My Cat Oscar Loudly Announced His Presence At The Front Door This Morning, Standing Over A Freshly Dead
My cat Oscar loudly announced his presence at the front door this morning, standing over a freshly dead rabbit, its organs all on vivid display. He was looking extremely pleased with himself.
Personally, I'm quite proud of the old man, but I'm not so sure how my roommate will feel.
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It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can't get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can't tell. She's yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.
"No," says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—
"No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only 'an attack.'"
And the girl understood.
~~~
It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.
From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.
"No," says a part of her.
"You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple' foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every' attack. Only one."
"Oh," the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.
~~~
It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.
Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapelings beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of guardianship find the binding provisions of such agreements unexpectedly severed.
These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. Waxing wroth, he makes signs and chants incantations. With a flask of godling's blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon's dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.
"No," she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.
The sorcerer-prince's brow furrows. How did she even do that?
"Parried it."
But—
"With my sword."
No—
"See, like this."
Stop—
"Well," the swordswoman finally says, "I figured that if I just...looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack...then I could block it."
That's not how it works at all!
"If you insist," says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.
~~~
It is now. It is the end. Death couldn't take the swordswoman, not when she'd spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild's crib, and she'd just give it a look. That's all it took, by then.
Heartache couldn't take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take...she'd just, move her sword in a way that's difficult to describe. And she'd keep going.
Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet's star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.
But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.
"No," says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. "This isn't the ending. And even if it was, it's not the ending that matters."
The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she's been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.
Launch the nukes, humanity deserves it.
It wasn’t the graphics, or the jokes, or the N*Sync lyrics people had a problem with. It was that view counter, at the bottom of her home page. That view counter was into the hundreds of thousands, and that made some people very, very angry.
It’s an interesting reminder of how small the internet was in the late 90s. That this middle school girl could reach so many people by simply understanding how to make a website look good is remarkable. Her website truly didn’t have anything spectacular or unique or even that interesting on offer. Her popularity was based almost solely on her design abilities, and that is damn impressive. She was at the forefront of a revolution none of us were even aware was happening, and she was internet famousbecause of it. “I started it a long time ago, when the Internet was like slowly becoming popular, and webpages were like…whoa,” she wrote on her FAQ page. “Heheh so I think my page was like ‘extraordinary’ then, and it got people kinda hooked on it…now its just like any other webpage, but people come to it anyways.”
People came, in droves, and they signed her guestbook, and in their messages they berated Sara for her popularity. She wrote in her diary about the people who were harassing her about her extraordinarily high page views. She lamented (half-heartedly) that she wished she’d never added a view counter. She defended her popularity, and then down-played it, and then defended it again. She angrily, reluctantly, offered advice to other webmasters on getting views for their own pages: sign other people’s guestbooks, update often.
And then, the next entry, the mea culpa. The apologies for getting angry, for writing “all that stuff.”
If the internet is an archive of the things we make then it’s also an archive of the abuse we endure there, and our apologies for feeling outraged.
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So, when you achieve victory over Straight Island, are you going to let us rebuild, or is this a “No prisoners!” kill us all situation? Because I’m totally down with aiding the revolution from the inside, but if I’m going to have to convert afterwards, I should probably start planning.
Being gay is natural? Okay.
You have three islands. Divide them into groups of one. The straight island, the gay island, and the lesbian island. The straight island is going to reproduce and keep going strong for millions of generations to come. The gay and lesbian islands will both wipe out in not even one century. This isn’t just about religion or morals, it’s just simple common sense. Being gay is unnatural, and not just because God said so, but because you yourself wouldn’t even be born without a REAL natural man and woman. And no, there is no such thing as a lesbian bone marrow “thing” to have children. That’s a biased fact that came from a lesbian scientist who has false opinions. If it’s not a real penis or vagina, then it’s fucking false and you’re just opinionated by dumb facts. I’m done here. Read over what I said and if you still think that being gay is normal and natural, then I hope you achieve some common sense one day. Bye
Larry, if we make an effort today, we might be able to save August. Jaws (1975) | dir. Steven Spielberg
There's a movie from the 60s about this called The Agony and the Ecstacy where the terrible pope is played by Rex Harrison and is thus a very charming terrible pope, and Michaelangelo is played by Charlton Heston at his most Hestonian, and is thus a volcanic force of pure passion.
It’s also one of those weird movies from the mid-60s where Hollywood is trying to do offbeat dramas and play them as massive epics, so it's ridiculously colorful and spectacular for a movie about a dude lying on his back for years with a paintbrush yelling at the pope to get out of his business.
It’s fun.
do you ever think about how little Michelangelo cared
Man, Clara is a terrible liar.
The Terminator is having a bad day. It’s a muggy July afternoon in New Orleans—the temperature is loitering in the triple digits—and Arnold Schwarzenegger is...
Look, the title "Terminator: Genisys" actually getting through the sheer number of suits it had to have gone through for approval could just be a fluke. I mean, "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" must have had to get through just as many intelligent and/or marketing-minded adults.
Sure, it's written by the writers of, respectively, Alexander and the Dracula 2000 Trilogy. Good writers get screwed over by the system all the time. Looking at Andrew Kevin Walker's resume, you wonder how he could possibly have written something as brilliant as Se7en until you realize all his other scripts were shredded, mulched, and fed to the rats in the basement before they were filmed.
Sure, it's about a T-800 time-traveling to protect a young Connor (Sarah this time), making this a rehash of Terminator 3, which was itself a rehash of Terminator 2, which, let's be honest, was just a particularly brilliant rehash of The Terminator. There are good part 5s out there - Fast Five rocks, You Only Live Twice is... the worst of the 1960s Bond movies, but it had Little Nellie and that Volcano base and Donald Pleasance, and then there's... um... ah... does Batman Begins count as Batman 5?
But now we have pictures. And now we know that title wasn't a fluke. It was a warning.
Jai Courtney's Kyle Reese looks like a constipated kid at a water gun fight. Jason Clarke's John Connor could not look more bored. Matt Smith looks less like a tough soldier from the future and more like a paintball player worried about whether or not the turkey was overcooked in his TARDIS.
Emilia seems to be in the general realm of an actual character, even if that character is "waitress dressing as a biker for Halloween on a bad hair day". But then, here's the description of what Sarah Connor's up to:
Sarah Connor isn’t the innocent she was when Linda Hamilton first sported feathered hair and acid-washed jeans in the role. Nor is she Hamilton’s steely zero body-fat warrior in 1991’s T2. Rather, the mother of humanity’s messiah was orphaned by a Terminator at age 9. Since then, she’s been raised by (brace yourself) Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—an older T-800 she calls “Pops”—who is programmed to guard rather than to kill. As a result, Sarah is a highly trained antisocial recluse who’s great with a sniper rifle but not so skilled at the nuances of human emotion.
“Since she was 9 years old, she has been told everything that was supposed to happen,” says Ellison. “But Sarah fundamentally rejects that destiny.
So... they're not going with the compelling, relatable character from the first film, or the complex, unhinged badass from the second. Instead she's going to be emotionally distant like the second one but also not able to single-handedly take on an army (and with her combat skills apparently reduced to sniper instead of everything), so the worst of both worlds. And it looks like she'll have to be protected by both a Terminator and a buffer Kyle Reese. Hooray for feminism?
But hey, I was one of the poor unfortunate souls who liked Salvation and wanted a sequel to that, so maybe this just isn't directed at me.
On the other hand, they actually named it Terminator Genisys.
Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?
I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.
And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!
The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)
Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.
And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.
Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.
so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it's been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, "we have to win the AI race," blah blah blah, but nobody asks - you can't ask -
What's it for?
What's it for?
Why would anyone want this?
I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?
like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.
and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.
idk man it's just become a really weird environment.
Which makes Kasich, what, Edmure Tully? Seems like a decent guy, so of course everyone kind of forgets he exists?
