#the sherlock one is from 2019 but i figured i might as well include it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

disbarredgoose0 · 4 years

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So I watched the whole Criminal: ___ series.

The Criminal series on Netflix, specifically the Criminal: UK series, recently got a second season. I hadn’t heard about it before, but the whole of the series first came out in 2019 and had four series set in four different countries, all on the same set: Criminal: UK, Criminal: Germany, Criminal: France, and Criminal: Spain. And honestly? I am sad that Criminal: UK is the one that got a second season.

Like, look Criminal: UK? It’s alright. Not the worst, not the best. It has several celebrities that appear in it as criminal suspects, and that much is cool. However, compared to Criminal: Germany and Criminal: France, it’s no where near as good.

An explanation:

Criminal: UK feels very British. It’s got that vibe of UK drama in the same way Sherlock might, though it does do a few things interesting. For one, it tries its best to show a very by-the-book police force which given the 2020 context is already utopic, though it fails a couple times and even manages to be legally questionable a few more. The show also has a tendency to keep the personal lives of the investigators separate from the stories of the investigations--often including fade-outs during investigator-centric moments--which I like a lot more than I expected, because quite frankly I could have cared less about the stories of the investigators. They just aren’t that interesting to be frank.

Criminal: Germany on the other hand? Who boy, that one’s amazing. As far as I’m concerned, the ranking on which ones are best--it goes: Germany, France, UK, and Spain (and Spain is last for a very serious reason, I’ll explain more later). Criminal: Germany comes out the gate with a conversation of East and West Germany, actively discussing the differences between the two before and after reunification and it does it all through the context of an investigation which is SO GOOD. Then the second episode goes through domestic abuse and grows increasingly more interesting as you go. THEN the third one deals with a woman who aided and abetted a murderer, and it manages to get fascinating. Compared to the other shows, the cast is also one of the more diverse and even features a pregnant woman who’s literally one of the best characters by the end and is also an authority figure through all of it. It’s good. Like just--watch it, it’s good. Really good. I won’t go far because spoilers, but it’s good.

Criminal: Germany also does the best job of balancing out the focus on the interviewers vs the interviewees. I liked all the interviewers by the end and was actually interested in their stories, unlike Criminal: UK and Spain specifically, but also Criminal: France to some degree.

Now, to the series with my favorite episode, Criminal: France. Third episode, my favorite episode outright, period. Second best show out of the four, but man that last episode is amazing. It is literally the only episode through the entirety of the series of Criminal: ___ that deals with queer issues in an actually good way. Like it forces you to contend with the reason why invisible identities are called ‘invisible.’ The first episode also deals with survivor guilt and talks about the November 2015 Bataclan terrorist attacks in an interesting yet complex way, though is curbed somewhat by the interviewers being so-so. I also loved the second episode which dealt with a construction site boss and a hospitalized worker.

Overall for Criminal: France, I think it’s major problem is that the story of the interviewers started to take over the plot in a way that I couldn’t stand. By the third episode it was bearable because it started to deal with the misogamy coming from one of the interviewers that was both negatively effecting his team and one of its member’s mental health specifically, but overall was so-so.

Now.... Criminal: Spain. And man, while it is the worst one in my mind, it is also the one with the most potential going into a second season. Criminal: Spain is the one where all of the police doing the interviews are corrupt as fuck, and by the end of it all you are begging for is for them to get their comeuppance. The second episode is especially bad, as it deals with the subject of abuse in just the worst way possible. Like, it’s bad--if you would be triggered by abuse (sexual, mental, and physical) or gaslighting, do not watch episode 2, you lose nothing by not having watched it other than despising the interviewers more. I mean even then, you only have to watch episode 3 to understand what I’m talking about. Like everything, and I mean everything that could be wrong with the police is presented in episode 3. Episode Three Literally Opens With A Police Officer Lying About An Arrest In Which A Suspect Was Beaten During. It is bad.

That said Criminal: Spain has the most potential if it was given a second season because that way it could actually fire and/or arrest one or all of the interviewers. It would be the only one of the four to do so, it would fit well with the current zeitgeist, and it would be awesome to see one of the actors for the interviewers to be on the other side of the table, because like come on that would be so cool though???

TLDR: Criminal: Germany needs a second season, Criminal: ___ overall is pretty alright, and don’t watch Criminal: Spain unless it gets a second season and just fires and/or interrogates one or all of the main cast of the first season.

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today-only-happens-once · 5 years

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With Great Power - Chapter 2

Title: With Great Power – Chapter 2

First Chapter | Next Chapter | Read on AO3

Fic Summary: Thomas Sanders is just a regular social media personality. But when he gets bit by a spider during filming one of his YouTube videos, his whole life is about to turn upside down—whether he (or the aspects of his personality) want it to or not. Platonic LAMP/CALM + Character!Thomas. Spider-Man AU (but more the concept of Spider-Man and contains no spoilers for any particular movie/comic series).

Word Count: 3522

Chapter warnings: some panicking, arguing, cursing, some doubting of reality (briefly), discussion/use of Cartoon Therapy, some spoilers for Danny Phantom, vertigo/nausea mention, falling furniture.

A/N: 2019 is off to a crazy hectic start. Sorry for the wait. Hopefully it was worth it! Special shout-out to @creativenostalgiastuff for helping me when I got extra stuck in this chapter. Edited by yours truly, so all mistakes are mine. I would absolutely love to know what you think.

WGP Taglist: @captain-loki-xavier, @magicpanda31, @the-peculiar-bi-tch, @mining-pup, @band-be-boss-blog, @asexual-trashbag, @samathekittycat, @why-should-i-tell-youu2, @theobsessor1, @princelogical, @vigilantvirgil, @always3charcoaltea, @changeling-ash, @logical-princey, @crimsonshadow323, @flickering-raven, @smokeyrutilequartz, @dontbugmeimantisocial (I’ll be keep this taglist separate from my normal one for organizational purposes. Please let me know if you’d like to be added!)

Thomas’s chest feels tight and uncomfortable. He wonders somewhere in the back of his mind if passing out would mean falling to the floor or if he’d just wake up still stuck to the ceiling of his bedroom. Thomas attempts to pulls his hands off his ceiling—praying that his feet would still stick to the wall so that he wouldn’t fall face-first in the floor—but they don’t budge.

“Why can’t you let go, Thomas?” Virgil demands in that deep distorted voice, the words falling out of his mouth in a jumbled panic. “Just pull!”

“I’m trying, Virgil,” Thomas snaps, an edge of panic in his own voice. “It’s not that easy!”

“What do you---” Virgil cuts himself off, pulling at the strings of his hoodie. He takes a breath. “Can someone else get in here, maybe?”

Thomas wasn’t sure who he was expecting to come to their aid, but it certainly wasn’t all three of them at once. Virgil’s hood is pulled so low over his face that his eyes aren’t visible, but the other Sides aren’t looking at him anyway. Roman’s jaw falls slack at the sight of their host clinging to the ceiling with his feet against the wall. Patton scratches the back of his head, his brows pulled together in confusion.

Logan’s eyes are wide. “Fascinating,” he says quietly, mostly to himself, but the room is dead silent except for the Logical Side’s voice. “Utterly fascinating.”

“This is probably just a dream. It’s not like it’s real,” Thomas insists, although now that he’s said it out loud, he can hear in his own voice how much he doesn’t believe it. He looks desperately at Roman across the room for confirmation.

Roman shoots Thomas an apologetic grimace. “Uh…” He rubs the back of his head awkwardly. “I’m afraid that while I may be the dreamer here, it’s more in a more… figurative, metaphorical sense.”

“Regardless,” Logan supplies, “a guaranteed way to wake up while asleep is through experiencing the sensation of falling.”

Thomas feels his stomach squirm at the same time Virgil makes a sound in the back of his throat. “Bad idea,” Virgil snaps, his voice still distorted.

“Yeah, I don’t really want to faceplant into the floor and break my neck.”

Logan glances at the floor below Thomas, then back up at the host. “Unlikely to occur from that distance. Besides, if we’re careful, you may even land perfectly fine on your feet. And on the off chance you are dreaming, you won’t land at all. You will be awakened from your dream state.” He adjusts the knot of his tie. “While I must admit, Thomas, the likelihood that this is a dream seems predominantly rooted in wishful thinking rather than being substantiated in evidence, we might as well permanently remove that option from the list of reasonable explanations.”

Thomas sighs and squeezes his eyes shut. He can feel the blood rushing to his head from looking upside down at his personality traits, and it isn’t helping the vertigo. “Okay,” he says. “Except that I don’t know how to let go.”

Patton hums thoughtfully. “Well, what worked for the phone?”

Thomas hesitates, glancing at Virgil as he answers. “I… tried that breathing thing you taught me, and the phone just kinda fell.” Virgil meets Thomas’s gaze, his eyebrows raising slightly in surprise. Wordlessly, Virgil nods a little, and Thomas sees him close his eyes and take in a deep, slow breath.

Thomas’s legs swing off the wall. The slight pain in his shoulders from the sudden weight pulling him towards the ground reminds him of the times he’d hang limply from monkey bars as a kid.

“All right, Thomas,” Virgil says in a quiet, measured voice. “I think I’m gonna need your help getting us the rest of the way. Breathe in for four seconds.”

Thomas closes his eyes and follows his Anxious Side’s instructions. Virgil walks him through the exercise even though Thomas remembers it well. It’s oddly reassuring to hear the manifestation of his own Anxiety try to help him calm down. Like they’re in it together. Thomas can’t help but feel like that odd feeling of being less alone—even though Virgil is just a part of him—is really what helps ease the pit in his stomach.

Thomas yelps when Virgil gets to count 7 of breathing out as his fingers abruptly detach from the ceiling and he falls hard on the floor of his bedroom. He lands on his feet, but his legs aren’t ready for the sudden weight and collapse beneath him.

“Thomas!” Virgil cries out.

“I’m okay,” he assures him quickly, really not wanting to risk getting either of them worked up again. The last thing Thomas wants right now is to be stuck to the floor and have to go through it all over again. “Just surprised me. I’m good.”

All the same, Thomas doesn’t try to stand up just yet. He sits on the floor near some dirty laundry that hadn’t quite made it to the laundry basket in his closet and takes a deep breath. His mind is still reeling. He blinks a couple of times.

“You Gucci, Thomas?” Roman asks.

Thomas swallows. “I… don’t know,” he says honestly. “I mean… what the hell was that?”

“Well, we have confirmed one thing that it is not,” Logan supplies. “You fell, and yet are still here in this situation. Therefore, this is not a dream. It’s a reality.”

Thomas can feel Patton’s worried gaze linger on him as he pushes himself to his feet. The father figure figment’s eyebrows pull together. “So what does that mean?” he asks.

“A reality means that the events are not occurring within an imagined construction of thought or fantasy, but rather—”

“No, I—sorry. I didn’t mean ‘what is reality’,” Patton interrupts hurriedly, holding out his hands. “I meant, what does that… mean? For Thomas and… for us?”

The silence that meets the end of Patton’s question hangs heavy in the air. Thomas’s gaze flickers up across from him and falls on Roman. The Prince’s eyes are wide, and he holds Thomas’s gaze for a moment before he looks around at the other three. He scoffs with a note of incredulity.

“I mean… isn’t it obvious?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas is pretty sure he sees Logan bristle slightly. “To what are you referring, Roman?”

Roman raises his eyebrows as if genuinely surprised at everyone’s blank look. He gestures towards Thomas. “Thomas has super powers.”

Logan opens his mouth, then closes it, his eyes narrowing first at Roman and then at Thomas with something akin to curiosity.

Virgil rolls his eyes, but Thomas doesn’t miss the way his shoulders shift uncomfortably underneath his oversized hoodie. “Super powers?” he says. “You can’t be serious. Logan already established that this is reality. We’re not living in some comic book.”

Roman holds an overdramatic hand to his chest. “I’ll have you know, that conclusion is perfectly reasonable.”

“Explain,” Logan says, a finger on his mouth as if in deep thought. His eyes flicker briefly from Roman and back to Thomas. Thomas tries not to squirm under Logan’s steady, intense gaze. He feels like some sort of specimen under a microscope.

Roman gestures in a wide, sweeping arc towards Thomas. “It’s not as if normal people can stick to walls. And wasn’t it just yesterday that he was bit by a spider? A plus B equals C and all that.”

Virgil is shaking his head before Roman has even finished speaking. “Logan, isn’t it you who always said that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation?” His dark eyes flash a bit as he says it.

“Now, Virgil—” Patton tries, his voice placating, but Logan cuts him off.

“While that is true, Virgil,” he says slowly, “It was Sherlock Holmes himself who said ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.”

“Ha!”

Logan continues, ignoring Roman’s shout of gloating victory. His gaze looks distant in thought. “Therefore, while it’s highly unlikely that Thomas gained any kind of superhuman capability from a simple spider bite, it cannot be entirely rejected as a possibility. The facts as they stand are that Thomas is not currently dreaming and he has exhibited capabilities that are beyond normal human ability. So far, that only includes sticking to phones, walls, and ceilings.”

Thomas stares at Logan. “Is the logical part of my brain actually saying that the idea that I might have super powers isn’t completely impossible?”

Logan flashes him a dry, unamused look. “Yes. This is already a highly improbable circumstance. The explanations in relation to it are likely to be equally improbable. Therefore, since I can’t definitively prove that super powers do not exist, I can’t fully rule it out as a possibility.”

“I…” Thomas starts to say, but trails off. He rakes a hand back through his hair and blows out a breath. He squeezes his eyes shut against his reeling thoughts. He has super powers? Does that make him like some kind of super hero? Is he supposed to crawl on walls and ceilings and drop down and somehow rescue people from…what? Some unidentified danger?

Thomas looks to his left towards Patton. His Moral Side is looking worriedly at him, his brows pulled together in thought. “Patton?” he asks, his voice sounding smaller than he expected it to, even to his own ears. “You doing okay with all of this?”

Patton sighs, averting his gaze with a small shrug. “Honestly, kiddo? I’m… not sure.” He glances up, then across the room towards Virgil. “Maybe we all just need a minute to process this.”

Thomas rubs the pads of his fingers over his eyes and shakes his head. “I…” he says. He knows that Patton may have a point, but it all feels like too much too fast. He suddenly wants everything to just stop for a minute, but it won’t and he knows it. “I don’t have time for this right now. Joan is waiting on me for filming.”

He snatches the pair of jeans and dark t-shirt he’d chosen from his closet and changes quickly.

“Thomas,” Patton says as Thomas tugs the shirt over his head with perhaps a bit more force than was really necessary, “Are you sure we shouldn’t… stay home for the day until we figure out what’s going on? We could tell Joan you… caught a bug?”

“Is now really the time for puns, Patton?” Logan asks dryly.

“I don’t know,” Thomas replies as he brushes past Virgil and snatches the phone off his bed. “Right now, I just want to focus on the things that I do know. So I’m gonna go film the rest of this Cartoon Therapy episode, and when I get back I’ll… we’ll figure it out.”

Even Logan looks a bit concerned as Thomas sits on the bed and jams his feet into the closest pair of sneakers he can find. “I’m not sure that is wise, Thomas.”

Thomas doesn’t reply as he pushes through the door and closes it behind him with an echoing bang.

…

“Sorry I’m late,” Thomas says as he rushes into the familiar office space half an hour later.

Joan already has the lighting fixtures and camera set up in front of the couch. Thomas drops his bag in the corner and shoves the bangs falling into his eyes back into his hair. He tries to flash Joan an apologetic smile, but from the way their brows furrow in concern, Thomas has the feeling it probably looked more like a grimace.

“It’s okay, dude,” Joan says. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Thomas says, hoping he sounds more confident than he feels. For a brief moment, he thinks about telling them. But he wouldn’t even really know what to say, and he has a feeling that it wouldn’t exactly help Joan’s evident concern if he told them he’d somehow found his way stuck to the ceiling of his bedroom and that he now thinks he maybe has super powers. “Just… a weird morning,” he says instead.

He can feel their lingering gaze on him as he turns to grab his laptop out of his bag. “Wanna talk about it?” they ask.

“Not really,” Thomas replies honestly. “I think I should probably just focus on filming.” He sits in the chair across the brown couch and opens his computer, pulling up the needed software and studiously ignoring Joan’s eyes.

“Okay,” Joan says after a moment. Thomas feels his shoulders relax a bit. “I was thinking we’d finish up filming Elliot’s scenes nad get what we’re missing of Picani’s. We got the last of Corbin and Sloane yesterday, so we should be good on that. And Valerie is doing her filming tomorrow.”

As Joan walks through the schedule, Thomas feels himself nodding along and doing his best to not let his thoughts drift. The normalcy of it all—the familiarity of the office, the routine of filming, hearing Joan lay out a concrete plan for the next couple of days—helps quell the jitteriness he’d felt the entire drive over. He can focus on the things he knows. The things that are familiar to him. And as he does so, he feels like it’s a little easier to breathe.

“So what do you want to tackle first? Since it’s just us to film today, we can kinda do whatever,” Joan says.

Thomas shrugs. “I think Picani is gonna take longer, so maybe we should start with that.”

Joan nods their agreement, and Thomas grabs Picani’s costume and changes quickly in the bathroom before hurrying back. He adjusts the pastel green tie as he takes his seat in the office chair. Joan has the camera set up and Thomas glances into the viewfinder and adjusts his hair slightly as they grab the laptop and pull it up into their lap.

“You ready?” Joan asks.

Thomas gives them a smile, and it feels a little more natural this time. “Yeah.”

Joan tugs the beanie down a little as it starts to slide back on their head, typing a few thing on the laptop before nodding. “Cool. We’re picking up in the scene with Elliot, right?”

Thomas agrees, grabbing the notebook off the shelf behind him. Joan, carefully balancing the laptop on their legs, grabs the script off the floor. Thomas takes a steadying breath. “Elliot has the first line, right?”

Joan nods, flipping a few pages before they find it. They cast a quick glance up at Thomas to double check that he’s ready before reading the line. “’Wait, there are two Danny’s?’”

“’Well’,” Thomas says in that thick Midwestern accent, “One is Dani with an ‘i’ and the other is Danny with a ‘y’, but we’ll just call ‘Dani with an i’ Danielle for clarity’s sake.’”

“’Okay…That’s not confusing at all…’” Joan reads with that familiar sarcasm from Elliot.

“Bear with me, Elliot,” Thomas says, holding his hands out. “Now, Danielle was created by Vlad because Danny wouldn’t disown his parents and become his son instead. In the eyes of Vlad, Danielle was just a poor imitation of what he really wanted.”

Joan pauses before they read the next line. “How did she react?” their voice is quiet, subdued. Thomas feels the corner of his mouth quirk in sympathy that is somehow a blend of acting and his own actual reaction.

“She didn’t let it stop her from being who she was,” Thomas replies gently as Picani. “When Danielle found out, she helped bring Vlad’s plan to a stop and then committed herself to doing as much good in the world as she could.” Thomas pauses, knowing they’d want to cut in with Elliot’s reaction briefly. “Just because Vlad created her to be one thing didn’t mean she couldn’t define who she was for herself.”

“I…” Joan falters on the line. “Cool? Nope. Fuck. Hold on.” They laugh as they look down at the script. “I forgot the line.”

Thomas laughs, the serious ambience of the moment breaking. This is what he remembers and what feels safe: making things he loves with his friends. Being creative, having fun with them, and laughing their way through the mistakes during filming. It’s a comforting routine.

“Wait, okay,” Joan says. “I got it. Turn Serious Picani back on, Thomas.”

Thomas laughs again. “Is this where I say ‘Going Serious’? Instead of ‘Going Ghost’?” He crinkles his nose after he says it. “Doesn’t really have the same ring.”

Joan shakes their head, smiling. “You could do something like the Box Ghost.”

“I am Picani! Beware!” Thomas laughs again. “Pretty sure therapists shouldn’t be yelling at their clients to ‘beware’.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” There’s still a twinkle of amusement in Joan’s eyes.

Thomas shakes his hands out and takes a deep breath in an effort to get back into character. “Okay, okay. What’s the line?”

Joan glances down at the script. “I just don’t really know where to start.”

“That’s okay,” Thomas says encouragingly. “Figuring out who we are independent of who other people think we should be is no easy task. Danny struggles with this too. Stuck between half-ghost and half-human, Danny always feels caught between worlds. And he finds it hard to be himself when neither side wants to fully accept him.”

“Well that sounds familiar,” Joan says dryly.

Thomas gives a sympathetic smile. “But the important thing, Elliot, is that both Danny and Danielle learn to accept who they are, complications and all, and they do what they can to help others.”

There’s a quiet, weighted moment after Thomas has finished speaking. The words echo in his head for a moment. Accept who they are, complications and all, and they do what they can to help others. The events of the morning flicker back through Thomas’s mind briefly. The two blend together in a combination that swirls uncomfortably in his stomach.

Joan cracks a small smile. “I feel good about those takes,” they say, pulling Thomas out of his thoughts. “What about you?”

“Yeah,” Thomas agrees, shaking his head quickly in an attempt to clear it. “Yeah, I feel good about it. I, uh, I think I’m gonna grab some water real quick.” He stands up suddenly, the chair pushing back into the bookcase behind him in the process.

Everything seems to slow down around him.

A voice in his head that sounds an awful lot like Virgil yells Thomas, behind you! He ducks out of the way instinctively as the bookcase wobbles.

Joan shouts his name as it starts to fall forward. If it falls, it’ll hit Joan.

He reacts on instinct. His hand darts out, catching the corner of the heavy bookcase as it pitches forward.

Joan has their arms thrown up to protect themself from the falling shelves. Books, stuffed animals, and other knick-knacks fall to the floor and Thomas uses his one arm to pull the bookcase back to the wall.

“You okay?” Thomas asks, looking to Joan with worry and adrenaline.

It’s not until he sees Joan’s wide, surprised eyes as they lower their arms that Thomas realizes what just happened.

He shouldn’t have been able to stop a bookcase full of things from falling on Joan with just one hand.

And he definitely shouldn’t have been able to pull it back with just one arm. Not one that had taken both Thomas and Joan to move into the office space to begin with.

Thomas thinks he can actually feel the color drain from his face. Joan is staring at him.

“I, um, y-yeah,” Joan stammers out. “Yeah, I’m fine.” They open their mouth, their brows pulled together and head cocked as if they’re about to ask a question. They close their mouth a second later.

“Good,” Thomas says tightly. “That’s good.” The bookcase hadn’t even felt like it weighed anything at all.

Joan nods slowly, uncertainty and doubt simmering in their dark eyes. “Did… did you just… I mean, have you been working out or something?”

“What?” Thomas asks absently. The question breaks through his racing thoughts in the next moment. “Oh. Yeah.” He knows he doesn’t sound convincing and it’s all he can do to avoid cringing.

The tie around his neck suddenly feels too tight. Thomas tugs slightly on the knot, unable to help the way his hands shake slightly. He doesn’t know if it’s the lingering adrenaline from the bookcase almost falling on him and Joan or if it’s something else.

“Are you okay, Thomas?” Joan asks. Their voice sounds far away.

Thomas swallows. His chest feels tight, and it sounds like more than one voice in his head is telling him to get out of there. Joan’s intelligent, careful gaze certainly isn’t helping. “I just… need some air, I think,” Thomas replies. He’s half-way out the door before the words are out of his mouth.

“Do you—”

“I’m fine,” he insists. He doesn’t meet Joan’s eyes. “I’ll be fine. I just need to stretch my legs.”

He’s out the door before Joan can say another word.

#sanders sides #sanders sides au #platonic lamp/calm #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides fanfiction au #spider-man au #tw cursing #tw panic #not a panic attack exactly #tw doubting reality #tw nausea #with great power #with great power fic #danny phantom spoilers

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu Revives the Strangest Movie Vampire

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Dracula is the most prolific character in cinema. Really. According to Guinness World Records, the not-so-good count even beats out Sherlock Holmes as the literary character adapted more than any other. Perhaps that’s why learning Universal Pictures has two new Dracula movies in production barely raises an eyebrow. Yet to hear a new interpretation of the vampire’s original cinematic incarnation is in the works—to hear that Robert Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy are at last remaking Nosferatu? Well, that’s a corpse of a different pallor… and one that’s eminently more sinister.

Yes, technically speaking, the director and star pair who made The Witch one of the best horror movies of this century are following in the footsteps of the first Dracula movie, F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionist masterpiece, Nosferatu (1922). But they’re also exhuming a legacy more twisted than that. Which provides them a lot of leeway to get weird with archetypal vampires and the ancient spells they cast.

This stems from the fact that Murnau’s Nosferatu is not officially an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. This detail was the result of a shady attempt by the German filmmakers to get around the novel’s copyright holder, Stoker’s widow Florence Balcombe. The scheme didn’t work. Nonetheless, it allowed Murnau to take what in 25 years had slowly become the definitive vampire yarn and reinterpret it into something infinitely more gruesome.

Released nearly a decade before Bela Lugosi successfully changed the vampire into a figure of sexual desire in Hollywood’s first Dracula adaptation, the silent Nosferatu went in a starkly different direction. The ‘22 film’s Count Orlok, portrayed with an unsettling pitifulness by actor Max Schreck, appeared as more of a walking cadaver than even Stoker’s literary creation. With sunken cheeks and rodent-like teeth, he was the manifestation of disease and pestilence—a decaying rat given human shape, and who brought the literal Black Death with him to Germany.

More abstract than Stoker’s source material, the Expressionistic Nosferatu is a surreal nightmare from which the DNA of all horror cinema can be traced. And while future Dracula movies continued on an increasingly familiar path after Lugosi, the legacy of Count Orlok’s grotesque visage refused to go the same way. In fact, the first Nosferatu remake by writer-director Werner Herzog was even more artful and detached than Murnau’s film. Long cinematic sequences drenched in atmosphere and dread are built around just the image of Klaus Kinski’s vampire sailing down a river.

In ancient folklore, the vampire was neither a creature of desire or great intelligence. It was a wraith; a revenant back from the grave who existed only to leech off the living. Herzog leaned into that idea and found even a macabre serenity in it, recreating Renaissance paintings that lovingly embraced the baroque despair wrought by plagues. One of the film’s best visuals is of rats who traveled with the vampire to Wismar now swarming an outdoor feast’s table. In times of modern pandemic and renewed interest in outdoor dining, such imagery hits all the closer.

Kinski would reimagine this version again in Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), a schlocky Italian pseudo-sequel that moves yet further from traditional vampire storytelling, reinterpreting “Nosferatu” (as he’s now simply referred to in that film) as a creature of comfort; a demon lover who frees his prey from the dreariness of this mortal coil and the constraints of their youth.

That Robert Eggers of The Witch and The Lighthouse fame is going to add his own distinct flavoring to this legacy is genuinely intriguing. As a filmmaker compelled to unearth the historical roots and wellsprings of our culture’s collective nightmares, Eggers will be liberated by the simple title “Nosfertau” to bypass a hundred years worth of Dracula, Anne Rice, Twilight movies, to name but a few. It’s worth remembering that the original 1922 Nosferatu already has its feet more firmly rooted in the 19th than 20th century. Still, revisiting a legacy with two horror masterpieces to its name is risky. Eggers told us as much in 2019 when we asked him about whether he was still moving ahead with a Nosferatu remake then.

“I spent so many years and so much time, just so much blood on it, yeah, it would be a real shame if [Nosferatu] never happened,” Eggers said at the time. “But also, I don’t know, maybe Nosferatu doesn’t need to be made again, even though I’ve spent so much time on that.”

Apparently, Eggers couldn’t let the project go, even as his and frequent muse Anya Taylor-Joy’s profiles continued to rise. Indeed, Eggers’ The Lighthouse won several Independent Spirit Awards, including for Willem Dafoe’s performance and cinematography. Meanwhile Taylor-Joy’s career has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to roles in Emma. and The Queen’s Gambit, and with the coup of being cast as a young Furiosa in filmmaker George Miller’s upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road prequel. Yet she and Eggers appear drawn to the same spirits, having already reteamed for next year’s Viking drama, The Northman. And it was Taylor-Joy who revealed this week to The Los Angeles Times that she and Eggers are prepping their third collaboration: Nosferatu.

Which raises the question of what Eggers and Taylor-Joy might bring to the material. Likely it’d be something as rooted in ancient vampire lore as the witchy authenticity of their first film, and the nautical superstitions in The Lighthouse… but also perhaps something that can justify a third major interpretation of such a storied title. A Countess Orlok, perhaps? It’s easy to imagine both parties sinking their teeth into that kind of interpretation…

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your-dietician · 3 years

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History presents 'Fight the Power'; 'Us' on 'Masterpiece' | Arts & Entertainment

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/entertainment/history-presents-fight-the-power-us-on-masterpiece-arts-entertainment/

History presents 'Fight the Power'; 'Us' on 'Masterpiece' | Arts & Entertainment

NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hosts and co-produced “Fight the Power: The Movements That Changed America” (7 p.m. Saturday, History, TV-PG). This one-hour survey offers a brisk glance at protest movements, from the Labor Rights struggled between the 1880s and the 1930s; the battle to give women the vote; the modern Civil Rights movement that emerged from the Montgomery, Ala., bus protests and the murder of Emmett Till; the fight for gay recognition and rights in the post-Stonewall era; and the recent uprisings protesting police violence against men and women of color. Each of these historical currents could fill a documentary of its own, if not miniseries treatment.

A fascinating figure who defies category, Jabbar was a perennial All-Star during his playing days with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. At the same time, he studied martial arts with Bruce Lee. In his retirement, he has emerged as what used to be known as a “public intellectual,” a writer and spokesperson unaffiliated with academia who has been vocal in his support of social justice movements. He’s also a widely published author. Similar to many famous people, he has written his memoirs but also has co-written several ruminations on Sherlock Holmes and World War II.

“Fight the Power” is one among many commemorations of Juneteenth, recalling June 19, 1865, when Black residents of Galveston, Texas, were informed of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. History will repeat “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” (8 p.m., Saturday, TV-14). Other notable cable offerings include “12 Years a Slave” (6 p.m. Saturday, Sundance, TV-14) and “Selma” (7 p.m., FXM, TV-14). CBS will air “Selma” (7 p.m., Sunday) as well, its network broadcast debut.

• Nothing quite announces a couple’s comfortable semi-retirement like a European tour. Unless, of course, you’re on the verge of splitting up and have a miserable teenage son tagging along.

That’s the gist of “Us,” a “Masterpiece” (8 p.m., Sunday, PBS, TV-14) presentation based on a novel by David Nicholls.

Douglas (Tom Hollander, “The Night Manager”) awakens one morning to his wife, Connie’s (Saskia Reeve, “Luther”), announcement she wants a change. Not a divorce as much as a separation. With their moody son, Albie (Tom Taylor), about to enter university, she thinks “their work is done” and can’t face the prospect of empty nesting with a man who can’t communicate.

Or so she says. This bombshell coincides with their long-planned grand tour of continental capitals, an expensive one at that. Douglas insists they call it off, but Connie persuades him it might offer one last chance for him to bond with his sullen offspring.

So, don’t go expecting an amusing travelogue similar to “The Trip” franchise with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. The spirit here is more akin to “Two for the Road,” the wistful 1967 anti-romance starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney.

Happily, it’s about this time “Us” offers prolonged flashbacks to the first encounters of young Douglas and Connie (Iain De Caestecker and Gina Bramhill), when he was a socially awkward biochemist and she a budding artist surrounded by a gaggle of pretentious friends.

Both the grand tour and the misty reminiscences unfold with a great deal of walking and talking, not unlike the charming and highly chatty 1995 Richard Linklater romance “Before Sunrise,” starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. At its best, and perhaps its most obvious, “Us,” suggests this long wander is about to enter a new juncture.

It’s a bit of a shame “Masterpiece” should offer this series during two Sundays in two-hour dollops. Sixty minutes of this talky and often heartbreaking story is more than enough in one sitting. Who tunes in to British TV to listen to characters talk about their feelings?

SATURDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

• 2021 U.S. Open golf championship (6 p.m., NBC).

• Auto racing (7 p.m., CBS).

• A pregnant woman vanishes in the 2021 shocker “Secrets of a Marine’s Wife” (7 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).

• Both clans face peril as “Meerkat Manor: Rise of the Dynasty” (7 p.m., BBC America, TV-PG) continues.

• Scheduled in the U.S. Olympic trials: swimming (8 p.m.); track and field (9 p.m.).

• When circumstances keep an event planner from attending her friend’s destination wedding, she turns to an old correspondent in the 2021 romance “Her Pen Pal” (8 p.m., Hallmark, TV-G).

SUNDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

• Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (6 p.m., CBS): A profile of the Minnesota prosecutors in the George Floyd case; the Oath Keepers’ role in the Jan. 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol; Japan’s baseball phenom Shohei Ohtani.

• The Braves host the Cardinals in Major League Baseball (6 p.m., ESPN).

• U.S. Olympic trials (NBC) include swimming (7 p.m.) and track and field (8 p.m.).

• “Kevin Can FK Himself” (8 p.m., AMC, TV-MA) migrates to cable.

• Sessions continue on “In Treatment” (8 p.m. through 8:30 p.m., HBO, TV-MA).

• Kiesha enters labor on “The Chi” (8 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA).

• Unfinished business on “Little Birds” (8:30 p.m., Starz, TV-MA).

• Dan wants to coach on “Flatbush Misdemeanors” (9:30 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA).

— OK, that was weird. The least expected story of the week was the scandal involving Felicity Huffman (“Desperate Housewives”) and Lori Loughlin, star of “When Calls the Heart” (7 p.m. Sunday, Hallmark, TV-G), in a bribery/cheating plot to get their respective daughters into elite universities.

This is obviously an ongoing case, and all sides must have their say, or day, in court. But the motivation at the center of this story is worth discussing. It involves some overwhelming need to do anything to get children into elite schools. As if anything “lesser” were unthinkable.

Television plays no small role in this insecurity. I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to describe an ABC legal drama where every single character hails from only the most exclusive Ivy and spends most of the pilot bragging about it.

There was a time, not that long ago, when John Grisham wrote best-selling books about young, barely accredited lawyers from no-name institutions who took on impossible cases against massive corporations and eventually won. And got the girl, to boot.

So, our current era’s neurotic obsession with elitism and inequality is hardly hard-wired.

If anything comes of this sordid affair, it’s an appreciation that shoddy efforts at snobbery are always essentially pathetic. Or on classic TV, comedic. Watching “Gilligan’s Island,” we identified with Mary Ann and the Skipper, and pitied the millionaire and his wife.

— CNN launches the four-hour documentary “Tricky Dick” (8 p.m., Sunday), profiling the life and times of Richard Nixon’s public career, which spanned the decades from the dawn of the Cold War to the Clinton years.

SATURDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

— An anxious new mother joins a group for solidarity and support, only to discover that it has darker plans on its agenda in the 2019 shocker “Mommy Group Murder” (7 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).

— The Thunder and Warriors meet in NBA action (7:30 p.m., ABC).

— An old kidnapper returns to form on “Ransom” (8 p.m., CBS, TV-14).

SUNDAY��S HIGHLIGHTS

— Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (6 p.m., CBS): Embassy workers in China and Cuba complain of mysterious ailments; AOL founder Steve Case and his plans to invest in the future of overlooked American small towns and cities; a visit to Monaco.

— The duels begin on “World of Dance” (7 p.m., NBC, TV-PG).

— Auditions continue on “American Idol” (7 p.m., ABC, TV-PG).

— Lex Luthor is on the loose on “Supergirl” (7 p.m., CW, TV-PG).

— Mr. Wednesday prepares for battle on “American Gods” (7 p.m., Starz, TV-MA).

— After learning about her royal lineage, an adopted 10-year-old becomes a little tyrant in the 2019 shocker “Mommy’s Little Princess” (7 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).

— A secret room holds dangers on “Charmed” (8 p.m., CW, TV-14).

— Hidden secrets revealed on “The Walking Dead” (8 p.m., AMC, TV-MA).

— A new trial is pursued on “The Case Against Adnan Syed” (8 p.m., HBO, TV-14).

— Axe is determined to destroy Taylor on the fourth season premiere of “Billions” (8 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA).

— Ulysses pursues a conspiracy theory on “Now Apocalypse” (8 p.m., Starz, TV-MA).

— “Unsung” (8 p.m., TVONE) profiles the Jets.

— Pacific overtures on “Madam Secretary” (9 p.m., CBS, TV-PG).

— Tensions rise on “Good Girls” (9 p.m., NBC, TV-14).

— Mo’s past is revealed on “Black Monday” (9 p.m., Showtime, TV-MA).

CULT CHOICE

— St. Patrick’s Day inspires many traditions. Syfy offers a marathon of “Leprechaun” movies, from “Leprechaun 5: In the Hood” (4 p.m. Saturday, TV-14) to “Leprechaun 2” (8 p.m.). TCM takes the traditional approach, ladling out the Technicolor blarney of director John Ford’s 1952 romance “The Quiet Man” (7 p.m. Sunday, TV-PG).

SATURDAY SERIES

“Dateline” (7 p.m., NBC, TV-PG) … “NBA Countdown” (7 p.m., ABC) … The kids are all right on “MasterChef” (8 p.m., Fox, r, TV-PG) … “48 Hours” (9 p.m., CBS) … A vintage helping of “Saturday Night Live” (9 p.m., NBC, r, TV-14).

SUNDAY SERIES

A visit from an old friend inspires Miles on “God Friended Me” (7 p.m., CBS, TV-PG) … Homer can’t leave Bart’s virtual realm on “The Simpsons” (7 p.m., Fox, TV-14) … Empathy for all things on “Bob’s Burgers” (7:30 p.m., Fox, TV-14).

A walk down the aisle on “NCIS: Los Angeles” (8 p.m., CBS, TV-14) … On two episodes of “Family Guy” (Fox, TV-14), Meg’s winter Olympics (8 p.m.), fighting over a dowager (8:30 p.m., r) … Aches and pains on “Shark Tank” (9 p.m., ABC, TV-PG).

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godaddywebsitebuilder285 · 3 years

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Webwaste

The Web is obese

In 1994, there were 3,000 websites. In 2019, there were estimated to be 1.7 billion, almost one website for every three people on the planet. Not only has the number of websites exploded, the weight of each page has also skyrocketed. Between 2003 and 2019, the average webpage weight grew from about 100 KB to about 4 MB. The results?

“In our analysis of 5.2 million pages,” Brian Dean reported for Backlinko in October 2019, “the average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.” In 2013, Radware calculated that the average load time for a webpage on mobile was 4.3 seconds.

Study after study shows that people absolutely hate slow webpages. In 2018, Google research found that 53% of mobile site visitors left a page that took longer than three seconds to load. A 2015 study by Radware found that “a site that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and a 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in 1 second, while a site that loads in 5 seconds experiences 35% fewer page views, a 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions.”

The causes of webpage bloat? Images and videos are mainly to blame. By 2022, it’s estimated that online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic—15 times more than in 2017. However, from the code to the content, everything about Web design has become super-bloated and super-polluting. Consider that if a typical webpage that weighs 4 MB is downloaded 600,000 times, one tree will need to be planted in order to deal with the resulting pollution.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, 1,000 words of text takes up roughly two A4 (210 mm wide and 297 mm long) pages and weighs about 6 KB. You’d place about four images that are 9 cm x 16 cm on two A4 pages. Let’s say these images are well optimized and weigh 40 KB each. (A poorly optimized image could weigh several megabytes.) Even with such high optimization, two A4 pages of images will weigh around 160 KB. That’s 27 times more than the two A4 pages of text. A 30-second video, on the other hand, could easily weigh 3 MB. Videos create massively more pollution than text. Text is the ultimate compression technique. It is by far the most environmentally friendly way to communicate. If you want to save the planet, use more text. Think about digital weight.

From an energy point of view, it’s not simply about page weight. Some pages may have very heavy processing demands once they are downloaded. Other pages, particularly those that are ad-driven, will download with lots of third-party websites hanging off them, either feeding them content, or else demanding to be fed data, often personal data on the site’s visitor. It’s like a type of Trojan Horse. You think you’re accessing one website or app, but then all these other third parties start accessing you. According to Trent Walton, the top 50 most visited websites had an average of 22 third-party websites hanging off them. The New York Times had 64, while Washington Post had 63. All these third-party websites create pollution and invade privacy.

There is a tremendous amount of out-of-date content on websites. I have worked with hundreds of websites where we had to delete up to 90% of the pages in order to start seeing improvements. Poorly written, out-of-date code is also a major problem. By cleaning up its JavaScript code, Wikipedia estimated that they saved 4.3 terabytes a day of data bandwidth for their visitors. By saving those terabytes, we saved having to plant almost 700 trees to deal with the yearly pollution that would have been caused.

If you want to help save the planet, reduce digital weight. Clean up your website. Before you add an image, make sure that it does something useful and it’s the most optimized image possible. Every time you add code, make sure it does something useful and it’s the leanest code possible. Always be on the lookout for waste images, waste code, waste content. Get into the habit of removing something every time you add something.

Publishing is an addiction. Giving a website to an organization is like giving a pub to an alcoholic. You remember the saying, “There’s a book inside everyone”? Well, the Web let the book out. It’s happy days for a while as we all publish, publish, publish. Then…

“Hi, I’m Gerry. I have a 5,000-page website.”

“Hi, Gerry.”

“I used to have a 500-page website, but I had no self-control. It was one more page, one more page… What harm could one more page do?”

Redesign is rehab for websites. Every two to three years some manager either gets bored with the design or some other manager meets a customer who tells them about how horrible it is to find anything on the website. The design team rounds up a new bunch of fake images and fake content for the top-level pages, while carefully avoiding going near the heaving mess at the lower levels. After the launch, everyone is happy for a while (except the customers, of course) because in many organizations what is important is to be seen to be doing things and producing and launching things, rather than to do something useful.

If you must do something, do something useful. That often means not doing, removing, minimizing, cleaning up.

Beware the tiny tasks. We’ve used the Top Tasks method to identify what matters and what doesn’t matter to people, whether they’re buying a car, choosing a university, looking after their health, buying some sort of technology product, or whatever. In any environment we’ve carried it out in—and we’ve done it more than 500 times—there are no more than 100 things that could potentially matter.

In a health environment, these might include symptoms, treatment, prevention, costs, waiting times, etc. When buying a car they might include price, engine type, warranties, service costs, etc. We’ve carried out Top Tasks surveys in some 40 countries and 30 languages, with upwards of 400,000 people voting. In every single survey the same patterns emerge. Let’s say there are 100 potential tasks. People are asked to vote on the tasks that are most important to them. When the results come in, we will find that five of the tasks will get the first 25% of the vote. 50 tasks will get the final 25% of the vote. The top five tasks get as much of the vote as the bottom 50. It’s the same pattern in Norway, New Zealand, Israel, USA, Canada, UK, Brazil, wherever.

The bottom 50 are what I call the tiny tasks. When a tiny task goes to sleep at night it dreams of being a top task. These tiny tasks—the true waste generators—are highly ambitious and enthusiastic. They will do everything they can to draw attention to themselves, and one of the best ways of doing that is to produce lots of content, design, code.

Once we get the Top Tasks results, we sometimes analyze how much organizational effort is going into each task. Invariably, there is an inverse relationship between the importance of the task to the customer and the effort that the organization is making in relation to these tasks. The more important it is to the customer, the less is being done; the less important it is to the customer, the more is being done.

Beware of focusing too much energy, time and resources on the tiny tasks. Reducing the tiny tasks is the number one way you can reduce the number of pages and features. Save the planet. Delete the tiny tasks.

A plague of useless images

I was giving a talk at an international government digital conference once, and I asked people to send me examples of where digital government was working well. One suggestion was for a website in a language I don’t speak. When I visited it, I saw one of those typical big images that you see on so many websites. I thought to myself: I’m going to try and understand this website based on its images.

The big image was of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman walking down the street while talking on her phone. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat. Hmm… Something to do with telecommunications, perhaps? Why would they choose a woman instead of a man, or a group of women and men? She’s married, I deduced by looking at the ring on her finger. What is that telling me? And what about her age? Why isn’t she younger or older? And why is she alone? Questions, questions, but I’m no Sherlock Holmes. I couldn’t figure out anything useful from this image.

I scrolled down the page. Ah, three more images. The first one is a cartoon-like image of a family on vacation. Hmm… The next one is of two men and one woman in a room. One of them has reached their hand out and placed it on something, but I can’t see what that something is, because the other two have placed their hands on top of that hand. It’s a type of pledge or something, a secret society, perhaps? Two of them are smiling and the third is trying to smile. What could that mean? And then the final picture is of a middle-aged man staring into the camera, neither smiling nor unsmiling, with a somewhat kind, thoughtful look. What is happening?

I must admit that after examining all the visual evidence I had absolutely no clue what this government website was about. So, I translated it. It was about the employment conditions and legal status of government employees. Now, why didn’t I deduce that from the images?

The Web is smothering us in useless images that create lots of pollution. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution and waste, as they cause page bloat, making it slower for pages to download, while pumping out wholly unnecessary pollution. They take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight, making people scroll for no good reason.

Interpublic is a very large global advertising agency. As with all advertising agencies they stress how “creative” they are, which means they love huge, meaningless, happy-clappy polluting images. When I tested their homepage, it emitted almost 8 grams of CO2 as it downloaded, putting Interpublic in the worst 10% of website polluters, according to the Website Carbon Calculator. (For comparison, the Google homepage emits 0.23 grams.) One single image on its homepage weighed 3.2 MB. This image could easily have been 10 times smaller, while losing nothing in visual appeal. The Interpublic website is like a filthy, rusty 25-year-old diesel truck, belching fumes as it trundles down the Web.

Instead of optimizing images so that they’ll download faster, the opposite is often happening. High-resolution images are a major cost to the environment. If, for example, you move from a 4K resolution image to an 8K one, the file size doesn’t double, it trebles. For example, I saved an image at 4K and it was 6.9 MB. At 8K it was 18 MB.

Digital “progress” and “innovation” often means an increasing stress on the environment. Everything is more. Everything is higher. Everything is faster. And everything is exponentially more demanding of the environment. Digital is greedy for energy and the more it grows the greedier it gets. We need digital innovation that reduces environmental stress, that reduces the digital footprint. We need digital designers who think about the weight of every design decision they make.

We must start by trying to use the option that damages the environment least, and that is text. Don’t assume that images are automatically more powerful than text. Sometimes, text does the job better.

In a test with an insurance company, it was found that a promotion for a retirement product was deemed less accurate when an image of a face was used than when text only was used.

An initiative by the UK government to get people to sign up to become potential organ donors tested eight approaches. The approaches that used images were least effective. Text-only worked best.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is that the Department of Useless Images?”

“Yes.”

“We have this contact form and we need a useless image for it.”

“How about a family cavorting in a field of spring flowers with butterflies dancing in the background?”

“Perfect.”

There are indeed many situations where images are genuinely useful, particularly when it comes to helping people better understand how a product works or looks. Airbnb, for example, found that its growth only began to accelerate after it invested in getting quality images of the rental properties on offer.

If you need to use images, optimize them and consider using real ones of real people doing real things.

They say a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes it’s a thousand words of crap.

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suzanneshannon · 4 years

Text

Webwaste

The Web is obese

“Hi, I’m Gerry. I have a 5,000-page website.”

“Hi, Gerry.”

“I used to have a 500-page website, but I had no self-control. It was one more page, one more page… What harm could one more page do?”

If you must do something, do something useful. That often means not doing, removing, minimizing, cleaning up.

A plague of useless images

In a test with an insurance company, it was found that a promotion for a retirement product was deemed less accurate when an image of a face was used than when text only was used.

An initiative by the UK government to get people to sign up to become potential organ donors tested eight approaches. The approaches that used images were least effective. Text-only worked best.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is that the Department of Useless Images?”

“Yes.”

“We have this contact form and we need a useless image for it.”

“How about a family cavorting in a field of spring flowers with butterflies dancing in the background?”

“Perfect.”

If you need to use images, optimize them and consider using real ones of real people doing real things.

They say a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes it’s a thousand words of crap.

Webwaste published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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This is a fascinating read involving the usual cast of characters(PUTIN, FSB, Manafort, Viktor Yanukovych, Donald Trump, Deutsche Bank), money laundering and the mysterious death of a banker. Remember the Netflix series 'The Russian Laundromat', if not I highly recommend you watch it because it helps to understand how Putin and his men have laundered BILLIONS with a 'B' out of Russia.

DEATH OF A BANKER: DID LAUNDERED RUSSIAN BILLIONS PLAY A ROLE?

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Note to readers: This is a step-by-step account of a WhoWhatWhy inquiry into an evolving story with global implications — one that has received only scant media attention. In this three-part series, as we close in on the central mystery, we invite readers and potential sources to join us in this expedition toward the truth.

“The dog that did not bark” is an oft-used expression borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes mystery, “Silver Blaze.” In the story, a dog’s failure to sound an alarm and bark during the night indicates that the dog was familiar with the intruder — an observation that helps solve the mystery.

In this story, there are two dogs, and neither one barked.

They are the beloved pets of an Estonian banker caught up in one of history’s largest money laundering scandals, an orgy of cash driven by funds exiting Russia.

The banker went missing in late September and, after an intense 48-hour search of the neighboring area, the authorities announced that he had been found dead — right in his own backyard.

We’ll come back to that grim discovery, the banker, his dogs, and more bodies tied to banking. But first, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

Do All Roads Lead to Putin?

It started with a whistleblower. In 2013, a UK national working as an executive at the Danske Estonian branch warned his superiors in Copenhagen that banks were allegedly laundering hundreds of billions of dollars — the largest cash wash ever reported anywhere — and the vast majority of it ran through a single Estonian branch of Denmark-based Danske Bank. (Go here to see the 60 Minutes interview with the whistleblower, Howard Wilkinson.)

The ultimate beneficiaries appeared to include Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first cousin, Igor Putin, as well as individuals with ties to the Russian intelligence elite, including elements of the FSB spy service. (Others implicated were from Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova, also part of the old Soviet Union.)

“There are two sorts of money that come from Russia,” Estonia’s Finance Minister Martin Helme said recently. “One is stolen money that wants to escape Russia.” The remainder, he added, “has been used by Russia’s security services to finance their operations abroad.”

He did not say what those “operations abroad” were. But here’s an example of how Russian money moved through neighboring Latvia was used: it supported an attempted coup in 2016 in Montenegro.

In the meantime, Russia’s money laundering machine is on spin cycle: the head of Russia’s Federal Service for Financial Monitoring told Vladimir Putin on November 12 that Moscow was winning international recognition for its efforts to tackle money laundering.

Helme is not likely to agree. He said Russian authorities visited Estonia recently, but not for the purpose of “tackling” money laundering.

“They are here to find out what we know and use that information to better conceal their operations.”

The full dimensions of the scandal are only emerging now. And the rot around Danske Bank’s operations extends to other banks, including another large Scandinavian entity, Swedbank — against whom Estonian financial regulators have just announced criminal charges.

Swedish Public Television found evidence that a Putin ally, former president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, had used Swedbank to launder money looted from Ukraine to send payments to Paul Manafort.

This laundry cycle involved moving funds from Ukraine to Danske’s Estonian branch to Swedbank’s Lithuanian branch… and into Manafort’s pockets.

Manafort, for a few weeks, was the 2016 campaign manager for Donald Trump.

This brings to mind what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently asked Trump: “Do all roads lead to Putin, Mr. President?”

Why ‘Give a Shit About Some Tiny Place’?

Estonia is the northernmost of three Baltic republics that declared their independence from the Soviet Union decades ago. It is a neighbor of Scandinavia, and small: just 1.3 million inhabitants. Yet it is an emerging player in, among other things, industry, science, and technology, with a world-class culture and famously vibrant nightlife.

It is also a place where East (Europe) meets West — with all the intrigue that entails.

When I mentioned what’s been happening in Estonia to one acquaintance, he was blunt: “I don’t give a shit about some tiny place.”

Angry about Trump, he was enraged over Ukraine. But why should money laundering and related large-scale tax evasion involving this below-the-radar gnat of a place matter?

Over the years, through a variety of whistleblowers, leaks to news organizations, and investigations, we’ve come to understand the magnitude and consequences of what the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project dubbed the “Russian Laundromat.”

Simply put, most of this money was originally other people’s. These oligarchs and their friends pillage public and private coffers, and the resources and birthright of others — impoverishing populations, destabilizing economies, and ultimately transforming national and even international politics. They craft policy and even international relationships based on the need to protect their illicit profits.

Russia’s own economy has been held back by the outflow of money that might have been used to improve the standard of living for its own long-impoverished masses. In Russia, there are people whose jobs are devoted to stopping money laundering and capital flight. What goes through their minds as they try to do their work while trying not to notice that their ultimate bosses are alleged to be involved — directly or indirectly — as key perpetrators?

The proceeds of these nefarious activities — indulged by “legitimate” interests in banking, real estate, luxury goods, and other industries — end up in apartments, palatial homes, and fancy cars in places like London’s Belgravia, Florida’s Gold Coast, or sumptuous triplexes stacked in Manhattan highrises like Trump Tower.

Since early in Trump’s term, WhoWhatWhy has reported on curious real estate transactions involving shadowy figures from the former Soviet Union and Trump and his long-time attorney Michael Cohen.

Money laundering is a financial crime. But it is also a means of protecting the proceeds of yet other crimes, including trafficking in drugs, protected wildlife, and human beings. Money laundering also touches virtually every aspect of our lives. For example, the luxury real estate market, inflated by illegal monies, adds to pressure on the existing housing stock and land use — and leads to further inequality in housing.

Ultimately, those who benefit from the global money laundering machine are not just the elites of the countries from which the tainted money flows; also lining their pockets are the bankers and their de facto allies and cooperators in the affluent Western countries, who claim to be upset about the whole thing.

Recently, Netflix began running The Laundromat, a film by Steven Soderbergh that dramatizes the alleged money-laundering and asset-hiding activities of an offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca, first brought to public attention through a trove of documents dubbed the Panama Papers. The firm’s business was chock-a-block with funds from Russian oligarchs with Putin ties — and, purportedly, from Putin himself.

As with that story, the Estonian tale is about thousands of bank accounts, numerous unknown figures moving and washing money, and, in the background, some big names.

This is why exposing the enormously complex and vast mechanisms for money laundering and tax evasion is important to the US and the world. The true identities of the ultimate “beneficial owners” of the funds are elusive. But there are identifiable entities and individuals who, despite their ability to avoid being directly tied to any improper activity, nonetheless leave footprints.

Those footprints showed up at the Danske Bank branch run by Aivar Rehe. But he is no longer around to tell us what he saw.

The Body in the Backyard

My inquiries began on Wednesday, September 25, when a researcher on my team sent over a short article from the New York Times. It reported that an Estonian banker, caught up in a big financial scandal, had committed suicide.

The Times article, datelined Frankfurt, also mentioned that the scandal had led to official investigations in Sweden, Germany, and the US, and even threatened the economies of the Baltic countries. That same day German prosecutors confirmed they were investigating the role of the large German entity Deutsche Bank as an intermediary that helped Danske process suspect customer transactions in the United States.

Deutsche Bank has been in the news a great deal because of its longstanding relationship with Trump. It is believed to have loaned more than $2 billion to Trump or entities related to him, over two decades, when other banks wouldn’t. The very day the Estonian banker’s body was found, German prosecutors marched into Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt and seized files.

All this financial stuff was provocative, but what really caught my attention was a fact only briefly mentioned in the article: Rehe, the Estonian banker, had been missing and a search had been conducted for 48 hours before his body was discovered — in the backyard of his personal residence.

The death of anyone caught up in a big, far-reaching controversy would seem to warrant further inquiry — especially when the details run counter to common sense.

Plus, given the magnitude of the alleged wrongdoing of the dead man’s bank, the ruthlessness of some of the alleged beneficiaries, and the unleashing of extensive investigations, it seemed to me that the death of this man should not be so quickly dismissed — even if there were the typical trappings of a suicide.

After all, when someone has sensitive information about illicit activities that, if disclosed, could present risks to others — it may introduce dangerous incentives to make sure the information is not made public.

And history shows us there are several means employed. One way is to make a bold statement and thereby shock and intimidate others with, for example, a very public “assassination,” such as a drive-by professional hit or a car bombing.

But if the goal is only to eliminate a problem while not drawing additional investigative attention, then the person must either be killed and the death made to look like an accident or suicide — or the person must be strongly incentivized to do himself in.

This is a common enough trope in books, movies, and TV shows. And, based on what the espionage experts tell us, it’s not mere fiction but standard “tradecraft” in the spying game.

I could not, of course, help thinking of the recent death by alleged hanging of another potentially inconvenient witness against powerful people: the financier Jeffrey Epstein.

What also struck me about Rehe’s death was that — despite the magnitude of the money laundering going on at his branch — he personally had not been arrested or charged with a crime by Estonian authorities. Yet lower-level local employees had been. And his ultimate chief in Copenhagen, the CEO, had been arrested by Danish authorities. No, the Estonian authorities were quick to say, this all had nothing to with the management of Danske Estonia Bank, and Rehe was not under investigation. In fact, he had been cooperative with them.

Cooperative? In what way? I needed to see for myself.

I fully understood that it was going to be hard to definitively establish how and why Rehe died. But I believe that it is imperative to make the effort.

As far as I could tell — based on a review of published material and initial inquiries with those who might know — neither the local Estonian press nor the international media were looking into it. I got why: nosing around this kind of story is considered hazardous to one’s professional and personal health.

“You’ve got to be [careful], haven’t you,” Howard Wilkinson, the whistleblower, told 60 Minutes. “The very nature of the people who want to launder money probably means that they’re not the sort that you want to go down to the pub and have a pint with.”

One acquaintance of mine with years of experience investigating money laundering offered an explicit warning. “You better be careful over there,” he texted me. “Those guys don’t mess around. This is dangerous stuff.”

On the first leg of my trip, across the Atlantic, I reviewed what had been written and what I had so far divined about the case.

The fallout after the money laundering scandal blew open in the fall of 2017 was considerable. At Danske’s corporate headquarters in Copenhagen, the CEO, Thomas F. Borgen, was charged by Danish authorities with neglecting his responsibilities. The bank’s former finance director was charged with failure to prevent the suspicious transactions. Estonian authorities arrested ten relatively low-level employees in the Tallinn branch — the ones who worked directly with accounts of nonresidents.

The Danish parliament increased money laundering penalties eightfold — they are now among Europe’s toughest. And Danske Bank was ordered to get out of Estonia altogether.

The bank’s stock shares plummeted 50 percent. Management stated that it expected to pay combined fines of several billion dollars to financial regulators in several countries, including the US. Other large regional banks have been implicated as well, and they are all bailing out of the Baltic banking scene. They fired top executives, their stocks suffered, and they face a barrage of institutional and other shareholder lawsuits.

As for the dead man, Aivar Rehe, CEO of Danske’s Estonian branch, he had left the bank but never been charged with wrongdoing. Aside from a rare interview, Rehe, 56, had kept a low profile. The man in the middle of this enormous scandal had somehow escaped all repercussions. Or so it seemed.

That all changed on that sunny morning in late September.

Rehe went missing on Monday, September 23. He left around 10 o’clock in the morning “to go for a walk,” he’d told his family. A handsome six-footer with graying dark hair, he left without his mobile phone, his wallet, or either dog. When he did not return by noon, his family called the police.

That same day, Valdo Poder, operations chief of the Northern Police Prefecture, told a local news service that Rehe’s family had “given sufficient hints” that he may have committed suicide.

Rehe had a handgun license, but no gun. The police did not report whether he ever had a gun, or why he no longer had it. Was it because of his suicide attempt? But why did he have a gun (if he did) in the first place? Poder was quoted as saying that police were not ruling out kidnapping or — and this astonishing item was just dropped in — the possibility that Rehe had been taken into a witness protection program.

An even more intriguing item came up briefly, then slipped beneath the surface: police reportedly had said, “there have been credible threats in recent months to his life.”

Later I learned that none of my contacts in Estonia knew anything about this, possibly because it seems to have appeared only once, and in only two foreign news outlets (Emerging-europe.com and amlcompliance.ro/news).

I wondered if those threats might explain the gun license.

Soon after Rehe went missing, police mounted a search party. For all of Monday, September 23, about 40 people, including both volunteers and officers armed with dogs and flashlights, combed the area and woods around his home in Pirita, a green, affluent neighborhood of Tallinn. Drones were employed to scan the area from above.

News reports were extremely vague, and because of that, locals wondered if perhaps Rehe had been kidnapped, or if someone had killed him. Some wondered if, under pressure of the scandal, Rehe had simply arranged to disappear.

The search continued into Tuesday. Nothing was found.

Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Still nothing.

Then on Wednesday morning, almost exactly 48 hours after the family had first alerted authorities, the police received a phone call from a family member: They themselves had discovered Rehe. The government officially stated that he had been found, somewhere “near” his home.

On Wednesday afternoon, police arrived at Rehe’s house to investigate … Behind Rehe’s house, they noticed a garden where someone had climbed over.There were also traces of movement behind the hay [in the back of] the garden, and police took a picture of the place.

My airBaltic flight from Paris touched down on a Wednesday evening, two weeks after Rehe had been found, and a late-model, spotless taxi brought me quickly from the small airport to my hotel, one of the tallest towers in the city center.

The next morning, I fortified myself with a typical regional buffet of herring and smoked salmon, fresh fruit, a variety of tasty cheeses (in Estonia, milk is called “white gold”), crunchy muesli, and very good coffee served in the dining room on a high floor with huge windows. I gazed out on the gray landscape, distractedly watching the harbor in the distance, where ferries plied back and forth, hauling day workers to Helsinki in neighboring Finland. On the street, a few people hurried to their offices. I began to plan.

I have always believed, even in this age of Google and social media, that there’s no substitute for personal contact. But I knew that, because of laws on privacy, plus the culture of the place — Estonians are rather close-mouthed — the government would be extremely reluctant to reveal any details to the public.

But I would try to speak — on the phone or face to face — with as many local journalists as possible; find out what efforts they had made and what they had found; and recruit local “fixers” who could help with translations of documents and, where necessary, technical interpreting (most Estonians speak English well), plus arrange logistics, introductions, and, as necessary, advise me on protocol and decorum. Then check in with someone from the US embassy, extend my outreach to a range of international organizations, and pose inquiries to Estonian authorities.

The first thing that struck me, as I began my rounds, was that most people accepted that Rehe’s death was a suicide, and that the authorities’ statement was the final word. Behind this easy acceptance was the simple fact that people under stress sometimes do kill themselves; that suicide is not so rare (Estonia ranks 16th in the world in suicides per 100,000 population); and that things had not gone well for the deceased in the last few years of his life.

And yet…

Rehe, who had worked in more than one bank where dubious monies were processed, was potentially a critical witness in how the “Russian Laundromat” continues to reinvent itself to get around the determined efforts of national and international bodies to foil the scheme. I wondered if he had known too much for his own good.

The banker was well-spoken and well-liked, according to locals and journalists I talked to. A corporate front man who presented a positive picture of his employer’s activities. After the Danske debacle, Rehe kept saying that there were no problems — though known to be detail-oriented, he declined to provide any details. The Estonian media grew increasingly frustrated with his stonewalling, and a journalists’ association gave him a facetious award as “Enemy of the Press.”

“We had the data showing all these weird clients, it seemed so shady, yet here he was assuring us that everything was just fine,” said one Estonian financial journalist.

No one with whom I spoke could make sense of the particulars. The basic “knowns” were maddeningly elusive, and often conflicting. They had emerged, in a nonlinear fashion, from an array of sources of dubious veracity. And since nailing down the facts and pinning down the sources appeared to be a hard slog, most just shrugged and concluded none of this would ever get figured out.

Rehe, according to one of my sources, had left behind his wallet and mobile phone, his wedding ring — and a suicide note. (This was also implied in vague media accounts that studiously sought to honor the government’s privacy protocol while still providing some reporting.) I didn’t know exactly when the family had found these items, or in what order. Did the family know from the start that he had planned to do himself in? Early news reports hinted that the police had been told he may have been suicidal.

Whatever they knew, the authorities almost instantly declared the case solved and pronounced the investigation, whatever it consisted of, over. But shortly before my arrival in Tallinn, the interior minister, Mart Helme, announced that the investigation was being reopened:

A person has died and the circumstances of his death have to be investigated to the level of all details and they have to be presented to the public to avoid all doubts.

Citing an “ongoing investigation” allows authorities to cloak their actions, past and present, in the phrase “unable to comment.” “Official” answers to the simplest queries, I realized, would not be forthcoming.

______

Tomorrow: Part 2. Our reporter starts digging, and discovers that things do not add up.

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ios-goodies · 5 years

Text

Week 284.5: WWDC special

Surprise! Happy Tuesday! The first day of WWDC 2019 was so amazing that made me want to send out a special edition of iOS Goodies to share all the good news. This is a special edition of our newsletter, so it's not following closely the usual pattern.

The opening keynote brought huge news to developers. tvOS will gain multi-user support, and watchOS gets some new audio streaming APIs. The Apple Watch will become more independent from the iPhone, also getting its own App Store. iOS 13 was announced, which will run on iPhone SE, iPhone 6s and above, dropping iPhone 6 and iPhone 5S support. Surprisingly, the iOS that's running on iPads was renamed to iPadOS. iPadOS is based on iOS and it seems that at least this year, iPadOS is still iOS, but the different naming might say something about the different directions Apple wants to take the two devices. iPadOS is compatible with iPad Air 2 and newer devices.

The new macOS is named Catalina, it comes with ZSH instead of bash, probably because of licensing issues, and will probably get a lot more new apps, since project Catalyst (what everybody knew as Marzipan) will help turn an iPad app into a Mac app only by selecting a checkbox. At least, that's what they demoed, so it must be true 🙃. It's not clear yet to me how Universal apps will be affected by the iOS/iPadOS split and if only iPad apps can be made into Mac apps or if an iPhone-only app can also become a Mac app, but we have enough time to figure that out until September.

The biggest news for developer this year was the introduction of SwiftUI: a new declarative framework for building UIs. SwiftUI works only on iOS 13, no backwards compatibility. Apple added some very nice tutorials for SwiftUI, which is in my opinion a much better way to learn than downloading sample code or reading some documentation. SwiftUI is built from scratch, it's not a wrapper, it works great with UIKit, AppKit and more, you can mix and match between SwiftUI and UIKit and the animations in SwiftUI are interactive and interruptible by default. If you think the SwiftUI sample code looks like Swift, but not too much, you're not alone. Recent swift Evolution proposals, such as Function Builders, Property Delegates and Opaque Results Types helped make that SwiftUI code possible. For a more detailed explanation on this, check out Bruno Rocha's awesome article. Before you get all too excited, remember that this is iOS 13 only, and to be able to test the Editor and Canvas (live previews) shown in the keynote, you need the Catalina beta. There are a lot of sessions on SwiftUI this year, make sure to watch some of them when they'll become available in the WWDC app or on the website.

Another new component that enables the magic behind SwiftUI is the new Combine framework, which is Apple's take on the reactive paradigm. I don't think anyone expected this to happen this year, but here we are. I think this is really exciting, make sure to watch the sessions on it later this week 😁.

And as if this wasn't enough already, we got a lot of Xcode improvements, such as Swift Package Manager that works with iOS. John Sundell already wrote an article covering this topic. Besides the SPM integration, Xcode also got some neat updates. The one people seem to be most happy about is the minimap. It can show breakpoints, it can show MARK: comments and you can hold command to see names of functions, classes, etc. Personally, I was surprised so many people were so excited about this, but I'm glad people are happy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Under security and privacy, some notable updates were a new crypto framework that finally marks MD5 as insecure and the tightened location privacy rules for asking for "always" access. We should also highlight here the Sign In with Apple, which is an anonymized way for users to sign into your app using their Apple ID. "Sign In with Apple" support will be mandatory for apps that provide 3rd party sign-in. Another update in the App Store Review guidelines referring to privacy is that kids' apps cannot include third-party advertising or analytics software and may not transmit data to third parties. This seems well-intended but harsh. And it's going to be very interesting to see what will be considered a 3rd party. Heroku? AWS?.

Other notable updates I found are the new Core Haptics framework, a quite obscure and poorly documented UICollectionViewDiffableDataSource that might be sherlocking IGListKit, undo/redo gestures that work out of the box with NSUndoManager, an updated card-like presentation style for modal view controllers and redesigned UISegmentController and my favorite, custom initializers for view controllers instantiated from a storyboard.

From a design perspective, Apple human interface guidelines were updated, SF Symbols provides consistent and configurable symbols and icons that can be used in apps, and we get some new Context Menus.

With all this new stuff, it's hard to refrain from installing the betas. However, Apple issued a warning implying they're a bit unstable. I've also seen people on Twitter saying that the betas from last year were far more stable. It's totally ok for first betas to be buggy and unstable, especially with so many new features that were introduced. If anything, it's last year that was extraordinary. But this year is simply mindblowing 🤯!

Credits

Information for this newsletter was compiled from tweets by: @_inside, @johnsundell, @UINT_MIN, @jckarter, @peres, @karolsmazur, @b3ll, @nevyn, @azamsharp, @BrunoPhilipe, @rockthebruno, @alanzeino, @twostraws, @_eliperkins, @twannl, @rustyshelf, @vixentael, @sandofsky, @_ryannystrom, @hansemannnn, @kharrison, @twostraws, @neoNacho