#our 2019 season that he keeps referencing was good because it had a story with characters and a cool arc and storyline and we had a fucking
Text
wait do you guys wanna hear the most accidentally fucked up stnetces said by my band director today?
(to give context our first marching band competition performance is on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. and our show is called “rise above”. yea)
“on september 11th we are going to rise above. we are going to shock the world”
#if we get first at that comp it’s gonna be hilariously fucked up#but also our show literally sucks so :/#like the sets and props are cool#but the wraps and colorguard costumes just have. words from a. speech on them by some man#and there’s no arc at all. it’s just. rise above -> were sad :/ -> rise above#our 2019 season that he keeps referencing was good because it had a story with characters and a cool arc and storyline and we had a fucking#battle in mvmt four of the red queen vs alice and the white team#this show only has three movements and our ballad song is fucking coldplay#also i have a 5 to 5 step size for 24 counts before a 9 count hold and then moving directly back so i’m gonna fight my hand f#director*#anyway. this has been anna ranting about band carry on#notpjo
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ask Answers: May 15th Part 2
And here’s the next part of the long answer set of the day!
When will OL: N&F take place? Beginnings and Always took place during summer breaks, will now and forever take place during a fall break or will the characters be going to school at the time of the events we play through?
It takes place over all of the fall season, so school will be happening in OL2. Some events do take place in school, though many times events only start after school is already out for the day, haha.
Hey!! I have kind of a weird question?? I’m sorry if it’s been answered before and I just haven’t seen it but is OL 2 taking place during the same years as OL 1? I’m just curious, thank you for such amazing games!!!
It’s a similar time frame, but not 100% exactly same.
Do you have any idea when the demo for now and forever will be available?
Hopefully this fall! But that’s not a guarantee.
Okay the crime show in Step 2: Growing up. Long blonde hair, police station, crime series? Was it The Closer? Because I’m the same age as MC and Cove and my mom was constantly watching that when I was 13. 😂
Haha, yeah! The Closer and, to a lesser degree, Medium were the kind of shows I was referencing there. My mom also used to watch those back in the day.
Hey um this might be an odd question but if the setting of OL: N&F is fall/autumn, what country or city will it take because my mind tells me it is either Poland or Canada. Also I can't wait for the game I am hyped
It’s set in the USA again. We’d like to be able to have cameos and that’s easiest to do if the OL games take place in the same country.
Is it possible for the PC of OL to have non-seriously dated other people in the in between years even if they’ve had a consistent crush on Cove?
You can causally date Baxter in Step 3 if you get his DLC and then ultimately choose Cove in Step 4. If you mean off-screen people, it doesn’t really come up, but you can certainly headcanon that. The game never says Cove is the only partner you’ve ever had.
Is there going to be a Kickstarter for Now and Forever as well? For like voiced names and stuff again? Didn’t find B&A until after it was released and I’d really love the opportunity to hear my name in the game 🥺
Yeah, we are gonna have a Kickstarter with getting a voiced name as a reward! Though, it will be more expensive than it was for OL1. I feel bad to raise the price but we realized too late the first time around that it was being super undersold for the amount of work it took, aha.
Do you know how much the remaining DLC for OL will cost? (Step 4, Derek, Baxter)
Step 4: Free
Wedding DLC: $2.99USD
Derek DLC: $4.99USD
Baxter DLC: $4.99USD
Has an artist for the new position been picked yet?! I'm super excited for the new game!
We did fill that spot. Thank you so much for taking the time to apply!
hmmm what would it take to get each of the XOXO jerk squad to feel the need to hug you?
They’d have to first like you a fair amount, otherwise the most you’d get is maybe a pat on the shoulder. If they were attached, they might hug you if you broke down crying or if you gave them super good news.
Unless it’s Shiloh, of course. If you want a hug you only have to ask!
May i ask how the Derek DLC will work? I believe that there aren’t any memories in step 4 and doesnt derek’s dlc take place during that step? So will the dlc add memories? Thank you!
Derek’s DLC will add five Moments to Step 2 (a new page will appear on that screen if you get the DLC). Then in Step 4 you’ll have to choose between playing the default epilogue or going through the Derek romance story.
Is the pc version on itch,io different from the steam version? Like an offline one or something?
Steam has achievements, but that’s about it. Both can be played offline, if you prefer.
I've been wondering this for awhile, what determines if cove winds up with a ponytail in step 3? I've done multiple runs with different MCs with varying hairstyles. Or does it have to do with a particular moment in step 2?
I’m afraid I can’t say exact choices that determine things. But generally it’s preference based options in the Step before that decide those things.
Any Floret Bond updates?
No, the artist had to leave the project and it’s been on-hold. I’m not sure if I want to try working just with what we have or replacing it all entirely. The design is a bit too specific for us to easily find someone who could mimic it. Hopefully we’ll work things out later, though.
In step 3 is Cove's plan always to stay in sunset bird?
Yeah. He is never ready at 18-years-old to make a big life change.
I love your content! If it's alright to ask, you answered in a previous ask about how Jeremy was too particular with what he likes his types to be romanceable with just any MC and it's sort of got me wondering.. What /are/ his types and/or preferences and such? Sorry if it's a lot!
Jeremy likes stubborn jerks and will not date someone who’s sweet or even generally a decent person, haha.
uh, excuse me if you said this somewhere before, but how will step 4 be actually? Will it he like an actual step and have moments and dlc and all? Or will it be more like a long epilogue of some sort?
Will the step 4, the wedding and extra routes dlcs be paid too? Im just confused, sorry if im asking too much
Step 4 is only an epilogue, so it’s just a long series of scenes one after the other rather than a collection of Moments you can choose from.
The Step 4 epilogue is free, the wedding DLC, Derek DLC, and Baxter DLC cost money.
i’m not sure how much of the wedding dlc you have planned already, or if this would be to spoilery, but what kind of wedding traditions will be included? i keep thinking about how flustered cove would get over a garter toss & was wondering if we’d see a scene like that haha. obviously no worries if it’s not included, i’ll enjoy literally anything cove related
I don’t know for sure yet, haha. Right now we’re focused on the parts before the big day. We’ll see how many scene alterations we can include for the wedding itself later on.
Hello! Firstly, thank you for creating such an amazing game like OL, and I couldn’t be more excited for OL2! Out of curiosity, are you looking for any writers to come on for OL2 or are you all pretty much set in that department? Just thought I’d shoot my shot haha but I’m still excited regardless ^^!
We will be hiring writers for OL2 later this year! Thank you for the interest.
Will we be blessed with a spin-off Yandere Cove, like XOXO Blood Droplets?
Sadly, no. It’s a shame but there’s not enough time to keep making OL1 bonus/spin-off content.
How is Q pronounced?
I’m afraid Q’s full name hasn’t been publicly announced yet so I can’t answer here (Q and T are the first letters of the names for the new LIs in Our Life: Now & Forever).
Question; is the steam version getting a Mac update? I purchased the dlc there thinking it had Mac support without realizing it and just wondered if I’d need to refund it to purchase on itch.io 😭
I’m really sorry, you will need to get a refund from Steam. We do hope to have it there for Steam eventually, but have no idea of when it’ll happen. Apple requires special notarization to be an officially accepted app for their devices. We don’t have that. Steam requires having that, Itch will let you release it as an non-notarized third party app. That’s why Itch is the only place that has the Mac version right now.
would you mind posting outfit sheets for Cove in every step? it would make things a lot easier for us artists. it would save a lot of time spent looking for references
I think we did do the earlier steps when they were finished way back in 2019 (this game took a long time to make, aha), but we can probably repost them sometime!
In our life n&f, will we be able to get into qprs/will there be more options in regards to having deep platonic relationships with the love interests? Because as an aroace individual, it would be great if there could also be emphasis on platonic love so that it's more aspec inclusive.
It’s a little hard to say at this point. There may not be things like a wedding DLC for OL2 and so the relationship for platonic and romantic feelings might not go as far as it did in the first game. We’ll kind of have to see how much we can do based on timeframe/budget constraints that will only be set near the end of the year. But we will be keeping things like that in mind at least.
hi! i really really like your game and im absolutely in love with it! i cant wait to try your other games like xoxo droplet and future OL NF :))
during the step 3 erands moment i got curious, which fudge flavor is his favorite? it seems like he likes all of them, but which 4 do you think he would like best?
also i noticed that in some playthroughs cove would let me give him a piggy back ride, and in some he wouldn't, how come?
how does your choices affect cove's interests or looks? i replayed the game without changing any choices but i got cove to look different, is it just random?
thank you!
Cove’s favorite flavors are ones with nuts and that are fruity! But he appreciates them all. Whether or not you can give him a piggyback ride depends on if your MC is fit/large enough to hold a muscular 6-foot-tall beach boy, haha.
Cove’s appearance does depend on choices and it’s generally tied to choices that are preference based rather than emotion/action based, such as which key chain you pick in Step 1.
Is it possible for cove to reject MC's proposal at the end of step 3?
Nope. He’ll always accept.
hi! i was wondering how heavily the side characters will be featured in the our life wedding dlc? obviously it'll be cove & mc focused, but i was thinking it'd be sweet if we could take lizzie dress / suit shopping or dance with cliff at the wedding or something.
The side characters are there about as often as they are in normal events. So, it’s clearly focused on Cove but he’s not the only person you have any meaningful moments with.
When will responses be sent out to applicants?
I’m afraid we don’t send responses out to all applications, only ones we’re interested in offering the position to. Not everyone likes rejection emails and the amount of applications is too high to contact them all to say we’re not hiring them. We post updates on the job page when a position has news. Right now we’ve filled every role that was open.
Is there also going to be the option to keep your relationships with the love interests platonic in Our Life: Now and Forever? That's something I really appreciate in Our Life: Beginnings and Always
Yeah! OL will never force you to end up in a romantic relationship with someone.
I was wondering, in the Step 3 Happiness moment, what are the different fishes Cove can compare MC to? I got "you'd be a paradise fish, because being with you is paradise," but my friend got "you'd be an angelfish." Are there more variations?
He says paradise fish if you’re a couple, angelfish if he’s just crushing, and then a royal dottyback/queenfish/emperor tetra (based on your gender) if he likes the MC platonicly.
Hello! So, in one of the Step 3 DLCs, Cove's arm was gone. I think it was to show him putting his arm behind his back. But if that wasn't the case, did it get yeeted?
Thanks for letting us know. That was an error we tried to fix a little while back. When did you make the save file you were playing? If it was older that might be why it happened. Or maybe the error wasn’t fully fixed after all.
Asking for your opinion, but do you think Cove would at all be into ABBA? Because all I could imagine during the car trip in step 3 was him and the MC belting to Mamma Mia.
Haha, yeah, there’d definitely be some ABBA songs he was into.
So throughout the game, Cove can develop different interests depending on the player’s choices; does this mean that he can have different careers in Step 4? Or his is line of work in adulthood never mentioned at all?
He can have different career paths in Step 4!
Hi!! I'm so so sorry if this has been asked before but I just acquired knowledge about the so famous nsfw dlc for OL and nearly chocked on my bubblegum 💀💀💀 So, my real inquiry is if that specific moment will have any kind of impact at some point of the fourth step OR if it will just be treated as a side-story-ish “what if” scenario.Also, is there any chance there'll be something similar for Step 4? Haha jk,,, unless 😳Questions apart let me thank you profoundly for making the best visual novel I've ever played 😭 Really really looking forward the epilogue and OL2 💕 Have a nice day
It’s just a bonus side story that’s fully separate from the main game.
It would be nice to have one for Step 4 too, but I sadly don’t see us having time to actually do it. I don’t know, if people are still asking for more OL1 content several months from now it might be doable and worth doing.
I'd just like to ask, when is Baxter's birthday :0 -- I'm really curious esp with their zodiac signs so ;w;
I don’t know, haha. Maybe I’ll come up with one someday.
Please help!! I bought the Step 3 DLC but I still have no idea how to get to where you can propose to Cove - any tips?
&
How do I get the option to propose to Cove at the end of the game?
You can click HERE for a discussion on that.
I love that Miranda and Terry are getting together! I'm curious if you have canon sexualities for them? Also just wanted to say how much I love OL and how much joy it brings me everytime I play it <3
Terry likes ladies and Miranda likes dudes!
ngl Step 4 Terry's design reads like y'all see trans guys as their assigned gender more than you see them as men to me (a trans guy)... like maybe if he isn't heavily dysphoric, I could see it, but everything you've said about him doesn't line up with that. Even then, immediate warning bells go off in my head looking at him. I wouldn't have touched the game if I saw him ahead of time.
I’m sorry you aren’t comfortable with the way the design looks. The situation with Terry is that he’s now open about who he is, but the body he was born with is still physically the same. He only came out recently as an adult and hasn’t gone through any treatments/procedures yet (his chest is flatter because he wears a binder). However, even though his body hasn’t transitioned at the point Step 4 happens, no one treats him as anything other than the guy he is. Having a trans character who’s identity is supported/respected from the start is what we’re going for in this case. But what we’re doing with Terry isn’t the only trans content we’ve ever had/ever will have in the future.
how would baxter react to bae pyoun and vice versa? and can you please detailly explain both love interests personalities from our life 2: now and forever? i was just curious, sorry for dumb question!!
I imagine it’d be pretty opposite experiences, haha. Bae would initially think Baxter is pushy and thoughtless, but would quickly realize, oh, he’s instead a soft, considerate boy. Very cute. Baxter would first be struck with the impression that Bae is charming and gentlemanly, but then would realize that, no, he’s a sarcastic asshole. And I’m afraid we can’t reveal the personalities for the next game yet.
Sorry if you've already answered this, but I have a question about the patreon exclusive moment you're working on. I was wondering if it's mainly going to be CGs or if it's mostly character sprites + backgrounds with some CGs.
Either way, thank you for doing the Lord's work and not only making Cove, but making this bonus moment as well 😌😌😌
It’s mostly sprites/backgrounds with two CGs!
—– —– —– —–
Thank you again for the interesting questions everyone :D
We released a new FAQ! It answers common questions and we’ll keep adding more to it. Please check there before sending an ask.
FAQ
Also, if you prefer to just see the main posts without all the asks/reblogs, feel free to follow our side account instead: GB Patch Updates Blog
#our life#Our Life Beginnings & Always#Our Life: Now & Forever#xoxo droplets#ask#gb patch#gb patch games
159 notes
·
View notes
Link
Thor and Hulk are at it again. The Avengers' helicarrier is under attack by a swarm of robot minions under the command of MODOK, the head of a tech company who became a super-powered Inhuman villain after a catastrophe known as A Day — and still the raging green muscle finds time to hurl a projectile at Thor’s head. “Just like old times,” says the Asgardian, referencing a bit from 2012’s Avengers movie. Only this isn’t their next blockbuster sequel. It’s their first blockbuster video game.
Since the MCU has been put on indefinite hold in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic (see: Black Widow’s release date, production on the next Spider-Man movie), games — and, specifically, Marvel Games — are rising to meet the need for fresh stories. This year alone will see the debut of Marvel’s Avengers (Sept. 4) from the Tomb Raider team at Crystal Dynamics, plus Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (holiday 2020), a separate spin-off of Insomniac Games’ 2018 Spidey adventure that revives the breakout Spider-Verse star.
“We always believed in the power of video games,” says Bill Rosemann, who’s like the Kevin Feige of Marvel’s gaming division. “We’re happy that more people than ever are discovering — even though you may be physically in different areas — [that] games can bring you together and create connections."
This next phase (to use an MCU term), which finally gives fans playable Marvel adventures on large console platforms, began with Spider-Man. Earlier attempts to make games of this scale, like an Avengers project planned to coincide with the original movie, fell apart. Leaked footage of this first-person effort, as well as a canceled Daredevil game, exist on YouTube as a glimpse of what could've been. The 2018 release, Marvel’s Spider-Man, finally webbed a green light because it was “all about timing,” says Rosemann. “It's all about what talent is available? Do they want to work with Marvel? If so, what's their passion? When you have all those things align, that’s when you can create something great.”
Jon Paquette, the lead writer of Marvel's Spider-Man, noted how one of their mantras "was to design an experience that felt like you were playing a Marvel movie." Out of that mission came a story about Peter Parker, a little more experienced in his years as New York's friendly neighborhood... you know, interwoven with a battle against a sinister rogues' gallery. It became the best-selling superhero game of all time, at over 13 million units. “We had a feeling it was gonna do that,” says Bryan Intihar, Insomniac’s creative director. "I mean, you don't [really] know. There’s this ultimate fear of screwing up one of the most popular characters.” When celebrities like Lin-Manuel Miranda and LeBron James began sharing images from the game on social media, they knew it had “reached another level."
They still didn’t know if they could make a sequel. There were two post-credits scenes that teased big things to come — another element borrowed from the movies — but that was them "stacking the deck," as Intihar put it. One stinger revealed that Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino teen from Harlem and a playable side character, also developed powers after a bite from a radioactive spider once held in Norman Osborn's secret lab.
“We knew really early that [Spider-Man] was going to end with him getting the spider bite," Intihar says. “We would tease it during development. I think everybody was focused on, 'Can you make the first one really good and we'll worry about the other stuff later?' But we wanted to have that set up so if it became a reality [to do another game] we could pull it off." At one point during an early workshop session, Miles was going to be a post-credits scene reveal and nothing more, but Intihar says the team determined it was important to "see the roots of him being a hero before he even had spider powers." Intihar adds of the final end-credits tag, "One of the reasons we put that out was to hopefully convince people that ‘He’s a Spider-Man now. Can we have a game with him?‘”
It paid off, partly because Insomniac went from being a partner with game publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment to being an official member of the Sony family once the company acquired Insomniac in fall 2019 for $229 million, per the company's financial statements. After that, "they were fully on board with the idea" for a sequel, Intihar says. Rosemann thinks of that first Spider-Man as "proof of concept." Now, for the holiday 2020 season (COVID-19 willing) Miles’ own game will further expand this virtual world.
In Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, set in winter one year after the events of the previous game, Miles' Harlem home is on the verge of being torn apart by a war between an energy corporation and a criminal organization armed to the teeth with advanced tech. It's not a formal sequel to Spider-Man. That, if the coy responses from the creatives are any sign, may or may not be coming later. It's a shorter spin-off, likened in scope to the Lost Legacy game in the Uncharted series. Nevertheless, Intihar promises "it has a lot of heart."
"This is a full arc for Miles Morales that started in Spider-Man," Brian Horton, the game's creative director, says. "We really are completing this hero's coming of age in our game. It is a complete story."
The choice of a smaller narrative came amid discussions of what that hero's journey looked like for Miles in the context of Insomniac's games. After all, Miles, according to Marvel Comics canon, doesn't typically exist in the same reality as Mr. Parker. "When we started crafting it," Horton recalls, "we realized that, with a little bit more of a compact storytelling style, we could tell a very emotionally impactful story that would fit really well as an experience that would take Spider-Man 1 and [Miles Morales] and do justice to this character."
Miles may be training with Peter to hone his Spidey skills, but Horton and Intihar see him as "his own Spider-Man." The animation, the movements, the mechanics, even his powers (including bioshock and invisibility) aren't just unique tricks for this character, they are metaphors for that hero's journey the pair keep mentioning. Peter's origin "was born out of tragedy" — i.e. the death of his Uncle Ben — but Horton mentions Miles "is more so born out of family. What I think is really compelling about Miles as a character is he has friends that he could actually let into his world — his human world and his Spider world. He's a little different in the way he approaches it."
Despite all this spin-off talk, Rosemann isn’t actively overlapping his universe of interconnected games — at least not yet. It's more like a Spider-Verse. "Each game is in the Marvel universe, but they're in their own reality, if you will," he says. "Currently, our plan is to keep each game set in its own Marvel universe." It's part of his goal to give game-makers as much freedom as possible to craft the stories they want to tell. So, while this year’s Avengers won’t be linked to Spider-Man, it has its own web-slinger. Spider-Man has been confirmed to arrive in Marvel's Avengers as a DLC story sometime after launch. But when the game drops, it will also come with a lead character who maintains certain parallels to Miles.
[..]
19 notes
·
View notes
Text
RNM 2x07 - Como La Flor
Apologies for being so late this week!! Lots of translating to do, and research. Mucho gracias to @queenrikki for reviewing this one for me!
EPISODE SUMMARY:
OLD WOUNDS — Liz (Jeanine Mason) is forced to revisit a painful part of her past when her mother Helena (guest star Bertila Damas) shows up at the diner unexpectedly. Michael (Michael Vlamis) urges Maria (Heather Hemmens) to seek help after she experiences a strange vision, and Kyle’s (Michael Trevino) attempt to get Steph (guest star Justina Adorno) to open up doesn’t go as planned. Finally, Helena’s arrival in Roswell sends Rosa spiraling. Nathan Dean and Lily Cowles also star. Barbara Brown directed the episode written by Danny Tolli & Carolina Rivera (#207). Original airdate 4/27/2020.
DETAILS:
Max and Isobel both describing to Rosa how it feels to use (and control) your powers.
Isobel:
"Ground your intention. Feel the current running through your body, your hands guiding it with purpose."
Max:
"Okay, draw energy from your spine…"
Arturo on Rosa:
"I heard a little mouse crying in her room this morning."
Escamoles - like Liz says in the episode, they're ant larvae. One article I found called them "the Caviar of the Mexican desert".
Helena calls Liz "mi corazón", which means "my heart".
"Arturito, te ves bien."
Arturo, you look good.
Adding "ito" to someone's name in Spanish can both be positive or negative. It can refer to smallness or also tenderness (like an affectionate pet name).
@tasyfa pointed out that there was a little timeline error in this scene. Arturo says that he hasn't seen Helena in 7 years, since Jim Valenti's funeral, but last season it was established in 1x12 that Valenti died in 2014. Also, remember the show is a year behind reality right now, so it's still 2019. So off by 2 years.
The reason for Helena's visit - transferring her ownership of the Crashdown for Liz so that Liz can sponsor Arturo's residency for citizenship. I did a lot of research trying to understand and clarify why this is. Thanks to those who weighed in when I was struggling to find a clear answer. Eventually I reached out to Define American, the non-profit org that provides support to the show on racial and immigration related issues. Here's the response:
The short version is that Liz has to meet minimum income requirements in order to sponsor Arturo, because she has to be able to certify that she can financially support him. Since she's currently unemployed except for the Crashdown, transferring half of the ownership to her makes her a business partner and helps her to meet the income requirements.
The Spanish:
"¿Cuánto quieres, Mamá?"
How much do you want, Mama?
"She has a very thoughtful manicure."
If you don't understand, it's cool. I'm not going to explain here. Feel free to DM me though! I won't judge, promise!!
Narrative thread about Max's nightmare/memory continues from 2x03 and 2x06. Don't forget that 2x03 was just Isobel remembering it. Max was a hallucination. So when he brings it up here, it might be something they haven't discussed in a very long time.
The Spanish from Rosa on her red jacket:
"Eres una mujercita."
Basically translates to you're a little woman or young woman. I assume the "cita" is supposed to be diminutive here.
"Mom is an opportunist. If she found out she had a kid who came back from the dead she would use you to get to Anderson Cooper. And then she'd use him to promote her latest lounge singer gig."
"Isobel pays double. Becky tax."
A Becky, according to common colloquial use, is an annoying white woman, usually entitled and privileged.
Lead bartender quit..meaning there's a job opening at the Pony…hmm. Wonder if any of our characters need a job... 🤔
Maria's vision:
Michael drops the change
Flash to Kyle dropping his keys & bending down to pick them up.
Kyle staring into a bright light.
Maria shouting his name.
"My heart was broken. Liz ended things and a part of me died."
Max's story to Valenti… not all THAT far off from the truth.
Note: has anyone told him about Valenti investigating him? We know Liz and Isobel were questioned. Michael was present when Liz was questioned. Kyle knows the whole theory his mom was pursuing. And he just wanders in there like nothing happened?
"Try leading several short staffed investigations with the mayor breathing down your neck."
Another subtle reference to the mayor, including the election banners hung around town in S2 and his "anti-immigrant agenda" which was referenced in S1.
Max has been with the department since he was 18 - this is the first time we learned that. In 2x05 we learned he was there at 21. So that timeline has now been further clarified. Which also means he was hired during Jim Valenti's time as Sheriff.
"I need eyes on you at all times now."
Definitely implies a lack of trust, or possibly still wanting to keep an eye on him for the purpose of her investigation (not a fact, just a theory).
Steph tells Kyle that she's always hanging around the hospital because she's doing admin work for her dad.
"I'm starting to feel like you're a ghost who only I can see."
"Ask them if they can see me. Or if you were just talking to a ghost."
Note that ghosts have been a running theme this season with Rosa returning from the dead. This seems to be in line with that. Or are they subtly tying Steph to Rosa (I'm grasping at straws here, probably).
Liz leaves the safe on 3...but before she changes it is on 81. Helena leaves it on 78 after stealing the ring. Good continuity, RNM!
The whole "my mom hates cops" theme is a little confusing to me. I mean, it makes sense given what we know about Helena. Except that she had an affair with Jim Valenti, who was… a cop. And also an addict. Maybe it was different because they rehabbed together (just an assumption, not a fact). Or maybe the Jim experience contributed to her dislike of cops.
Liz...might be grasping at straws when she refers to police work as "something you love" to Max. He didn't exactly seem enamoured by the job when we first met him in Season 1.
First time we learn Max and Isobel's father's name. And it is… Dave. 🤔
The Spanish Helena uses when she meets Max:
"Pero que guapo estas."
But how handsome you are.
"Cuidado Arturito."
Careful, Arturo…
Helena found Liz and Diego's wedding registry online.
“Look there are medical reasons for non-drug-induced hallucinations - epilepsy, schizophrenia…”
“My mom has a degenerative brain disease. My grandma did too. I've always known I'd be next.”
Helena wanted to be Selena.
Which fits with Liz's lounge singer comment earlier.
And the "drunkenly singing in the car with your daughters in the backseat" fits with the story Liz and Rosa discussed in 2x02 about the car accident they got into as kids with Helena driving drunk.
Helena shows Liz her ten years sober chip, suggesting that she's been sober since Rosa died, but Rosa finds pills in Helena's car later in the episode. Oxycodone. The same drug that Rosa used to steal from her mom as a kid (which we learned about in 2x04) and the same drug that she and Kyle discussed when he was checking her health in 2x01.
During Helena's toast to Rosa:
Preciosa = precious
Rosa Linda… still not sure personally if this is a continuity error or a pet name. I’m inclined to go with a pet name. Throughout the whole episode Helena uses lots of pet names, nicknames, diminutives to address people. Rosa Linda may be just another version of this since Rosa's middle name was pretty well established as Helena in Season 1 between her grave, memorial pamphlet, etc.
Kyle calls attention to Steph's bandage on her arm. She says she gave blood, but it feels like she's evading.
Also she calls him McDreamy, which is a Grey's Anatomy reference. Kyle called himself McSexy (another Grey's nickname) in 1x08 as well.
Note: I've seen some people talk about the speech about his sick friend as being about Maria, but I think he's really talking about Steph. Or both, vaguely. He's certainly trying to get Steph to open up to him. Here's what he says:
"I just found out a friend of mine is sick. And I can't do anything to help her. And I hate feeling helpless."
Only after Steph puts her walls back up, does he gesture to Mimi's files.
The Spanish:
"Oh, ándale, gùero."
Ándale is like, go! Or let's go! Gùero we discussed earlier...basically white boy.
Por favor - please
Rosa's art that we first saw in 2x05 now looks finished:
Isobel's graffiti "In Pod We Trust"
Both Isobel and Rosa's graffiti:
Isobel's assessment of Rosa's art
"That's a black hole. An unstoppable force of destruction. And it's getting closer. I see a girl looking into her own doom. She thinks it's inevitable, that she can't stop it, but she can. See, she created it. That means she can destroy it."
Rosa on Isobel's efforts to help her:
"You and Max, you keep talking about harnessing emotion and grounding myself, right? But I can't do that. It is in my DNA to be screwed up. Literally. My mom's mentally ill. So, so am I. I was broken long before Noah did what he did. That's why he chose me to prey on. That's probably why he chose you too."
Maria on her grandmother:
"When I was a child my Grandma Patty was the only adult who understood my make-believe world. Thing is, I was six. So my favorite things about her were just illness, I guess…"
Maria on her mom:
"She was always kind of out there. By the time I realized it was more than that, I just became obsessed with money. Wanted to be able to take care of her. I invested everything Grandma Patty left me, and I worked, scrounged. It was about three days after my mom was finally fired from her job at the Pony, I bought the place."
Maria's blood does not contain the alien protein that Kyle found in the Pod Squad and Rosa after being in the Pod for a decade. (and yes, he actually said Pod Squad, which feels like an OG fandom victory)
"Look, there is one thing I noticed in your grandmother's file. Her insurance company is the same one that paid for my dad's cancer treatments...My dad got cancer because of an alien incident at Caulfield Prison. A fake insurance company established by Project Shepherd covered his bills."
"Okay so my grandmother got sick at the same alien prison where your mother died?"
More Spanish (there's lots of it this week).
Helena, when she gestures to the present:
"Abre tu regalo."
Open your gift.
Quinces is just slang for Quinceanera.
Just in case you're not familiar with quinceaneras (Liz's was also referenced in 1x02).
"Mija, me enseñas tus prom photos?"
Daughter, show me your prom photos.
Regarding the power outage. Liz thought it was Max. Max thought it was Rosa. But the wire is frayed, like it was cut or chewed through. So it wasn't alien power related. When Arturo finds the wire though, he says, "Must have been a little mouse." Which is how he referred to Rosa earlier in the episode. So the question is, does he actually think it was a mouse? Or does he think Rosa cut the wire? And if Rosa did cut the wire, then why? To distract them while she goes after her mom's car?
In the big Liz/Helena argument, Helena calls Max “a güerito cop”. Güero means white person, similar to the more commonly used gringo. But by adding the “ito” onto the end (like discussed before), Helena is basically diminuitizing Max. She’s using the “smallness” above to basically imply that he’s some white nobody.
“I may not be the PTA mom who made cookies for bake sales or hosted sleepovers, but I sacrificed everything to come to this country to give you a better life.”
This is...not actually true. Liz and Rosa are both natural born U.S. citizens, born in Roswell. So she didn’t “come to this country” for that reason. She was already here when Liz and Rosa came into the picture. And it’s not like she came pregnant with Rosa or anything, since Rosa is Jim Valenti’s daughter.
The ring that Helena took was ARTURO'S mother's ring. It wasn't even Helena's family's heirloom.
Liz and Arturo sharing flan for dessert. At the start of the episode before Helena arrived they discussed making flan for Rosa.
Arturo admits that he always knew the truth about Rosa's heritage. (*fistpump* that's one of my headcanons coming true).
"Rosa es mi hija, siempre y para toda la vida."
Rosa is my daughter, always and for life.
"Maybe you're right. I am playing the hero. Just like you're playing the politician's perfect arm candy. See, I did a little digging. And your boyfriend, Dirk-- he ran for city council. It's very impressive. But there's no mention of your daughters. I'm guessing Dirk doesn't even know about Liz or Rosa. Does he know anything about you, Helena? 'Cause it would be such a shame if he found out about a little town called Roswell."
Helena gives Max the ring, but keeps the box… maybe that's what Helena really wanted?
Huevos = eggs. Basically, slang for balls.
"I know that face. You uncovered a massive conspiracy."
"I checked the Caulfield drives. No sign of a Patricia DeLuca, but there was a Patricia Harris. Her maiden name. She signed up to participate in an experimental trial. Government was interested in weaponizing alien abilities. They wanted to create super soldiers. Your grandma was one of the first human subjects."
"Kind of wish I was an alien instead."
"What happened to the experiment?"
"It was a total failure. Caulfield shut it down in the '70s after people started dying. I don't understand how your grandmother got involved."
"I do. Henrietta Lacks, Tuskegee, Holmesburg. The DeLucas aren't the first black people to be secretly experimented on."
Highly encourage you to read these if you're unfamiliar with any of these references. It's African-American history (and really a black mark on U.S. history) that's rarely taught in schools.
Henrietta Lacks:
Tuskegee:
Holmesburg:
Reality versus Maria's flashes… great gifset by @rosaortecho on this here:
Kyle rips his jacket, staggers out to the parking lot, drops his keys, and is almost hit by a car, but Michael throws him out of the way with his powers (and Kyle still ends up injured because he lands on a glass bottle).
"Now that we know your illness is related to Caulfield we can find a cure for it."
"Maybe it's not an illness. I saw the future today, Guerin. When I first found out Grandma Patty was experimented on, I was furious. But what if my genetic inheritance isn't just injustice? It's also actual superpowers. Saved a life today. And not just any life-- Kyle Valenti's. Tomorrow he's gonna turn around and save five more lives."
Liz and Rosa's dueling big sister act is super fascinating. Rosa admits that she wasn't going to burn the car, and then she saw Liz crying, felt helpless, and that's when her powers went all wacky and caused it to explode.
Meanwhile, Liz has spent the whole episode trying to keep Rosa safe from Helena, and is trying to comfort her here by talking about Helena's sobriety.
But--Rosa stole Helena's pills, so she knows Helena is not sober, and she doesn't tell Liz that. Why? To protect her.
At some point these two should probably stop keeping secrets to protect each other and start actually sharing what they know.
Kyle stitches himself up.
Steph quoted in this scene:
"I was up in the gallery contemplating American downfall thanks to progressive socialism."
"People tend to bail when things get real. I'm not into that."
Cameron's car was impounded a couple hours away.
Max is turning in his badge and gun and is turning down desk duty to search for Cam.
Isobel and Michael's discussion at the Pony:
"Do you think that Noah chose me because I was already broken?"
"I think you are the only one of us who ever keeps it together."
"I'm serious, Michael. The night that drifter attacked me, why am I the only one who started blacking out? I mean, Max literally murdered a man, but I'm the one who breaks?"
"You were traumatized. We were kids. At that age, trauma gets etched on to your soul."
"But what if it's not in my soul? What if it's in my DNA? Look, my whole life, I've played Stepford wife, because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. But...I need to understand myself now. I need to know where I'm from. And if I don't know who my biological parents are, how am I ever gonna know who I really am?"
"What are you saying, Iz?"
"I know that we said we shouldn't look into the past, but…"
"It keeps pulling you back. Me too. I spent my whole life thinking I'd build a ship and blast off into the ether. And then the minute I decide to leave that all behind and focus on this good thing in front of me, I'm sucked back in. Maria's family was experimented on at Caulfield. I need to find out more so I can find a cure for her illness."
Rosa takes one of her mom's pills. 😭
MUSIC:
1. Cactus Groove "This World"
2. Shelly Fairchild "Drive"
3. Mathis Hunter "Mrs. Vinegar"
4. Big Stone City "Good For Zero"
5. Big Stone City "Way Down Below"
6. Selena "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom"
7. Elizabeth Moen "Best I Can Do"
8. Wagons "Keep Coming Back"
9. AG "Where Is My Mind" (Pixies Cover)
8 notes
·
View notes
Note
for the directors cut thingy what are you doing the rest of your life? this is one of if not my most favorite warm fuzzy lemonberryice fic so any part of it you want to talk about, but especially the bit starting with “‘I wouldn’t run,’ I said. ‘And I will thank you not to point out my previous track record of doing just that’”
thank you!!!!!!! also, true to form, this is, so long, cause i just did the whole thing. what else would i do. the tl;dr of it all is that when i write fic, i am always thinking about writing structure and individual characterization and what the point of any given story is above all else, and that consumes a lot of brain power. and that you could give me any line in a fic and i will have an incredibly specific anecdote for it.
the first lemonberry ice i wrote!! what a time. i specifically tagged it as ‘very little angst and no one dies!!!’ because i’d just posted beatrice like. three months before??? and i said to myself ‘hmm. i don’t want people to think all i can write is angst......’ so i wanted the fic to be like, look! nothing bad happens here this time!! it’s all good!!!!!!!!! and i had wanted to write something happy!! i like fluff a lot!!
like bertrand, i was also searching for the right sinatra song for this fic. if it isn’t obvious, by now, three years later, i love sinatra a lot. on my previous laptop, the file for this fic was still titled after the first song the fic was supposed to be about, but when i backed up everything in googledrive i titled it properly, so the file name is the proper one now, but i’m, 99% sure the original song was i get a kick out of you (specifically this super jazzy one, not the one with the opener, it’s slower and doesn’t sound the same). but LIKE WITH EVERY CHOICE I MAKE IN A FIC i wasn’t sure it really captured what the fic was about. especially the “you obviously don’t adore me” line, because the fic was certainly more upbeat than that. so i dug around on youtube for one i thought fit better and found what are you doing the rest of your life. for three people, living such turbulent and unpredictable lives, to hear this song about always wanting to be there, for everything, no matter what it is, and for the rest of their lives, to admit that’s possible............ i couldn’t find a recording of young!sinatra singing it, though, which bummed me out a little. nothing wrong with old!sinatra, but you can start to hear more of the.....age his voice, you know?
since this was 2017, only the first netflix season was out, and we all still had such high hopes for it, and i sure did, and tito puente was mentioned in miserable mill and because s1 was so good i didn’t mind making a couple references to it because EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, and i just wound up sticking him in beatrice and what are you doing the rest of your life because his music was great and it was a fun callback! simpler times indeed........
my main goal with the fic was, i think, to try and figure out how i thought the three of them worked in a relationship, since it was my first time writing them. which is why there’s really specific lines like, “A year had gone by and I still wasn’t used to how free Bertrand was with his affection.” and “I grinned, because after all this time I knew when she was kidding. Beatrice’s razor-sharp wit, and the touches of playfulness behind it, was one of my favorite things about her.” they’re lines that i still think are absolutely in character for lemony, and i probably wouldn’t change them if i wrote it now, but i do feel they’re a little too, on point. or not on point, just.....obvious. like, not only did the lines have to make sense in the style, but they had to make sense, for me, as i was writing, as i was trying to figure out their characters and what would show lemony’s nerves alongside bea and bertrand’s habits and their relationship as a whole, and that’s a lot to try and do
“‘Sonnets,’ I said. ‘Beatrice will write sonnets.’” truly. i am truly haunted by this line now. it will keep me up at night.
oh boy, that section is. a lot. i gotta go through the whole thing. i do.
“I wouldn’t run,” I said. “And I will thank you not to point out my previous track record of doing just that, because they were all for relatively legitimate reasons.” I liked to think that I wouldn’t do it again, if the sort of situation arose where it was something I had to consider. (i think every writer in this fandom will admit that one of the hardest things to do, when writing a happy fic, is trying to find the line between, ‘i cannot avoid the legit canon events that have happened to these characters and turned them into the people they are, and i need to address that, no matter what i’m doing’ and ‘i want them to be happy and they deserve it’ and i think that’s a lot of what this section is. referencing how in canon lemony runs to not necessarily avoid his problems, but also, mainly, i think, because he believes 1) that’s the only way to protect the people he cares about and 2) that they’re better off without him, and how there’s definitely a gap between him leaving stain’d-by-the-sea and returning to the city, where anything happened, that counts as ‘leaving,’ and it was also supposed to reference one of the giant fics i was working on at the time, where the climax was, of course, and like any good slow burn fic, a misunderstanding that involved lemony leaving before reconciling with bea and bertrand. this fic would’ve taken place after it.) I liked to think that marriage wasn’t one of those things, because it was something I genuinely wanted. (2017!me had no idea what 2019!me would do......) But the uncertainties of the world sometimes made even that lovely thing seem so far out of my grasp that, if I was honest with myself, I had considered slipping away into the night so that I wouldn’t ruin anything else. It was an upsetting thing to think, but I had thought of it as much as I had thought about those musical numbers. (i still think about that, sometimes. lemony and bertrand, proposing like true theater nerds.)
Bertrand looked out over the water. “Do you think I’m not scared too, Lemony? About the things we do, the positions we put ourselves in, whether this assignment or the next one will be the one that takes one of you away from us?” (my mental checklist of things i write include ‘lulu, is there a moment in the fic where like, The Point Of The Fic Is Made,’ like the moment where it all comes together and, this is what the fic was For an What It’s Supposed To Say, and that’s what this scene was for, and it’s definitely in what bertrand’s saying here.) (but because it’s 2017, like some of the earlier lines, i feel as if The Point is Too On Point. but it’s something i still struggle with, even now.) (it’s still important for bertrand to say it, though.....)
“No,” I said. “I’m not that much of a fool to think that my fears aren’t universal.”
“Sometimes you act like you do,” Bertrand said quietly. “And I am under no delusion that our feelings for each other will fix any or all of our problems. But they can be a little easier to deal with that way, when you know you aren’t alone. You know that, don’t you?” (i had a lot of characterization notes around this fic (and the giant fic i was writing) since i was, again, just writing them and trying to figure out how they all worked, so i had a little list of like, what each of them do for the other, and parts of it were “bertrand prevents beatrice and lemony from being too dramatic, bertrand prevents lemony from being too self-deprecating, lemony allows bertrand to feel less self-conscious (and probably less worried because bertrand knows someone else shares his terrible anxieties)” and there are things i write differently now, because i’ve been at it for a while, but it was important for me to figure out how they connected with each other and....not what they offered each other, and certainly not how they fixed each other, but how each of them lessened certain canon elements that would make their relationship go differently. because again all my lemonberry ice fics (with the exception of the letter) are written from a standpoint where they would rewrite canon, especially this one. anyway, that’s.....that’s what that dialogue was supposed to do. when all three of them are together, they’re capable of being that support for each other and evening each other out.)
I wanted very much to believe that, but every time Beatrice or Bertrand said it, it never seemed to sink in the way it should. It is one thing to love someone, or multiple someones, to love them so much you often can’t think of anything else, but another thing to trust them and the things they say and yourself, especially when you live the kind of lives that we lived. (i hate to keep bringing up years i know it’s like. weird but it’s how i sort where my brain was, and 2017 was a great year for analysis in this fandom and i don’t remember who exactly had brought up, that lemony sees a difference between love and trust, especially after ellington (he loved her but he didn’t trust her), and that’s something that’s so true that i’ve never forgotten and that gets brought up in other fics too (bea in the letter loving lemony but not trusting him.....). there are certain headcanons, of my own and of others, that i tend to just get, attached to, so they just. keep. happening.) Perhaps I did forget about it sometimes, the terrible recklessness with which Beatrice occasionally acted, how Bertrand tended to be much too quiet at times, the things all of us did when we forgot we weren’t alone. (yet another ‘line that has to work in the narrative and Say The Point’ because that really is a big thing in how i structure stories. i feel like it’s so necessary for there to BE a point to each thing i write, ESPECIALLY in shorter pieces, otherwise, why???????? and you know what, i need to be less strict about that, really.) The three of us were not perfect people, not by any means, but three imperfect people doing what they can for each other in a turbulent world is sometimes better than three perfect people going through life without a care about anything else. (i rewrote this line a few times, but it’s one of my favorites. this fic really has aged well, especially with lemony’s narration, this line in particular.)
I squeezed Bertrand’s hand and didn’t say anything more.
speaking of lemony’s whole love vs. trust thing and my rewriting, i tend to keep most of what i cut out of a fic, especially while i’m trying to figure out a certain line (although sometimes i’ll just rewrite over it and then it’s lost to time), and the file has my original attempts for this scene, which still had some good lines --
I think it is a universally accepted truth that if you love someone, you trust them, in one way or another, but I have never felt that way. there have been quite a few people whom I loved a great deal but didn’t trust them, or people that I knew I could trust to act a certain way but certainly didn’t love at all. I believe it comes with the sort of upbringing that involves a great deal of suspicion for even the people around you.
the circumstances around you meeting them. but sometimes also because of the things they do. or you can not love someone at all and trust them, because you know them to be a horrible person and trust that they will continue to act in horrible ways, and that at the bottom of every root beer float you drink in their presence there will be a small collection of thumbtacks.
bertrand looked out over the water. “we love you very much, lemony,” he said, “and I don’t expect that to fix any or all of our problems. but do you trust that we feel that way?”
I did. or I wanted to. the thing about trust is that it is a very difficult thing, and as much as I wanted to spend the rest of my life between the two of them, the amount of uncertainty I felt about myself and our lives and even about that uncertainty was a heavy thing.
“what if it’s not enough?”
“maybe it’s not,” bertrand admitted. “but it’s good enough.”
“‘Hey, hey!’ Beatrice said, snatching the plate from him. ‘Don’t be like that with the good plates.’” still one of my favorite actions. still makes me laugh, even though now i think bea would be the one to be reckless with dishware.
and beatrice talking about their apartment being too small for children is a top favorite fic ending. i love her. so much.
3 notes
·
View notes
Note
You keep referencing your old fear of IZ but will we ever hear the whole story?
Alrighty! In honor of the spooky season, I think it’s time I told you all the full story of how my fear of Invader Zim came to be and how I conquered it!
When Invader Zim first came out I was at the ripe old age of 5 years old. I never saw the first episode but still enjoyed watching cartoons off all kinds. Except Ahh! Real Monsters which I’m still afraid of to this day
My first encounter with Invader Zim was when I was 6 years old. I was watching Tv at my cousin’s house when an episode (I believe it was Door to Door but they memory’s kinda foggy) popped on.
I never knew Zim was an alien but my goodness he was the cutest boy I had ever seen! I didn’t even care that his skin was green I just thought he was cute!
“Wow! I love Zim!” I remember giggling.
“Really? I think Dib’s better” My cousin countered.
Now, she was like a few years older than me so I really looked up to her and wanted to be like her.
So I took back my love for Zim and pretended to like Dib. I never really understood why she preferred Dib as I always thought he was mean.
I did catch a few pieces of episodes here and there on my own and did see Zim’s alien form. However, my child brain was quite stupid so I always thought he was just an oversized bug who liked to talk to his cousins. (Yes. I thought that the Tallest were Zim’s cousins. I was that stupid y’all.) I never once considered that this oversized bug and the cute green skinned boy were the same person.
Now, I should probably note that I had an insanely overreactive imagination growing up. (This is part of what inspires me to write lol)
So Zim sorta became an imaginary friend of sorts. Because I had fallen in love with him, I assumed that meant we had to get married (Curse you Disney for your unrealistic expectations!)
So Zim and I had a cute little imaginary wedding.
Everything seemed fine until the day I found out about the harsh truth.
I remember going upstairs to my room when I heard Tallest Purple’s voice coming from the upstairs TV.
“I thought you were trying to destroy the Earth?”
I gasped! Who was trying to destroy the Earth?!
Sure enough I looked up and saw the oversized bug once more.
“Ah yes! You heard wrong! My original plan was to destroy Mars! Just a little warm up before I destroy the humans! I’m an unstoppable death machine you know! Well, Invader Zim signing off!”
I felt a pang of fear in my gut. Zim?! The cute green skinned boy I called my imaginary husband was really an evil alien out to destroy the Earth?!
I ‘confronted’ him and he owned up to being an alien.
I felt my heart shatter into a thousand bite sized pieces. I never felt so betrayed! So bamboozled! So smeckledwarfed!
I let out a scream and ran into my bedroom. I spent the rest of the day sobbing and cuddling my Scooby Doo plushie.
I remember going to see a ‘friend’ of mine. (She was a pretty shitty friend but I still liked her.)
I brought up Invader Zim and we chatted for a bit. She begun to tell me about a girl in the show.
“Are you talking about Gaz?” I asked as I tilted my head.
“No. No. She was a beautiful girl and she was also an alien.” My friend explained.
I realize now that she was probably referring to Tak.
However, my foolish child brain was convinced that Zim had somehow turned a girl into an Irken!
Needless to say, this did not help my fears.
So after talking to my friend I kept having nightmares about Zim turning me into a half human half Irken hybrid.
I got so scared that I had to sleep in my parent’s room for a week.
After that, I would run screaming at the mere mention of the show.
My brother used to watch Nicktoons a lot and would often torment me by referencing Invader Zim (as well as Ahh! Real Monsters.)
As I got older, a lot of middle schoolers would walk around wearing brightly colored GIR shirts. I would always cringe in fear and avoid them.
I couldn’t even walk past a Hot Topic without my stomach churning.
Eventually, the day came where I could take my fear of Invader Zim no longer!
I was 13 going on 14 and there was an Invader Zim marathon on Nicktoons.
There used to be a large TV right in front of the kitchen table, so my brother decided to watch the marathon there.
Unfortunately, I wanted to eat my snack and my mom refused to let us eat in our bedrooms.
My brother was being nice for once and offered to change the channel.
I was about to say yes but something in me snapped.
I was so sick and tired of hiding in my room whenever the show came on. I was tired of gasping at the sight of GIR shirts.
I was so done with living in fear.
“No. Leave it on. I can handle it.” I said as I sat down with my snack.
“Are you sure? I can always change it.” My brother offered.
“It’s ok. I can handle it.” I insisted as I started to eat.
And with that, I stared straight ahead and decided to give it a watch.
The episode was Hamstergeddon, and the moment Zim started screaming about Pipi, I felt a change in me.
In that moment, Zim no longer seemed so scary. In fact he was funny!
Soon I found myself laughing instead of screaming.
Why was I so scared of this show? It was comedy gold!
When I finished eating, I went to the upstairs and grabbed both my Kirby and Scooby Doo plushies. I sat down in front of the upstairs Tv and turned on Nicktoons.
The opening theme song used to sound like nails on a chalkboard but not anymore.
Now it sounded like music to my ears! Soon, Invader Zim went from one of my greatest fears to one of my most beloved special interests.
And it was just in time for my scene phase!
I rushed to Hot Topic and bought every piece of GIR merch I could get my angsty scene paws on.
When my 14th birthday rolled around I asked for a plushie of Zim off of eBay. The seller was an asshole and he charged us an arm and a leg but it was well worth it.
My Zim plushie went everywhere and I mean everywhere with me. To the park, to my brother’s soccer games! Even to renaissance fairs! Hell there’s said to be an ad for some autism organization that has footage of me holding Zim.
I let myself fall in love with Zim all over again (Only this time I didn’t marry him like an idiot.)
I delved into the Invader Zim fandom and begun to churn out OCs and extremely cringey fanfiction ideas.
When my scene phase wore off, I realized that Zim wasn’t very nice so I kept him away from my other stuffies for a little while.
However, I was no longer afraid of Zim but I still cringed when I looked back on my old ideas.
Fast forward to August of 2019. Rise of the Teeange Mutant Ninja Turtles was on a massive hiatus and I was slowly going insane on the world’s worst cruise.
As I suffered aboard the SS Retirement home, I scrolled through tumblr and noticed that Netflix had just released Enter the Florpus.
Maybe, I had gone completely insane on that boat or maybe I was just excited to see Invader Zim make a comeback.
Either way, I felt my special interest in Invader Zim reawaken
The first thing I did when I got home was dig out my Zim plushie, log into Netflix and turn on Enter the Florpus.
In that moment, I fell in love with Invader Zim all over again.
I soon wrote up my first Reader insert fic and now here we are.
Now, I love Zim free of fear and cringe!
24 notes
·
View notes
Text
Christmas 2019: Day 4 - A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Four rounds of sliders!
So, turns out I had the title of this movie wrong, it’s not just A Harold & Kumar Christmas, it’s a 3D Christmas! Which also answers the question of where we go from the second movie, apparently out goes all that racism and in comes just so, so many shots of things flying at the camera.
It’s 2011 by this point, have we not left all this in the past? Hell, they were doing this in House of Wax when I watched that last year and that was back in the 50’s. To their credit, they do poke fun at the whole 3D thing at times, like near the start Harold’s assistant brings in a big ass TV meant as a present for Harold’s father in law. Harold questions if the whole 3D thing hasn’t jumped the shark by now but his assistant disagrees, exclaiming that it’s going to be ‘amazing’ as he points down the camera for emphasis. Harold just dryly asks who he’s looking at.
Harold has been moving up in the world it seems, now a very successful businessman on Wall Street. Unfortunately this comes during the whole ‘Occupy Wallstreet’ movement and the streets outside his office is lined with protesters wanting to eat the rich. Perhaps with a side of eggs which they throw at him by way of the camera lens.
Like a good soldier though, his assistant steps into the line of fire and takes a barrage of eggs to the face. RIP in peace. They have this whole musical sting whilst it’s happening, I feel like this has to be referencing something but I’m not sure what, war movies aren’t my thing.
Harold’s father in law by the way is played by non other than Danny Trejo, which is a rather scary thought. Trying to impress the father in law is bad enough without factoring that into the equation. He’s predisposed to disliking Harold as well given that his mother was killed by a bunch of Korean street thugs when she came over to America.
We learn that in his youth, Mr Perez dreamed of celebrating Christmas with a Christmas tree but would never get his wish. It was only upon reaching America that his mother promised they would have one every year, only for his life to be cut short. That’s why he holds this season and Christmas trees in particular in such high esteem. We also learn that apparently he was born with his moustache, which honestly wouldn’t surprise me with Danny Trejo. Also, someone being viciously murdered by street thugs seems a bit dark for this franchise.
Speaking of facial hair, Kumar is still a layabout bum who got kicked out of medical school for failing a drugs test. I do dig the beard though. Vanessa has left him though and he lives in filth with a neighbor who rents out his bathroom to let homeless people take a shit. So yeah, little bit of a mismatch on how our two heroes lives panned out over the last 7 years. I’m digging the beard though, but he promptly shaves it off under the pretense of trying to finally mature somewhat when he finds out Vanessa is pregnant.
Although, he is a little distracted during this revelation by the unfolding scenes of A Christmas Story and Flick getting his tongue stuck to the flagpole. Clearly an Xbox man as well, seemingly playing some Crackdown and Gears of War recently. This isn’t like that time I kept seeing It’s A Wonderful Life everywhere, is it? I’m not going to start having A Christmas Story pop up in all these movies, am I?
H&K are reuinited for the first time in two years when a package turns up at Kumar’s apartment addressed to Harold, which turns out to be a massive joint. Kumar lights up, only for Harold to play narc and throw it out of the window. Miraciously though, it curves around and flies back in a different window, lighting up Mr Perez’s Christmas tree and nearly burning down the whole house. This only reinforces what a negative influence on Harold’s life Kumar is and it looks like our duo are going their separate ways again. But, this does give us our impetuous for another hour and a half of whacky shenanigans because if Harold doesn’t fix that tree, there’s a good chance Mr Perez might kill him.
So we get the odd foursome of Harold and his new white bread bestie, Todd (and his daughter) and Kumar and his neighbor, Adrian, out on the lookout for a tree. This does lead to perhaps the most racially driven portion of the movie as they head to a tree lot run by two African-American guys trying to do this ‘good cop, bad cop’ thing, the Fat Albert looking guy playing nice and the other wondering what a pair of honkey, cracker, white ass fools are doing coming up in their turf.
Turns out Mr Perez isn’t the only one out to kill Harold though, as the tree search takes them to a party by way of Adrian who has a hookup waiting for him that he met online. She’s a virgin because apparently all the guys at school are scared to go anywhere near her. Adrian realizes that’s because her dad is notorious Ukranian mobster Sergei Katsov. At first I thought this was Chris Meloni making his third outing in the series but no, it’s actually Elias Koteas who was Casey Jones in the Ninja Turtles movies.
After Adrian goes soft upon finding out this information, Mary will settle for anyone at this point and goes to start blowing Harold right in the middle of the party. An inopportune time then for Daddy to come home and find what looks like an Eiffel Tower situation going on.
Even after they barely escape though, the nightmare is far from over as they start tripping and think they’re in the middle of a multi storey evil snowman attack. And, this all takes place in claymation. This is a really awesome scene, the design of the snowman is great and the level of destruction going on is amazing.
I could do without Kumar showing off his clay cock though, I only dread to think how much worse this is in 3D with him waving it about in your face.
Luckily, old buddies Rosenberg and Goldstein are there to shake them out of their bad trip and take them to White Castle to relax. Man, they have a much easier time getting their this time. They’ve clearly learnt from their past experiences. Along with the whole 3D into the camera gimmick, the racism angle has been replaced somewhat with religion, notably here with a whole speech about how Goldstein’s wife had him convert to Christianity and him just going in on those ‘dirty Jew bastards’.
That and the use of his son as a distraction so Harold & Kumar can go steal a tree from a church. ‘Pillow fight in the altar boys room, last one there is a rotten egg!’. Going in on the Catholics as well, I see.
And of course, the big one, the main man JC. Apparently Heaven is like a nightclub and we get the story of how NPH was ushered in the front door following his altercation at the whore house. Only, Jesus didn’t take kindly to NPH macking on his ladies so put in a word to the big man upstairs to send NPH back down to Earth. I mean, it’s not 100% to the letter but I’ll take this as I fucking called it.
The third part of the trifecta of racism replacements in this movie is metaness. There’s a good example here how they call out NPH coming out of the closet in real life, only to reveal that NPH is as big of a poon hound as he’s ever been and this is all just a trick to get the ladies. David Burtka? He’s not his husband, he’s just his dealer!
There’s a couple of other moments like someone referring to Harold as ‘Sulu’ or Adrian saying he lied to Mary and said he was Robert Pattison’s acting coach and that Kumar worked in the White House.
NPH is starring in some big festive stage show and sweet talks one of the dancers back to his dressing room, suggesting she strip down so that he can give her a massage. Hey, it’s cool, we’re all girlfriends here, right? Now just give him a minute so he can squirt some of his special lotion on your back...
He hooks up H&K with a tree from the set but before they can head home, the gangsters catch up with them take them to a secluded part of town for an execution.
But as they make their escape, Harold finds his dick has become stuck to the pole they were tied to. Okay, firstly, between this and Office Chrstimas Party, I’ve seen just about enough dicks to last me til the end of the season. Secondly, maybe this is God’s way of reminding me that I have some unfinished business with A Christmas Story. Sure there was the original and that sequel no one asked for but there is another...
And just in case you forget this is a Christmas movie, Harold inadvertently shoots Santa out of the sky and Kumar has to perform impromptu surgery, because he always does. Santa being played by Richard Riehle who was in Grounded for Life and, relevant to this blog, Chillerama and the Rob Zombie Halloween II. Turns out he was the one who sent Harold the massive joint so that the two of them could reconcile. I never knew Santa cared so much about the friendship of two potheads. I don’t know if he’s a good fit for Santa though, a little too gruff and mean. Doesn’t have the heart of say, an Edmund Gwenn. That could have been an alternate way to do this actually, have a totally sacherine by the numbers Santa that gets corrupted by H&K when they get him to smoke with them, he’s on too much of a bad trip to deliver the toys like normal so it’s up to them to save the day.
I think I would have to put this above the sequel but behind the original in terms of quality. As one note and as fleeting an appearance as he is, the Ukranian gangster somehow feels more of a threat than the entire US government in the second film. Keeping this adventure local again makes it feel much more grounded and there’s just a more light hearted atmosphere to the whole thing when you don’t have that massively racist and oppressive tone pressing down on it.
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
VIDEO GAMES—Sunday Chats (10-29-17)
There are a lot of video games, and I haven’t done questions in a minute, so those too. Let’s get to it!
ExtraLife 2017
I wanted to throw a PSA in here that Irrational Passions, my “conglomerate” is throwing together our big special ExtraLife show for 2017 on November 11th, starting at 12pm Eastern Time, and we’ll be playing video games and live streaming them for 24 hours from then. It’ll be live over on twitch.tv/IrrationalPassions and myself and Roger Pokorny threw together a little announcement video, since a TON of guests will be there with us! You should check it out!
youtube
That’s really it for stuff I wanted to get out of the way, not games and questions!
What’s on Tap
Two things, that are not games, that I want to mention.
Stranger Things Season 2 is out now on Netflix and I have watched all nine episodes of it. It’s very excellent, and you should take the time to watch the series. It’s fun, and funny, and tense, and has a lot of great relationships between characters.
And actually, above all the amazing things to come out this week in the media world, my favorite, hands down is the new cover album from Ninja Sex Party, featuring Tupperware Remix Party (TWRP). It’s called Under the Covers Vol 2 and it’s legitimately incredible. Easily my album of the year, and I’m listening to it right now while writing this. Dan Avidan’s voice is perfect.
That is all on that front.
The Evil Within 2
So I finished The Evil Within 2! It’s great, very fun, very well made, very polished, and has some excellent mechanics.
I think the weakest aspect of the game really is the story, and specifically in that the performances of the characters. There is just not any one really well done character save for the two major villains of the game.
I actually rolled right into New Game Plus right after finishing it too, and that’s been fun since you just get so much extra points and parts to upgrade your guns and abilities, so you turn into a powerhouse pretty quickly.
It reminds me a lot of Dead Space 2 weirdly enough, just not quite as excellent. Regardless, it’s still a really excellent game and worth a look, especially if you at all liked the first.
Super Mario Odyssey
Joy.
This game is just purely joyous, and unabashedly so. It just takes delight in its own mechanics and creativity.
It’s just a massive breath of fresh air, in a similar way to how Zelda was, but in a totally different way as well.
Nintendo has laid out some stellar stuff this year, and Mario is no exception. While Mario has never held the same special place as Nintendo’s other properties for me, this one channels all the best parts of Mario and his lineage and brings that glee to light. It’s excellent, and I’m sure you didn’t need me to tell you that.
Questions!
Look for my Tweet with the hashtag #SundayChats that I shoot out Sunday afternoons. Respond with your question, and I’ll answer it here on Sunday Chats!
Okay, but I mean is this—
Um... Okay. Yeah dude. You do you. Glad you got a Switch and the Mario and stuff...
But really, a lot of playing Mario for me has been falling back in love with the Nintendo Switch as a platform. I’m curious what you think of it Logan! Glad you seem to be enjoying yourself!
No. For sure not. I also didn’t really love their E3 showing, so who knows. I think Sony is gonna have some cool stuff to show, but I think the “Second half of E3″, if that is gonna be anywhere outside of E3, is going to be at PSX, especially after The Last of Us 2 drop last year. With Uncharted fully done now, we know Naughty Dog is likely all hands on deck with Last of Us Part 2. I cannot wait, with that in mind, even though it’s likely still 2019. But I think PSX will see the reveal of Sucker Punch’s next game, so I don’t know what that leaves for Paris Games week.
This is a great question! It’s hard to pin down, and I’m honored to say some of my favorite things I’ve read this year have been on IrrationalPassions.com. But outside of that, I wanna give a shoutout to Jason Schreier’s unveil of what went on with EA and Visceral, from this very week.
It’ll be in the Checklist section, but it’s kind of the first of these big exposés I’ve sat down and read all the way through in one sitting, and it was phenomenal. It really opened my eyes to the different kinds of struggles that studios can run into that I had no perception of at all. It’s a fantastic read, and an even better story.
I mean, yes. And no.
Taking into account that I know you, and I know you don’t really like 3D games and games of that ilk, of course, yeah I get it. Taking those big ones out, games like SteamWorld Dig 2, Stardew Valley, HiveSwap, Shantae, and more can’t carry a year like the heavy hitters in the 3D space. But I think you have to take that step back and look at the wider "games” as a whole.
To use me as an example, I don’t like Wolfenstein nor do I plan on playing the new one, or Battlefront 2, or Call of Duty World War 2, those are the big games that don’t click with me, but that doesn't mean those games can’t be incredible, and just because I don’t like them doesn’t mean they’re not great or incredible, but my appreciation of them will be different. But that’s my critic’s perspective.
I think that’s okay, but I’d encourage you to keep trying those games you typically don’t like and search for something in them that you can find and enjoy. I’ll try the betas for Battlefront 2 and CoDWW2 and try and try and look for something I like even if I can’t find it, because I’d rather waste my time looking for the good then take the easy road of assuming the bad.
But eh. That’s just me being a goody two shoes as always.
Yeah, it does! I would love to see that extend out to Bandai Namco! Getting games like Dark Souls, and the upcoming Code Vein on Switch would be excellent. But more over, I think they’d be shrewd, and quiet, like the Bethesda team up. Bandai Namco isn’t the biggest publisher, not even top three, but it covers another niche of games that Nintendo can draw to its platform. Those kinds of players maybe are to chopped on what system they play on, just how enjoyable that experience is. Going the obscure route has worked so well for them, and I think this could work to.
Plus I really want a Dark Souls remaster/re-release with some new features/better frame rate, and it being on Switch may be even better.
Princess Peach, Princess Zelda, and Samus Aran.
We’d have tea and crumpets, and discuss cute color combinations and space ships, because I think all four of us would have some broad, sweeping opinions on all of the above.
Another good one, a bit more serious, is Nathan Drake, Marcus Fenix, and... Well, Samus Aran again.
Can I just have a date dinner with Samus Aran?
It’s been crazy weird dude. I wish the world wasn’t in as rough shape as it was :/
Uhg.
Fuck.
This is a great question Miranda, but god fuck all of this.
Okay.
A wolf.
And hear me out, because the wolf would probably kill me a lot slower.
But the same shit with Octopi that is with spiders, which I hate. Octopi got too many legs, and I just don’t wanna fuck with it. And it’d be all slimy. And I know both would ultimately kill me, because Octopi do NOT fuck around, but I can like, imagine the Wolf is a cute fucking doggo and be slightly less sad about it.
Also like, then I’d get to see a wolf, which I’ve always wanted to see, and I never want to see the sea-spider for as long as I live.
He is a v. v. handsome boy Cameron and you should be proud.
I’d say at least two customs, and one robo.
Because I know me.
I’m not selfish.
Save some Robot for the other kids.
I think it’s definitely up there. I love it for sure. I love that it’s doing something different on Netflix, and blending this weird nostalgia and referential material into a really cohesive and well made original thing with its own ideas and things to say.
And these latest season has a ton of Ghostbusters so I’m a fan.
This is so rad! For folks curious, here is the referenced article:
https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/28/16563612/destiny-2-deaf-clan-leviaithan-raid-calus
I just love this shit. I hadn’t seen it, but it shows the tenacity and ingenuity of players from all walks of life. What I’d really like to see, and it’d be hard to set up, but having all six players on six screens in the same room so the Shadow Realm folks didn’t need to say anything, and the ones outside could just look and know. It’d be super rad, and we may be able to do this at ExtraLife, but we’ll see.
I love making new and original solutions to problems, and just like I said with the whole jargon-discussion when we played the raid, this is this team making their own jargon for the raid.
The Checklist
The Collapse of Visceral’s Ambitious Star Wars Game - Jason Schreier - Kotaku - https://kotaku.com/the-collapse-of-viscerals-ambitious-star-wars-game-1819916152
This is the first one of these I’ve actually really read, at least since Klepek’s last one I would have read. And it was fascinating. I have so many thoughts and feelings on this piece, and I know Schreier has a book out about them, and did one for Mass Effect earlier this year, but this is the first one I’ve ever really sat down and read. And it’s phenomenal. And eye opening.
Orc Slavery Made me Quit Shadow of War - Matthew Gault - Motherboard - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjve9q/middle-earth-shadow-of-war-orc-slavery-lord-of-the-rings
This is so, so, sooooo good. I haven’t really read anything on Motherboard before, but being a close sibling to Waypoint, which has skyrocketed to my favorite video game site on the internet this week, I will tune in more after this. Shoutout to OK Beast Podcast episode 65 for bringing this up and reading an excerpt from this. It really hooked me.
Inside the Sexual Misconduct Allegations Rocking NEOGaf - Patrick Klepek - Waypoint - https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/qv384d/inside-the-sexual-misconduct-allegations-rocking-neogafs-last-48-hoursd
This is a weird story for sure. And I wish i could talk to Patrick about it. It’s invasive, but it’s also incredibly well reported, and I think clears up a lot of the misconceptions in the situation. There are no biases in Patrick’s writing. It’s really excellent, and help me get a grasp of what went on on Gaf. And I appreciate it.
Whew, good to get in the swing of things again. I’ll say, we are two weeks out from ExtraLife, and I am going to assume there will not be a Sunday Chats that day. Sorry in advance, but I will try to get my “Alex-Asks-A-Question” style Sunday Chats done like normal next week.
But it’s been a fucking crazy month, and I am so happy to see all the hard work I put in this month come to fruition, and the next big thing is that ExtraLife extravaganza. I hope to see you all watching.
But until then
keep it real.
1 note
·
View note
Note
what are some BLs you recommend?
Omg I’m so sorry for taking so long responding! I’ve been so busy and was not ignoring you i swear! Btw I’m not listing these in any order other than how they come to me. Anyway I hope you like at least one thing I recommend ^^
1. History 2 Crossing the Line: it’s on youtube subbed. It’s a high school love story, which I admit I am a sucker for those. Ngl I am the type that falls for the secondary couple lol but I was totally invested in the main couple! The History series is also an anthology series so you don’t have to watch in order at all.
2. Ossan’s Love: I watched on dramavery but I think it’s on fb too? I don’t use it anymore so idk really ^^’’ A real estate worker in his 30′s is courted by his older boss and new younger worker. This definitely leans more towards comedy but I love comedies because the serious scenes feel more impactful to me. A movie came out this summer but I don’t think it’s subbed yet.
3. History 3 Trapped: On Viki. About a cop who falls for a mob leader. There are definitely not a lot of bl shows in that setting so this was fun! The main couple was amazing but I definitely fell for the secondary here xD zhao zi is just soo lol
4. Theory of love: On youtube: About a film student who has been in love with his best friend for 3 years and his attempts to move on. Really well made, great acting, fun film references, and the secondary couple Killed me lol
5. Together With Me: I watched on dailymotion. 2 best friends realize their feelings for each other after a drunken one night stand. The acting was great, chemistry for days, and fleshed out secondary characters. Tbh did Not like the secondary couple. I was very uncomfortable and skipped a lot...I got the lesson, the handling was actually good, but i guess I couldn’t stomach it. There is a second season but people don’t like it and i haven’t checked it either :/
6. Love by chance: On youtube. A sheltered boy(college student?) meets a soccer player and falls in love with him. There are technically 4 pairings in this series but I really only watched the main aepete and tincan...the other 2 again made me uncomfortable and like TWM. More like it was trying to handle “mature”,”taboo” topics and just couldn’t....A season 2 has been announced with a tincan focus so yay!
7. 2moons2: On youtube. About a college freshmen reunites with his highschool crush. The thing about this show is that there was a 2moons season 1 but ish happened and the old cast was dropped and the show was redone. I watched 2moons and as far as recommending? sure? lol I really only liked the mingkit pairing so yeah lol I personally do prefer 2moons2. The acting does start more stilted because they are beginners but they get better and the cast chemistry is good, pairings are better explored, and a type of cheesy that i am totally here for! A season 3 (technically 2) has been announced ^^
8. Lovesick the series: On youtube... I wouldn’t say this is top on my list but it’s a really well known bl as kind of what started the Bl trend. About high school boys falling in love. For what it is it’s cute and the acting gets better. Also earnpete is the couple that never was that Still haunts me to this day!!! lol
9. Our Skyy: I watched on dailymotion. An anthology about couples from various gmmtv series revolving around their future. Really well made episodes. I watched all of them without watching the shows they were referencing and still liked it so you might too ^^
10. Kiss me Again: On youtube and dailymotion. About 2 college boys who can’t stand each other but fall in love. This show actually has a lot of pairings that have nothing to do with the BL story. The gmmtv youtube has the bl only cut so I would recommend that because i hear the show suckksss lol Personally I prefer the dailymotion bl cut because it keeps a lot of scenes that gmmtv didn’t.
ongoing shows as of (12/2019)
History 3: Make our days count: On Viki and kissasian: A high school love story that is just soo cute!!! bcz of course that’s my thing lol
Until we meet again: On youtube: A couple reincarnated after committing suicide and finding each other again. love the cast chemistry!
Dark Blue Kiss: On youtube. A sequal to kiss me again. More of a bl focus on the kma couple kaopete and the introduction of another couple. I Love this! for the most part people are loving the 2nd couple more (morksun) but i’m still enamored by kaopete ^^’’
Shows I haven’t finished or watched but hear great things
Great Men Academy: Kissasian: About a girl who is transformed into a boy and must find a way to turn back. I started it but haven’t had time to finish. But it’s really really good! I think this could have been handled very badly but it was done so well, the acting is great, and the world building makes sense.
He’s coming to Me: chingming subs on twitter. About a ghost trying to find out who killed him and meeting the one person who can see him. I’ve heard only great things about this show. It’s definitely on my to watch!!
Sotus: Youtube and now netflix Ok so i half watched this? i personally didn’t really feel chemistry with the couple and the story kinda felt like it was missing something. but at the time it was one of the only bls I knew about it so I kept with it but at this point i remember almost nothing!!! lol i know it’s about an upperclassman hazer who is courted by a freshman. So even though it did not strike a chord with me, it is a very very much loved show so you might love it too ^^
Diary of Tootsies: Youtube. About friends trying to find love. I’ve heard great stuff about this show. Apparently there’s good comedy and well handled issues which i love so i really need to watch!!
The Untamed: Netflix. A show based on a bl but bcz it was made in china it is very censored. It’s about cultivators, kinda like magical warriors, who try to bring stability to the world...i think lol....now i’m not the biggest fan of “implied” relationships, so i haven’t watched this and might not, but people Love this show!! I also don’t like overly magic stuff GMA i think had a level that i’m cool with but this might be too much. It is on netflix tho soo the convenience factor might bring me to watch it.
Love is more than a word: Youtube. Another china bl that is obviously more censored...buttt i think done soo well. I haven’t finished this but I love what I’ve watched. The love just feels more explicit..and i think maybe bcz the acting may be better? (For me!) (I’ve seen gifs of Lan Wang ji and the ‘looks’ he gives We Wu Xian and I just Really don’t see it. like at. all.) (of course that could just be because i haven’t watched it, but i saw gifs of this show before watching it and i saw “it” lol) The Untamed is better made, beautiful visuals, but i just feel like this show draws me in more...but maybe it’s the magic thing too???
I know this is long but I feel really bad for taking forever so i hope this helps ^^
0 notes
Text
Best TV of 2019 so far
Back to Life
Daisy Haggard’s downbeat gem took on a tough topic – a woman’s return to her home town after a stretch behind bars – and turned it into a meditation on grief, regret and the passing of time, though with enough gags to keep things zipping along.
What we said: A few episodes into Back to Life, I felt like pushing it away in protest. “No, no!” I cried inwardly. “It’s too much! It’s too good!” Read the full review
Barry
In its second season, this black comedy about a hitman who catches the acting bug took its story into darker territory, with Barry’s attempts to extricate himself from his past life only dragging him further into oblivion. Things aren’t going to end well.
What we said: Though it’s a comedy rather than a thriller, Barry replicates much of what made Breaking Bad irresistible. Read more
Broad City
After five virtually flawless sitcom seasons, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s millennial kweens went out in the same way they came in: with gross-out gags, madcap surrealism and one of the greatest on-screen friendships in TV history.
What we said: This season has given Abbi and Ilana the best possible send-off. It has been joyful, silly and wild, and while it feels like the perfect and necessary time to wrap up their adventures, it is poignant that they’ve done so by reminding you just how good those can be. Read more
A fitting, shocking end ... Catastrophe. Photograph: Channel 4
Catastrophe
Another comedy that went out on a high, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s tale of floundering parents managed to deliver more home truths about the family unit, pay fond tribute to late guest star Carrie Fisher – and offer up one of the most shocking endings in recent TV history.
What we said: From first to last, Catastrophe has been an unremitting triumph. Read the full review
Chernobyl
Already sitting atop IMDb’s top 250 TV shows list before the final episode has even aired, Sky and HBO’s restaging of the Soviet nuclear disaster captures the ineptitude, corruption and horror at its core.
What we said: Chernobyl is a disaster movie, a spy movie, a horror movie, a political thriller, and a human drama, and it spins each plate expertly. The terror is unflinching and explicit, and its images of burned bodies collapsing into putrid decay are impossible to forget. Yet it never feels shocking for the sake of it, only as haunting and horrible as its subject matter demands. Read more
Finally ... David Attenborough lays bare our greatest threat in Climate Change: The Facts. Photograph: BBC/Polly Alderton
Climate Change: The Facts
After years spent hinting at the damage done to our planet by the climate crisis , David Attenborough finally laid out the threat in all its magnitude, in a documentary that may just have turned sceptics into believers.
What we said: This is a rousing call to arms. It is an alarm clock set at a horrifying volume. Read the full review
Dead Pixels
E4’s comedy accurately captured the loneliness and mundanity, but also the sense of community, that comes with picking up a controller. All that, and it was as addictive as an all-night Fifa session to boot.
What we said: This wickedly entertaining new sitcom may have been inspired by the massive success of online games like World of Warcraft but, thankfully, you are not required to know your Azeroth from your elbow to enjoy it. Read more
Derry Girls
One of last year’s surprise hits, Lisa McGee’s Northern Irish comedy didn’t let things slip in its second season, with its quartet still finding teenage kicks in the midst of the Troubles. The scene in which teens from both sides of the sectarian divide unleashed a barrage of stereotypes about each other (“Protestants hate ABBA!”) is among the year’s funniest.
What we said: Derry Girls’ magic remains intact. The evocation of the 90s is as lightly done as ever (Elizabeth Hurley is fleetingly referenced – “She’s a total ride, but she paperclips her frocks together”) and the Troubled setting never overwhelms but simply throws into relief the ordinariness of the girls’ lives in the middle of extraordinary depths of conflict. Read the full review
Don’t Forget the Driver
Bleak comedy … Toby Jones in Don’t Forget the Driver Photograph: BBC/Sister Pictures
Pulling off a state-of-the-Brexit-nation series looked a tall order, but Toby Jones’s understated comedy-drama was taller, finding humour and pathos in its tale of a coach driver who discovers a refugee hiding in his wheel arch and a body washed up on the beach.
What we said: If it is a comedy, it is one with the bleakest tragedy at its heart. But whatever label you put on it, it is a fine, fine piece of work. Read the full review
Fleabag
Back for its second (and, as it turned out, final) outing, Fleabag added a hot priest into the already heady mix of biting wit and family dysfunction – and it built to a heart-rending ending with a wedding, a mad dash to the airport … and a fox. Unforgettable.
What we said: Series two raised the bar. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s risks were so impressive all one could do was shake one’s head in appreciation. Read the full review
Game of Thrones
Unquestionably the TV event of the year ... Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO
Did the gargantuan fantasy drama stick the landing in its final season? That’s an argument for the comments section, but both in the scale of its six episodes, and the fevered discussion they prompted, it was unquestionably the TV event of the year.
What we said: The ending was true to the series’ overall subject – war, and the pity of war – and, after doing a lot of wrong to several protagonists, it did right by those left standing. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. Overall, I think, it won. Read the full review
Gentleman Jack
Sally Wainwright travelled back in time for her latest piece of thrillingly human Yorkshire drama, with this real life tale of Anne Lister. Suranne Jones has received rave reviews for her portrayal of the 19th-century industrialist and diarist, who developed a code to hide her lesbianism.
What we said: It’s Regency Fleabag! Because the heroine occasionally breaks the fourth wall and exteriorises her inner monologue. But it’s set in Halifax in 1832, so it could be Northern Jane Austen. Then again, it’s about Anne Lister, who has been dubbed the first modern lesbian, so maybe it’s Queer Brontë ... You can afford to have a little fun with Gentleman Jack; Sally Wainwright clearly has. Read the full review
Ghosts
The Horrible Histories team offered up more unashamedly silly comedy with this spirited sitcom about a group of ghouls going to war with the new owners of a crumbling mansion.
What we said: In making us giggle at the supernatural, Ghosts is very British. But it is American in the sense of having a gag-to-airtime ratio much higher than British sitcoms normally manage these days. Read the full review
I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson
This deliriously absurd sketch show from a former Saturday Night Live player was hailed immediately as one of the greatest Netflix shows to date.
What we said: I wolfed down the entire series in one sitting, genuinely incapacitated with laughter. And then I watched it all again. I’m at the stage where I’m cherrypicking sketches now, but I’ve seen my favourites six or seven times. I’m fully obsessed at this point. At its peak, I think I Think You Should Leave might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Read more
Leaving Neverland
A devastating four-hour exposé of alleged child sexual abuse by Michael Jackson. Wade Robson and James Safechuck chillingly and plausibly outlined their accounts of childhood grooming by the man that they, and the whole world, worshipped.
What we said: An astonishing piece of work. Relentlessly spare and unsensationalist, it manages better than any other in its genre not to let its attention wander from the survivors’ testimony. Footage of Jackson is confined almost wholly to that of him with the boys themselves on stage, private calls between them and family snaps. He is never allowed to overwhelm the story. Read the full review
Line of Duty
Complex … Martin Compston and Stephen Graham in Line of Duty. Photograph: BBC/World Productions
Jed Mercurio’s police corruption masterpiece returned for a fifth outing after a two-year wait, bringing with it a stunningly complex performance from Stephen Graham, more urgent exits required … and heartstopping, jaw-dropping action to the last.
What we said: As ever, nothing is wasted; not a scene, not a line, not a beat. It fits together flawlessly – you can imagine Mercurio sitting like a watchmaker at his table with the parts spread before him and fitting the loupe to his eye before assembling the whole thing and listening for its perfectly regulated tick. Read the full review
Mum
Stefan Golaszewski’s sitcom tour de force ended on a heartwarming high. Over three lovely series, Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan as Cathy and Michael gave us the gift of a quietly epic romance that will echo down the ages – and kept the tears in our eyes.
What we said: Mum might have looked like it was just a sitcom, but it had something beautiful to say about love and loss. It’s said it. Read the full review
Pose
Assembling the largest collection of trans actors in televisual history, Ryan Murphy’s big-hearted drama about the voguing scene in 1980s New York had style, grace, swagger and sass for days. What’s not to love?
What we said: Razzle-dazzle showmanship isn’t Pose’s only source of infectious joy. Watching the slow, still-unfolding process of these characters becoming more and more their true selves is as exhilarating as the opening bars of Cheryl Lynn’s Got to be Real. Self-actualisation isn’t easy, but it sure is beautiful. Read the full review
Pure
Frank and fearless ... Pure. Photograph: Sophia Spring/Channel 4
Following a young woman with a form of OCD called Pure O, which manifests as constant invasive thoughts about sex, this comedy-drama was among the year’s frankest and most fearless TV.
What we said: The drama and the gags are never sacrificed to worthy exposition, virtue-signalling or finger-wagging, but, at the same time, the series has so evidently been made in good faith that you can surrender to it entirely, never fearing that it will put a foot wrong. Read the full review
Russian Doll
A hipster Groundhog Day, but also so much more, Natasha Lyonne’s comedy about a thirtysomething trapped in a time loop of death and rebirth proved a truly mind-bending proposition.
What we said: Russian Doll is an acquired taste. But do persist: there is such a fine, idiosyncratic, impressive show nested within. Read the full review
Sex Education
Gillian Anderson starred as Jean, a sex therapist whose son Otis (Asa Butterfield) – though too anxious to masturbate himself – sets up a sex advice service at school. A punchy, horny comedy, with the added bonus of the fantastic Ncuti Gatwa as Otis’s best friend Eric. Worth watching for his heroic prom outfit alone.
What we said: Endlessly and seemingly effortlessly funny, in a naturalistic way that doesn’t have you listening for the hooves of the next gag thundering down a well-worn track but, like Catastrophe, catches you almost unawares and makes you bark with laughter. Read the full review
The Last Survivors
Sam Dresner, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Frank Bright and Susan Pollack ... The Last Survivors. Composite: BBC/Minnow Films Ltd
Arthur Cary’s thoughtful, wonderful and always dignified 90-minute documentary heard the stories of some of the last living people who survived concentration camps as children. A very important work indeed.
What we said: For an hour and a half, I was crying, especially when Cary followed three generations of Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz, knowing all the time that tears are not enough. Nor guilt. Read the full review
The Other Two
How would you react if you could barely get cast as Man Who Smells Fart in an advert while your kid brother became a Bieber-esque teen hearthrob overnight? That’s the premise of this brilliant satire, which skewers our pop-culture-obsessed society spectacularly.
What we said: It has heart, charm, steel, belly laughs and a gimlet eye. Get on it. Read the full review
The Victim
John Hannah and Kelly Macdonald starred in an intelligent drama about a vigilante attack on a potential child killer that managed to ask ever more challenging questions as its episodes rolled on.
What we said: It is a drama that resonates with its time by asking what constitutes a victim and how much leeway we allow in bestowing that status. Do they have to be perfect? How sure do we have to be? And what happens when the perpetrator becomes a victim too, of a different kind? Read the full review
The Virtues
Shane Meadows reunited with This is England star Stephen Graham for an unflinching drama about a troubled dad attempting to reunite with his long-lost sister and process childhood sexual abuse.
What we said: Unspoken pain infuses every scene, every gesture and expression from Stephen Graham and in doing so lays the foundations to do justice to the suffering of victims everywhere. Read the full review
The Yorkshire Ripper Files
Liza Williams’s three-part documentary revisited one of the biggest – and longest – murder manhunts in British history, taking us back to a time so different it seemed almost foreign.
What we said: At its best, Williams’ series – with its mixture of archive footage and new interviews – is a social document. The hindsight it offers is not primarily about the mishandling of the investigation, but of the grim tone of the times. Read the full review
This Time With Alan Partridge
Appalling company ... This Time With Alan Partridge. Photograph: Colin Hutton/BBC/Baby Cow
The excruciating monkey tennis-pitcher went back to the BBC for a One Show-style magazine programme. Inevitably – and hilariously for viewers – it wasn’t the smoothest of returns.
What we said: We get the heroes we deserve, and as you finish writhing in agony and lie limp from laughter, hatred, panic, despair or in awe at the end of another half-hour in his appalling company, you can only reflect that if Brexit means Alan then the whole business just got more complicated still. Read the full review
Veep
A last hurrah for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s mendacious yet incompetent vice-president, in a political satire that was perfectly attuned for these most buffoonish of times.
What we said: Louis-Dreyfus has won a record six Emmy awards for her role as Selina Meyer, and, frankly, it’s no wonder. She is magnificent, brittle and furiously amoral. In this seventh and final season of Veep, it appears to be getting out while it still has a hope in hell of making its fictional world look more comedic than the real one. Read the full review
When They See Us
Almost unbearably harrowing ... When They See Us. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix
Ava DuVernay’s staggering miniseries about the Central Park Five showed how a group of young boys came to be falsely convicted for raping a young white woman in 1989. It is unbearably harrowing to watch the boys, as young as 13, get violently coerced by police into giving confessions.
What we said: The performances are uniformly astonishing – especially from the central five, Asante Blackk, Caleel Harris, Ethan Herisse, Marquis Rodriguez and Jharrel Jerome, most of whom are just a few years older than the teens they are playing. They capture the innocence, in all senses, of children, and the permanence of its loss. It feels like a great privilege to see them. Read the full review
Years and Years
Russell T Davies’s hugely ambitious drama followed a family through the next 15 years of British life, taking in the migrant crisis, terrifying technological innovations and Trump’s increasingly fraught face-off with China.
What we said: For a series that compresses 15 years into six hours, it seems to pass in the blink of an eye thanks to Russell T Davies’s trademark humour, compassion and the kinetic energy with which he infuses every project. We do not deserve Davies, but thank God he’s here. Read the full review
100 Vaginas
Following her projects about breasts and penises, artist Laura Dodsworth photographed a range of women’s vulvas, then showed the sitters their vaginal portraits and interviewed them for their responses. The result? Intimate, empowering television, unlike anything that has ever aired before.
What we said: A gently but relentlessly radical documentary. It’s not until you see a full set of female genitals filling your screen that you realise how little you see anything of or about them in wider culture. Read the full review
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/03/best-tv-of-2019-so-far
0 notes
Text
May 2019 Update
My goals this year have been simple as I narrow down my interests from the previous years. At the beginning of the year (before I got busy and forgot to post my stuff), I came up with three major categories of everything I wanted to do in 2019. Since then, things have changed because of my dislocated shoulder and failures.
work - do good at my job, actuary, investment, do my own taxes and loans, organize my life
social - making friends, find a girl, looking clean
entertainment - Pokemon, TV, running
With work, I don’t know what to think of it. I haven’t gotten fired yet, and I hope I don’t in the future. My coworkers have all been laid off or resigned, which probably gives me job security. I’m struggling with learning my role, and no one really has availability to help me. My coworker is still trying to make me look bad, even though I’m new.
As for my actuary exam, I failed. I got 51.5 on the exam while the pass mark is usually 53. I don’t see the pass mark being any different for this sitting. Failure wasn’t a thing I had considered when I made my plan. Now, I plan on retaking MAS I in the fall, Exam 5 in 2020, and Exam 8 in 2021 before taking a break to focus on my engineering exam.
In May, I just want to sit at Starbucks and focus on statistical programming on R. R is widely used by actuaries and I need to get good at this program. Plus, it helps me understand the material even better if I can integrate it to my studies. I’m not going to be studying for MAS I specifically, but I am going to use the guides from various actuary exams to help me learn and use R to solve problems. In June, I should get my official score report back, and I will start studying for MAS I again.
With R, there are four textbooks that are required reading for exams. Even though R is not required, it is still useful to know to put on your resume. I will separate my learning out in chapters. There are 10 chapters in Statistical Learning, 12 chapters in Time Series, 15 chapters in Bayesian, and 8 chapters in Linear Mixed Models. I don’t care about learning R or learning material in the exams. I will only care about learning practical uses of R, and using R to solve problems in these textbooks will be ideal. There are 45 chapters in total, so I will work at them at a rate of one chapter a day. That will bring me to the end of June, which will be time to start studying for MAS I again.
Now that I’m done studying for actuary for now, I want to figure out what my finances are. My mother made me sign up for a bunch of credit cards that I have not kept track of throughout the years. I also want to handle paying for my student loans myself and keeping track of my two bank accounts. I already have an Excel spreadsheet I used for stocks last year. Now I’m going to expand that spreadsheet to include all of finances. I need to include web links, passwords, and usernames in this spreadsheet.
The first quarter of 2019 was bad. I dislocated my shoulder, then I got sick at speed dating at a college with uninteresting girls. In February, I’ve been watching old scenes from Gossip Girl, Friends, and How I Met Your Mother. I have no idea why. I remembered a scene from 2015 I thought was really funny on Friends. The thought just popped out of nowhere. I haven’t thought about that scene in three years, but somehow I remembered it. It was the last episode where Phoebe thought something was wrong with the phalange.
With TV this year, I hope to watch the Office and Pretty Little Liars, but we’ll see how far I get with this goal. Also, I need to continue watching Game of Thrones, 13RW, and Stranger Things. On top of that, I need to watch Kim Possible Live Action, Pokemon Live Action, and Frozen 2. I watched Kim Possible Live Action, and I watched Christopher Robin live action. I found it on the plane. Then I watched a Wrinkle in Time and now I’m focused on the Man in the High Castle. I will start watching Game of Thrones on May 5.
The only good thing that happened to me this year is my trip to Montana for work. I have a friend from Montana, so I was texting her a lot but that sort of ended after I came back home.
The Man in the High Castle is great. It takes place after WWII when the Axis powers won the war. America is divided between Japan and Germany, while Italy is somehow not referenced, even though they helped the Axis powers. I liked the fact that Germany bombed Washington DC to end the war instead of America bombing Japan to win the war. It is almost like a parallel universe. Also, instead of the Cold War happening between the US and Russia, it happens between Germany and Japan, which is really interesting if you think about it. At first, it looks like Japan is the good guys, since they are underpowered and do not have weapons of mass destruction. Plus, their people have more freedom than under Germany’s rule, but still not as free as the US.
All the main characters are very likeable. Even Hitler is likeable in this timeline. Although he is mostly referenced and only shows up no more than twice in the series, he is the one that’s keeping the peace in the world. However, he’s about to die in 6 months, which will start a war that Japan is guaranteed to lose.
So you have Joe, who’s working for the Nazis, but is considering joining the Resistance against the Nazi and Japan because of his affection for Juliana. Juliana joins the Resistance when she sees her sister gets killed and now she wants answers. Her boyfriend Frank lost his family and is framed for shooting the Japanese crown prince because he actually made a gun and was about to do it. But instead, Ed protects him, who is the biggest bro in the series, and now its Frank’s turn to save Ed from Kido. Frank is working with an antiques seller, Childan, who successfully sold a fake antique, which Frank outed in the first episode of Season 2.
Kido is on everyone’s cases and I really don’t like him. He’s the head of the Japanese police and his main focuses are Ed and the shooting of the prince, even though he found the Nazi who actually killed the prince. He killed Frank’s sister and her family when Frank wouldn’t tell him where Juliana went because they wanted a film from her. Once they found someone that stole Juliana’s bag, it was revealed that this person did not have the film he was looking for, so they freed Frank. He’s also after the Japanese mafia who has a film that Juliana needs to get for the resistance, but the mafia has warned him that they will go public about Japanese officials doing illegal activities if anything bad happened to them. Lastly, he’s after Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister who wants peace between Germany and Japan. He does all this, and yet he claims he is “not a monster” in the second episode.
Now let’s talk about how awesome Tagomi is. He wants peace. He gets a German Nazi Wegener to give him plans for a bomb so that Japan will be on par with German in terms of nuclear weapons. He then gets Wegener out of the Pacific States of America (California) before Kido can accuse him of conspiracy. I love the rivalry between Kido and Tagomi throughout Season 1, but it looks like they won’t be in any scenes together in Season 2. Because of Wegener, Kido thinks Tagomi is responsible for the crown prince’s death. He tries to get Tagomi to stop drug trade from the mafia. He disapproves of hiring Juliana to help Tagomi. Kido says goodbye to Tagomi when he was going to commit an honorable suicide since he failed to find the crown prince’s killer, only to realize he could blame Ed. Tagomi also has a vision of a more peaceful America, which is basically what happens in our timeline. He’s one of the few good guys working in the government.
Unfortunately for Tagomi, his contact Wegener gets arrested by a Nazi, John Smith, who’s been giving Joe instructions. John is also a respectable character, and I like him, even though he wants to kill Juliana for being part of the resistance. He wants to get rid of traitors within the Nazi ranks because Hitler does not want another war once he’s gone. Hitler is aware that there will be war and he does not want this. Hitler is portrayed as a good guy who’s trying to resist war, which is strange because we usually see him as a bad guy in our timeline. Also, the Nazi’s sign in America is an eagle carrying the Nazi swastika, which is really cool because Hitler did not completely remove America’s heritage when he took over.
I really want to see stories in other places, like the UK and France. They do mention Mexico and South America, which makes me wonder what happened to places like China or India. Apparently, the characters want to “flee to Mexico”, but what does that mean? Its actually kind of ironic how Mexico is the “safe place” in this timeline since in our timeline, Trump wants to build a wall.
With Pokemon, that’s been coming along nicely. I’ve finished catching the 403 Pokemon in the Aloladex so now I’m hoping to borrow some games from the library. However, a lot of those games are missing, which puts a dent in my plans. I might have to buy a flashcart sooner than expected if I want to catch them all.
Now in Pokemon, I need to make sure I have one Pokemon from each evolutionary line. I also want them to have their Hidden Abilities. If they evolve by trading, I’ll include the evolved form instead of their base form. For Golem, I will have to include both forms, but the Kanto Golem should have its HA. Since I can search by symbols now, every Pokemon in this breeding living dex that I want to keep or has its HA should have a star so I know which ones I should keep. A heart will mean that it has good stats but no HA.
So my week-by-week plan in May is the following:
5/13: Finish up running, finish watching Man in the High Castle Season 3, start learning R, start learning about my finances, clean up my old computer, finish getting gift Pokemon in Ultra Moon and practice for the VGC weekend
5/20: Grab some friends for the long weekend, finish watching GOT last season, play Pokemon VGC weekend
5/27: watch a bunch of movies, RNG Pokemon Black, finish organizing my Pokemon
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
whatsappdpfor
Whatsapp DP
marcusrevans
Marcus E
bolly--quinn
cringe cannot exist in a vacuum
ask-human-noelle
❅ Have a cup of cheer! ❅