiet as Miles carries Aaron to safety, caught up in the scene.) “We’re all kind of gripped.” “We’re supposed to be giving interesting anecdotes here, guys, come on.” “It was so cold that day…”

Prowler’s death was the first session they did with Mahershala. “He’s a method actor, and his death scene, it was like he was really dying.”

“We gave animators the freedom. You can make Miles unattractive. He can ugly cry, because this is raw and it feels so emotional.”

(When Miles throws his sketchbook out the window, only for it to immediately come flying back in:) “It’s a one-shot transition from deep emotion and regret and pain. We said, ‘He’s gonna throw the one thing out that really represents his uncle, yet it’s gonna come flying back in.’ It was hard to make that shot work.” “It’s a great story statement that you can’t lose the things that make up your past.”

When everyone is talking about someone they’ve lost, an alternate line has Ham saying “I lost my uncle. He was electrocuted, and it smelled so good.” It got a lot of laughs, but the team says that from then on, the audience “resisted” Ham because he killed the mood, and it was hard for people to see him as anything other than a goofy cartoon, so they changed the line to “Miles, the hardest part about this job is you can’t always save everyone.” (Megan’s note: I think they probably didn’t bother to re-animate the others’ facial reactions after changing Ham’s line, because judging by the reactions from Peter and Miles in this shot it feels like Ham just said something annoying/out of place lol.)

When Peter says “It wasn’t their decision” (for Miles to stay behind), Miles has a very quick reaction shot where he turns away, bites his lip, and shakes his head. Someone mentions it’s one of their favorite shots of Miles.

(On the scene with Miles and his dad at the door) “When Brian Tyree Henry saw this scene [with a rough performance, just animation], he got the movie. It made such an impression on him. He was very happy to come in and pick any lines up for us and just keep working.” “We were working on the shots on layup for this. The idea of having them be on thirds to start, then coming closer, and finally ending with the final split-screen shot at the end.” “And Jefferson crosses the scene, which I think is really interesting. They start off on opposite sides of the screen. He makes the first move.” “It’s amazing to me to see Miles transformed by his father.” “It feels earned.”

“In an earlier version of that scene, Aunt May gave him a version of that speech, which was nice, but it needed to be Dad.”

(Later on, someone mentions:) “Tom was the first one to say ‘It shouldn’t be Aunt May at the door, it should be Dad.’ And we all sort of slapped our foreheads going ‘That’s absolutely right.’”

“After our premiere, my 9yo son [Luca? Luka?] asked me this. ‘So Papa, you know Miles spray-paints one of those suits and it becomes his suit. Super cool, Papa, but it shouldn’t fit him. It’s way bigger.’” (Laughter) “Did he have to wait a few hours for it to dry?” "We cut out the sequence where Aunt May sewed it tighter and altered it.” “And they had the hair-dryer express drying it. ‘Your friends are in danger.’ ‘Well just let me let it dry first!” “I tell you, spray paint, five minutes and you’re dry.” “She pre-altered it. She knew he was coming. She said, ‘It took you long enough.’ It all happened in advance.”

“The scene of Miles falling and everything slowing down and I always appreciated that Phil called out he was ‘falling and rising’ and the same time.” “It made the movie. A rare thing that goes from the stage directions all the way through production and onto the screen.”

“This sequence used to end with him getting hit by a truck. But really felt like it was time for Miles to get a big victory.” (Megan’s note: This scene is shown in draft stage in the alternate universe cut. Miles makes his leap, free-runs over some trucks and buildings, and his scene is interrupted when he gets hit by a truck and crashes to the ground. There’s a moment where he collects himself, the pushes himself to his feet and runs off into the city to join the others at the collider. I interpret this idea to be their showing how Miles fully embraces the “Get back up” lesson, since Miles’s pose in the sketches imitates the same one in the basement when the spiders are hazing him and he’s on the ground.) “And now people applaud.” “There’s a general attitude with this movie that was like, ‘How can we do things differently?’ That was a case of when we were like, ‘What if we didn’t have the audience feel really good in this moment?” (Laughter) “What if we had them feel really bad? Right at the moment they want to feel good, what if we made them feel terrible?” (Joking) “Let’s poke THEM in the eye.” “I think in early drafts, we just were like, Miles is losing and falling short the whole movie until the very end. And when we put that up, we realized that you needed to see him slowly winning and winning and winning until he won even bigger at the end.”

A set-up that never fully made it in the movie is that Fisk runs charities for Spider-Man and that’s why the dinner was set up like it was.

The bread scene was on the chopping block for a long time. “By adding this interaction, and making it about Peter and MJ and something real, all of a sudden this scene was worth it.” “It’s necessary to know what Peter’s giving up by sacrificing himself.” “It lasts just long enough because we learned that if you stay way from Miles too long--” (They interrupt here to point out two cameo people at dinner, “Danny and Josh,” who I couldn’t get a cap of) “--We lose our connection to the movie in a way. But at this point we care enough about Peter to want him to get back to MJ too.”

“The servers that were holding the movie were moving slow by the end of this shoot. And we had the best computers.” “At a certain point I think we overloaded Imageworks’ server. There was a moment they were afraid the movie was going to break their machine.” “Which was our whole idea. Our whole approach was, how do we break these pipes that make the movie?”

(During the final collider fight sequence, but they don’t specify what idea this was about specifically:) Chris Miller: “One of the only times I can ever remember saying ‘Okay you’ve gone too far.’ There was one brand where I was like, ‘I don’t get this.’ A few of the drawings that were somehow even more insane than this.” “What you’re saying, Chris, is that there’s a version of this scene that’s even crazier than this?” “Literally the only time I can remember going, ‘Okay guys, you’ve done it. You’ve broken it.’”

“I’m sure there’s are filmmakers watching this, so I think this is a learnable lesson from this sequence. Which is if you want to put something super crazy in your movie, wait until the very end when a lot of movie has been spent on your movie and your release date is 3 to 4 months away and they literally cannot stop you or else they have no movie.”

One of them points out Miles webs a turntable to propel himself upward. (Megan’s note: Miles also does this just as his own theme starts playing, which starts off with a record-scratch. I thought that was cool.)

(The moment when Gwen calls Miles “Spider-Man”:) “That choice went through a lot of iterations like “What’s the end of their relationship?” That she calls him Spider-Man instead of giving him a kiss on the cheek? It makes me well up just thinking about it.”

Kingpin breaks the glass of a building and the pieces fly toward Miles. Bob Persichetti calls these “Dorito chips.”

After the train enters a collider steam, there are versions of the interior of the train that flash from all five dimensions. There’s a futuristic Peni version, an old-timey Noir version, there’s a Gwen version… “As it passes through the beam, you get to see five versions of the train existing at once.”

(Vanessa and Richard seeing Kingpin) “This idea of repeating mistakes (for Kingpin). No matter what, he was gong to keep repeating these mistakes.” “He’s still who he is.”

“It was my dream to have Kingpin headbutt Miles and it finally came true.”

Each one of these character is in a black costume, and black surrounds them, and yet you can still see what’s happening.

“I remember people wanting to cut the shoulder-touch at the end.” “Who wanted to cut this?!” (Overlapping chatter) “No names in the screen.” “I remember feeling, oh my god. You’re LUCKY you got the shoulder touch in.” “The fact that you could pay off a set up that wasn’t even a set up…”

(On Miles seeing inside the universe as the collider explodes) “And then this. How long can it be? Let’s make it way too long!”

“The Anvil (that clanks at the end) was in Ham’s pocket?” “In the hammer space.”

(Miles hugs Jefferson) “This was the moment everybody went ‘Oh, YES.’ No matter what, we have to get to the hug, and the disguised voice, and the ‘I love you.’”

Someone describes the ending soundtrack as “Miles’ playlist meets Aaron’s playlist meets a superhero movie.”

They indirectly confirm Peter B and MJ do get back together. “Peter B gets his happy ending.” Another bit someone mentions was a late addition.

“I like that the movie starts and ends with Miles in his bedroom by himself.”

“We could do a whole other commentary saying completely different things.” “Probably four.” “We should do an alternate universe commentary.”

“You’re your own champion, I think that’s the idea. This is a story of empowerment. A champion is not coming from outside of you to come and save you. It’s your job.”

(As the credits roll) “Every name you see right now, we’ve seen them cry.” “We’ve made them cry.” “Every name you see right now has yelled at us.”

(On the post-credits scene) “We thought of this (post-credits scene) two months ago.” (They recorded this commentary in Dec 2018.) “We wanted to get Miguel in there and show the opportunities of where the multiverse could go.”

“I looked this up. This IS the most expensive dumb joke of all time.”

“We didn’t finish cleaning the cell on that close-up of Spider-Man.”

#into the spiderverse #miles morales #peter b parker #spiderverse stuff

[currently-lurking-brb]

Boy, do I have a story for you

This is a very petty story and I'm not sorry. So, I am writing this while I have a movie on the tv in the background, I am checking my phone every so often when I receive a message, and I am talking to my dog at a sensible volume whenever I wish to do so. Why am I able to do all this, while watching a film, you ask? Well, I can do this because I am watching it in the comfort of my own home. You see, while at home, you can do whatever you please while watching films, as you do not need to worry about disturbing others. If you wish to watch a film with no disturbance, lights off and phone away, you can do so, or if you wish to multitask like I am doing now, you are also able to do that - because it is your home, your viewing experience, and you can do whatever you like. A cinema, however, is somewhat different. It is a shared viewing experience, and that can sometimes be fun. There are stories of people cheering together in the theatre when the Star Wars theme blared through the speakers during the premieres of The Force Awakens, which I imagine was a wonderful shared experience. Because a cinema trip is a shared experience, it is incredibly important to show a little decorum, and consideration for your fellow cinema-goer. As you can likely tell, I am about to tell you a very frustrating, but somewhat satisfying story. So, today my family and I took a trip to the cinema to see the positively-reviewed Dunkirk. As the trailers started, I turned my phone onto airplane mode, so it wouldn't buzz during the film. Because I'm nice like that. As the trailers were starting, I happened to notice a group of lads come in. It was hard not to laugh, as it was genuinely impossible to tell them apart. All three had bleached blond hair, shaved at the sides and plastered like a solid brick towards the backs of their heads. For the following piece I shall call them Lad 1, Lad 2, and Lad 3, as there was very little else distinguishing them, apart from approximate age. Lads 1 and 2 are clearly teenagers, can't be much more than 16, can't be less than 14, while Lad 3 seems older, possible late 20s/30s. Maybe he's a dad or an uncle, either way, he dresses like he wished he was the same age as Lads 1 and 2. However, I did try not to laugh, because even though I thought they looked like idiots, there are a lot of kind, genuine people in the world who have silly haircuts, and it would be wrong to judge someone by their fashion choices. It was a little harder to not judge when the moment his arse landed in the expensive VIP seat, Lad 2 (seated in the middle, in the row directly in front of me so I could see them very clearly) opened FaceTime to call a mate. You're in the cinema?? Why are you FaceTiming someone? Random, but I push that thought away because it is still the trailers, and not even the trailers based on the movie you're about to watch, so there was a good twenty minutes of adverts before the film was actually due to start. Then, Lad 2 puts his phone away and they all sit very quietly in their seats, watching the adverts just like everyone else. I stop noticing them because I am also watching the adverts. That is what I'm here for. For a little reminder, cinemas are designed so you have very little peripheral vision. You cannot see anything of the row behind you, because of how high the chairs are and the positioning of the rows. However, you can see a lot of whatever is happening in the rows in front, which is why kids used to go to the back row for a quickie in the olden days. If you wanted to see something going on behind you, you would need to twist and crane your neck right back. Any sort of phone/bright electronic-based activity is clearly visible to someone in the row behind you - I thought most people knew this, but apparently not, so there it is, explained. The adverts go wholly undisturbed, until the film actually starts. Lad 2 pulls out his phone, and films a little bit of the screen announcing that we would be watching Dunkirk that afternoon. He then proceeds to add a caption: 'at the pics with @followmyfriend and @followmyotherfriend.' I can see this clearly because he is directly in front of me and his screen is on full brightness. It's annoying. The opening credits are starting - and those who have seen the film know it starts stating some facts and statistics on the true event, which is important to read - and he is still on his phone, attempting to tell all his insta-fans that he's at the cinema, when he had twenty minutes of not-film time to do so. It's really bright, he's taking twelve years to post it and is starting to disturb the whole full row behind him. My mum leans forward and says: "Excuse me? Hi, could you turn your phone off please? It's really bright and right in our eyes." Fair, yes? There's a whole advert asking you to refrain from using your phone during the film, because it's disturbing. That advert happened about three minutes before this event occurred. Lad 2 turns around and snaps: "In ten minutes." ???? Ten minutes is the main exposition of the film. You'll miss a shitload of plot and I'll have to try and watch it while your screen is flickering away?? Nah. My mother retorts, "No, now please." (Teacher voice: activate). The film is starting, the actors are looking dramatically into the middle distance. Instead of watching the film, Lad 1 starts to join to defend Lad 2, whose ego is clearly bruised after being called out by an adult, and starts huffing and puffing generalised 'yeah what are you gonna do hahahaha,' and they are quickly accompanied by Lad 3 telling my mother not to start on them, as he puffs up to look hard as nails. So my dad just says "Don't start," because ya know he's gonna defend his wife, and it's all getting very annoying. My mum correctly points out that they can be removed from the theatre for disturbing other cinema-goers, and they laugh at this. I tell Lad 2 he can tell his insta-fans about the film later, let's just watch it. Tbh I'm probably not the nicest person for that but a literal teenage boy was trying to give lip to a couple of strangers for being asked to be more considerate, and the most fun way to jab at someone after that is to be patronising as shit. I'm from the posher end of Oxfordshire, I can be patronising. The film continues and the Lad collective settles down, and I think: yay! Time to enjoy the film. Wrong! Ten minutes later Lad 1 whips his own phone out, to send a text. I honestly don't understand how it could be impossible to go to a movie theatre and leave your phone undisturbed for a relatively short period of time. Seriously - ten minutes??? I've had farts last longer. Anyway, after the text, which he angled away so my mum couldn't see - but I could - he proceeds to stare at my mother. Lad 2 joins staring at my mother. They're smirking and staring, as if waiting for something to happen. I am directly behind them and tell them not to stare. I'll smugly admit they jump a bit, as they didn't realise I was looking at them, and I may have spat it a little meanly, but fuck it, they were rude and childish, and waiting to be called out on. It's weird to think you'd need to tell someone not to smirk and stare at people, were they never taught it was rude as hell? They proceed to whine: "We just want to watch the movie!" "Then turn around and watch it." Imagine being thick enough to prod and poke to try and start a little drama, and then get upset when someone calls you out on it? Bless. The film goes on, and Lad 3 huffs and puffs every now and then, at first I assumed he was attempting to seem tough and strong in front of the other Lads, but I was corrected later. He was vaping away. In a cinema. Charming. I continue to watch the film, and see little blond plastered heads bobbing away, chatting to each other, leaning close to whisper for a solid twenty minutes. You just wanted to watch the movie? With audio commentary maybe?? By the time we're hitting about the 40 minute mark of the film, I've noticed the solid gel-brick head of Lad 2 twisting around as far as his scrawny neck will take him to stare at me. I am not editing the truth to make myself the hero of a story, I was literally sitting, trying to watch Mark Rylance's beautiful acting. I couldn't have been doing anything to bother the row in front, because of the peripheral vision I mentioned earlier. Regardless, Lad 2 turns around to watch me no less than four times. Why? Are you struck by my ethereal beauty? Fat chance. Can you hear me breathing and is it somehow annoying? Nope. Are you a little shit? Yep. This continues and it's beyond creepy. Like, let it go, little boy. We've hit 45 minutes, it's starting to get really good. This film is intense as hell and I'd highly recommend it. Out of nowhere, I get the eeriest feeling. I already know what it's going to be. I look down and there they are; Tweedle-Fucking-Dee and Tweedle-Fucking-Dumb. They have both craned their necks around as far as they can to look up directly at me. I feel like an acorn that's been spotted by two competing wannabe-alpha squirrels. Squirrels don't even have alphas, so that says a lot, really. By the way - this is REALLY FUCKING CREEPY. What business do you have staring at a random girl??? Is this how you think you get them to like you? It's not. It's predatory and beyond gross. You literally disgust and repel me. I look down at them, they look up at me. Lad 2 smiles, as if he's somehow accomplished something. Then again, he's blessed with my attention, so he should feel lucky (sarcasm). I lean forward, I smile, and very sweetly say "I'm sorry, I thought you said you wanted to watch the film?" Lad 1 sits back and huffs, while Lad 2 has a brain fart. I don't think he managed to comprehend what was going on. He started wildly gesticulating, furiously whispering random babbled words that didn't really made sense. Something along the lines of: "Oh my god!!!! Why are you would you stop this is so I can't believe-" Poor kid can't even pull together a single sentence. No wonder staring was the only weapon in his arsenal. Gormless shit. Again, I find myself wondering: Why would you attempt to start a drama or pick a fight, and then act so surprised and offended when you are called out on it? I don't know, maybe they haven't been taught about cause and effect in school yet. Anyway, while Lad 2 is having his tantrum, Lad 3 gets all guffaw-y, and my dad just gets out and leaves. Lad 3 stands up, and follows shortly after. He is puffed up like an overweight pigeon that's holding in as much vape-shit as possible to attempt to seem big. The next part I wasn't privy to, but my dad filled me in after the film. According to dad, Lad 3 walks straight up to the manager and goes off on one. He claims my dad is picking on 14 year old boys, that he's disturbing him, that he wants his money back, swearing and raising his voice, blah blah blah. The manager stays quiet, as does my father. At the end of Lad 3's tirade, the manager appears confused. She says: "I thought you said they were 15?" OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Honestly I lost my shit when my dad told me that. Apparently Lad 3 shat himself, and the manager followed procedure. From my viewpoint, Lads 1 and 2 left their seats and never returned. The rest of the film passed by in a breeze of clever cinematography and wonderful acting. On coming out of the cinema, my dad went over to the manager who had taken over from the previous manager, and thanked her for how they dealt with it. The lovely manager then said she was sorry for the disturbance, and offered us free cinema tickets to use. Brilliant. Some may read this and think: 'Hannah this is so mean?' But you know what? If a couple of teenage boys are going to try and act all tough, high and mighty, and think they're really clever, they deserve to face consequences. They thought they were so big, so hard, and we very pettily ruined their Sunday afternoon. My favourite little kick to the teeth for this story is: they facetimed a mate to announce they were watching the film, they texted to announce they were watching the film, they posted on their instagram to announce they were watching the film, and they even forked out more money for the expensive, fancy VIP chairs to sit in to watch the film, and they didn't get to watch the film. This was because they were removed for behaviour that goes against policy - which is clearly stated right before the film starts. Got no one to blame but themselves. I wonder how this afternoon will be twisted, maybe they'll go home to mum and cry that a mean lady was sarcastic to them, and they were wrongly pulled out of a film because a mean old man made up terrible lies about her darling children. Ha. My question is - why? Why do teenage boys like to prove themselves? Why must they show everyone how big their dick is? Why do they feel the need to tell everyone how tough they are - that they could take on the world if they wanted to? I'll tell you why, because they're victims to toxic masculinity. What's that, you say? It's a set of societal conventions that show men are only tough, strong, with washboard abs. They never cry, because emotions are weak and they must punch their way through their sadness. It's the alpha-beta complex that so many men and boys fall for as they learn what a 'real man' is through the media. That's right, boys, not only are you pricks, you're daft enough to fall for mainstream media tricks. I feel sorry for you pricks. Until you carve that chip out of your shoulder, you'll forever live a half life, restricted and you may never feel truly happy and free. You poor, poor things. This is my message to all lads everywhere, or boys/men with the aspirations to be 'one of the lads.' You don't need to be rude and inappropriate to prove how cool you are. You may think you're hard as nails and beyond cool, but you'll likely end up embarrassing yourselves, or being kicked out of a cinema. Trust me, no one thinks that you being a twat is cool. Leave picking fights to the schoolyard, not the real world. Ironically, this happened during the showing of a film that actually defies a lot of tropes that toxic masculinity requires. There are no big, manly heroes, and they never refuse to show their emotions. Dunkirk is a new kind of war film, that acknowledges that you don't need to be the hero to be a compelling character in a story, you don't need to take unnecessary risks to show that you're a real man, and it's okay to be afraid, it's okay to be upset, because to feel is to be human. With the likes of Batman V Superman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man: Homecoming, Hollywood cinema is slowly turning around to remove the traits of toxic masculinity from their stories. Of course, this isn't an excuse to the Lad collective, they're still awful. Maybe as films show more realistic expectations for men - as they are currently doing for women - the next generations to come will be kinder, and less likely to huff and puff to try and show the world what big boys they are. I'm petty. I'm not sorry.

#petty revenge #Dunkirk #rude people #lads #creepy boys #teenage boys #revenge #pettiness #stories #this really happened in my life #cinema #films #phones

[ameliette]

0: Prologue - or more of a preface

I'm one of those who likes to ramble and publish the ramble without editing it, so these will be messy!

'prologue' Middle English: from Old French, via Latin from Greek prologos, from pro- ‘before’ + logos ‘saying’.

And before anything is said about the book, I want to give context to this all. I didn't participate in the Hobbit group-read - mostly because I wasn't in this fandom at the time - so I'm not 100% sure what everything should be in these posts. Also I'm very bad at doing actual thoughtful commentary, especially on books. It's easier on visual media, but my "commentary" is still usually half sentences that don't make any sense. I have two hobbit trilogies worth of notes to testify that. - Or, like seen here, I read fifteen levels into each word.

Should be mostly spoiler free, since I don't even know what happens past mid-point of The Two Towers in the books.

Reading this with a close eye (I have to, otherwise I might just skim everything), I noticed the wording "seldom now reach three feet". Hobbits used to vary between two and four feet, huh? So even though the films portrayed the hobbits all about four feet tall (Bilbo's listed as being 4'2'' in the art book so I'm going off that), that was more the upper limit for "normal" height. And then a few sentences later there's this: "[Bullroarer] was surpassed [in height] -- only by two famous characters of old; *but that curious matter is dealt with in this book*." I'm probably reading too much into it, but does it suggest that Frodo and Sam are especially tall for Hobbits, even in their time?

On feet: I'm a writer and research random things sometimes. Last night I was reading through nanowrimo's research forum, checking everything that sounded interesting, and stumbled upon a topic on barefoot running. From what I read, it's more likely that hobbits actually walk more on the balls of their feet than on heels, as it's easier on knees and hips. Not a detail that would get much notice in a book, but could be explored in art. (Maybe not so much in film, given the limitation of feet prosthetics used.) Walking like that consumes more energy than walking on heels, so if they're walking tip-toe all day, no wonder hobbits eat more! 

On pipeweed: "tobacco of the Southfarthing play[s] a part in the history that follows" I still don't have the full context for this one (recall my words that I'm in Chapter X of Book III?) but I recall being absolutely confused by this the first time. How could tobacco play a part in world history? Well, I know a bit now, (again, Chapter X) but still not much. (And well I've read portions of the Atlas so that was a few spoilers *shrug* but spoilers are still not full context!)

Given how idyllic the Shire is portrayed in the movies, I'm actually surprised not all Hobbits can read!

"who reached a hundred as often as not" means 50% of hobbits reach 100 years of age, right? I'm no mathmagician, and median is not mean, but does that suggest hobbits have a life expectancy of 100 years? Given the lack of modern technology in Middle-Earth, I'm rather surprised. How long might hobbits live if they lived in modern times? (In visible populations, with modern tech)

On the finding of the Ring: "the party was assailed by orcs in -- the Misty Mountains" nitpicking and grammar-filing, but I actually discussed at length with a friend about the difference between orcs and goblins, since in the Hobbit movies, only the ones under Misty Mountains are called goblins, and Azog and his army are called orcs. Of course it would be repetitive to repeat the discussion here, but I find it interesting that the switch from English 'goblin' to Westron 'orc' was here applied "retroactively" so to speak. (And also, 'goblin' will always say to me 'funny little creature under a mountain', whereas 'orc' is 'dangerous thing do not approach')

"the ring slipped quietly on to his finger" and given what I know of the ring, it was all deliberate by it. Ring wants to go back to its master, and it cannot achieve that goal by staying with Gollum. Making Bilbo invisible will help the ring out of the cave. ... I suddenly wonder if there are fics written in the Ring's POV? (Too bad the ring didn't know Hobbits are not so easily influenced by it) "the ring, secured by a fine chain --" which we never saw in the films! I wanted to see the ring on a chain like a pocket watch!

Regarding the last few sentences of the chapter. (I've quoted so much directly by now that I think I'll pass, esp. for this long an excerpt) I didn't really notice it last time, but this really makes it sound more like a preface to a historical novel than a work of fiction - which was the idea, I suppose, given this is meant to be the English translation of Red Book of Westmarch. In any case, detailing events so far into the book and past the scope of its prose section is certainly a different approach to fiction! (It also explained a few things I was left wondering about regarding movie's Gray Havens scene.)

I also want to detail how I got into this fandom, because it ties into the prologue a bit.

I tried watching the LotR movies back in 2014 (I wanted to watch the Hobbit films, so maybe I could go see BoFA in theatre, but knew I should start with LotR), but kinda fell asleep (or something) during FotR (like I did watch it through but didn't really focus on it) so I let that plan be (even though I had all three films borrowed from the library so honestly I could have just rewatched it the following day), and didn't come back to it until this summer (2016 July in case I someday have a theme that doesn't have time stamps) when YLE (Finnish national radio/tv broadcaster) showed them on tv and they were also available online for a few weeks. Did the traditional method of marathoning all three in a row, didn't finish till 4am. I have a friend who joked about me being the one to learn Sindarin once I'd read the books, but after LotR, I said something to the effect of "well I'm not that much into this" - like, for me, back then, it was still "a film classic I must watch to be a proper young adult" type of deal. 

Then I got the Hobbit trilogy from the library, and this is where I need to get into detail. I had a new computer ("new", it's over five years old, but it used to be my brother's so it's new to me), so I wanted to watch the DVDs on that, but I couldn't find AUJ on DVD in the library so had to take Blu-Ray. I swear this is relevant. DoS and BoFA I did get on DVD. So I watched AUJ on tv screen, and then next tday DoS on computer. And half of BoFA.

... Not because of the movie itself. It was my computer that fucked up. You see, it's that old and has a bad processor, so it couldn't handle me watching 4+ hours of DVD straight. Cut it off twice in the Dale scenes. I got mad and didn't get that it was because the computer was overheating. Anyway, now I'm getting to the point.

I mentioned I got the films from the library? Well, I also got FotR and The Hobbit books at the same time, and because I was still in the middle of BoFA, I started with FotR. Can you see where this is going? Well, I had been spoiled back in 2014 so technically I knew, but I had forgotten it, and then "On the Finding of the Ring" had to mention it. Killed my mood for a while, but I pressed on with the book. A few days later I finished BoFA, dug up the hobbit tags of those I followed, started following more people, read basically all meta I could find, and here I am. I'm still definitely more Hobbit person than LotR person (definitely more dwarf person than elf person!), but that may or may not change during this read-though. I'm in the middle of TTT, (After reading through FotR in a month...) so I don't know if I'll continue with that, or just re-read FotR and then have initial reactions to books 3-6. (I read the appendixes a lot for reference purposes so I don't count them here) In either case, this should be fun! It's sometimes scary to be in this fandom because I'm only a very tiny person who hasn't read everything yet, but frick, fandoms should be welcoming, I doubt you're as bad as the old SW fandom was joked to be. (I recall a text post that listed quizzing on Wedge's shoelaces or something)

Said friend? Well, she wasn't *wrong*... I took up Khuzdul.

#mine #text post #silmread #lotr: prologue #/ #// #lotr #amy liveblogs everything #long post #for gods sake tumble don't mess up my formatting #shorter post now that i moved the readmore a lot higher

[andrewdburton]

Lessons in Fear and Wealth from the Coronavirus

As I write this, the biggest story in the entire world is a virus that is making its way around the planet, leaving a trail of sickness and death in its wake, while sending a much bigger shockwave of fear and uncertainty out front. Last week, the US stock market dropped 15% in just a few days, the most shocking correction since the 2008-2009 financial crisis (and the most interesting drop since the founding of this blog in 2011).

I am sure you’ve been hearing, reading or watching plenty about it already, but the real question is, what should we do about it?

The Scary Side

Is this a screenshot from the fear-mongering TV news? Nope, just a moment from a classic zombie movie, although sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.

The fear and doubt seems to be what the news stories have been emphasizing. The disease is highly contagious, and very sneaky. Each carrier seems to infect 2-3 additional people, which means exponential growth. And with an observed death rate of about 4% so far, it is about 400 times more deadly than the common flu.

On the news, we see rows of hastily installed hospital beds, people wearing paper face masks even here in our own country, empty supermarket shelves and shuttered factories and public venues.

And we are reminded that we ain’t seen nothing yet, because with mild symptoms that can hide for days, most cases are going unreported and the disease is pumping its toxic tentacles through the arteries of our economy, plotting its attack while we are left POWERLESS UNTIL THE RIOTS IN THE STREET START AND PEOPLE ARE SMASHING THROUGH OUR WINDOWS TO TAKE OUR LAST FEW CANS OF BEANS AFTER WE RUN OUT OF AMMO IN OUR SHOTGUNS.

Some people are just prone to this type of thinking, and I even have a few in my own life. They have warned me to gather “at least a few months worth” of nonperishable food in my pantry and make sure I have a generator and plenty of fuel, at the very least. And to reconsider my stance of not keeping any guns in the house.

The Not-So-Scary Side

I went out on the town at the peak of the scare. The reality is different from the news headlines.

As I write this on March 2nd, there have been about 90,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. And while the number is still growing rapidly, at the moment it is still a tiny number, about one thousandth of a percent of the world’s population. So even if it multiplies 100-fold, it would be a tenth of one percent. And out of these 90,000 people, about half are already recovered and have moved on with their lives. And the vast majority of the remaining ill, and all those who are so far undetected, and those who are yet to get infected, will also recover.

Past and current status of the outbreak.

But do we have any idea how bad it will get, before it gets better? As it turns out, we do. But first, some perspective.

Here are this year’s numbers for the tried-and-true traditional flu for the 2019 flu season in the US alone (and remember the USA is only four percent of the world population):

Wow, 32-45 million cases of the flu already, and tens of thousands of deaths. Even I had no idea it was that serious, and yet the flu is something I don’t even worry about – ever!

Even scarier: every year, about 2.8 million people die in the US alone, and a full 70% of these deaths (over two million people per year) are caused by “lifestyle factors”, which to put it plainly means ignoring Mr. Money Mustache’s advice about bikes, barbells and salads every day.

So if we start with the common flu, which is surprisingly scary, choosing car-based transportation and TV-based entertainment and consuming processed high-carbohydrate food and soft drinks should feel at least an additional hundred times scarier than that.

But do you feel the appropriate ratios of fear in these two situations? And a much smaller amount of fear about the Coronavirus? Probably not, because we humans generally suck at putting numbers, statistics and probabilities into perspective.

We Have Been Here Before

In my lifetime alone, we have seen the rise and decline of quite a list of worldwide health scares, each of which was covered in the news with similar intensity to what we see today. AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Bird Flu, and the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, also known as H1N1. That one was particularly serious in retrospect, having infected between 11-21% of the world’s population and taking the lives of about 500,000.

Yet here we are, with that fearful event gone from the rearview mirror and a global economy that is far richer than it has ever been. Which is exactly what we will eventually be saying about the present moment in time, from our vantage point in the even more prosperous future.

And Math Can Help Create Perspective

Contagious diseases don’t just grow forever until everybody is dead. They follow an S-curve, like this recent prediction for Covid-19’s spread. It currently estimates that we may see things flatten out fairly soon, but more importantly it continually updates to new information and makes an educated guess – a great strategy for dealing with unknowns in life in general.

One mathematical model that a researcher is updating each day – image source.

On the other hand, some estimates are more pessimistic. Disease modelers at Northeastern University uses different assumptions to predict between 550,000 and 4 million cases worldwide*, before we reach the flat top of our “S”. But that’s still only a twentieth of one percent of the world’s population who would even get the disease, and then a further 96-98% of those would recover.

As a final source of information, when it comes to world health issues I always like to see what Bill Gates has to say. And sure enough, he written this great opinion piece in a medical journal. His main point? The damage done by a virus really depends on how well our governments respond to it. Lots of caution and a quick response leads to much better results.

So there’s still a lot of uncertainty. But when faced with a lack of information, we can choose one of two options on where to learn more:

Good looking news anchors with fake tans and no scientific background, who make more money if they generate more viewership hours and advertising revenue, which is proven to multiply if they can cause their viewers to experience fear, or

Scientists and mathematicians who study this stuff for a living, and use incoming data to make a series of continually refined predictions.

As Mustachians, we get our information from scientists rather than news anchors and politicians, and then we choose a course of action based on what is in our circle of control. In the case of the Coronavirus, I would say that means taking the following steps:

Continue the usual program of living a healthy life. Just the incredibly simple steps of cutting cars, sugar and television out of your life as much as possible will virtually eliminate the 70% fatality risk factor of being inactive and unfit – and yet only a tiny percentage of people – even those lucky enough to still have fully able bodies – actually follow this advice. On top of that, this strategy will also greatly boost your immunity to Covid-19, and decrease your chance of serious illness or death if you do catch it.

Don’t try to out-guess the stock market. Just celebrate the fact that we have a temporary sale on stocks. While the endless stream of meaningless market commentary every day means absolutely nothing, one fact remains indisputable: stocks you buy today at a 15% discount from their peak, will be 15% more profitable for you over your lifetime.

And finally, still important but statistically less urgent is taking actual steps related to dodging this and other viral illnesses. Wash your hands a few times a day and avoid unnecessary large gatherings of people in close quarters, until the health organizations tell us we are in the clear.

Guns and ammo and a bunker full of canned beans not required.

* a really interesting quote from that same article about the size of the uncertainty around diseases: ” In the autumn of 2014, modelers at CDC projected that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could reach 550,000 to 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone by late January if nothing changed. As it happened, heroic efforts to isolate patients, trace contacts, and stop unsafe burial practices kept the number of cases to 28,600 (and 11,325 deaths). “

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[damonbation]

Lessons in Fear and Wealth from the Coronavirus

As I write this, the biggest story in the entire world is a virus that is making its way around the planet, leaving a trail of sickness and death in its wake, while sending a much bigger shockwave of fear and uncertainty out front. Last week, the US stock market dropped 15% in just a few days, the most shocking correction since the 2008-2009 financial crisis (and the most interesting drop since the founding of this blog in 2011).

I am sure you’ve been hearing, reading or watching plenty about it already, but the real question is, what should we do about it?

The Scary Side

Is this a screenshot from the fear-mongering TV news? Nope, just a moment from a classic zombie movie, although sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.

The fear and doubt seems to be what the news stories have been emphasizing. The disease is highly contagious, and very sneaky. Each carrier seems to infect 2-3 additional people, which means exponential growth. And with an observed death rate of about 4% so far, it is about 400 times more deadly than the common flu.

On the news, we see rows of hastily installed hospital beds, people wearing paper face masks even here in our own country, empty supermarket shelves and shuttered factories and public venues.

And we are reminded that we ain’t seen nothing yet, because with mild symptoms that can hide for days, most cases are going unreported and the disease is pumping its toxic tentacles through the arteries of our economy, plotting its attack while we are left POWERLESS UNTIL THE RIOTS IN THE STREET START AND PEOPLE ARE SMASHING THROUGH OUR WINDOWS TO TAKE OUR LAST FEW CANS OF BEANS AFTER WE RUN OUT OF AMMO IN OUR SHOTGUNS.

Some people are just prone to this type of thinking, and I even have a few in my own life. They have warned me to gather “at least a few months worth” of nonperishable food in my pantry and make sure I have a generator and plenty of fuel, at the very least. And to reconsider my stance of not keeping any guns in the house.

The Not-So-Scary Side

I went out on the town at the peak of the scare. The reality is different from the news headlines.

As I write this on March 2nd, there have been about 90,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. And while the number is still growing rapidly, at the moment it is still a tiny number, about one thousandth of a percent of the world’s population. So even if it multiplies 100-fold, it would be a tenth of one percent. And out of these 90,000 people, about half are already recovered and have moved on with their lives. And the vast majority of the remaining ill, and all those who are so far undetected, and those who are yet to get infected, will also recover.

Past and current status of the outbreak.

But do we have any idea how bad it will get, before it gets better? As it turns out, we do. But first, some perspective.

Here are this year’s numbers for the tried-and-true traditional flu for the 2019 flu season in the US alone (and remember the USA is only four percent of the world population):

Wow, 32-45 million cases of the flu already, and tens of thousands of deaths. Even I had no idea it was that serious, and yet the flu is something I don’t even worry about – ever!

Even scarier: every year, about 2.8 million people die in the US alone, and a full 70% of these deaths (over two million people per year) are caused by “lifestyle factors”, which to put it plainly means ignoring Mr. Money Mustache’s advice about bikes, barbells and salads every day.

So if we start with the common flu, which is surprisingly scary, choosing car-based transportation and TV-based entertainment and consuming processed high-carbohydrate food and soft drinks should feel at least an additional hundred times scarier than that.

But do you feel the appropriate ratios of fear in these two situations? And a much smaller amount of fear about the Coronavirus? Probably not, because we humans generally suck at putting numbers, statistics and probabilities into perspective.

We Have Been Here Before

In my lifetime alone, we have seen the rise and decline of quite a list of worldwide health scares, each of which was covered in the news with similar intensity to what we see today. AIDS, Ebola, SARS, Bird Flu, and the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, also known as H1N1. That one was particularly serious in retrospect, having infected between 11-21% of the world’s population and taking the lives of about 500,000.

Yet here we are, with that fearful event gone from the rearview mirror and a global economy that is far richer than it has ever been. Which is exactly what we will eventually be saying about the present moment in time, from our vantage point in the even more prosperous future.

And Math Can Help Create Perspective

Contagious diseases don’t just grow forever until everybody is dead. They follow an S-curve, like this recent prediction for Covid-19’s spread. It currently estimates that we may see things flatten out fairly soon, but more importantly it continually updates to new information and makes an educated guess – a great strategy for dealing with unknowns in life in general.

One mathematical model that a researcher is updating each day – image source.

On the other hand, some estimates are more pessimistic. Disease modelers at Northeastern University uses different assumptions to predict between 550,000 and 4 million cases worldwide*, before we reach the flat top of our “S”. But that’s still only a twentieth of one percent of the world’s population who would even get the disease, and then a further 96-98% of those would recover.

As a final source of information, when it comes to world health issues I always like to see what Bill Gates has to say. And sure enough, he written this great opinion piece in a medical journal. His main point? The damage done by a virus really depends on how well our governments respond to it. Lots of caution and a quick response leads to much better results.

So there’s still a lot of uncertainty. But when faced with a lack of information, we can choose one of two options on where to learn more:

Good looking news anchors with fake tans and no scientific background, who make more money if they generate more viewership hours and advertising revenue, which is proven to multiply if they can cause their viewers to experience fear, or

Scientists and mathematicians who study this stuff for a living, and use incoming data to make a series of continually refined predictions.

As Mustachians, we get our information from scientists rather than news anchors and politicians, and then we choose a course of action based on what is in our circle of control. In the case of the Coronavirus, I would say that means taking the following steps:

Continue the usual program of living a healthy life. Just the incredibly simple steps of cutting cars, sugar and television out of your life as much as possible will virtually eliminate the 70% fatality risk factor of being inactive and unfit – and yet only a tiny percentage of people – even those lucky enough to still have fully able bodies – actually follow this advice. On top of that, this strategy will also greatly boost your immunity to Covid-19, and decrease your chance of serious illness or death if you do catch it.

Don’t try to out-guess the stock market. Just celebrate the fact that we have a temporary sale on stocks. While the endless stream of meaningless market commentary every day means absolutely nothing, one fact remains indisputable: stocks you buy today at a 15% discount from their peak, will be 15% more profitable for you over your lifetime.

And finally, still important but statistically less urgent is taking actual steps related to dodging this and other viral illnesses. Wash your hands a few times a day and avoid unnecessary large gatherings of people in close quarters, until the health organizations tell us we are in the clear.

Guns and ammo and a bunker full of canned beans not required.

* a really interesting quote from that same article about the size of the uncertainty around diseases: ” In the autumn of 2014, modelers at CDC projected that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could reach 550,000 to 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone by late January if nothing changed. As it happened, heroic efforts to isolate patients, trace contacts, and stop unsafe burial practices kept the number of cases to 28,600 (and 11,325 deaths). “

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[toptecharena]

The BT Ultra HD YouView has now been around for a number of years, piping out 4K UHD broadcasts to anyone with the kit and money to be able to watch them.

More technically known as the Humax DTR-T4000, it certainly lives up to the hype surrounding UHD. With compatible systems now on the market from the likes of Sky and Virgin Media though, does the BT option still hold up?

The Humax DTR-T4000 is a YouView+ box, virtually identical in appearance and functionality to the YouView from BT box, except with a 1TB hard disk capable of storing 60 hours of UHD content.

With live UHD content still thin on the ground, you might well be filling the BT Ultra HD YouView box with HD or even SD shows, giving 250 hours and 600 hours respectively. Another difference is that this box is fan cooled, which makes it a bit noisy when the TV’s been switched off but is totally necessary as it runs hot enough to fry an egg on.

To watch in BT Sport in 4K Ultra HD you’ll need a compatible screen with at least one HDMI 2.0 input that can handle HDCP 2.2 content protection and a picture resolution of 2160p (50Hz). Most modern 4K TV screens will play nice with the UHD channels.

Incidentally, you can also watch 4K channels downscaled to 1080p on a non-4K screen, which is something to bear in mind if you’ve got an older set.

What does it cost?

First up, you need to be a BT Infinity broadband customer (with a minimum 40Mbps connection) and a subscriber to BT TV’s top-level Ultra HD packages, which start at £15 a month.

You’ll also have to pay £50 for the box (free to new customers), line rental of £16.99/month and an installation fee of £44 if a BT Engineer is required to get you going.

New BT customers will have to pay £6.95 for a BT Home Hub router too.

Note that the IP content including BT Sport will not work if you use a different make of router, and that the Humax box isn’t wireless. BT does supply a 10m Ethernet cable, but you could try a Powerline connection.

You get 248 channels including 47 premium entertainment, documentary and lifestyle channels. Freeview channels are delivered via an aerial, the rest via internet.

Nearly 50 channels are in HD, 13 of which are premium ones (including seven BT Sport Extra channels). You also get the BT Sport Pack (BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2, BT Sport Europe, BT Sport ESPN) which includes all of the UEFA Champions League and a number of Premier League games.

Some of these will be shown in 4K on the Ultra HD channel (number 434 on the EPG). Aside from the odd live broadcast there’s very little to UHD, just a slew of short promo films designed to show off the format.

Netflix’s Ultra HD content has now arrived to add some much-needed extra 4K content. You can also subscribe to Sky Movies, Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2, but only in HD.

To operate the box you use the humungous remote control, which is a touch unwieldy but at least the operating system is pleasing to look at and logically laid out, with carousels of menu options appearing in narrow bands at the bottom of the screen.

YouView+ means you get an EPG that scrolls back seven days as well as forwards and allows you to record shows from the past week so long as they are also contained within the relevant on-demand engine (iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4, Demand 5, BT Player, Now TV, Milkshake!, UKTV Play, Sky Store, Quest, S4C), plus two apps (BBC News and BBC Sport), with Netflix now joining the party.

There are also scores of movies, TV shows (including box sets) and music videos to rent or buy from the likes of Sky Store, BT TV, Curzon Cinema, Nat Geo Wild, E!, SyFy, Universal, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Sony TV, Discovery, TLC, History, Fox, Comedy Central, MTV, and more…

Unfortunately, the box is no quicker to power up than the BT TV YouView box, taking a good 20 seconds or so from standby (and that in the non-eco mode, with the latter taking a full minute).

Considering how complex the content offering is the box itself is pretty easy to get to grips with.

Recording shows and accessing them proves a cinch and seems reliable. My only gripe here is that fast forward and rewind don’t allow you to shuffle through at twice normal speed, four times, eight times, etc. Instead each press of the FF button skips ahead about a minute at a time, which makes it very hard to find a specific incident. Also, there’s no slow-mo (as there is on Sky’s services).

While live 4K football is shown simultaneously in HD and Ultra HD each channel has its own cameras, commentators and studio support. And both require a lot of equipment and manpower to capture and deliver the picture.

Having checked out some of the matches broadcast in 4K, we can say the extra resolution proves captivating, especially when compared with the HD feeds. The most obvious difference is the extra detail afforded by the higher resolution format.

Everything is sharper than it is in HD, not just a bit sharper, much sharper. Admittedly, BT Sport 2 is a bit on the soft side anyway compared with football on Sky, which I discovered when I switched over to my Sky box to check out the Dundee United vs Aberdeen match on Sky Sports 1 HD.

Anyway, the outline of players in UHD is much clearer, the detail in the grass is better (even in wide shots), and you can actually read the wording on the ads that run round the upper tier of the Wembley stand.

This additional detail allows the camera to zoom out wider, so you see more of an overview of the action. Static detail is especially good since there is some inevitable loss of resolution with motion and the frame rate isn’t high enough to keep fast moving objects pin sharp, though it is running at a higher rate than HD.

One shot that really showed off the extra detail had Jose Mourinho standing on the touch line, taken from afar but framed so that you could see 20 rows of fans behind him, and you can clearly see the faces of around 800 supporters.

Astonishing detail

Another great shot was when Hazard took a free kick, which Cech saved, seen zoomed in from the opposite end, the clarity was a level above anything else ever seen in HD.

Any Ultra HD screen will be equipped to show off the extra detail with motion resolution holding up pretty well thanks to a 50fps frame rate.

As such, my 2015 model Samsung 48JU7000T looked excellent, especially with its Auto Motion Plus motion control mode set to the Smooth setting, keeping the ball from distorting when moving quickly through the air, and more pertinently, doing so without any processing artefacts.

Colours, set to output via HDMI in 10-bit, were also terrific, though the luminosity of the players’ pink and green boots was arguably too intense.

The match proved tricky at times for the cameras because of the immense contrast between sunny and shady parts of the pitch and the technology was clearly at its best when the light level was even (no wonder Sky adopted HDR for its own 4K service).

Even so, the broadcast was without doubt a success, with just a couple of very minor picture glitches and no sound problems at all.

Happily, the IPTV stream is outside of your internet service, so watching a broadcast won’t affect simultaneous streaming or web browsing elsewhere in the home on a computer. Also, the IP stream is user-agnostic so your speed won’t be affected by the number of other users in the district.

Given that so few boxes were out in the wild at the time of the first UHD broadcast it was perhaps forgivable that BT would skimp on the frills, with Peter Drury expected to provide the commentary and fulfil the pre-match and half-time hosting duties along with single guest Kevin Davies.

HD viewers on the other hand had the A-list – with Glenn Hoddle, Ian Wright and Rio Ferdinand.

It felt a bit like a beta service had been unleashed on the public, but Jake Humphrey, the main BT Sport presenter, was at the birth of his second child on the eve of the broadcast so there was a definite element of reshuffling.

As time has gone on though, 4K has grown in stature, with football matches at least broadcast in the higher Ultra HD resolution as a matter of course.

Considering its diminutive size and unremarkable design the Humax DTR-T4000 packs one hell of a punch, offering a broad quantity of free and paid content including the YouView seven day roll-back EPG and BT TV’s bespoke entertainment and sports offering.

Undoubtedly though it’s the BT Sport Ultra HD channel that we’re principally interested in, and without a doubt 4K UHD is the jewel in the BT YouView crown. Don’t forget that extra content from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video though.

We liked

The box is easy to get to grips with, with an intuitive onscreen menu system that makes you more inclined to explore the on-demand content than before.

The EPG is nicely laid out, which makes it a doddle to find and watch TV shows from the past seven days.

The box’s most important and likeable trait by far is the quality of the UHD channel. Utterly perfect for live sport, 4K images are astonishingly crisp and highly detailed.

We also like the way the live broadcast is directed to take full advantage of the greater clarity on offer.

We disliked

The UHD channel needs more shows, even with the addition of Netflix and Amazon Prime. The on-demand repository also requires a massive boost to its 4K content.

Recording is fine but the fast forward and rewind functions aren’t smooth and make it tricky to shuffle through a recording looking for a specific moment. Neither the remote control nor the box itself are going to win any design awards.

And for a significant portion of the population who don’t have the option of a 40Mbps BT fibre broadband this is a complete non-starter.

Final Verdict

More than ten years since the first HD broadcast the, ahem, goalposts have finally shifted again thanks to the BT Sport UHD channel.

The channel itself doesn’t yet seem like the finished article but the fact is the picture quality is so spectacularly good it makes it nigh-on impossible to revert to inferior Full HD pics once you’ve had a taste of the 4K manna.

If you’re a sport-loving BT Infinity subscriber the extra cost (£15/month and a one-off £49 charge) is almost a no-brainer, for non-BT customers the cost implications are higher and more complicated. You can check what it will cost you here on BT TV’s webpage.

Ultra HD is just getting started of course, and with Sky and Virgin Media now offering their own packages, the BT Ultra HD box looks a little inferior by comparison.

How BT gets all those pixels from pitch to picture.

Go to Source Author: BT Ultra HD YouView box The BT Ultra HD YouView has now been around for a number of years, piping out 4K UHD broadcasts to anyone with the kit and money to be able to watch them.

[dadsontour]

Dads on tour: One day in Antarctica

My dad loves to write a holiday letter. And they’re usually too funny not to share. Names have been changed to protect fellow passengers (you’ll understand why)...

This letter was received after a sightseeing flight to Antarctica.

This was never going to be a typical flight, albeit Melbourne to Melbourne (via Antarctica) non stop for 12 ½ hours depending on what happened along the way.  

The instructions were quite simple – bring the camera and not much else, no check in, no luggage,  just a lanyard and two boarding passes (one for the trip to Antarctica and a different seat for the return).  I opted for the back section of the 747 where viewing was as unrestricted as it can be through plane windows.  Good choice.

The passengers

Three hundred and something people boarding a jumbo in domestic – well it worked and there was not a spare seat!  I couldn’t help but notice a school group decked out in their uniform.  Of course my thoughts went straight to which private school was this and then counting the rather good teacher to student ratio! 

 It was only later that we found out that the school was a government one and was one of three (the others from Hobart and also Invercargill) as part of a scientific research program in schools. I suppose no overseas travel documentation required on a Melbourne to Melbourne flight!

Not having extravagant luggage to squash into the overhead lockers might have simplified boarding considerably had it not been for the couple in row 46 who just could not work out which seats they had, but we got there.  Off and in the air by 8.20 a.m. in the safe hands of “one of QANTAS’s most experienced captains” with two other captains and a second officer along for the ride.

Remembering the first rule of group travel “if they are not talking about someone then watch out it could be you!” we weren’t even past take off when it became obvious I was surrounded by some of the potential talking points of the outbound journey.  

Yes my neighbour (let’s protect the innocent and call him Bert) and his daughter (let’s call her Beryl!)  Well Bert did manage to ensure that everyone around had an individual explanation of his hernia op and his knee replacements before Port Phillip Bay had disappeared. 

 And Bert was a contractor in building the runway too!  But wait Beryl, they have the flight path on the screen “I’ll show you how to read it” And read it he did, aloud! Photos, he had to get a few so off to a window before announcing that his phone was just about full somewhere across Bass Strait. To some relief he found himself trapped behind the drink carts and unable to get back to his seat until somewhere around Hobart.

We also had a film crew on board from the Places We Go (channel 10 in October) - the Clint Bizzell one.  I saw Clint at one stage come down to  the next galley but they didn’t trouble themselves with the rear cabin!

Brunch

Its brunch time over the Southern Ocean and of course being seated down the back, the food options were reduced by the time the trolley came around, but no problem. We didn’t come for the food.  

Bert got half way through his meal when he informed us that he had a Japanese tenant at one stage and she sends him photos of food still. He decided it was time to return the favour, so took a photo of the meal to send to her.  Next time Bert perhaps before you start it rather than half way through??  The food served, the young gentleman in the seat in front of Bert took the disruptive step of putting his seat into full recline (the only one in the whole cabin) and settling into a movie as you do on a sightseeing flight to Antarctica. 

Now my solution to that as previously trialled on long haul flights is quite simply to undertake very regular knee and leg exercises into the back of the seat of the offender.  Not really a possibility for Bert with those knees (“titanium you know”). 

Valentines day passion

I had joked previously about all of the Valentines Day couples who would be on the plane.  Well let’s put the record straight.  By 10.30 the queues for the toilets certainly reflected the demands of ageing bladders, not Valentines Day passion!

The plane was a real mix of people, but there was certainly an over representation (in my part of  the plane at least) of daughters around 50-70 taking one or both of the elderly parents along for the ride.  Not sure who was paying!

“Beryl, how about we have a selfie” says Bert and so lots more NQR photos before a woman in front ends the misery by offering to take the photo of them.  “They call this a selfie” says Bert to the helpful lady. “ I have a couple of selfie sticks at home but they are broken”  For that we could be grateful as I told him!

The first icebergs

By 11.20 the first sightings of icebergs appeared amongst lots of clouds,  announced by someone walking the aisle as “I just saw an icicle!” Much excitement and photos of course.  

By this stage we were not at the Antarctic Circle and still cruising along at just over 10,000m ASL.  Apparently the weather all week in much of Antarctica had been really bad and although they had 19 alternative flight paths, it was quite clear they were hoping to some extent on this occasion.  

Typically it all starts to open up about 4 hours into the flight as the ice takes over. That ice on this occasion was below a very thick cloud cover.  The most common flight path is apparently to head for the South Magnetic Pole and then on hitting the coast travel west along the Australian section of Antarctica, but not today.  

We were aiming for the Ross Sea and Ross Ice shelf where the weather was expected to be better.  On passing over Cape Adare we dropped down to just over 5000 metres which was to be the level we flew at whilst down there.  Remembering of course that much of the land is over 3000 metres ASL. Only -26 degrees outside which I expected to be a bit colder!  

The clouds have cleared

And then 4 and a half hours into the flight the clouds cleared and the most amazing sights appeared. At this point the whole dynamic of the plane changes.  Even the movie goer is out of his seat taking a photo or two.  Bert has managed to squeeze out a few more photos.  

Virtually no one is in the centre bank of seats and everyone is in the aisles or squashing into the 3 or 2 side seats.  We then spent the next four or so hours cruising around the Ross Sea with the plane doing figures of 8 to ensure everyone saw plenty.  

Concurrently two former Antarctic Expedition Leaders provided continuous commentary over the P.A., which was good although difficult to hear at times.  I was very appreciative of an exceptionally generous couple (my seat rotation pair) who were happy to share their window views on the way down.  That was the sort of atmosphere that prevailed once the views appeared.  

Spotting penguins (not quite)

We flew over the Korean base and the Italian one (the Italians had gone home for winter) and although McMurdo was down there I did not see it.  One of my real highlights was flying adjacent to Mt Erebus and actually being able to look into the smoking crater of the volcano as we flew just 1500 metres above it. 

Pristine ice tongues extending out into the ocean looked amazing, stunningly sharp and steep mountains and some great glaciers but let the photos speak for themselves in that department.  We got down to 78 degrees south. 

No, we didn’t see any penguins, but as I am reminded by the fans of Happy Feet the girls have done their bit and left the eggs with the males whilst they go back out to sea.  My view on these flights had always been that a flight and could not match the ground experience.  How that has changed.  

The distance we flew over and the sights we saw from the air were just amazing.  Such a fantastic experience.  And of course each flight is different.  The one the week before from Sydney had passed over Mawson’s Hut and other places that were off limits to us due to the weather, but then the comment was made that they had not seen parts like Mt Erebus as clearly as this flight on any previous one.  I don’t think anyone felt left out of the viewing or the experience.  

Heading back to Melbourne

When the cloud set in again about 4 hours later we went back up to altitude and started heading for Melbourne.  We weren’t finished though as the Balleny Islands (right on the Antarctic Circle) popped out of cloud – an uncommon phenomenon apparently.  Of course that meant a 30 minute detour to take these in as well. That was the sort of flight that it was.

The return flight was a much more subdued as dinner and the fundraising raffles (for Mawsons Hut restoration) were underway.  A head wind back as well as our detour around the Bellany Islands meant that the 6500 kms was a bit slower, with a late arrival, but who cared!  Certainly not me.  

It certainly did not feel like a 13 hour flight.  As everyone had been thanked and we cruised into Melbourne there was one more experience awaiting.  Our much praised Captain (under the watchful eyes of his two peer captains) misjudged the last few metres of the descent and we arrived with a (huge) thud.  

The passengers in front who were suddenly presented with a whole bank of oxygen masks falling out of the roof certainly got a huge shock!  The Captain came on the P.A. and apologised for the landing, assuring us though that there is a silver lining to every cloud – the sudden stop meant that we had a much shorter taxi to the terminal!  

What an unbelievable experience!

Dad

#travel #travelblogger #travelblog #dad #antarctica #qantas #flying #tourist #traveller