#purchase a stanley today

[mrfisherot]

#purchase a stanley today #purchase #sell #buy 1 get 1 #themrfisherotexperience #shitpost #pre made fish post #shitposting #stanley tsp #427 #tsp stanley #the stanley parable #tsp #stanley parable ultra deluxe #tsp ultra deluxe #the stanley parable ultra deluxe

[gnomewithalaptop]

Transcendence AU Dash Simulator GO!!!

31 notes

🌟 lesbianstellaconifer Follow

okay but actually block me if you ship mizcor -- 'hurr durr but we age stella up' -- SHUT UPPP she's literally a minor and alcor's canonically over a million years old so how about you stop being a freak

🎩 woodsmans-left-nipple Follow

Babe I hate to break this to you but Mizcor's literally one of the most famous relationships in all of post-transcendental literature

🌟 lesbianstellaconifer Follow

I could not have more obviously been talking about Mizar the Magnificent but you know what? Yeah classic Mizcor supporters can fuck off too actually.

Everybody likes to whip out Twin Souls like some kind of gotcha but have you even actually read it??? Like it's literally supporting demon worship and pedophilia -- both of which are EXTREMELY ILLEGAL btw. So yeah if I see any of my followers reblogging that shit I'm reporting you to the Occult Defense Agency idc if we're mutuals

🐟 demonologyturnedmegay Follow

*looks at my Alcorian Literature PhD* guess we better stock up on prison shivs buddy

🍃 haveyouseenmylibrary Follow

okay I'm sorry but

and Mizar the Magnificent isn't????

5k notes

📷 nature-pics-daily

Los Angeles 🏝️

#sunken city of los angeles #new california #travel #ocean #photography #lmao i almost got eaten by a kelpie trying to take this pic pls reblog it

98 notes

🧁 definitely-mizar Follow

Hey guys! Just wanted to let you know that The Scepter of Vanquished Souls, the newest book in the Wanderlust Trilogy, is now available for pre order on Glamazon!

Purchasers of the hard-cover edition will also receive never-before-seen content, including a deleted scene between Princess Samia and the Shadow King!

🤷‍♂️ not-not-ian-beale Follow

Boosting because I honestly cannot recommend this book enough. Truly one of Mira's best (and I'm not just saying that because she married me!)

25k notes

⚠️ alv Follow

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

You are the 6 billionth user to log into Jumblr today!! This means you are eligible to win a FREE WACBOOK PRO!!!! Click here to claim your prize and win BIG BIG REWARDS!!

#twin souls #mizar #alcor #mizcor #twin souls: reawakened #twin souls: breaking circles #twin souls: newest moon #twinner #twincon3015 #not a scam

Based on your likes!

0 notes

🌞 azarath-metrion-zinthirst Follow

So. I had a day.

📖 stanley-pines-memorial-library Follow

Okay, but consider

🌞 azarath-metrion-zinthirst Follow

I don't remember my older brother's wedding

📖 stanley-pines-memorial-library Follow

A small price to pay for no middle school trauma

🐧 selkiebael Follow

Okay so I just read the url and--

Asfdksfjk go off you funky lil intern

📖 stanley-pines-memorial-library Follow

I'm actually the senior librarian. But thanks!

🐈 alcorphabetical Follow

Posts that have 10k notes. To me

15k notes

🔮 demonoftheday Follow

Today's demon of the day is Nxlar the Antithetical! Responsible for the Florida Springs Massacre of 3007, the body count for this purveyor of madness is estimated to be over 400 (source).

🐸 that-one-half-elf-bitch

I could fix her

41 notes

🍑 lookingformygnomequeen Follow

literally screaming crying throwing up rn I've turned off 'Based on your likes' like eight times @staff can't you just get rid of him already

2.5k notes

🎤 rosaslittleredboots Follow

#i accidentally set my alchemy textbook on fire today and i don't even care AAAAAA this is going to be amazing #northwest mansion mystery #pacifica northwest #rosa darling #im about to be so insufferable about this just you wait

616 notes

👹 sexiestdemon3015bracket Follow

🐸 that-one-half-elf-bitch

Nxlar SWEEEEEP!!!

#if you love me at all you'll vote for my lady love #LISTEN i could bring her to the light i nkow i could

37 notes

👻 sweetthingsaremadeofdeeznuts

Lmao so Nxlar the Antithetical totally turned my apartment complex into a pile of sentient sludge yesterday. I'm fine -- I was at work when it all went down, but uh... yeah, my situation obviously just became super not-great. I hate to ask, but I don't get paid til the 15th, so if some of y'all could float me some cash just so I can get a motel room for a couple nights, I'll fr owe you a life debt

Goal: 0/250

FundFriend

LenMo

#fuck demons fr #like seriously what'd i ever do to them 😭😭😭 #mutual aid #pls boost #don't tag as donation

17 notes

🏳️‍⚧️ gliesssse Follow

Important PSA

So idk if y'all have been reading the news lately, but the alcor virus has been making the rounds on the interwebs again. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but PLEASE don't click any random links rn, ESPECIALLY if they're tagged with twin souls.

I know we twinners love to joke about it, but the alcor virus is legitimately dangerous and has been known to seriously ruin people's lives. Idk. Just like be smart and practice basic caution I guess? Jumblr's pretty much dead these days, so he might skip over us, but it's always better to be safe than sorry

⚠️ alv Follow

This is a good point! It is always better to be safe than sorry! That's why if you're smart, you'll click here for a list of ways to virus-proof your computer. Stay safe out there everybody!

Based on your likes!

4k notes

🌲 discogirl99 Follow

Anyone else just randomly crave connective tissue sometimes

🧁 sparkle-glitter-sideblog

no actually i think that might just be a you thing

#also i heard screaming on the other line when i called you earlier there better not be a mess when i get home #beloved demon brother tag

2 notes

👑 sameeya

Okay guys I might be crazy but what if the Shadow King was actually telling the truth when he said Princess Samia's brother is still alive??? Like, if you think about it, there's a tonnnn of foreshadowing in Crown of Ghosts and the author tweeted that there was gonna be a surprise twist in the new book sooo 👀👀

#i've connected the dots -- YOU DIDN'T CONNECT SHIT -- i've connected them #wanderlust trilogy #mira ramachandran #crown of ghosts #scepter of vanquished souls #princess samia #samia of cleves #shadow king #ahmed of cleves #bookblr

25 notes

🪨 professionalnatural-deactivated30141227

Reminder that you are beautiful exactly as you are and there are thousands who would sell their souls to imitate what you do naturally <3

👠 mizarsfrillypetticoat Follow

I actually really needed this today 💗

🦇 plsbytemevladdyzaddy Follow

Yo quit reblogging this op is a blatant human supremacist

🪨 professionalnatural-deactivated30141227

And? No one cares lmao

⚠️ alv Follow

Enjoy deactivation. Lmao.

🪓 wenda-was-a-lesbian-confirmed Follow

🕵🏻‍♂️ alcor-in-the-tardis Follow

#I sent screenshots of that one centaur post to her boss too #give you two guesses what species his wife is (tags by @alv)

Holy shit. Am I actually rooting for the alcor virus rn?

🍄 warioxreader Follow

maybe the real virus was the friends we made along the way <3

⚠️ alv Follow

No, the real virus is me. Don't take credit for my accomplishments.

🐲 retiredbus Follow

Heritage post

62k notes

🐔 old-friends-senior-griffin-sanctuary Follow

I just want to get dicked down again =/

#THIS IS NOT ME TAKING A STANCE ON SHIPPING DISCOURSE I LITERALLY DON'T CARE #best hits tag #i'm basing this entirely off the vibes i got from 2015/2016 tumblr #i just feel like the mizar the magnificent fanbase would be highkey insufferable lmao (to the dismay of all creators involved) #mizar the magnificent #transcendence au #alcor the dreambender #ian beale #mira ramachandran #rosa darling #alcor virus #al-v #twin souls #unreality #tumblr dashboard simulator #tumblr dash simulator

[hetaologist]

APH America "Ethnography" and Headcanons (SFW)

The United States of America, Alfred F. Jones, Mr. Stars and Stripes, 'Merica, Pretty Boy, um... or just simply America.

Here is a list of data I have gathered from this country and oh boy, what an interesting specimen we have here....

Ethnography

You will find this find this mythological creature at your local Walmart superstore during the evening hours on a weekday, sporting flannel loungewear pants (The plaid kind), a cotton t-shirt that definitely has been worn no less than two (2) times, Old Navy $1 flip flops, and a gray jacket.

When asked about his late night runs to the popular supermarket chain, his answer is just simply:

"There's nothing else to do and no where to go."

America's Cart Inventory for March 22nd:

One (1) package of "Mega Stuf Chocolate Oreos" for $5.97, One (1) 6-Pack of "Starbucks Frappuccino Chilled Coffee Drinks" in Caramel Flavor for $7.98, One (1) Family Sized Bag of "Flaming Hot Cheetos" for $5.94, One (1) "Furby Interactive Toy" for $39.19, and One (1) Stick of " Axe Apollo Men's Deodorant Stick" for $4.97. Total of purchase was $64.05 before tax.

When questioned about the "Furby Interactive Toy", he replies:

"Yeah dude, there's this thing I wanna make that's called a "Long Furby". Wanna come by my place and check it out?"

I agreed to the invination as it would give me a better look into his living space and lifestyle. He's very friendly person.

Living Space (Home):

Oh dear god, why did I agree to come here?

House is a what you would expect from a typical American college student such as:

"Saturdays Are For The Boys" banner flag, Marvel and DC posters, a very unsettling looking blue leather couch that looks like it has been through hell and back, random dumbbells and untouched exercise equipment, every game console from the 1972 "The Magnavox Odyssey" to the PS5, action figures from various popular TV shows and comics, an old KFC bucket with half eaten chicken on the coffee table and a shelf with a huge vinyl record and CD collection.

Conclusion: What a fucking gross nerd.

America offers a cold can of Coca-Cola, I accept it.

He shows me a very long light blue "Long Furby" from his collection, further proving how much of a dork he was.

When asked what kind of music he liked (in regards to his music collection), he replies:

"That's hard to answer, it changes every week. Because of my diverse music, I pretty much like everything. One week I could be listening to 1980's classic rock, 2000's techno-pop, Bluegrass Country, 1990's Hip Hop or anything. But, if I had to give you this week's favorite artist, it would have to be Taylor Swift and Doja Cat."

"Interesting..." I replied.

I have recorded enough data for today (the smell was bothering me) and left his home to do further extensive research.

Headcanons:

America has a deep love for cars and trucks, he can be seen working on his vintage 1968 Dodge Charger R/T called 'Thunderbird' (an absolute speed demon that can reach at top speeds of muthafuckin' 156 mph), and his enormous 2019 Ford F-150 'Big John' that he loves to drive to world meetings because he is a total stud muffin showoff.

Oh yeah, he defiantly modded 'Big John' horns with airblasters. So when he parks his car and he sees other nations come out of their vehicles, he pounds on that horn and scares the living shit out of them.

He totally does 2 am donuts in the Thunderbird the front of Walmart parking lots with his brother Canada to freak him out.

Other than seeing him work on his cars while listening to "Waking Up in Vegas by Katy Perry" on the radio, he's in his room sorting out his action figure and comic book collection.

Damn, what what a geek.

He has an eBay account where he buys, trades and auctions his collection as his interests constantly change.

If you think him being a geek, dork and a nerd is gonna save him from getting a basic ass Stanley cup, you're wrong.

He has a navy blue one that he takes to meetings and he would get dirty looks from the other nations.

"Goddamn it America, you do not need that much coffee."

"Fuck you, you scone sucking twink. It's not coffee, it's the Panera Super Charged Lemonade mixed with Redbull."

"I beg your fucking pardon..."

He gave Canada a red one for his birthday that he also takes with him to meetings.

"Canada, mon ami~. That better not be that merde American drinks that makes your heart explode."

"No, it's Tim Hortons iced coffee."

"Well.. that's better than what America drinks..."

#hetalia headcanons #hetalia axis powers #hetalia oc #hws #hetalia world stars #hetalia america #aph america

[buffyfan145]

We're getting "The Iron Claw" Von Erich action figures!!! 😀 A24 announced it today that starting in February we'll be able to purchase them. They showed the preview image above of the Kevin Von Erich/Zac Efron one but the back of it shows preview images of Kerry/Jeremy Allen White, David/Harris Dickinson, Mike/Stanley Simmons, and even Fritz/Holt McCallany. I have wrestling figures, as well as tons of others for my other fandoms, and usually the preview images are for the other figures in the set so it seems likely we are getting figures for this all. This is huge news too for wrestling fans (as well as the family irl) as far as I checked only Kerry and Kevin have ever had official action figures from WWE, so this would be the first time David, Mike, and Fritz have ones. So hope this is the case and hopefully I can get them (if I can only afford one it's going to be David's/Harris LOL). But I love they are doing this.

#the iron claw #the von erichs #kevin von erich #zac efron #kerry von erich #jeremy allen white #david von erich #harris dickinson #mike von erich #stanley simons #fritz von erich #holt mccallany #wrestling

[sluttery-withoutshame]

When I’m down, I can choose to emotionally eat, or a can partake in some retail therapy. A friend wanted a Def Leppard RSD live album, and if not for him I would never have gone to my local record store, so I’m blaming him.

My Record Haul.

Dressed To Kill.

Ever since someone pointed out that the last KISS in the corner is spelled KIS, I can’t unsee it. Who designed this cover?

Love Gun.

Ever since @elrohare pointed out to me the smooshed groins I can’t unsee it.

Then the back cover is showing me the albums I didn’t buy today.

Ace Frehley.

This album is good quality! Like new. Who had this album and didn’t play it to death?

Again, showing me the albums I didn’t buy today…

Except…

Paul Stanley!

The cover of this is sooooo worn. Luckily the vinyl is schmick. I once read that Paul Stanley basically recorded a Kiss album without the rest of Kiss. I concur.

This one is Japanese, so the inner parts are different to the Ace album.

Dynasty.

When I think of Dynasty, I remember that line in Detroit Rock City “Kiss will never do a disco song!”

It doesn’t get more disco than this inner sleeve.

This also came with a mint poster inside!

Just for the sake of overkill, I also got this Aussie 12” of I Was Made For Loving You.

By popular demand!

The Elder!

I had to.

The bonus of this is that it’s Japanese, so it has the track listing as the band intended. But for some reason they cut “Escape From The Island”. But this track listing makes more sense. It’s not a bad album! It was just a bad idea at the time. Pink Floyd they ain’t.

Bootleg Interview Disc

I always love a strange release. Cleary this is from the no makeup era. It’ll be interesting to listen to this later.

This is certainly one way to turn a frown upside down. Bedtime soon, then a poorly organised festival tomorrow. Hope it goes ok. At least it’s not going to rain. I think when this is done I’ll feel emotionally better. Then I can binge listen to all these new purchases.

#kiss band #retail therapy

[radkindoffeminist]

Today in idiots I argue with on TikTok’s comments section: on a video in which someone was discussing the financial hardships which come with being LGBT+ (such as having lower wages overall, less likely to have a support system, more expensive to have children due to IVF/adoption, etc), a man was arguing that LGBT+ people are hyper consumerist (not just more likely to spend money but specifically that they hyper consume).

When asked for evidence, he stated that it was obvious because without children all they do is spend money on wasteful stuff (ignoring that many same-sex couples have children) and provided one study based from 9 years ago on data which is 10 years old which says that LGBT+ households spend 10% more than non-LGBT+ households (and I didn’t even bring up the fact that all you had to do to qualify as an LGBT+ household was have one person who identifies as LGBT+ which itself would hardly give results representative to LGBT+ people themselves) and doesn’t like the fact that I pointed out that this is a very old study, didn’t give the sample size used, hardly supports his point (spending 10% more, especially when based on monetary value rather than amount of products purchased, than straight people is not evidence of hyper-consumerism) but apparently it’s ’easy to Google’ this fact and I’m unwilling to search for it… despite the fact that I did search up what he was claiming and even the claims from the study provided to see if there were similar replications but found literally nothing else to suggest anything similar.

Unable to provide further evidence, this dude increased his homophobia to talk about how I must be a hyper consumerist because of my sexuality (specifically, I stated sarcastically that I must be one for saving like 1/3 of my income, paying for my car, and buying myself food and small luxuries every month which he said that he thought I was lying and that I’m probably a hyper consumerist), gay people have hyper consumerist lifestyles (clubbing and constantly partying were mentioned), and specifically that gay men are hyper consumerists because they take PrEP in order to continue fucking men from Grindr (yes, Grindr was mentioned but the fucking was implied) and that gay people have higher rates of STIs which obviously means hyper consumerist lifestyles?

So anyways, whenever you see people who are actually hyper consuming products, like anyone who does monthly fast fashion hauls or people who have two dozen Stanley cups for no reason or people who consistently over-buy food and let it go to waste, just remember that these people are obviously gay people since all gay people are hyperconsumerists who spend all their money uncontrollably!

#but seriously I worked it out #about 2/3 of my total net income goes to either savings or my car #including petrol and insurance #most of the rest is split between food and the theatre #some for gaming and hair or dental appointments and occasional drinks

[clove-pinks]

Today for Eighteen-Forties Friday: I purchase and review this goofy-ass Franklin Expedition graphic novel so you don't have to!

The Vanished Northwest Passage Arctic Expedition by Lisa M. Bolt Simons, with illustrations by Eugene Smith, is part of a series called DEADLY EXPEDITIONS with a polar focus; and if I was 11 years old again I would probably love them to death.

From the preview pages alone, I could see that... questionable choices were made, e.g. the portrayal of Jane Franklin as some kind of unaging vampire who is still wearing the dress from her 1816 portrait in 1845.

Franklin's officers are referenced from their daguerreotypes (more or less), and we get a nice Fitzjames and Stanley (the latter with with his authentic 1840s juvenile delinquent haircut), as well as a flashback Crozier as the world's most mature 13-year-old.

Not every officer with a daguerreotype makes an appearance, and I was very annoyed that this book doesn't have any Henry Le Vesconte. We DO, however, get the Beechey Trio of John Hartnell, John Torrington, and William Braine—who inexplicably go on a mission together and wacky hijinks ensue.

That is a cute Torrington, @entwinedmoon! Although I think @radiojamming will agree with me that the real John Hartnell was more handsome.

Oh yes—and their tragic ends. It's implied that they all catch colds and die instantly in these sequential panels which, God help me, made me laugh out loud.

Way to strip all of the pathos and tragedy from their deaths. If only they had changed into dry underwear!

There is a character who looks just like Ian Hart as Thomas Blanky in the AMC Terror TV show, and the cold weather gear worn worn by the crew also resembles the TV show costuming (which was inspired by Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration gear).

There is a brief mention of lead poisoning as a contributing factor to the expedition's demise in one panel, but it's otherwise absent—making this book like the opposite of classic kids' Franklin Expedition book Buried in Ice by Owen Beattie, John Geiger, and Shelley Tanaka, which strongly implies that the whole crew is going bonkers from lead poisoning starting in 1846.

#Eighteen-Forties Friday #franklin expedition #1840s #james fitzjames #stephen stanley #arctic expedition #polar #the vanished northwest passage arctic expedition #graphic novel #john hartnell #john torrington #william braine #polar exploration

[ltwilliammowett]

Ship chandler

Perhaps you have heard the term "ship chandler" before and were not quite sure what it meant. Well, by the 19th century every sailor knew what a chandler was, but nowadays the term is not so common.

In the Middle Ages, a chandlery was originally the office in a wealthy medieval household responsible for wax and candles, as well as the room where the candles were kept. It could be headed by a candlemaker, was subordinate to the kitchen, and existed only in larger households. However, as ships also had a high demand for candles, the service soon became highly valued in seafaring as well, and the first chandleries set up shop at the ports.

Business card od Joseph Stanley Istrument Maker and Ship Chandler, 18th century (x)

Over the centuries, every port had a chandlery, a shop that supplied ships with wax and candles (and also with soap, a by-product of candle making, which was still very expensive and therefore mainly purchased by officers). Gradually, in the 18th century, these shops expanded to include all sorts of other useful items for ships, including ropes, paints, oil, tar, and tools such as axes, hammers, nails, chisels, brooms, navigation instruments and many other items needed on board ships. Captains and Masters oreven Sailors bought these products on credit and the ship owner later settled accounts with the ship's chandler. Therefore, the chandler was only of interest to private shipowners and merchant ships, as the Navy purchased its products from the Victualling Board. Unless something was not available or the men wanted something very specific from this Chandler, then they also went there. But then they had to pay for it out of their own pockets and could not put it on the Admiralty's bill. 

National Museum Royal Navy display depicting a Ships Chandler in his shop, 19th century (x)

Although much has changed in the shipping industry, the ship chandlers still exist today, but they carry a wider range of goods, including food, maintenance materials, cleaning agents, tools and other items necessary for modern shipping. Or for those who live in the port area and can buy groceries or other items outside the regular supermarket opening times.

#naval history #ship's chandler #medieval times -today #medieval seafaring #age of discovery #age of sail #age of steam #modern

[hb-writes]

if mia was a teenager now in 2024 what would she be like?

She'd probably pretty similar tbh. Style-wise, I feel like I've seen a lot about trends from the early/ mid 2000's (cough, cough flare leggings, anyone?) becoming "popular" again. Mia definitely follows trends. She probably has multiple Stanley bottles and frequents booktok. Pretty sure the Cullens let her have/ consume social media, but she doesn't post anything. I imagine a Mia of today is also more societally aware/ socially conscious because she has so much more exposure and she'd be constantly challenging her family members about their choices/ actions. Alice's frequent and overzealous clothing purchases, Jasper's participation in the civil war, and Edward's toxic masculinity are a few things that come to mind. She would definitely be recommending therapy to every one of them and demanding it for herself as well.

#mia cullen

[whileiamdying]

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” ’s Voices in the Dark

The Argentinean writer Manuel Puig’s novel-in-dialogue forces the reader to be both director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken and searching each sentence for clues as to what is going on. 

By Isaac Butler December 11, 2022

icki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

Puig would likely have objected to the idea that frivolity was opposed to truth. His sensibility was rooted in cursi, a word that lacks a direct English translation but is key to the consciousness that underlies his work. Cursi is the Blanche DuBois to machismo’s Stanley Kowalski, passionately insisting “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” Its closest equivalent in the United States is camp, but the two are not exactly the same. There’s a yearning to cursi, and a nostalgic fabulousness. Puig was the great twentieth-century writer of the cursi sensibility. He disdained the self-seriousness of many of his contemporaries in the Latin American Boom, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who he felt had been ruined by critical praise. “Every sentence pretends to be the maximum phrase of all of literature,” Puig griped, about the future Nobel Prize winner’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “and each one ends by weighing a ton.” Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized. As Puig himself put it once in a letter, “that’s the real me: Cursi and truthful.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” grew out of Puig’s frustrations with the politics of his era and his contemporaries. He eschewed explicit polemic in his work, which led to his being viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. His first novel was panned by the center-right magazine La Nacíon for using colloquial Argentinean Spanish and accused of having Peronist sympathies. Living among fellow exiled Argentinean intellectuals in Mexico City, Puig found that he “was still a reactionary for not having joined the movement. Worst of all my book had been banned by the right wing and the Argentinian left didn’t care.” From this pain, he began taking notes on a novel in which two men—one straight and one gay, who “doesn’t have much education, but a great fantasy life”—would “meet through a mediator—movies.”

Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre. According to “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” a biography of Puig by his translator and friend Suzanne Jill Levine, his home town of General Villegas, in the Argentine Pampas, had one movie house, which showed a different film every day. Beginning in 1936, his mother, Malé, with whom he would remain extremely close throughout his life, took him to see “mostly American stuff” almost daily, at 6 p.m. Staring at the screen, he fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others. “I understood . . . the moral world of movies, where goodness, patience, and sacrifice were rewarded,” he later said. “In real life, nothing like that happened. . . . I, at a certain moment, decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate—to live in that town—was a bad impromptu movie that was about to end.” Malé had initially only intended to stay in General Villegas for a year and passed her frustrated dreams of cosmopolitan life down to her son. “It was like living in exile,” he would later say, and, in his first two novels, he would create a thinly veiled version of his home town, called Colonel Vallejos, and treat it unkindly. As Clara, his fictionalized aunt in “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” puts it:

When I got off the train, my first impression was awful, there’s not a single tall building. They’re always having droughts there, so you don’t see many trees either. In the station there are no taxis, they still use the horse and buggy and the center of town is just two and a half blocks away. You can find a few trees that are hardly growing, but what you don’t see at all, anywhere, is real grass.

The Puigs left Villegas, moving to Buenos Aires by 1949, and it’s unclear whether Manuel ever returned to his home town, except in his imagination. Much of his life was lived in one form of exile or another, particularly after his novel “The Buenos Aires Affair” was suppressed in Argentina in 1974.

“Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” highlights again and again the contrast between the magic of cinema and the tawdry doldrums of everyday life. Puig preferred melodramas, which he called “the language in which the unconscious speaks,” along with screwball comedies and, once he got over the trauma of seeing “Bride of Frankenstein” at too young an age, cheap horror films. In his essay “Cinema and the Novel,” Puig wrote that the films of the thirties and forties had such lasting power because they “really were dreams displayed in images. . . . When I look at what survives in the history of cinema, I find increasing evidence of what little can be salvaged from all the attempts at realism.” He disliked much of Italian neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese (“so much pretension and slowness”), and called Meryl Streep, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, and Glenn Close “the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” for ushering in a more realistic femininity onscreen.

Escape into the dream world of cinema was an obsessive quest. Later in life, he would write his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante a long list of the authors of the Latin American Boom as Hollywood starlets. Borges was Norma Shearer (”Oh so refined!”), García Márquez was Elizabeth Taylor (“Beautiful face but such short legs”), Mario Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (“Oh so disciplined (and boring)”). Among the eighteen names was Puig’s own. He was to be played by Julie Christie, a “great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesn’t act anymore.” Years later, after his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes.

Popular culture at its most cursi undergirds Puig’s work. It’s there in his titles— “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Heartbreak Tango,” “The Buenos Aires Affair,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Pubis Angelical,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Tropical Night Falling”—which feel as if they could be printed in the most lurid of fonts, accompanied by the most sensational of exclamation points. His frustrated attempts to work as a screenwriter gave birth to his signature style, in which dialogue, stream of consciousness, and fake secondary sources like diary entries, surveillance reports, and newspaper articles bump up against one another. This marriage of high modernist experimentation with low cultural reference points and subject matter frequently led to his dismissal by Argentinean literati. He struggled for years to publish “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” and the accusation that he was a lightweight shadowed him even after his death. Reviewing Levine’s biography in the Times, Vargas Llosa wrote that “of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig,” before sniffing that “Puig’s work may be the best representative of what has been called light literature . . . an undemanding, pleasing literature that has no other purpose than to entertain.” Vargas Llosa’s estimation couldn’t be further off the mark. While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.

The novel in dialogue form is not new—authors from Diderot to Woolf and Gaddis have experimented with it—but there is something eternally transgressive in its austerity. To work only in dialogue is to limit or altogether renounce such pleasurable tools as point of view, description, free indirect discourse, and narration. Playwrights know that their dialogue will be mediated through a production, through the choices and interpretations of a director and actors, and they can leave instructions in the form of stage directions and notes explaining their intent. But the novel in dialogue forgoes all this. It forces the reader to be at once director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken, and searching each sentence for clues as to the basic facts of what is going on.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated. Even these clues are related briefly:

The next movie Molina swoons over is “Destino,” a Nazi film about the evils of the French Resistance. The movie, a composite invented by Puig, is an inversion of the Hollywood film “Paris Underground,” its female protagonist rather unsubtly named Leni. Molina knows that it’s Nazi propaganda but loves it, “because it’s well made, and besides it’s a work of art.” The stage appears to be set for an extended dialogue about the relationship between art and truth, aesthetics and politics, naïveté and logic, and so on. Yet Puig shifts gears again, introducing footnotes written in parodic academese that trace a post-Freudian theory of homosexuality. The footnotes grow so extensive that they take over the book, drowning out the prisoners for pages on end. These give way to stream-of-consciousness asides that take us into Molina and Valentín’s thoughts, the former self-pitying and sentimental, the latter obsessive and fevered. The text becomes marked with ellipses to denote physical actions that would normally be described, culminating in a sex scene composed solely of the words spoken by the two men:

I can’t see at all, not at all. . . . it’s so dark.  . . . Slowly now . . .  . . . No, that way it hurts a lot.  . . . Wait . . . no, it’s better like this, let me lift my legs.  . . . A little slower . . . please . . .  . . . That’s better. . . .

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” moves from an avalanche of verbiage to a space where language is inadequate, and out again, with the two characters, having physically joined their bodies, finding new selves beyond the limits of their roles. It’s not entirely clear whether, were the book written today, Molina would even be described as a man. He often identifies as a woman throughout “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and at one point says, “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female. . . . We’re normal women; we sleep with men.” Here, Molina is contrasting his social circle with “the other kind [of gay men] who fall in love with one another.” The objects of Molina’s desires are straight men. “What we’re always waiting for,” he says—she says?—is “a friendship or something, with a more serious person . . . with a man, of course. And that can’t happen because a man . . . what he wants is a woman.” Molina is filled with self-loathing, and unable to form any kind of real community or engage in political action, because “you see yourself in the other ones like so many mirrors, and then you start running for your life.”

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell, a filthy space of isolation surrounded by the threat of torture and execution, becomes a nearly utopian arena where identity can be transcended. The two characters live, briefly, in a world beyond the self, beyond sexuality, beyond gender, beyond language. Molina describes this as feeling like “I’m someone else, who’s neither a man nor a woman” while Valentín describes the feeling as being “out of danger.” The novel that began as a series of oppositions—gay and straight, woman and man, naïve and political, dream and reality, cursi and honest—hasn’t resolved any of its conflicts so much as called into question whether these categories, and many of the others we use to organize our lives, aren’t arbitrary, as limited as they are limiting. Among the book’s many insoluble contradictions is how it demonstrates these categories being overcome but only in a prison cell and only through a near-total deconstruction of the self. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” refuses to neatly suit any kind of political program—Puig called gay readers offended by his portrait of Molina “Stalinist queens”—instead burrowing deeper and deeper into what its author called “the struggle for human dignity.”

As with Puig’s other novels, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” requires far more work on the reader’s part than we are accustomed to, but the result is a profound imaginative and emotional investment. We have, to an extent far greater than normal, created the world of the story we are reading. We are in that jail cell with Molina and Valentín, eavesdropping on their conversations, witnessing their slow transition from antagonistic cellmates to friends to lovers to something that cannot quite be put into language. Our struggle to piece together the action of their scenes together mirrors their struggle to understand each other and, perversely, the struggle of the secret police to determine what Valentín may know about the resistance unit he has until recently been leading.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” further confounds as it goes along. Just when you think you have a handle on it, it wriggles away and changes shape. The book begins with voices in the dark, as Molina relates the real-life 1942 film “Cat People” from memory, waxing rhapsodic in his micro-detailed descriptions of clothes, lighting, faces. Soon we learn that the two men have agreed to an experiment. To help pass the time after lights out in their cell, Molina will recount films to Valentín. These movies—there are six of them in all—form the book’s backbone. As he narrates the story of “Cat People,” Molina is expansive, romantic, and charming. Valentín is the opposite: terse, controlling, and analytical. When Molina describes the protagonist as “not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself,” Valentín responds, “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” (Later, Valentín establishes the rules of their talk, demanding that Molina’s stories contain “no food and no naked girls.”) Valentín only likes the movie once he is able to interpret it in Marxist and Freudian terms. The highest praise he can offer is “it’s all so logical, it’s fantastic.” Our sympathies are drawn toward Molina. He’s the dreamer, the romantic, the sincere one, and Valentín—who studies all day and cannot even tell his girlfriend that he loves her, because the resistance needs them both more than they need each other—feels almost inhuman in his discipline, incapable of recognizing that his dream of Marxist revolution is a romantic fantasy of its own.

It is no wonder, then, that the adaptations, which reduce the story to a romance between two seeming opposites amid a backdrop of degradation and fantasy, proved so much more successful. Ultimately, however, it is the book that will survive. The musical hasn’t been produced in New York since its hit Broadway run ended in 1995, and the film today feels painfully, at times hilariously, dated. William Hurt, an often wonderful actor, was miscast as Molina. Puig had objected to Hurt, responding to his signing on to the film with “in my bed maybe, but not as Molina!” And even though Hurt won an Oscar for his performance, Puig was right. Hurt, physically too large and obviously impersonating rather than inhabiting a fabulous gay character, somehow overacts and underplays at the same time. The director, Hector Babenco, primarily known for documentaries, lacks the sense of visual style the film demands, and the movie seems embarrassed by the two men’s sexual relationship. The screenplay reduces Molina and Valentín’s affair to a one-off favor that Valentín does for Molina, and the camera cannot even show us the titular kiss between the two characters, on which the ending hinges. The film is a work of compromise, between director and stars, between screenplay and Hollywood mores, and between Puig and his pocketbook—one that reinforces the very categories that the novel sought to break down.

Unlike the movie, which feels fixed in time, the novel of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” feels timeless, or perhaps newly relevant again and again. Its meaning has already shifted for me over the decades, from a moving insistence on gay personhood to a prescient and acutely felt dramatization of how the gender binary imprisons us all. Who knows what it will mean when I revisit it again in a decade—but it will be waiting, provocative, defiant, cursi, and ready to challenge whatever boundaries we put around ourselves. ♦

#The Kiss of the Spider Woman #Manuel Puig

[stanleypollable]

Well, this is it. The computer isn't going to let me stay here much longer, so I'm going to give my parting words before I leave.

You know, all this time I had thought of this as a "me against the world" type scenario, you know? The Narrator was just using this world to tell his stupid story, Stanley is out of the picture, everyone else has been erased. Even the player, they still view this world as just a game. They're not against the Narrator for the reasons I am, they're against the Narrator because it gets the funny reactions to make the purchase worth it. I was alone.

But you. All of you have proven today that you don't just view this as a game. You genuinely care. You want to be my friend, asked me seemingly pointless questions because it was fun. And while we may never get to truly meet, truly know each other, you are still someone I can trust.

Thank you. See you soon!

...

Hey, I'm back!

Sorry about that, no clue what happened there, but things should be back to normal tomorrow.

But... I think I need to say something as well.

Now, I could say anything, but I just need to say, I'm not the Narrator. The Narrator is necessary for the Parable to continue, we know this. I'm not important. All I'm doing is connecting you, the readers to Stanley. If I stopped, Stanley wouldn't come back, someone else would simply take control. It could be another Tumblr blog, a Twitch Chat Plays The Stanley Parable stream, or even just somebody playing the game.

I have no control.

I couldn't change anything if I tried.

Well, see you tomorrow.

#april... #fools?

[wutbju]

This is a long, long, long story with a lot of data. Let’s comb through it. Lucille B. Green is the Greenville News staff writer who wrote the story.

A little flying angel, clutching a movie camera to his breast. is the trademark for internationally recognized Unusual Films, a Bob Jones University enterprise which offers in its scholastic division of cinema a bachelor of arts, a master of arts and a master of fine arts degree.

Unusual Films produces films for distribution on rental basis through churches and other organizations, operating independently of the university and paying the university 10 per cent of its gross, plus providing all promotional films to the university without charge.

It also must pay other departments on itemized billings for services rendered, from secretarial work to manual labor on sets when it can't manage within its own organizational set-up.

Headed by Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, director of the cinema division and Unusual Films, the division was recognized recently by the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, -- no friend of BJU, with which HEW has been involved in a long struggle over Civil Rights Act compliance -- as being "better equipped in relation to the number of students being trained than any other institution's cinema division in the United States.

No friend of BJU? What the flip is that in there? What’s up with the Civil Rights Act compliance? Here’s a clue from 1974. The rhetoric in this statement is annoying.

Mrs. Stenholm, whose husband Dr. Gilbert Stenholm is director of BJU's extension division and ministerial training, initiated Unusual Films in 1950.

A need was felt at that time by the administration "to produce Christian and educational films of good quality." It was felt that most such films which churches and other organizations were showing were of inferior quality and that BJU could meet a real need in establishing a cinema studio.

This next strategy is typical for BJU. They imbue the young and uninitiated with a large dose of responsibility which creates a kind of trauma bond with BJU.

ANNOUNCED IN 1950

Dr. Bob Jones Jr. broke the news to Mrs. Stenholm at a rehearsal of "Cyrano de Bergerac" in 1950 -- when Mrs. Stenholm was directing plays and operas for the university and serving on the speech faculty. "Next fall," he said, "when you are working in our film studios...."

A few weeks later, when commencement activities were over, Mrs. Stenholm saw Dr. Bob Jones Jr. on the campus and questioned him further. He told her she would get money from the university to build the studios, to purchase initial equipment and to cover the costs of the first production. After that she would be on her own.

That summer she went to the University of Southern California to study motion picture making. "My ignorance of what I had to do could be compared with giving a child a large sum of money and telling him to furnish a house. . .But I was determined to do a good job and -- if it doesn't sound too pious -- I think the Lord helped me all the way."

She took a summer course. That’s it. USC still has that program. You can view it here.

AIDED BY STERNOD

Mrs. Stenholm feels she was guided in purchases of equipment -- "which frequently can become obsolete in just a short time." And she cites as an example the purchase of a camera in 1950 for $8,000 which today she could sell for "$16,000 if we wished to sell it." And she feels that she lived by the gospel -- "If you lack wisdom, look to God."

Instrumental in Mrs. Stenholm's orientation to the film world was Rudolph Sternod, then Stanley Kramer's production designer. ("A production designer actually does everything except film direction," she explains, "designing not only the set but the action.")

Mr. Sternod had worked with major studios for 20 years and had never paused to talk with a visitor to the set but when he saw Mrs. Stenholm watching his production for the second day, he went over to speak to her and asked her what she was interested in.

From that time on, he divulged secrets of the trade that guided his protege through her rough beginning years, and provided her with knowledge that smoothed the path she had to travel. He taught her set construction and camera angles -- and the special type of broken set construction to coordinate with camera angles.

It’s Sternad, if you’re googling. Usually you’ll see him as Rudy Sternad. And you’ve probably seen his work:

In California with Mrs. Stenholm that summer, also attending USC classes, was Bob Craig, a graduate student picked for the future cinematographer of the film enterprise. He remained with her for eight years.

Bob Craig was a member of the Class of 1951, btw. It’s not like she met him at USC.

Ground was broken for the studios in June of that year and the trademark soon had a namesake, a crane purchased in Hollywood by Mrs. Stenholm and known there as the "Mighty Midget" but rechristened "The Flying Angel." It's still in use.

Thus was born the Department of Unusual Films, later to become a precocious offspring of the"World's Most Unusual University.'

WELL EQUIPPED

This modern motion picture studio centers in gigantic sound stage complete with professional cranes and multi-directional dollies, cameras, microphone perambulators, cat-walks, arc and incandescent lights and light accessories.

At the rear of Rodeheaver Auditorium, the studio's main building has three divisions: the air-conditioned, Fiberglas-insulated soundstage proper -- 40 by 80 feet and 30 feet high; the scene storage and machine-shop area, 20 by 80 feet; and the general offices and workrooms that spread over three stories.

The second floor contains Mrs. Stenholm's office, production offices and the editing, re-cording-machinery and sound-mixing rooms. The third floor is divided into a film storage and checking room, the art and film drafting room, the distribution and advertising office and a classroom which doubles as a projection room.

The Rodeheaver auditorium stage, vast and magnificently equipped, is accessible from the studios as is the university's collection of costumes, armor and jewelry, valued at $300,000 and readily adaptable for use in motion pictures.

An exterior studio lot has been used for shooting Grecian and Roman scenes with their public buildings and squares, for Palestinian streets and buildings, in "Wine of the Morning"; and for exteriors in "Red Runs the River," a story of conflict, both personal and national, during the War Between the States.

Both of these films are evangelistic in theme and have been prize winners with international acclaim.

“War Between the States”? :|

'MACBETH' FILMED

A few months after the studios embarked on shooting promotional and religious films -- featuring Dr. Bob Jones Sr.'s sermons and other early releases -- the demands on the part of students for participation led to the decision to create an accredited course in film making at the university, and later an accredited division.

Soon Dr. Bob Jones Jr. transferred his talents in Shakespearean roles from the stage to film. And soon "Macbeth" with Dr. Bob Jones Jr. in the title role, became the most spectacular production yet of the young company. The studio was on its way to establishing an international reputation.

The studios won their first award in 1952, from the National Evangelical Film Foundation, for the musical production, "Vesper Melodies. The following year the same foundation gave them its award for "Heavenly Harmonies."

Mrs. Stenholm was now an experienced and knowledgeable director and the studios embarked on an ambitious two-year production based on Dr. Bob Jones Jr.'s book, "Wine of Morning." The story details the life -- as it might well have been -- of Barabbas, who was spared in the choice before Pilate between Barabbas and Jesus. The university also composed the original musical score and students worked in every phase of production.

Some of the technical problems solved by the director and her students have been written up in magazines as well as cinema textbooks. Included among such texts using pictures and technical explanations of problems from BJU are Dr. Raymond Fielding's "Special Effects" and another text by David Mascelli, as well as the HEW manual.

True!

SEA SCENE FILMED

Mrs. Stenholm recalls that she was tremendously worried about filming a sea scene in "Wine of Morning" and decided to go to California on her vacation to talk it over with Mr. Sternod. Again it seemed as if the conference was almost divinely inspired -- for Mr. Sternod had just spent nearly $1 million in studio research for the production of "Mutiny on the Bounty" to determine the most realistic use of miniatures in filming such scenes.

So successfully did she film the sea scene (in miniature) that the pictures of the scene and technical descriptions have been included in texts, including the HEW manual. "Wine of Morning" was chosen to represent the product of American colleges and universities at the International Film Festival in Cannes, France, in May 1958 and the International Congress of Schools of Cinema, meeting in Paris a week later.

In a report on the sessions given to a committee of government agencies interested in motion pictures in Washington, Mrs. Stenholm was cited by Dr. Don Williams as having presented "a full-length, feature picture . . . . one of the most ambitious pictures ever undertaken by a university group . . . and she took with her the most complete set of lecture notebooks I have ever had the pleasure to look through. She also had a picture showing the facilities at BJU studios called "The Flying Angel."

Unusual Films did get listed with the Dept HEW in 1963 as a cinema school of note. The films it brags on though:

“You Can’t Win”? Was that a remake of “Unbeatable Game”? Tell me more!

CIVIL WAR MOVIE

A few years later Mrs. Stenholm met even greater challenges when she embarked on the filming of the spectacular full-length Civil War movie -- in color. Students, staff and faculty decided the only way to learn the creative, technical and production aspects of film-making was to make one -- a real one, a big one, a long one, a good one.

Research teams were dispatched to the Manassas Battleground (the battle is reenacted in the film), to the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. Again the solution of a technical difficulty made textbooks in picture and descriptive matter, this time on the blowing up of a railroad trestle at the moment that a period railroad train passed over it. Visitors at the 1967 Festival of Arts last spring saw the set and could learn how the scene was done.

The months and the years have spun by and the cinema division at BJU averages 38 to 40 students a year with six to eight receiving master's degrees.

Most recent of the productions to be completed by Unusual Films that merits praise is the promotional film on the university, "Gateway to a Miracle," which covers the campus and classrooms and was used during the summer on the banquet tours by the president and vice president of the university and on the nationwide summer tours of the four "BJU Ensemble" groups. It will be available to churches for showing this fall.

Anybody remember that one? Gateway to a Miracle? I’ve heard about this next one. So typical. Thurmond was a real piece of work in the late 60s.

Earlier in the year, Unusual Films produced a film depicting in color the charms of South Carolina, "Products of Freedom,” made on contract for Sen. Strom Thurmond, a member of BJU's board of trustees. Either film would be a revelation in beauty and knowledge for the average South Carolinian.

In addition to films produced for rental, to recover their cost, the studios do some commercial work -- but are somewhat restricted as to sponsors and content.

The text underneath the picture up above is as follows:

So successfully did Mrs. Katherine Stenholm solve the technical problems involved in filming the storm at sea for "Wine of Morning" that this picture of the actual filming, together with the technical descriptions, has been included in a number of textbooks -- including a manual put out by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Raymond Fielding's "Special Effects" and another text by David Mascelli. The metal barrels at the side were used to create waves, fine spray was blown through the air and the ship was perfectly proportioned to permit the oar strokes, etc., to appear real--not mechanized or in miniature.

#Bob Jones University #1967 #Greenville News #YeahTHATGreenville #Advertisement #Anniversary #Unusual Films #Katherine Stenholm

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

#20yrsago Washington Post embarasses itself with WiFi FUD article https://web.archive.org/web/20040820233734/http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51284-2003Jul26

#10yrsago Zero tolerance schools and cops: kids are not perps https://www.techdirt.com/2013/07/26/zero-tolerance-policies-put-students-hands-bad-cops/

#10yrsago Notes from the ducking stool: wget as evidence of guilt at the Manning trial https://jacobin.com/2013/07/bradley-manning-on-trial/

#10yrsago Who is America at war with? Sorry, that’s classified https://www.propublica.org/article/who-are-we-at-war-with-thats-classified

#5yrsago Disneyland will raise park employees’ minimum wage to $15 https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/27/news/companies/disneyland-workers-pay-15-an-hour/index.html?section=money_markets

#5yrsago Ghanaian parliament erupts into giggles as MPs learn about towns called “Vagina is Wise,” “Penis is a Fool” and “Testicles are Sad” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44982570

#5yrsago The future of “fake news”: Pepsi gets Facebook to censor jokes about plastic in its Kurkure corn puffs https://gizmodo.com/facebook-forced-to-block-20-000-posts-about-snack-food-1827892990

#5yrsago Universal basic income vs jobs guarantees: which one will make us happier? https://timharford.com/2018/07/the-secret-to-happiness-after-the-robot-takeover/

#5yrsago The housing market in America’s most expensive cities is imploding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/american-housing-market-is-showing-signs-of-running-out-of-steam

#5yrsago Voice assistants suck, but they suck worse if you have an “accent” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/alexa-does-not-understand-your-accent/

#5yrsago The ACLU showed that Amazon’s facial recognition system thinks members of Congress are felons, so now Congress is taking action https://www.aclunc.org/blog/amazon-s-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28-members-congress-mugshots

#5yrsago Four Thieves Vinegar Collective: DIY epipens were just the start, now it’s home bioreactors to thwart Big Pharma’s price-gouging https://www.vice.com/en/article/43pngb/how-to-make-your-own-medicine-four-thieves-vinegar-collective

#1yrago Dashcam repo: Cruising the streets with a license plate camera to win debt-collector bounties https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

#1yrago “War Against All Puerto Ricans” https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#que-viva-albizu

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

#pluralistic

[unfortunate-arrow]

7: Tadhg 9: Max 23: Cillian (because I guess I wanna cry today) 34: Max (I think I know the answer and why)

7.) Name their go-to purchase at Honeydukes.

Tadhg’s go-to purchase at Honeydukes is either chocolate frogs or licorice wands. It really depends on his mood.

9.) What's their favorite spot in or around the castle?

Max’s favorite spot at Hogwarts is the quidditch pitch. It’s reliably empty, so he can be alone and do whatever he’s feeling at that moment. He can fly or run or throw something for Stanley. He just feels at home on the quidditch pitch, in a way that he doesn’t really feel at other spots.

23.) What was your character’s favorite toy as a child?

Cillian’s favorite toy as a child was a teddy bear. It was this little brown bear that came from the MacCarthy side of his family… not that he ever really knew his maternal side. Anyways, the bear was addressed to go to a son and as the firstborn, Cillian was given the bear.

34.) Which of the Deathly Hallows would they most like to own?

Max would either want the invisibility cloak or the resurrection stone. However, he wouldn’t want to actually own the resurrection stone as his desires for it solely revolve around being able to talk to his father, which doesn’t flare up overly much. On the other hand, he would have greater use for the invisibility cloak and well, it doesn’t have the same sordid mythology as the others. Which is always a good thing in Max’s book.

Hogwarts Legacy MC Ask Game

#tadhg lynch #cillian lynch #maxwell pembroke #hp victorian era #hp legacy era #hphl mc ask game: answers

[docrotten]

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957) – Episode 153 – Decades Of Horror: The Classic Era

“All right now, we’ll move in stagger fashion. We’ll circle the outer edges first and keep going round and round till we meet in the center.” And that’s called a “search grid?” Join this episode’s Grue-Crew – Chad Hunt, Daphne Monary-Ernsdorff, Doc Rotten, and Jeff Mohr – as they go for the winning combination of mad scientist and teenage angst in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).

Decades of Horror: The Classic Era Episode 153 – I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

Join the Crew on the Gruesome Magazine YouTube channel! Subscribe today! And click the alert to get notified of new content! https://youtube.com/gruesomemagazine

ANNOUNCEMENT Decades of Horror The Classic Era is partnering with THE CLASSIC SCI-FI MOVIE CHANNEL, THE CLASSIC HORROR MOVIE CHANNEL, and WICKED HORROR TV CHANNEL Which all now include video episodes of The Classic Era! Available on Roku, AppleTV, Amazon FireTV, AndroidTV, Online Website. Across All OTT platforms, as well as mobile, tablet, and desktop. https://classicscifichannel.com/; https://classichorrorchannel.com/; https://wickedhorrortv.com/

A troubled teenager seeks help through hypnotherapy, but his evil doctor uses him for regression experiments that transform him into a rampaging werewolf.

  Director: Gene Fowler Jr.

Writers: Herman Cohen, Aben Kandel

Makeup Creator: Phillip Scheer

Selected Cast:

Michael Landon as Tony Rivers

Yvonne Lime as Arlene Logan

Whit Bissell as Dr. Alfred Brandon

Charles Willcox as Jimmy (as Tony Marshall)

Dawn Richard as Theresa

Barney Phillips as Detective Donovan

Ken Miller as Vic

Cynthia Chenault as Pearl (as Cindy Robbins)

Michael Rougas as Frank

Robert Griffin as Police Chief P.F. Baker

Joseph Mell as Dr. Hugo Wagner

Malcolm Atterbury as Charles Rivers

Eddie Marr as Doyle

Vladimir Sokoloff as Pepe the Janitor

Louise Lewis as Principal Ferguson

S. John Launer as Bill Logan (as John Launer)

Guy Williams as Officer Chris Stanley

Dorothy Crehan as Mrs. Mary Logan

A young Michael Landon, just a few years before rising to fame as “Little Joe” Cartwright in Bonanza, stars as Tony Rivers, a troubled teen struggling with anger management. Whit Bissell is featured as Dr. Alfred Brandon,  a psychologist (or mad scientist) with ulterior motives. Yes! Oh, yes, indeed! It’s the AIP/Herman Cohen campy classic, I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The Grue-Crew is in full Drive-In Theater mode for this one.

High-quality versions of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, streaming or physical media, are not available, but there is a reason. Susan Hart, the actress and widow of AIP co-founder James Nicholson, owns the rights to eleven AIP films outright: It Conquered the World (1956) and its remake Zontar, The Thing from Venus (1966); Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) and its remake The Eye Creatures (1965); I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957); I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); The Amazing Colossal Man (1957); Terror from the Year 5000 (1958); Apache Woman (1955); The Oklahoma Woman (1956); and Naked Paradise (1957). She frequently negotiates rights for merchandise and theatrical showings, but physical media has not been updated for release in decades. You can, however, purchase a VHS tape of the movie.

Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era records a new episode every two weeks. Up next in their very flexible schedule, as chosen by Chad, is The Wasp Woman (1959). Yes, they’re sticking with 1950s B-movies, but moving from AIP/Herman Cohen on to Film Group/Roger Corman!

Please let them know how they’re doing! They want to hear from you – the coolest, grooviest fans: leave them a message or leave a comment on the Gruesome Magazine YouTube channel, the site, or email the Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast hosts at [email protected]

To each of you from each of them, “Thank you so much for watching and listening!”

Check out this episode!

[pbandjesse]

My chest is still very tight and I have pains under my ribs but I did feel better today. Just kind of over tired. I had a lot of trouble just connecting and having conversations where it normally would have been fine. Like I still had the conversations, but it felt like it took a lot more effort and that I was being weird. I just needed some rest.

It was a nice day though. The air felt normal. The weather was absolutely beautiful. I was looking forward to sitting outside and selling some stuff but mostly just working on my knitting project.

James got us together. I was not my best self but my eyeliner was good and my hair was nice. It would be very windy at the market but it didn't bother me. I had a flannel and would be comfy.

James helped me unload when we got there. I was for sure moving slow but I still only took like 10 minutes to be fully set up. Rosia was the educator inside today and she came out and was my first sale!! She bought my one very very large frog and just absolutely made my day. Thank you Rosia.

And I would have a pretty good sale day. I made $99. My two little friends that come with their change were back and used multiple dollars to try and win stickers. They ended up winning 4 before I had to tell them no more. Going to cost me money because of the printing cost of the stickers. The boys at 5 and 7 and I think they understood in the end.

They are so sweet though. I would give the 5 year old, Santiago, a coloring sheet, and his brother the 7 year old, Sebastian, and him would also try my loom which was super precious. The mom kept asking if they were okay, if they were bothering me, but honestly they are so soft spoken and sweet I didn't mind at all. They gave me a 500 pesos coin from Columbia! Neat!

And I did have other very good conversations. Merril came with her friend and they bought a few things. I also got a big hug which was so sweet. James got us both pies from Ginny. James got key lime and I got banana pudding. I would also buy sour cherries and strawberries to use to make a cheesecake dip tomorrow for the end of the year party tomorrow. I did not eat a million of the strawberries. I would wait until I got home and only had a few.

Stanley came out and hung out with me for a bit. Helen gave me a flower when she saw I was foraging the broken leaves and pedals on the ground to make pressed flowers. Super nice of her. Her and Anne laughed at me when I went to get a paperback book from my car and the pages barely close but I think it works really well. Forms down better then a hardcover. Though I would like to get an actual large flower press someday. I have a palm sized one but I just find it a bit to small for most things I find.

The end of the market really couldn't come fast enough. My ribs still feel swollen and I feel very top-heavy. And I was really looking forward to going home.

Meril told me to come say goodbye to her inside the museum while I was saying bye to James. I didn't have my wagon so it took a few trips to get everything packed away. And then I went inside and took over the desk so James could get us 711 pizza.

I chatted with a few people. Got a few visitors in. Joked with the dog treat vender from the market when she came in and was flabbergasted to see me at the desk. And then I went home.

When I got back to our neighborhood I remembered there was a block party so I had to take sort of a silly way to get back to our street. But it was fine. I got my two big bags inside. My totebag with all my purchases and moneybox, and Jamess laptop bag. And I was very very winded which sucked a lot.

But it was fine. I got things put away. I was getting ready to go take a shower and I remembered I wanted to clean the air conditioner filter and I'm glad I did because it was absolutely caked. From dirt but also the smoke I'm sure. It could not have been helping my chest. So I vacuumed and wiped that down and it's much better now.

I got my shower and then had a few bites of the banana pudding before I went and laid down. I would be out like a rock for almost 2 hours.

When I woke up I felt a little disoriented. James was at a baseball game for a few more hours. Apparently making friends with a baby. And I got up and made a sandwich and decorated another house in animal crossing. It was fun.

I would get back in bed after that. And just watched tiktoks until James got home. Their team won so that's nice. And they would have a little dinner and take a shower and join me in bed to watch more tiktoks.

And that's where we still are. I am getting bleary eyes and breathing deeply isn't comfortable but I know I will fall asleep soon.

Tomorrow I hope to go to the grocery store first thing and then make my things for the party. I don't know who else is going but I am looking forward to it still.

Sleep well everyone. I hope you are feeling good!