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rapz-rites · 3 months

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Demon Daughter

Damian Wayne x Reader, Damian Wayne x Daughter!OC, Reader x Daughter!OC

Time travel is tricky. So of course your daughter is accidentally going to come home early, 20 years too early to be exact.

Inspired by @cipheress-to-k-pop

A/N: this was kinda requested after Demon Spawns which some of you really enjoyed so I hope you all enjoy this one too. I did merge several dc worlds together so sorry if it’s a little confusing

Word Count: 1.3k+

Warning(s): idk 🤷🏾‍♀️ (I’m honestly too lazy atm)

Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

“I’m never time traveling with Willow every again!” Milena whispers harshly to herself as she sneaks back into the manor. She sighs as her feet hit her bedroom floor only to realize she forgot something in the Cave from earlier in the day.

After being chased by dinosaurs and almost dying from a meteor shower, Milena decided to be lazy and just boom tube to the Cave. It was only a 5 minute walk but hey, it’s okay to be lazy every now and then. What she didn’t expect to see was strangers in costumes ready to attack her.

“Who the hell are you?” A voice asks as she readies her weapons in response to seeing them. She turns to face the voice.

“I should be the one asking you,” she says as she faces one of her weapons toward them. “Who are you people and the hell did you get in here?”

They could see Milena was a bit shaken up and confused. But it didn’t explain what she was doing in the Cave. After a few moments of silence, Dick was the first to speak.

“How about we all put our weapons down and talk like adults,” he said hands up in surrender. His hands have been up since the moment Milena pointed a weapon at him. Normally, he wouldn’t be fazed but when the weapon looks like one of Cyborg’s, he wasn’t going to take the chance. Especially considering that Cyborg’s canons can easily blast through thick walls of concrete.

“Listen kid-”Jason started thinking he might try and break the tension, only for you to cut him off. “I’m not a kid. I’m 19.”

“Why are you dressed like old heros?” Milena asked. “Those costumes aren’t even sold anymore.”

“What do you mean old?” Dick asked, clearly confused.

“Old as in 2010s-2020s old get with the times,” you say, as if you just stated the obvious. Now they were all confused.

“It’s 2023,” Tim said.

“What?” you questioned in a confused voice. How could it be 2023? How could you be 20 years in the past?

After retracting your weapons you let out a sign. Under your breath you whisper, “I’m going to kill Willow.”

“Willow?” Dick asked.

With slumped shoulders, you turned to look at him.

“Willow West. Wally West and Athemis’ daughter,'' you stated nonchalantly. At this point, you were done with everything. Heading back into the manor you say, “I'll try to reach Willow and get back to my time.I'm going to bed.”

“Hey hey hey! We can't just let you in the manor. You know our identities and we have no idea who you are” Jason retorted. You couldn’t help but roll your eyes at him. Was he being serious right now? How does he think you got in the Cave?

‘Dimwit’ Milena thought to herself. But just as she was going to say something three people entered the Cave. It was Bruce, Damian, and you. Milena couldn’t help but stare in awe.

“Who is this?” Bruce asked in a husky voice.

She paid him no mind, eyes trained on you and Damian. You stood 7 inches below Damian’s 6’1 frame, head tilted up to look at him as you spoke to each other. No one could mistake the look of love in Damian’s eyes as he looked at you while you spoke. He listened intently as you talked about God knows what. But what really struck her was your swollen belly. You were possibly 4 or 5 months pregnant: at the stage were it was kinda obvious you were pregnant but your belly wasn’t huge.

In your peripheral, you saw a girl looking at you and Damian. You gave a small smile as you walked towards her to greet her. Every step you took, you realized she looked more and more familiar. However, just as you were about to reach her, Dick stopped you.

“We don't know who she is or how she got in here. She could be dangerous and she could hurt you,” Dick spoke. But the entire time he was speaking you just looked at the girl. Taking in her features you realized who she was. Your daughter.

“Dangerous? Most likely, but i know my daughter wouldn’t hurt me”, you said smiling at her, your hands on her cheek. Milena couldn’t help but smile at you too. She let out a soft, “Hi mom.”

You didn’t even realize the tears streaming off your face until Milena wiped them away. You turned to look at Damian, teary eyed with a huge smile, “She looks exactly like I dreamed.”

Looking back and forth from Milena and Damian you started to list any and all similarities between them. “She has your eyes. The shape is sharp and green like yours, but is kind of softer like mine.Oh her nose. And-”

“Beloved, she’s tired, let's give her a break,” Damian said. If Damian hadn’t stopped you then you would’ve done a full head to toe assessment to find any similarities you could. The others didn’t know how to react. Tim honestly couldn’t care less. He just wanted to finish his work to go to sleep.

With the help of Alfred, Damian ushered everyone back into the manor for bed.

“Well this is my room.. Well it’s supposed to be. It’s probably a nursery now isn’t it?” You mutter shyly, stopping in front of your room. You and Damian stood in front of the room across from her. With a sorry look you gave her a small nod.

“You can stay with us,” you offered without even thinking about it.

“Absolutely not,” Milena and Damian said at the same time. Milena grew up with you. So she knows how you get sometimes, especially when you were pregnant with her siblings. She’d rather let her father deal with a pregnant and hormonal you. “Thanks but I’m pretty sure there’s an empty room somewhere.”

The next morning you and Damian were in the kitchen having breakfast with the family. That’s when Milena came rushing in from up stairs. You watched her as she hurriedly greeted everyone while fixing herself a plate. Once she sat she began inhaling her food. You don’t even think she chewed any of her food. “Mina, honey, maybe you want to slow down a bit and actually chew your food.”

“Sorry Mom-” Milena started. She whipped around the kitchen like it was second nature. Like she did this all the time. She placed her dirty dishes in the sink and thanked Alfred for the breakfast. “My ride is going to be here soon.”

Suddenly what even one thought was a boom tube appeared at the entryway of the kitchen. Everyone looked back at it to find a teen girl, not too much younger than Milena walking out of it.

“Sorry to drop in unannounced,” she said with a small smile. You could tell by her fighting to stay still that she was a speedster, most likely Wally’s daughter at that. “Milena time to go.”

Milena came around and gave Damian quick hug and a ‘see you son’ before stopping in front of you. You couldn’t stop the tears in your eyes as she hugged you goodbye.

Walking up to the boom tube, she turned to look at you. “Don’t worry. You’re an amazing mom. I couldn’t ask for a better one,” she says, disappearing.

Hugging your side, Damian rubbing his hand up and down your arm. Tears were flowing down your cheeks as you muttered to yourself . “Damn hormones. I’ll see you in a couple months, Milena.”

FUTURE

Walking out of the boom tube, Milena was face to face with her father. She couldn’t help but crumble into his arms. Keeping them both steady, Damian brings them to the floor.

“I saw her. I saw her Dad.” Milena cries into her father’s chest. Damian just rubbed her back, trying to console his crying daughter. “But she’s gone and I miss her so much.”

“I miss her too,” he said in a low whisper. “Every single day.”

Plot twist 🫢

Did y’all enjoy it tho??? 🤔

Taglist:

@devotedlyshadowytheorist

#damian wayne #damian wayne x reader #damian al ghul #damian al ghul x reader #requests #damian wayne x female reader #damian wayne x y/n #damian wayne x you #batfam x reader #batfam #dc

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alphynix · 9 months

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Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 2: Walking With Victorian Dinosaurs

[Previously: the Permian and the Triassic]

The next part of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur trail depicts the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Most of the featured animals here are actually marine reptiles, but a few dinosaur species do make an appearance towards the end of this section.

Although there are supposed to be three Jurassic ichthyosaur statues here, only the big Temnodontosaurus platyodon could really be seen at the time of my visit. The two smaller Ichthyosaurus communis and Leptonectes tenuirostris were almost entirely hidden by the dense plant growth on the island.

Ichthyosaurs when fully visible vs currently obscured Left side image by Nick Richards (CC BY SA 2.0)

Head, flipper, and tail details of the Temnodontosaurus. A second ichthyosaur is just barely visible in the background.

Ichthyosaurs were already known from some very complete and well-preserved fossils in the 1850s, so a lot of the anatomy here still holds up fairly well even 170 years later. They even have an attempt at a tail fin despite no impressions of such a structure having been discovered yet! Some details are still noticeably wrong compared to modern knowledge, though, such as the unusual amount of shrinkwrapping on the sclerotic rings of the eyes and the bones of the flippers.

———

Arranged around the ichthyosaur, three different Jurassic plesiosaurs are also represented – “Plesiosaurus” macrocephalus with the especially sinuous neck on the left, Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus in the middle, and Thalassiodracon hawkinsi on the right.

They're all depicted here as amphibious and rather seal-like, hauling out onto the shore in the same manner as the ichthyosaurs. While good efforts for the time, we now know these animals were actually fully aquatic, that they had a lot more soft tissue bulking out their bodies, and that their necks were much less flexible.

———

The recently-installed new pivot bridge is also visible here behind some of the marine reptiles.

———

Positioned to the left of the other marine reptiles, this partly-obscured pair of croc-like animals are teleosaurs (Teleosaurus cadomensis), a group of Jurassic semi-aquatic marine crocodylomorphs.

A better view of the two teleosaurs by MrsEllacott (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Crystal Palace statues have the general proportions right, with long thin gharial-like snouts and fairly small limbs. But some things like the shape of the back of the head and the pattern of armored scutes are wrong, which is odd considering that those details were already well-known in the 1850s.

———

Finally we reach the first actual dinosaur, and one of the most iconic statues in the park: the Jurassic Megalosaurus!

Megalosaurus bucklandi was the very first non-avian dinosaur known to science, discovered in the 1820s almost twenty years before the term "dinosaur" was even coined.

At a time when only fragments of the full skeleton were known, and before any evidence of bipedalism had been found, the Crystal Palace rendition of Megalosaurus is a bulky quadrupedal reptile with a humped back and upright bear-like limbs. It's a surprisingly progressive interpretation for the period, giving the impression of an active mammal-like predator.

This statue suffered extensive damage to its snout in 2020, which was repaired a year later with a fiberglass "prosthesis".

———

Reaching the Cretaceous period now, we find Hylaeosaurus (and one of the upcoming Iguanodon peeking in from the side).

Hylaeosaurus armatus was the first known ankylosaur, although much like the other dinosaurs here its life appearance was very poorly understood in the early days of paleontology. Considering how weird ankylosaurs would later turn out to be, the Crystal Palace depiction is a pretty good guess, showing a large heavy iguana-like quadruped with hoof-like claws and armored spiky scaly skin.

It's positioned facing away from viewers, so its face isn't very visible – but due to the head needing to be replaced with a fiberglass replica some years ago, the original can now be seen (and touched!) up close near the start of the trail.

———

Two pterosaurs (or "pterodactyles" according to the park signs) were also supposed to be just beyond the Hylaeosaurus, but plant growth had completely blocked any view of them.

Although these two statues are supposed to represent a Cretaceous species now known as Cimoliopterus cuvieri, they were probably actually modeled based on the much better known Jurassic-aged Pterodactylus antiquus.

A second set of pterosaur sculptures once stood near the teleosaurs, also based on Pterodactylus but supposed to represent a Jurassic species now known as Dolicorhamphus bucklandii. These statues went missing in the 1930s, and were eventually replaced with new fiberglass replicas in the early 2000s… only to be destroyed by vandalism just a few years later.

(The surviving pair near the Hylaeosaurus are apparently in a bit of disrepair these days, too, with the right one currently missing most of its jaws.)

Image by Ben Sutherland (CC BY 2.0)

The Crystal Palace pterosaurs weren't especially accurate even for the time, with heads much too small, swan-like necks, and bird-like wings that don't attach the membranes to the hindlimbs. Hair-like fuzz had been observed in pterosaur fossils in the 1830s, but these depictions are covered in large overlapping diamond-shaped scales due to Richard Owen's opinion that they should be scaly because they were reptiles.

But some details still hold up – the individual with folded wings is in a quadrupedal pose quite similar to modern interpretations, and the bird-like features give an overall impression of something more active and alert than the later barely-able-to-fly sluggish reptilian pterosaur depictions that would become common by the mid-20th century.

(Much like the statues themselves, the "modern" reconstruction above is based on Pterodactylus rather than Cimoliopterus)

———

The last actual dinosaurs on this dinosaur trail are the two Cretaceous Iguanodon sculptures. At the time of my visit they weren't easy to make out behind the overgrown trees, and only the back end of the standing individual was clearly visible.

Named only a year after Megalosaurus, Iguanodon was the second dinosaur ever discovered, and early reconstructions depicted it as a giant iguana-like lizard.

The Crystal Palace statues depict large bulky animals, one in an upright mammal-like stance and another reclining with one hand raised up. (This hand is usually resting on a cycad trunk, but that element appeared to be either missing or fallen over when I was there.)

Famously a New Year's dinner party was held in the body of the standing Iguanodon during its construction, although the accounts of how many people could actually fit inside it at once are probably slightly exaggerated.

A clearer view by Jim Linwood (CC BY 2.0)

Considering that the skull of Iguanodon wasn't actually known at the time of these sculpture's creation, the head shape with a beak at the front of the jaws is actually an excellent guess. The only major issue was the nose horn, which was an understandable mistake when something as strange as a giant thumb spike had never been seen in any known animal before.

(The fossils the Crystal Palace statues are based on are actually now classified as Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis, but the "modern" reconstruction above depicts the chunkier Iguanodon bernissartensis.)

———

Image by Doyle of London (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I also wasn't able to spot the Cretaceous mosasaur on the other side of the island due to heavy foliage obscuring the view.

Depicting Mosasaurus hoffmannii, this model consists of only the front half of the animal lurking at the water's edge. It's unclear whether this partial reconstruction is due to uncertainty about the full appearance, or just a result of money and time running out during its creation.

The head is boxier than modern depictions, and the scales are too large, but the monitor-lizard like features and paddle-shaped flippers are still pretty close to our current understanding of these marine reptiles. It even apparently has the correct palatal teeth!

Next time: the final Cenozoic section!

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ifuckinglovedinosaurssomuchjesus · 6 months

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On the subject of Dinosaur Documentaries...

So Life On Our Planet dropped a few days ago, another installment of this seeming boom of these kind of shows since Prehistoric Planet last year, and it got me thinking about this whole little niche genre.

The very first "Paleodoc" was released in 1922, made by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to educate museum goers on how the fossils they saw were collected and prepared. This began the format I like to call the "Talking Heads" Paleodoc which is mainly in the form of interviews or narration over actual footage of Paleontologists at work with the occasional "Live" Dinosaur for visual aid. These are by far the most common form of dinosaur documentary you'll find, even today, mainly because they're cheap to produce and fit in the general style of most science documentaries.

For many decades throughout the 20th century, Paleodocs were pretty rare. They would pop up time to time, and with the sudden influx of attention they got after Jurassic Park, we got some really good ones. Yet they were all the same Talking Head types. What really changed the game was the good ol Magnum Opus of the field: Walking With Dinosaurs.

WWD pioneered the second type of Paleodoc I believe to exist, which are the "In Their World" Paleodocs. These are different in the fact they focus almost entirely on the live visual aids, with the human presence being limited to narration or brief pauses for context. They're meant to simulate the modern nature documentary, like Planet Earth, that focus more on showcasing animal behavior with state of the art filming techniques than being a source of in-depth science.

The success of WWD cannot be overstated, and I have to say I do find the In Their World format a lot more engaging and easier to connect with. They portray the wonder of prehistory spectacularly, letting audiences get emotionally connected in the animal characters the story creates, even if this has lead to criticisms of anthropomorphism. These programs also almost always use real footage of modern day earth for their prehistoric creatures to roam on, which I'm sure is very sad for the people who want to see their favorite dead plants on screen.

The Walking With... series would expand into sequels and spin-offs and Nigel Marven, and other companies like Discovery would jump on the bandwagon and release their own takes on the concept, but by the mid 2010s the format had basically died out. We'd get one or In Their World style doc every few years until we just didn't get anything. Outside of the occasional TV special that reused When Dinosaurs Roamed America footage, it was empty.

It took until Disney's Live Action remake of The Lion King of all things for that pendulum to start swinging again. Seeing those expressionless CGI cats got Jon Favreau thinking about how he could use this technology and the talented people behind it to make something really cool, and we got Prehistoric Planet.

And, in a repeat of Walking With Dinosaurs, we're seeing more of these In Their World type shows. The original guys behind WWD are even making a comeback with their own series, Surviving Earth. Plus even more little hints and rumors of massive incoming projects from overexcited paleontologists trying not to break their embargo.

It looks like the 2020s will be another resurgence in these types of spectacle Paleodocs, and while a good ol Talking Head will always be there, I can't help but get excited for these animated spectacles and all the weird and wonderful ways they flash those visual aids across our TV screens.

#dinosaur #prehistoric planet #life on our planet #media #so much musings

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rustybottlecap · 1 year

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So recently I remembered that weird af game trailer from years ago during the PS5 reveal conference, featuring anthro characters one of wich I doubly-erroneously thought was a bird-girl.

Turns out the game is called Goodbye Volcano High and it got delayed several times, but it’s actually coming out in a few months as of this post, and something I read about its premise has me OBSESSED.

youtube

So the characters are actually anthropomorphic dinosaurs, and while I don’t prefer this kind of anthro animal designs (reptiles with human hair), turns out they are like this FOR A REASON:

The meteor is coming.

The meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

Everyone in this game is going to die. And the protagonists are teenagers, who were made to believe they had a whole life ahead of them. And the adults would rather just have everyone go on with their routine like nothing’s wrong.

So the protagonists have to decide what to do with the short time they have left, confront their identities and be true to themselves. The pterodactyl protagonist Fang, for example, is non-binary and part of a rock band. Depending on the player’s decisions the rock songs they are composing and playing throughout the game will change.

The paralels with the pandemic and other recent events as experienced by today’s youth are inevitable, and likely played a big factor during its development... yet the original trailer I mentioned in the first paragraph (not the one I posted) came out in 2020. They already had this idea before the pandemic.

While doom and gloom can be found at any point in history, I wonder if at least some of the people involved in the game grew up during the 80s and very early 90s, near the end of the Cold War, back when mutual annihilation via nuclear weapons seemed inevitable, even to little kids.

It doesn’t take much digging to find examples of dinosaurs being used irl to cope with the Cold War fears of nuclear armaggedon. They could be used as metaphors, how nuclear weapons were going to “take us back to the stone age like in The Flintstones”, or comparing it with the meteor that killed the dinosaurs (The 1988 song “Walk the Dinosaur” by Was Not Was, wich many may remember from the old Super Mario Bros. movie and Ice Age 3, is actually about this; there are some clues in the lyrics but the band has outright confirmed it).

On the other hand, dinosaurs had a rise in popularity during the 80s due to new discoveries, and served as nice escapism. Why fear a nuke when you could be crying your heart out while watching The Land Before Time? The 80s was even the decade when the theory that it was a meteor that killed the dinosaur became mainstream. Associaction!

So anyway... the game is finally coming out June 15 August 29, but I want to play it NAOW!!1! Let me laugh in the face of the apocalypse with my dinofriends!

Also if you were turned off from this game due to some shitty content online, know that it was made by a vocal minority trying to sabotage it for being LGBTQ+ friendly. Just ignore them. Do not make this about them. The game will stand on its own.

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annoyingeye · 3 months

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☢︎︎m҉e҈o҉w҈ m҉e҈o҉w҈ :3☢︎︎

NIKA/ALL PRNS/PL, RUS, ENG

𝙼𝚈 𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙴𝚂𝚃𝚂!!

-slenderverse

-creepypasta or just creepy stuff:D

-analogue/psychological horrors

-INDIE, STORY AND HORROR GAMES

-true crime

-paranormal things

-lost media

-psychology

-astrology

-demonology

-urbex

-OCEAN AND SEA!

-ranfren, ptp, htf, ddlc>_<

-punk rock, post punk, emo and goth music!! (i like metal too but not that much)

-zombie and vampires

-wars!

-dinosaurs or just history/prehistory

-guns/weapons

-alan tutorial!!

𝐌𝐘 𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒

Flippy (htf), Habit (emh), Vinny (emh) Observer (t12), Prebrand (t12), Alex Kralie (marble hornets), Jeff The Killer (crp), Ghoulia (mh), John Doe (jd XD), Sid (skins), Maria (silent hill), Chris (dh00), Michael (ml0), Andre and Cal:3 (zero day), Pinkie Pie (mlp), Abby Anderson (tlou), Toki (Metalocalypse), Ada Wong (resident evil), Wesker (resident evil), Hank Anderson (dbh), Larry Johnson (sf), Todd Morrison (sf), Postal Dude (postal), Sophie (cof), John Ward (ftut), Miles Upshur (outlast), Norman Jayden (heavy rain), Shaggy (scooby doo), Patrick Bateman (american psycho), Jesse Wells (hollow hemlocks)

𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗱��/𝗔𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶 𝗲𝗻𝗷𝗼𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁

Anal Cunt, Buerak, Sedes, 5mewmet, dj trippie flameboy, Злые Гномы, Пурген, Molchat Doma, KMFDM, Type O Negative, Chernikovskaya Hata, Mindless Self Indulgence, Ploho, Nürnberg, Linkin Park, ssshhhiiittt!, Crystal Castles, Pisse, Dezeter, Brudne Place Zabaw, Pornofilmy, Myslovitz, CASTET, 100 Tvarzy Grzybiarzy, Twoyastara Of Death, Hamulec, Gruzja, Казённыи Унитаз, Fester Witch, Оргазм Нострадамуса, Elusin and many many many other

𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐢 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭

Postal, Half Life, Silent hill, Lomando.com, John Doe, Outlast, Sally Face, Fran Bow, Cry of Fear, Afraid of Monsters, Faith the unholy trinity, Buckshot Roulette, Priest Simulator, Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Mortal Kombat, KryptaFM, Neverending Nightmares

movies/shows/series that i like:3

Duck, Zero Day, Saw, IT, My Little Pony, Monster high, Elephant, Scooby Doo, Fight Club, Breaking Bad, American Psycho, Sala Samobójców

𝚁𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚘𝚖 𝚏𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚜 𝚊𝚋𝚝 𝚖𝚎:3

-I love windy weather smsmsmms

-talking abt ai 24/7

-im lonely as hell

-im watching movies with Joey Smack all the time

-i love darkness

-staying up all nights

-YES I LOVE EDGY MEDIA

-im a walking multifandom literally

-I LOVELOVELOVE COOKING CAKES

-my favorite animals are wolfs, dogs and lemon sharks!

-idk what i feel abt my sexuality tbh

-my comfort people are Evan Jennings, Rikki Audax and Andreas Ronnberg:3

-atheist:D

-i think about zombie and fake shooters media all the time

-PLAYING GAMES AND LISTENING TO MUSIC 24/7

⠀ DNI!!

-minor p3dos/p3dos

-n4zis.

-adam r0sner supporters

-SOME yansim/genshin/pj sekai toxic fans

-dsmp fans

-ppl who r romantizong being slavic bc its annoying

-SOME taylor swift and lana del rey fans (i dont mean listeners!)

-millennials

-proshippers

-PEOPLE WHO HATE DOGS OR CATS.

-posers

-annoying skinheads and metalheads

-ppl who are hating on other basic/alt ppl

-EVERY WEIRD south park fans

-g0re enjoyers

INTERACT!!

-slenderverse and creepypasta enjoyers!

-tcc (just dont talk abt killers like abt little kids and be normal)

-punks:3

-POST PUNK AND PUNK ROCK LISTENERS.

-indie, story and horror games fans

-KMFDM AND MSI LISTENERS (jimmy supporters dni lol)

-fictional school shooters enjoyers!!

-minors

-edgy people pleaseee

-PRIEST SIMULATOR OR KRYPTA FM POLISH FANS

-analogue horrors enjoyers

-kpop community (the same thing as tcc)

-artists!

-cosplayers hell yeah

-ranfren russian and polish fandom (BE NORMAL PLESSEEEEE)

-PPL WHO KNOWS ABT ALAN TUTORIAL

#Spotify #slenderverse #creepy pasta #zero day 2003 #zombiezzmwuah #starter pack #pokemon #intro post #silly #introduction

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timelesstimesgoneby · 1 month

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All Disney animals I can think of but I'm not including any Disney animated cannon or anything connect to that universe and same with Pixar because of cars universe please add anymore in the comments section

Ducktales 1987â€“1990

Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers

1988â€“1990

Mickey's Christmas Carol 1983 G 26m

A Goofy Movie 1995 G 1h 18m

Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers 2004 G 1h 7m

Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh G 1977 1h 14m

Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search For Christopher Robin 1997 G 1h 16m

The Tigger Movie 2000 G 1h 17min

Piglet's Big Movie 2003 G 1h 29m

Winnie The Pooh: Springtime With Roo 2004 G 1h 5min

Pooh's Heffalump Movie 2005 1h 8m

Pooh's Heffalump Halloween Movie 2005 G 1h 7m

Winnie The Pooh 2011 G 1h 3min

Christopher Robin 2018 Pg 1h 43m

Dr Dolittle 1967 Nr 2h 32m

1. Ice Age 2002 Pg 81 Min

2. Robots 2005 Pg 91 Min

3 Ice Age: The Meltdown 2006 Pg 91 Min

4 Horton Hears A Who! 2008 G 86 Min

5 Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs 2009 Pg 94 Min

6 Rio 2011 G 96 Min

7 Ice Age: Continental Drift 2012 Pg 88 Min

8 Epic 2013 Pg 102 Min

9 Rio 2 2014 G 101 Min

10 The Peanuts Movie 2015 G 88 Min

11 Ice Age: Collision Course 2016 Pg 94 Min

Alvin And The Chipmunks 2007 Pg 1h 32m

Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb 2014 Pg 1h 38m

Snow Dogs 2002 Pg 1h 42m

White Fang 1991 Pg 1h 47min

White Fang 2: Myth Of The White Wolf 1994 Pg 1h 46min

The Call Of The Wild 2020 Pg 1h 40min

Iron Will (1994)

Eight Below 2006 Pg 2h

Secretariat (2010) Pg 2h 3m Go

We Bought A Zoo Pg 2011 2h 11m

1. The Crimson Wing: Mystery Of The Flamingos (G, 2008)

2. Oceans

2. African Cats

3. Chimpanzee (G, 2012, 1h 18m)

4. Bears (G, 2014, 1h 18m)

5. Monkey Kingdom (2015, 1h 21m)

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954) G 2h 7m

Swiss Family Robinson 1960 G 2h 6min

The Absent Minded Professor 1961 Son Of Flubber

1962 1h 42m

Sammy, The Way-Out Seal 1962

The Incredible Journey 1963 G 1h 20min

A Tiger Walks G 1964 1h 31m

Moon Pilot 1962 1h 38m

Rocketman 1997 Pg 1h 35min

The Barefoot Executive 1971 G 1h 36m

Monkeys, Go Home! 1967 G 1h 41min

The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones 1964 G 1h 31 Min

The Monkey's Uncle 1965 1hr 31min

George Of The Jungle 1997 Pg 1h 32min

George Of The Jungle 2 2003 Pg 1h 27min

Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar 1967 G 1h 15min

The Adventures Of Bullwhip Griffin 1967 G 1h 48min

That Darn Cat! 1965 G 1h 56min

That Darn Cat 1997 Pg 1h 29min

The Million Dollar Duck 1971 G 1h 29min

Bedknobs And Broomsticks 1971 G 1h 35m

Snowball Express 1972 G 1h 39m

Superdad 1973 G 1h 36m

Charley And The Angel 1973 G 1h 33m

The Castaway Cowboy (1974) G

The Cat From Outer Space 1978 G 1h 44min

The Hunter And The Rockstar 1980 Nr 60 Min

Disney Classic 4 Movie Collection

Darby O'gill And The Little People 1959 1h 33m

The Gnome-Mobile 1967 1h 24m

The Happiest Millionaire 1967 2h 52m

The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band 1968 G 1h 50m

Kurt Russell 4 Movie Collection

The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit 1968 G 1h 54m

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes 1969 G 1h 31m

Now You See Him, Now You Don't G 1h 28m

Strongest Man In The World G 1h 35m

Disney Don Knotts 4-Movie Collection

The Apple Dumpling Gang 1975 G 1h 40m

Gus 1976 G 1h 36m

Hot Lead And Cold Feet 1978 G 1h 30m

The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again 1979 G 1h 28m

Dogs 1

The Shaggy Dog 1959

The Ugly Dachshund 1966

The Shaggy D.A. 1976

The Shaggy Dog 2006

Dogs 2

Rascal 1969

The Journey Of Natty Gann 1985

Benji The Hunted 1987

Where The Red Fern Grows 2003

#animals #disney #Disney animal movie

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blueiskewl · 1 year

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Record-Breaking Footprint Found on England's ‘Dinosaur Coast’

More than 3 feet long, the footprint was made by a meat-eating theropod dinosaur almost 166 million years ago from the Jurassic Period.

The brooding landscape of the English county of Yorkshire has perhaps been best known as the home of the gothic novels “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre” by the Brontë sisters.

But long before they put pen to paper, giant carnivorous dinosaurs roamed the area that locals refer to as “God’s own country” and one left a footprint that experts Thursday confirmed was the largest ever discovered in Yorkshire.

More than 3 feet long, the footprint was made by a meat-eating theropod dinosaur almost 166 million years ago from the Jurassic Period, according to the authors of a study published in the Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society journal.

They added that they thought the dinosaur was squatting or resting when it left the three-toed footprint in the Cleveland Basin area, which is now the east coast of Yorkshire.

The footprint was serendipitously discovered in April 2021 by local archaeologist Marie Woods, while she walked along a stretch of coastline known as the Dinosaur Coast.

“As an archaeologist, I know the importance of recording objects and exploring the potential for recovery,” she said via email Thursday. “This was no exception, even though it’s not my field of expertise.”

“I contacted various local people and sent photographs and the location to see if they had come across the print before me, they all said no,” said Woods, who is also a co-author of the study.

Shortly afterward, she contacted her friend Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at The University of Manchester and a fellow author of the study.

“By studying the angle of the footprint, its shape, and the impressions of the claws, the fossil provides insights into the behavior of this individual from around 166 million years ago,” Lomax said in a statement.

“Features of the footprint may even suggest that this large predator was squatting down before standing up,” he added. “It’s fun to think this dinosaur might well have been strolling along a muddy coastal plain one lazy Sunday afternoon in the Jurassic.”

While the area is well-know for dinosaur footprints, few are found in such well preserved condition, the study said. It is one of only six similar footprints to have been recorded in the area, the first being found in 1934, it added.

A popular destination for paleontologists and fossil enthusiasts, it is considered one of the best places in the world to find footprints from the giant creatures.

After it was determined the footprint was at risk of being exposed to extensive damage by the tide or landslips, it was quickly recovered from the shoreline by a team of experienced fossil collectors.

During that time, it emerged that the footprint had been spotted five months earlier in November 2020 by a local fossil hunter and a co-author of the new study, Rob Taylor. Bit it was not fully exposed when he found it.

The footprint has been donated to a local museum for conservation purposes.

By Aina J. Khan.

#Record-Breaking Footprint Found on England's ‘Dinosaur Coast’#dinosaur #theropod dinosaur #fossil #paleontologist #archeology #archeolgst #ancient artifacts #history #history news #ancient history #jurassic period

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dumpsterfirepropaganda · 1 year

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So a while back, I decided to make a spreadsheet listing all of the franchises/series/properties/etc. that I have a special attachment to, along with specific elements/aspects that I particularly enjoy in the media I consume, in order to see if there was any one variable all of them had in common.

It ended up looking like this:

I added the year I got interested in each property as well, and it’s been funny to see the progression - you can see how it starts with the movies my parents showed me at the beginning, then the video games my friends introduced me to (or that I fortuitously found out about after skipping vacation bible school one day but the full version of that story is for another time), then my special interests growing out of a mix of those...then that little stretch in 2020-2021 where I started dipping my toes into things out of morbid curiosity and getting genuinely invested in them whoops

Anyway, I wanted to share this in case anyone else is interested in creating something like this. I think it’d be so fun to see what other people consider to be the most appealing aspects of the things they’re into, as well as how their tastes evolved over time!

(Zoomed in versions of the spreadsheet under the cut for easy reading, as well as abbreviated explanations of how I got into everything on this list, if you’re interested.)

Jurassic Park - I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid. My parents were like, “Hmm, she might like this - we’ll just make her cover her eyes for the scene where the T-rex eats that guy off of the toilet.”

Star Wars - Parents bought me Lego Star Wars for the Wii because THEY liked Star Wars but I had no clue what was going on, walked in on them watching Episode V and they let me stick around

Pokémon - All my closest friends were into it but I wasn’t allowed to play until finally my parents caved and let me get a DS and a copy of Platinum. Easily the franchise I am the most invested in ahaha

Sonic - Went to the phone store with my mom and they had a mobile version of Sonic 2 on one of the demo phones. Went home and got it on virtual console, literally defined how I play video games now

Mega Man - Picked up a copy of Nintendo Power (RIP) because it had Mewtwo on the cover. Featured character was Zero. His design activated all the neurons in my brain so I read everything I could about him and eventually got into the games, and now Mega Man characters own the deed to my house and my firstborn child

FNAF - Friend showed me a video of a playthrough at my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Scared the pants off of me. Couldn’t stop watching it.

Alien/Aliens - The Great Movie Ride at Disney, but specifically the waiting room where they play the trailers for the movies (I closed my eyes during the actual Alien section of the ride because it freaked me the heck out). That trailer stuck in my brain and one day I just decided I wanted to watch it. I’ve never mentioned them before but I need y’all to understand that these are my favorite movies of all time and I literally wrote a college essay about why they are so good

Metroid - Saw Samus in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and thought she was super cool. Got an SNES Classic for Christmas and tried out Super Metroid...instantly hooked. One of the most amazing games in the universe you guys

The Thing - Dad was like, “Oh yeah I watched that in theaters when I was 12 it’s great let’s watch it.” I couldn’t look my own dog in the eyes for three days.

Terminator - Wanted to check out more 80′s sci-fi. Plus Michael Biehn. Love Michael Biehn.

Twilight - Me and a close friend (neither of whom had grown up reading these) decided to watch the first one as a joke. Got invested. Ended up watching them all. Now I write Mega Man/Twilight fanfiction. Beware what you do ironically, folks.

Homestuck - Was vaguely aware of it for years but (like most people) had no clue what it was about until the Sarah Z video. Decided to give it a try.

It checks almost every single box on this spreadsheet, so...there’s my defense for that, I guess.

The Locked Tomb - Everybody kept posting weird things about this book series and it sounded too crazy NOT to read

Subnautica - I love the ocean. I love space. I love aliens. I couldn’t get a copy of Pokémon Violet at Wal-Mart and wanted something new to play and it happened to be on the shelf.

#dumpsterfire drabbles #fandom list #If any of you decide to try this please please tag me!!! I'd love to see it

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stormcrow513 · 8 months

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Tw for death and suicidal thoughts

Even more sure now that Bailey isn't going to make it much longer and I'm very very fucking familiar with dogs deaths, the youngest I was 4 and brother dog knocked up his sister, there were puppies most were born dead but two lived at first I was there when the one Raccoon died, his brother Socks died much later when I was a teenager and I was there for that death as well,

I've walked the death road so many times with all sorts of animals but none so much as dogs,

I know dogs so well I could probably make one,

One thing some people who've had dogs die mostly around 7,8,9 when dogs get into their teens they are basically a human in their 90s,

Their tough son of a bitches but any little thing they could once shurg off their so old now it's easier for it to kill em, they are running out of heads in a coin toss,

My last dog to go was in 2020 or 2021 can't think right now to fucking high and hurting to think dates,

So where we're at that February got a horrid cold, while it was warm inside it was cold outside below 0 we would have gladly let him pee on the floor, but he wouldn't he would strain and cry to hold it and go outside what else could we do? we let him out, then he started going down we had to carry him, then the night I knew he was going I sat on the floor with him til he took his last wheezing breaths,

And no we didn't take him to be put down the stress of the car ride he hated cars would have killed him rather he end wheezing at home with me loved the scared out of his mind,

Two options only and only you can decide

I don't need the trolley question because I've lived it enough to know you can only make the decision in the moment and you'll never be sure you were right after wheather anyone agrees with you or not,

So Bae my beautiful girl is 15 and she was absolutely going to make it to the end of the year then this mother fucker basically in my backyard the ONLY place I can let my dogs pee he dumps fucking pesticide all over on weeds he'd just hired someone to mow,

Now my babies dieing cause that shit has made everyone in my house sick,

It's okay for this guy to do this,

He can pour poison into my space as surely as if he were smoking tobacco or vaping in my living room small beings always hot hardest,

But people in some areas can't put a big metal dinosaur statue in their yard (real thing saw it in local Colorado news,

People can dump known acknowledged in court of law poison all over me and mine cause it's his house right in mine,

This is all right cause he's getting rid of weeds cause the fucking slow tape and murder of the land means it's okay to kill my baby girl my family I've had her as a puppy and it was love at first sight,

I kept poison out of this land for two months off six fucking years but some asshole who owned the land behind us that went to his house and was empty land, he didn't like my dad or other people here he bragged how he cut his land in three this guy who bought the house wanted the land with it to store cars which would have been perfect they were good neighbors, they guy refused then sold to Clayton home who at first was going to put one house in middle and then put two house there putting one right next to my fence,

The city council allowed this to happen everyone's sure they got slipped some money,

All this shit is a fucking ok, if I put a rainbow flag up here at my house my gun owning republican neighbors would likely shot me or or as has fucking happened to me throw rat poison into my backyard, hey look how we are right back to the star,

Poison in my yard dieing dog,

I'm so fucking tired right now guys so damned tried and I know myself now I know who I am in this time I am not going to ever kill myself once I thought it meant taking control over my life from my father and sister now I know that I wouldn't be winning I'd be losing,

That's just how I see it now for me not saying suicides have lost maybe for them in that moment they won their fight we can never know what they felt then, just like we can't determine what is winning and what is losing for another person,

But I know what it is for me, I can't go that way,

If this world wants me gone it's going to have to kill me itself,

But now there's no break to think I could rest I could close my eyes and be done I can make that choice,

I don't have that little comfort anymore,

And I no longer can take any breaks now, I am just being hot over an over increasingly so over the years

I can't take a break though every thing keeps telling me to,

I can't the second I stop to float something grabs my ankle and pulls me underneath,

I have to keep swimming or it's going to drown me,

It's why I'll never be able to be anything but a witch my need is so great magic is all I can turn to,

If I don't get myself out and pull ma up with me then it's all over,

I understand stand others experience otherwise but this is my experience

And I came to know it through abilities that came naturally to me,

But I'm just so tired and I feel like it's just pulling me down so hard I can't even try to swim I'm caught in a net right now,

And I'm sorry if some of you get oppset with me for writing this down,

I need it

And once I needed to read others messages like this

So to teenage me you are not alone

No matter what others are out there

Same and different

I love you I'm sorry you hurt cause I've hurt and it sucks and it's never ever fair

Edit also I am not typically the type to punch first I tend to let people hit me or someone I care about before I tap in, and even then I might think thwice before I swing,

So I won't tolerate being punched on this post

Therefore if you are rude to me on this post I will immediately block you unless I've talked to you enough to check you meant it badly, otherwise I'm blocking immediately if treated badly on this post

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kylesvariouslistsandstuff · 11 months

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ELEMENTAL Projections

So apparently ELEMENTAL is on track to flop-a-doo this coming June, huh?

Recent projections made by Box Office Pro have it opening at $28m minimum, $38m maximum. They note that the picture has the chance to have those usual Pixar summer legs and break the 2020s Disney theatrical animation bad streak at the box office, and make it to around $155m domestic, which would be a fantastic total for a post-outbreak original animated movie. COCO, back in early 2018, finished up with around $209m domestically. $200m is usually an easy threshold for Pixar. Only one picture in the 21st century that wasn't a sequel missed it, that was THE GOOD DINOSAUR, which still made over $120m domestically. ONWARD I do not count, because that was cut off one week in by the pandemic.

Box Office Pro has a history of lowballing animated movies on their opening weekends, though. They also had THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE pegged for a roughly $65-90m opening, when the thing cruised well past $140m+ for the three-day alone... I knew it would top $100m easily, and I'm no box office pro... I've only made predictions for fun for about a decade, many of which concerning animated movies, haha.

They also weirdly note that the picture, being a romantic comedy, will have a hard time appealing to young boys... Okay, are young boys the ones with the money buying tickets? You know, Walt Disney had once said in an interview with the BBC in 1959:

"Well, no, you have to appeal to the adult, or... Well, the adults have money, the children don't have any money."

Interestingly, Walt had kind of cracked it when it came to making movies by that point in time. As he saw it, anyways. He had theorized that appealing to "mom" was the way to go, the target to hit. Because mom takes dad and the kids, the whole family, to check out the movie... And mom tells her friends... So on, so forth... Maybe it's not young boys that Disney should be appealing to. Remember when they tried very hard to appeal to that demographic in the late 2000s? Making major changes in animation because of that? Nearly jettisoning fairy tale stories for good and messing with movie titles for fear of boys finding them to be too girly? (I still dislike "TANGLED" as a title, to be completely honest.) I guess the romances of classic Disney animated movies were a hard sell, huh? Because boys under the age of 13 might not like them?

I'm not trying to knock the good people at BOP, by the way. I frequently enjoy their podcast and analyses, but sometimes I think they can be a little off with animated movie, and because there's a lot of internet dogpiling on this one Pixar picture that no one except the film crew has even *seen* yet... I just wanted to weigh in.

As BOP noted, and many others have noted as well, ELEMENTAL has a big uphill battle to face in the form of the Disney+ problem. We all know what that is... A lot of people, especially those who are tight on money and have to narrow their moviegoing choices every calendar year, might've been conditioned to just wait for these family movies to come to Disney+. No need to spend $100 at the multiplex on tickets, snacks, and of course take a gamble on whether the experience in a theater will be good or not... It's right there, at home, in a few months, and we got all the snacks without having to spend a mortgage on!

I've stated on here many times before that I work at a movie theater, and a major chain movie theater at that. A Cinemark. Been there for almost 8 years, and I feel I get the first-hand idea of what audiences want to see as opposed to very-online "experts" on twitter and elsewhere.

And it seems like people are digging ELEMENTAL. "Ah cool, a water and fire people movie! Looks cute!" Most of my co-workers think it looks like it's worth watching. I've seen some customers walk up to the posters and say "Is this INSIDE OUT 2?" "Hah, looks like Sharkboy and Lava Girl."

A lot of people online are writing ELEMENTAL off as generic-looking, but that might be... In a weird sense, its secret weapon.

Familiarity sometimes works for movies, and sometimes it doesn't. LIGHTYEAR, I'd argue, had trouble having some kind of longevity at the box office because of how much it deviated from what people associate with TOY STORY and the titular character. Of course, if you're me, and you knew full well what that movie was going to be (read: an actual sci-fi space adventure where Buzz is actually a space ranger, not a toy), that wasn't much of an issue. Some just genuinely didn't like the execution of it. It rung more INTERSTELLAR and '70s sci-fi movies than anything, Buzz was a little more serious here, he wasn't his toy counterpart at all nor was he the fun cartoon hero in the 2000s TV series BUZZ LIGHTYEAR OF STAR COMMAND. I get that. I myself quite enjoyed the movie, but I can totally see it how it just wouldn't gel with most audiences.

TURNING RED, I feel, would've done okay at best at the box office, not because of its perceived quality (I loved the movie), but because of - again - most audiences being very careful with their money. I keep thinking it would've made around BAD GUYS/ENCANTO numbers, $90m domestic and around $200m worldwide. Not enough to cover the usual Pixar budget... Which is typically a gargantuan $150m+... I feel they, and Walt Disney Animation Studios for that matter, shouldn't spend so damn much on their movies... It puts an unnecessary strain on them, gives them a sometimes impossible task to achieve. It soooo ain't 2003 anymore, when any CG animated movie you dropped in front of an audience was 99.99% guaranteed to make a blockbuster amount of money...

ELEMENTAL also shares June with... ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE, TRANSFORMERS LIVE-ACTION MOVIE #7, THE FLASH, RUBY GILLMAN *comma* TEENAGE KRAKEN, and INDIANA JONES 5... Wowee... And a good chunk of those movies weren't supposed to open in June 2023 in the first place, they all just ended up landing there. Pixar usually locks mid-June for a movie years in advance, and the movie could be anything, be it ELEMENTAL or TOY STORY 5. It just so happened to be ELEMENTAL... Maybe they should've moved it, just to be safe...

So, opening weekend could make or break it... But the legs will be the most important thing... And we don't know what those will be like... We have to know first and foremost, come opening day... Did audiences like it?

LIGHTYEAR got a not-so-hot A- CinemaScore, and had abysmal legs thereafter... STRANGE WORLD from WDAS was the rare family friendly animated movie release to score less than an A...

It's hard to gauge off of two animated sci-fi action movies, which have a history of... Not making blockbuster totals meant to cover ludicrously high budgets... Just ask TITAN A.E., ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE, and TREASURE PLANET. WALL-E was a sci-fi romance movie with cute robots, and that did very well. Also had that Pixar goodwill that was very strong back then. The name's not a guarantee anymore.

How do I think ELEMENTAL will do?

Animated movies that aren't sequels are usually kind of hard to track, and they seem like they'll do okay-ish at first... Until the week of release, the tracking shoots up... And word-of-mouth kicks in after opening day...

So, $28m for ELEMENTAL could very well be looking like $40m minimum within a week of its release... Opening at Cannes this coming week, if the picture is acclaimed, will look nice too. I don't see why it can't open below $40m, the only thing that could hurt it is just SPIDER-VERSE and LITTLE MERMAID being out, and families having to make tough choices. Adults w/o families will be the ones to get, if they're not as choosy. The romantic comedy angle might just make it a date movie.

Not the first time that happened... That's what Disney took total advantage of during the Disney Renaissance in the early '90s, pushing BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN as date movies for young adults... Oh, and it paid off nicely... A lot of people tend to overlook this, but... It's *adults* who make animated movies huge, too. Not just "kids dragging their parents" to the cinema. If that were the case, every kids' movie would be a FROZEN or MINIONS-sized blockbuster. No! Those movies make so much because a lot of adults like them, too, and there's stuff in them that appeals to adults. A novel concept, I know!

A movie like THE BAD GUYS didn't need to worry about that, being a much lower budget endeavor, ditto DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS. Even Illumination's movies don't have to worry about that, either... But Disney Animation and Pixar? They gotta hook everybody if they want to make back the $150m+ they spend on each and every movie. LIGHTYEAR seemed to turn families away and had a hard time getting adults, STRANGE WORLD seemed to appeal to no one. ENCANTO dealt with Delta and Omicron, RAYA was still a bit too early to be a theatrical release. SOUL, LUCA, TURNING RED, all straight to Disney+ releases.

It's like each new Disney animated movie release is some kind of test... ELEMENTAL is next line, and WISH will follow... And do I think ELEMENTAL can get that adult appeal?

I think so. ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE already has it built in (projections are saying $85m minimum for the opening weekend, which sounds about right, could go even higher), but does anything else coming out in June other than INDIANA JONES have it? I think audiences are largely burnt out on the Autobots, THE FLASH comes on like some big NO WAY HOME-esque event for DC but I sense a real "who cares?" aura around it, plus superhero fatigue seems to have kicked in... That's about it? RUBY GILLMAN seems muted and quiet, it probably doesn't need to make a blockbuster gross... It's very possible ELEMENTAL is the most appealing June release to... Normal people.

Online, it looks like some crap generic Pixar movie... But normal people? Who aren't there for TRANSFORMERS 7 and a DC movie that happens to have Michael Keaton Batman in it? They might be digging it. For what it's worth, when I caught the trailer in theaters before GUARDIANS VOL. 3, I heard some of the adults in the crowd laugh at the funny bits.

It's kind of a wild card, but I have kind of a good feeling about this one. Maybe... Or, come late summer, I'll be eating crow on here. I'm sure Disney Co and Pixar don't want it to fail. Especially since the smarter of the two Bob CEOs came back, the very Bob who wants to focus much more on theatrical releases than sending massive-budget movies quickly to Disney+.

So, rough prediction. Around $40-45m on opening weekend, very solid legs, over 3.5x multiplier, $140m minimum domestically and double that overseas, $400m+ worldwide finish. We shall see...

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newluddite · 2 years

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Math is a Bitch

I read one of those rabbit hole articles about the world going electric. It is really messy. So I do a bit of checking. Yup messy to the edge of impossible.

In University I did really well in Thermodynamics. All the engineers had to take it and it was pretty rough for many as the concepts are rather abstract. If you get stuck in a conversation with an engineer or scientist just bring up entropy and see what happens. Energy is a number. I can work with numbers.

The inspiration for this is in California they just mandated that no new fossil fuel vehicles may be sold after 2035. Well they will allow hybrids if they are up to 20% of sales. The polar bears are cheering.

Canada has enacted similar goals.

And there is a But. The math don't work.

Boiling down to the basics there is not enough power. Not enough electricity to charge those cars. Hybrids burn fuel and and charge themselves, so they still need dino juice. (Hey I know oil is not dinosaurs but gotta have a bit of fun)

US Statistics are easy to find so lets look at those.

The US electrical grid and all sources of those Watt Hours produced 4.223 TWhours of power. (that is 4223 Billion kWhrs) About 40% is from Natural Gas and 22% from coal, and 19% from Nuclear, and the rest is renewables which includes Hydroelectric but is mostly wind and solar. The "grid" is groaning under the stress and working up slowly to rid itself of coal. Wind and Solar are coming. Can't dam anymore rivers for Hydro though. You may have noticed that some rivers with dams are drying up.

In California the next item after the 2035 announcement was a request to limit electricity use to prevent brown and blackouts. One suggestion was to NOT charge those Teslas. They already don't have enough electricity.

So how much energy do IC cars use? That number is big. A gallon of gasoline has about 32.9 kWhrs of energy in it. In 2020 the US consumed 128 Billion gallons of gas. That is 4218 Billion kWhrs of energy equivalent. Add diesel at 1244 Billion kWhrs for a total of 5462 Billion kWhrs of motor vehicle energy consumed.

Now IC engines are only about 25% efficient. So of that 5462 only 1365 Billion kWhrs is needed. But electric cars are only about 90% efficient so they would need 1517 Billion kWhrs to replace everything on the road.

That would bring up the total need for electricity to 5588 billion kWhrs a 32% increase in total grid capacity while shutting down 22% of power from coal and 40% from natural gas which is a fossil fuel too. That means the other sources of power have to increase by 348% to keep up. The only source that can ramp up that fast is nuclear, sorry. That's because we know how to build them already. There are only 13 years and it takes longer than that to bring anything that big on line.

Is it going to happen?

Will people in California ask for utilities to build nuclear plants near them? I'm going to guess no. Will they pave the desert with solar cells made with really toxic chemicals? (yup arsenic and heavy metals) Nope again.

Oh and here is a painful fact about EVs. You have to drive them about 100,000 miles to break even on the greenhouse gas produced in building them. In every one on the market now the batteries will not last that long. They may never break even.

This is not a one-more-breakthrough type of issue. Like I said the edge of impossible. If there is a social revolution and nuclear power is once again a good thing and society walks more and drives far less there is a thin sliver of a chance.

I ride bikes.

One thing would be to outlaw Crypto currency mining. I mean 150 TWhrs just for FN Bitcoin. That would help a bit. (pun intended)

I am not optimistic. Con men and charlatans will make money but in about 10 years deadlines will be extended before they are just abandoned. Almost all the politicians making these policies will be retired or dead. All problems are for the next generation.

I live in British Columbia a place where there is a chance of hitting those goals locally. All our power is from Hydroelectric dams. We have some big ones. We also have one tenth the population of California.

But global warming is the opposite of local.

And China puts out more greenhouse gas and burns more coal than everyone else and they simply do not care.

#electric cars #climate change #global warming #coal power #2035 car ban in California #not enough electricity #nuclear power #renewable energy

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infantisimo · 2 years

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A man is calling home from the phone booth of a hospital. He is in the emergency room, but doesn’t want to scare his wife, so he tells her that he has a stomach problem, nothing more. The wife blames herself for not being there with him. He smiles and presses one hand against the glass partition of the booth. “Really, it’s not that bad,” he says. She asks him about the doctor. He pauses before answering. If not for the pause, you’d never suspect that something else is at stake. Now you understand that the man is lying: “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.” His hands are fumbling inside the booth for what he can’t bring himself to say.

Since Irrfan Khan died in 2020, I have returned often to this moment from The Namesake. Something about the man’s tact—part of what Khan once called the “rhythm” of every character he plays—has remained with me for months: something about those hands. Khan’s career was in many ways studded with tragic roles—a doomed lover in Maqbool, a stubborn outlaw in Paan Singh Tomar, a hands-on billionaire pursuing a dinosaur from a helicopter in Jurassic World—and yet I keep replaying the one death scene where his character doesn’t let the audience know what is about to come. The man persuades his wife that he is alright before putting back the receiver. Then he withdraws his hands into his pockets and walks away from us.

There was Khan fifteen years ago, just when his film career was starting to take off, somehow able to embody the sense of an ending. He would come to repeat the performance, this time for real, once he was diagnosed with cancer in 2018. In a span of two weeks, his calendar changed: his life, as he wrote then, quickly became “a suspense story.” He moved with his wife, Sutapa Sikdar, to London for treatment. But a year later, he was back in India, shooting a film, looking happy on set. For a while, as in that scene in The Namesake, his demeanour seemed to betray nothing untoward. After his death, Sikdar revealed that his medical reports “were like scripts which I wanted to perfect.” In his last months, while coming to terms with his illness, Khan was sparing his future biographers any qualms about pacing.

Actors’ lives do tend to mirror the imagined arcs of their movies, but Khan’s trajectory seems ultimately more redemptive than the elusive men he portrayed. To those of us who grew up in India at the turn of the millennium, Khan first proved that it was possible to be a protagonist in a popular film and not sing and dance in the rain; that a character could be brought to life as much by what they said as what they didn’t; that a scene you watched unfold swiftly on screen often involved years of contemplation and restraint. When Khan took up roles in international releases like The Namesake and A Mighty Heart, he didn’t undergo much of a makeover. He was still the outsider, born to middle-class Muslim parents in Jaipur. He seemed worlds apart from the prancing heroes of Bollywood musicals, the handful of families who maintained an incestuous grip over the studio system in Bombay, or the older generation of cosmopolitan Indian actors who spoke Edwardian English and contented themselves with supporting roles in British period films. In just over a decade, he became a presence on screens all over the world, with appearances in The Warrior, The Lunchbox, Slumdog Millionaire, Haider, Life of Pi, Jurassic World, even a sizeable part in The Inferno, where he outshone a glib Tom Hanks in scene after scene.

The first time I noticed Khan on a screen I thought he screamed like Al Pacino. Not the Pacino of Scarface or Dog Day Afternoon, braying out threats all over the place, but rather the don in The Godfather Part III: older, lonelier, the bravado all but invisible, howling skyward when his daughter dies in his arms. The scene I watched Khan in, from Life in a Metro, didn’t feature any deaths, but the moment I remember was inflected with a similar sadness—a need, paradoxically private, to exert one’s lungs out. Khan’s character, Monty, has dragged his work friend Shruti (played by Konkona Sen Sharma) out to the rooftop of their office building in Bombay. Shruti happens to be dealing with multiple disappointments in her life. Her sister’s marriage is falling apart; the last man she dated lied to her about his identity. “Who are you angry with?” Monty asks her. “Somebody in particular? Or just your luck? Whatever it is, just let it out.” At first, Shruti is reluctant—“It’s not so easy,” she tells him—but then the two of them scan the skyline for a moment and start shouting together at once. Their voices ring out in the quiet. The building is tall enough to drown out the city’s sounds and impose a simulated silence. When Shruti breaks down halfway through, you sense that she is facing up to her pain. But Monty’s yelling is tinged with the weariness of having tried a trick one too many times and still being doomed to try again.

From that moment on, you know that Monty and Shruti will fall for each other. The scene on the roof crackles with the thrill of seeing and being seen, the vulnerability usually associated with a first kiss. Later in the film, Monty asks her why she ghosted him after that first date. She replies that she’d caught him staring at her breasts once. “That?” Monty bursts out shouting. “You rejected me for just that?” Then he grins and steals a glance at her body again. Khan’s eyes carry that scene. You can’t really tell whether they seem glazed over because of the smoke from his cigarette, or because he is pretending to be upset.

I fell quickly for Khan: those pauses, those eyes. How they made you think there was more to him than he let on. As a teenager, I’d spend days watching the Godfather movies on a loop, mouthing Pacino’s lines, memorizing his gestures to try on friends. Now I modelled myself on an Indian counterpart who didn’t even need a good line to be noticed. When I moved to Bombay for college, I remember walking around the sea on my first evening and finding myself at the exact spot where they had filmed Monty confronting Shruti about her rejection of him. It felt like a meaningful sign in a city that seemed to desperately believe in portents. Everywhere you went, you could glimpse in people’s faces either a placid certainty or a fear of transformation. Inside crowded trains during office hours, unsure if the incoming rush will part for me to get down at my stop, I’d overhear lonely men consoling one another with their plans of getting married and rich. Couples lined the promenades and beaches late at night, their backs turned to the bright lights on land, as if their time together made more sense in the dark. Each time you passed by the studio lots, rows of would-be actors sized you up around the gates, in case you were a casting agent looking to give someone new a break.

I, too, had come looking for a break. But what was it that I wanted to do? One week I’d design a billboard campaign for an ice cream brand, aspiring to end up in an ad agency. The next week I was a documentary filmmaker, getting arrested while shooting undercover in a temple. I longed for the exhaustion of experience: perhaps a job where, at the end of the day, someone might invite me to the rooftop of the office building and let me yell my feelings out. Khan’s antics exuded depth, an air of having seen and lived through so much—precisely the image a college student, hungry for life, yearns to project.

Once, I asked a woman to meet me early in the morning near the waterfront. The idea was to find a quiet place and, I remember texting this, shout “our inner demons out.” It must have been a confusing message and yet she showed up more or less on time. We sat on two chairs overlooking the beach and risked stern glances from morning joggers to awkwardly launch our voices across the sea. The sun was already blazing on our backs and soon we gave up trying to impress one another. We started going out not long after, but never spoke of that day again.

Irrfan Khan was born Sahabzade Irfan Ali Khan at a time, long ago now, when Indian Muslims were perceived as Indian above all. His father was a lapsed aristocrat who had given up his family land and privileges but still liked to go on frequent hunting trips. His mother was more introverted and usually at home. Little Irfan, the second of four children and the first boy, would have liked nothing more than to be affirmed by her. “I desired to be close to her,” Khan once said in an interview, “but somehow we’d end up fighting with each other. I used to imagine her patting my head in approval—I think I’ve been looking for that feeling all my life.”

His mother imagined that her children would settle not far from her in Jaipur, taking up modest jobs that just about paid the bills. Years ago, her brother had travelled to Bombay, looking for work, and never returned. Her husband’s early death only added to her fear of abandonment. Irrfan was nineteen then, and as the oldest son, expected to look after his father’s tire shop. But his hopes had been stirred up watching leading men in Hindi matinees: a grandiose Dilip Kumar in Naya Daur, a raffish Mithun Chakraborty in Mrigayaa. Someone told Khan that he looked like Chakraborty: tall, dark, un-photogenic. He began to style his hair like the hero. After high school, he joined evening theatre classes in a local college and even witnessed a couple of Bollywood shoots in town. He wrote to the National School of Drama in New Delhi, bluffing in his application about plays he hadn’t acted in. They offered him a scholarship and Irrfan moved out of the house.

In Delhi, Khan nearly got his big break. The director Mira Nair had come to campus looking for actors to cast in her debut film, Salaam Bombay. One day, she noticed Khan in a classroom. “He wasn’t striving,” Nair later recalled watching him act. “His striving was invisible. He was in it.” She cast him in the main role and Khan went to Bombay in the middle of the semester to train with the crew. But after two months of rehearsals, Nair decided that Khan didn’t look the part. In the final film, Khan appears for a grand total of two minutes, as a letter writer who dupes the child protagonist. In life, however, it was Khan who might have felt deceived: he had travelled all the way to a new city, thinking he had bagged the role, only to end up on the train back to Delhi before the shoot. His first role, as he would say later, also “became my first setback.”

Nair took another twenty years to cast him again in The Namesake. That Khan would rough it out for so long should not come as a surprise, for actors remain dispensable in Bollywood, unless they become box office gold or belong to insider families. Squint at the backdrop of a scene in any Hindi film and you will spot a good actor—good, in spite of their measly roles. “Talent is insignificant,” James Baldwin once wrote. “I know a lot of talented ruins.” Thirty years ago in Bombay, around the production offices in the western precincts, you were likely to find just as many untalented plinths. There was the shirtless scion of a famous scriptwriter who showed off his abs in every other scene (and keeps doing so these days opposite women thirty years younger than him). There was the son of a powerful producer who became the country’s most bankable director by having his romantic leads tussle it out on a basketball court—then a rarity in India—and heralded the industry’s turn away from rural audiences to richer, albeit equally conservative, Indian expatriates. Then there was the middle-aged director who liked to appear in medias res in all his movies. He would pop up halfway through a song or a scene, staring at the camera from under a sun hat, just so you didn’t forget you were watching his film.

Khan tried his best to find an opening in this milieu. He was told, for instance, that the showman director in a sun hat had seen Khan act somewhere and was apparently considering him for a part. He spent the next few months waiting in vain for the director to call. Casting agents would glance at his portfolio and chide him for taking on diverse roles. He was told not to fiddle with his looks and angle for essentially the same character in every film. He survived those years doing television gigs, daytime soap operas where the action happened once in real time and then again—twice—in slo-mo, so that viewers could follow what was going on with their eyes closed. What was an actor’s actor doing in that world? Producers would tell Khan off on those sets for pausing between his lines. Cinematographers wanted him to look at the camera while talking.

He met Sikdar, a screenwriter, in drama school, and by the end of the millennium, they were married and had a son. Sikdar even brought him aboard a couple of shows where she was employed as a writer, but Khan didn’t land a leading role throughout the ’90s. One time he was so desperate for work that when someone pointed to a TV tower on a hill and joked that Khan might get a job there, he actually trekked up the mountain.

I know that tower on a hill: it was the landscape of my childhood. My mother worked as an engineer for India’s public broadcaster. Every few years she’d be transferred to a different TV station across the country, which meant that we had to move from one housing campus near a TV tower to another. At the same time Khan was struggling to find his bearings in soap operas, my mother was helping beam those episodes into homes week after week. Later, when he talked about these shows in interviews, I’d recognize their names, but have no memory of their protagonists or storylines, never mind any flashback of Khan stumbling through a scene. What I do remember is the tedium, the eternal blandness of those afternoons and evenings when a cricket game spread over five days would seem like the least onerous thing to watch. Cable channels had arrived some years ago with the opening up of the economy, but their content was still lacklustre: turgid comedies, lachrymose adaptations of Hindu myths, stale reruns of Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful. On weekdays, kids had just an hour of Disney cartoons—mostly DuckTales and TaleSpin—while on Saturdays, they could skip school to catch up with a preachy local superhero moonlighting as a buffoon in glasses.

Looking back on his lost decades, Khan felt that his biggest challenge was remaining interested in his craft: “I had to come up with ways to keep my inspiration going.” The first time he got paid for a role after moving to Bombay, he bought a VHS player, apparently to avoid getting “bored of my own profession.” The Indian viewer in those days was just as bored. I remember making do with little: listening to songs from forthcoming films, then watching the video sequences of the same songs on TV, so that by the time we caught the movie in a theatre, we’d get our money’s worth whistling and crooning when the songs came on.

The world opened up, at least for my generation, with the prevalence of CD and DVD burner drives on computers that freed us from the tyranny of television and the next Friday release. By the time I was eleven, I was hanging out at a friend’s house every afternoon just to copy out discs from his older brother’s collection of MP3s. Vendors on the street would sell bootlegged prints of everything from Rashomon to Home Alone to Deep Throat, and soon enough, grainy camera recordings of the newest movie in theatres, for the exact price of a balcony seat.

I remember watching a pirated print of The Warrior, the film Khan credits with reviving his career. The scenes were gorgeously rendered: Khan, long-haired and lanky, brandishing a sword in a forlorn expanse of sun and sand. Then later, with his hair cut, looking both lost and determined as he treks his way through cascading woods in the Himalayan hills. Khan didn’t need to puff up his arms or chest to play the part of an enforcer to a medieval warlord. His eyes gleam with menace when he goes plundering across villages on horseback, and afterwards with trauma, when he is forced to watch his little son being executed in an open field. Silences suffice in this world of mythical beauty and carnage. Feelings are conveyed with the slightest of frowns and hand movements; everyone speaks in hushed tones despite the bloodshed.

When the director Asif Kapadia—who later made the Oscar-winning documentary Amy on the singer Amy Winehouse—first auditioned Khan, he thought he looked like “someone who’s killed a lot of people, but feels really bad about it.” Kapadia had discerned something essential about Khan’s appearance in any movie: the story of a film often played out on his face.

The Warrior was never released in Indian theatres. (US rights were bought by Miramax, where it became another film that Harvey Weinstein shelved for years.) But a couple of new directors noted Khan’s ability to evoke menace and cast him in two films that gave him a footing in Bombay: Haasil and Maqbool. His characters in both films have killed a lot of people, but it is in Maqbool, where he plays the lead again, that you get to see how he feels about it. There is a moment when Maqbool is staring at the corpse of his best friend, having himself ordered the hit, and he imagines that the dead man has opened his eyes again. Maqbool falls tumbling backward in shock. Apparently on set, Khan was so persuasive while doing the scene that his co-actor Naseeruddin Shah thought he had really lost his balance and held out his arms to support him. Shah had been one of Khan’s idols in drama school, and there he was, taken in by the latter’s performance. “You’re bloody good,” he told Khan.

By the time I saw a pirated print of The Warrior, Khan had impressed many others with his breakout roles. He stood out in The Namesake as the withdrawn father. Wes Anderson wrote a part in The Darjeeling Limited just for him. He was cast as a cop in both A Mighty Heart and Slumdog Millionaire. In India, Life in a Metro showed that Khan need not always play the brooding murderer. He even appeared in a TV ad that became very popular because of its setup: sixty seconds of Khan just impishly chatting up the viewer from a screen.

Those were indulgent days. Bollywood was finally catering to the country’s craving for realism. Filmmakers could hope to break even by releasing a movie only to select audiences in cities, which meant that they could steer clear of big studios and song-and-dance routines, and instead cast new actors as leads.

In Bombay, a decade ago, I often had the sensation that we were making up for lost time: all those hours squandered in childhood when we were deprived of things to watch. I lived at the YMCA with a roommate who was glued to his laptop all day and night, watching something or the other. D. had a couple of 500 GB hard drives, stacked with torrent downloads of the latest Japanese anime series, episodes of every American TV show aired in the last thirty years, and an unbelievable archive of international movies grouped in alphabetical order by their directors’ last names. He would be at his desk early mornings, sipping tea, his eyes blazing red from the memory of the show or movies he had stayed up all night to watch. On weekends he’d head out to a friend’s place in the suburbs, to replenish his stock of content. The diligence with which he’d finish a series in the span of a day, or go looking for a director’s deep cut: I never thought of him as a passive binger. To D., watching was work.

Khan, too, was putting in the work. In Bollywood, this often involved playing to the gallery, for as he once admitted in an interview, “You don’t need nuance here as an actor. Attitude is enough.” He disliked repeating himself. If he was asked to do eight takes for a scene, he’d do them in eight different ways, letting the director figure out the rest. Even with subtler roles, Khan didn’t believe that an actor could always become the character and trusted his imagination more than research. Before playing an Indian-American man in The Namesake, for instance, Khan had never travelled to the US. He understood that getting the clothes and the accent right could go only so far in conveying the inward rift of an immigrant. He fell back on his memory, recalling a previous trip to Canada where he had noticed some dour-looking immigrant workers in shops. “Something stayed in my mind,” he told TIME magazine in 2010. “A strange sadness…A rhythm that middle-aged people have.” In The Warrior, he didn’t quite believe the scene where his character watches his son being killed. He approached the moment by telling himself that the experience of shooting a film was like life, and “sometimes you have to live a life because you have no choice.” My favourite Khan anecdote is from the set of 7 Khoon Maaf, where he was cast as the third of the seven husbands of the protagonist Susanna, played by Priyanka Chopra. Khan couldn’t relate to his role: a “wife beater” Urdu poet. The poet was just supposed to be persistent with his abuse, so that the audience could empathize with Susanna when she killed him. While getting ready for his scenes, Khan happened to be listening to a random ghazal by the singer Abida Parveen. “All of a sudden,” he told Kapadia later, “that ghazal created a whole world around me.” The song helped him delve into the inner life of the poet, find a pattern to his behaviour. He was able to transform himself within moments.

On talk shows, Khan would often recount the story of inviting his mother to the premiere of The Namesake in Bombay. After the screening, she apparently asked Khan to introduce her to the director, Mira Nair. “Let me talk to her,” his mother told him. “I want to ask her why, of all the people in the world, she had my son killed off in the film?” His mother was joking, of course, but something about the recurring deaths of his characters can seem, at first glance, manipulative. The scripts that came his way seemed to repeatedly indulge the fantasy of his eventual disappearance. But death is also the script everyone wants to perfect: it is the endpoint of “striving”—the word Nair used to contrast the experience of watching Khan act in drama school—and if you dig deep into many of Khan’s roles, you’ll find a striver, a man relentlessly searching for something. Whether he is projecting nonchalance (Maqbool), pain (The Warrior), or disdain (Slumdog Millionaire), signs of hustling are always evident. In Life in a Metro, Monty is even striving to find a wife. Towards the end of the film, Monty encourages Shruti to move on from her bad relationships and try dating someone new. “Take your chance, baby,” he tells her. You almost feel that it is Khan talking, counselling the viewer to keep looking for all there is to find.

What was Khan really striving toward? He seldom gave any straight answers. In public he offered zen disquisitions about the mystery of life. Hours after his death, a scene from Life of Pi, in which he delivers a heartfelt monologue about “letting go,” went viral. He went back and forth on his name, adding an extra r to “Irfan,” dropping the “Khan” because “I should be known for what I do, not for my background or caste or religion.” In Bombay, he refused the trappings of a star despite his American fame. He lived on Madh Island, a ferry ride away from the studio lots and the inland neighbourhoods where celebrities usually splurged on landmark mansions and apartments. The distance was partly self-imposed: he never got over his disdain for messianic Bollywood heroes. For all his cameo parts in franchise movies abroad, Khan first tasted blockbuster success in India with Hindi Medium, which was released just three years before his death. He didn’t seem to mind being typecast in big Hollywood projects, turning up invariably as the “international man.” But he turned down roles in The Martian and Interstellar when their production dates clashed with smaller projects. And there was that unforgettable photograph of him looking sullen when Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture at the Oscars, while the rest of the crew are smiling and exulting around him.

Both In Treatment and The Lunchbox make good use of this enigma: the way Khan couldn’t help but look slightly disaffected everywhere. “He’s got the loneliest face I’ve ever seen,” Paul, a therapist played by Gabriel Byrne, says of Khan’s character, Sunil, in one episode of In Treatment. And indeed, Sunil is alone, even though he lives in Brooklyn with Arun and Julia, his son and daughter-in-law, six months after his wife passed away in Calcutta. Every few episodes, Sunil sits in Paul’s office and grudgingly reveals his woes—how his wife had in her last moments made sure that Sunil would move in with their son overseas, how he can’t stand the fact that Julia gives him a weekly allowance and monitors his time with the grandkids, how she goes around calling his son Aaron, how he is absolutely certain that she is having an affair. There is something bleak about Sunil’s obsession with Julia: his eyes visibly light up when he describes the way she talks, the visions he has of “smothering” her when he hears her laugh. The showrunners keep circling back to the creepiness of Sunil’s fixation, but they miss the fact that this revulsion gives him a reason to wake up every morning in a new country. Just for a while, he can forget that his wife of thirty years has died. The deeper rift is between Sunil and Arun; Julia is just a proxy for the repressed feelings. The son has travelled too far, too soon, and the father can’t keep up.

The distance between Sunil and Arun is precisely the one Khan covered in his lifetime: from Jaipur to Jurassic Park; from the rooftop of an office building in Bombay to a therapist’s couch in New York; from playing a melancholy gangster in Maqbool to swishing in and out of boardrooms as Simon Masrani in Jurassic World. Together his roles encompass the story of South Asian globalization in the last three decades: these are men whose lives look nothing like their fathers’. For all their striving and ambition, their private lives are stunted. They don’t quite know how to be well-rounded in a rapidly changing world. The journalist Aseem Chhabra writes in his book, Irrfan Khan: The Man, The Dreamer, The Star that Khan was squeamish about doing sex scenes. Perhaps this is why so many of his characters are literally learning to love. In Paan Singh Tomar, he has to teach his wife how to kiss. In Road to Ladakh, where he plays a fugitive on the run, a lover must demonstrate the correct way to lock lips. “I don’t suppose you watch too many movies,” she teases him in bed. “We watch movies to learn these things.”

In The Lunchbox, Saajan Fernandes neither cooks nor watches movies. He is a widower, with no children, no friends. He plans to retire from his job soon and move out of Bombay. Years ago, when his wife was alive, she used to record her favourite TV sitcoms on tapes, so that she could return to them on weekends and laugh at the same jokes again. Now he stays up at night watching those old tapes, smoking on his porch, counting the hours until morning when he can go back to work. (Saajan is what Monty in Life in a Metro might have become if he had never met Shruti. Sunil, from In Treatment, can also look forward to a similar existence once he is deported back to India.) After a lunch delivery service misplaces their orders, Saajan starts exchanging letters with a youngish housewife, Ila. He tells her about his past, how he keeps forgetting things because he has “no one to tell them to”; she shares her darkest impulses of sometimes wanting to jump from her apartment window upstairs. They decide to meet and run away together to Bhutan. They arrive at the same café for their first date, and he sees her waiting alone at a table. But he can’t bring himself to walk up to her and reveal his face. He sits at another table and watches her scanning the door for his arrival. He fears that he is too old for romance.

Saajan may have missed his chance with Ila, but Khan’s performance in the movie was universally acclaimed. The Lunchbox won an important award at Cannes. Sony Pictures Classics picked it up for distribution in the US where it did good business during Oscar week. The reviews in the American press were all so gushing that I couldn’t help but slightly wonder about the applause. Why were people in New York and Los Angeles connecting so much to this portrait of a loneliness I associated with Bombay? After all, not too long ago, Slumdog Millionaire, a lacklustre musical even by Bollywood’s standards, had been championed at the Academy Awards. But my doubts mostly stemmed from an immigrant’s anxiety about their new home, for by then I was a graduate student in the Midwest. From the moment I first landed at O’Hare Airport, I was conscious of being mistaken for someone else, someone who fitted a perceived notion of being Indian. “Creative writing, really?” The immigration officer who stamped my passport did a double take while scanning my I-20 form, no doubt more accustomed to incoming Indian students enrolled in engineering and life sciences courses. My landlord in Iowa City picked me up from the nearby airport and seemed surprised that I spoke “good English.”

It was in Iowa City that I first saw The Lunchbox, in a narrow one-room theatre at the Ped Mall. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood had been screened earlier in the afternoon, and a section of the audience, which included an author who was among the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, had stayed back to catch the evening show of an Indian film. After the screening, the author and his wife waved me over to their seats. We fell into the usual post-show chatter about the film. “Watching it I felt so hungry, you know,” the author said, “The food! The spices!” He turned to his wife. “Honey, do you mind eating out tonight?”

Where I had glimpsed something ineffable—two lonely people in a city—he had spotted something expedient: his dinner plans. And indeed, later that night, when I passed by the only South Asian restaurant downtown, he was seated at a table by the window, stuffing his face with a naan. When I watched the movie again, I realized there were barely any close-up shots of the spices or the food: mostly you saw Ila filling up the containers of the lunchbox in the mornings and Saajan licking his fingers clean at lunch. I guess, for the author, the spices were a part of what was clearly an Indian night.

“You look like the guy from Life of Pi.” I heard this often enough in Iowa City to know that it wasn’t just an old white man thing. Baby-faced theatre majors part-timing as baristas in cafés, international writers staying over on a residency during the fall: they’d all recall the last time they had seen an Indian on screen, moments after meeting me, and offer what they no doubt thought was a compliment. The child in me wished that they were talking about Khan, though they probably meant I reminded them of Suraj Sharma, who plays the half-naked kid stranded in the middle of the ocean for much of the film. I looked nothing like Sharma, but did feel some affinity for Pi during the shipwreck. Before boarding, the boy had watched his father’s zoo being loaded on the docks, all those animals that they hoped to carry over into their new lives.

I missed Bombay, and worried about forgetting the place during my time away. In the stories I wrote during those years, I was recreating the city in my head, street by street. To workshop those stories in the Midwest was to receive an education in distance: I grew aware of the difficulty of things travelling through intact, the quixotic task of carrying over one’s past. There was the time twelve graduate students sparred in a room for over two hours on whether my characters should be talking to one another in Hindi. Or the afternoon I lost my patience when someone suggested that a story by another writer about an Indian family in Alaska could be improved if the children ate more curry. Each morning I might return on the page to the roads and promenades I had moved through for years, but the American reader would be stuck wondering—this was a verbatim comment I received on one of my stories—if “the city of Mumbai allowed double parking.” I thought of Khan buying a VHS player decades ago, to keep up with actors abroad, or my friend D. staying up all night and watching movies in Bombay, to keep up with the world. We might spend our lives back home bridging the gap with the West. But not many here were keeping up with us.

The years just prior to Khan’s cancer diagnosis were his busiest. According to Chhabra, Khan acted in sixteen projects between 2015 and 2018. He turned producer with Madaari, a jingoistic thriller where he positioned himself as a man taking on a nexus between politicians and businessmen. In Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet set in Kashmir, he embodied the part of the ghost, apprising the protagonist of his uncle’s betrayal. Judging from his roles in films like Piku, Hindi Medium and Angrezi Medium, he was branching out in this period as a comic hero. The loneliness was again evident: his droll characters don’t come across as clowns so much as men cracking jokes to fill up an awkward silence.

Awkward silences were becoming a norm in Bollywood as India was succumbing to Hindu nationalism under a new leader. The country’s biggest actors and directors held their peace when more and more films began to be censored after Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014; they refrained from commenting when mobs of armed policemen stormed university campuses, when Muslims were stripped of their citizenship and lynched on streets; they chose to appear in group selfies with Modi and call him a “saint,” even as multiple dissenting activists ended up in prison without a trial or, worse, dead. They didn’t even speak up when a young male actor died of suicide in 2020, and his girlfriend, also an actor, found herself being vilified night after night on partisan TV news channels. One woman took the fall in a media trial fueled by wild insinuations and blinkered opinions. She was blamed for swindling her boyfriend’s finances and accused of practicing “black magic.” In the end she was arrested, allegedly for buying him marijuana, weeks before a crucial election in the deceased actor’s home state.

I watched this tragedy unfold month after month back in the country where I was less likely to be confused for someone else. To assert that a place has changed in your absence is perhaps the oldest truism in the world, but the vitriolic mood of the Modi years is undeniable. In newspapers you read every day of someone being arrested or beaten up or killed because they hurt “Hindu sentiments”: victims of hate crimes get treated as accomplices. Cities like Delhi and Bombay are now unrecognizable. Those old buildings and seafronts where Khan’s characters had once reflected on their misspent lives are being razed as colonial hangovers. If you stare into the horizon, you won’t see the TV towers of my childhood. Everywhere you look, the skyline is obscured by creepy portraits of Modi. The values of this new India—violence, patriarchy, resentment, a paranoiac fear of others, a toxic mix of capitalism and religious conservatism—are exactly the ones promoted by devotionals and revenge sagas from the ’80s and ’90s, the movies that Khan had once found himself shut out of. And if the influence of some old box office heroes has waned, it is partly because Modi has annexed their passionate cults of personality. Years ago, I’d wonder at the crowds waiting outside actors’ houses in Bombay, people who had travelled hundreds of miles away from their homes just to catch a fleeting glimpse of their idols. Now I recognize the same loud fervour in Hindu men who swear they’ll always vote for Modi.

After Khan died, it struck me that his last two films—Doob and Angrezi Medium—were going against the grain of patriarchal South Asian expectations: those oppressive social mores, reinforced by celluloid, that allow parents to dictate to their adult children who they can marry and what they can eat. (I still wince at the coercive tagline of a blockbuster movie from the 2000s: “It’s all about loving your parents.”) In both films, Khan plays a flawed father who is refreshingly worried about the ways in which he might be failing his children, how he might have scarred them with his choices. For a change, we see protagonists striving to be helpful to the generation after them, endeavoring to be more empathetic parents. There is a terrific scene in Doob where Javed, a troubled filmmaker, realizes that his teenage son is being bullied in school after the parents’ divorce. He tells his son to make him out to be a bad father, but the son knows better: he knows that his parents were stuck in a miserable marriage.

Angrezi Medium is not as nuanced, but the bond between generations again seems compassionate. Khan’s character is a single father to a girl who seems to be reprising Khan’s own childhood in a sleepy Indian town. She, too, has dreams of seeing the world, and her artless father and his friends struggle to get her admitted to a college in London. They beg, borrow and steal, until the daughter realizes that she doesn’t need to empty her father’s savings for a degree abroad. When she tells him she’d rather study in India, you’d think any father would hug his child in that moment, but no, Khan just smiles and leans out of the window of the cab they are travelling in. He glances away, holding it all in, looking happy for once.

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