spindizzy | Network

can, to some small degree, be simulated by a blindfolded person trying to push buttons while someone else shouts confused and panicked instructions at them:

Watch on YouTube

(Except that these guys mastered jumping WAY faster than I did.)

It's hilarious and delightful to me to watch people having an experience of Dark Souls which is not wholly unlike mine. In a weird way I feel kind of #represented.

In later vids, they have (like me) discovered the joys of the halberd as adaptive technology for people who are bad at spacing and aiming.

sholio

Cannot BELIEVE I still have an SPN icon!

Anyway ... I first started making fanvids for fun in 2002, but I began posting them on LJ in 2006, and since 2026 is therefore my 20th anniversary of posting the first one (#what) and I've been wanting to get more of them on AO3, I decided to make that a project for this year!

So here's my 2006 one and only Supernatural vid, Life is a Highway.

This isn't the first one I put online, but of the 2006 vids I think it's probably one of my favorites and a good one to start with. Contains clips up to late season one because that's all I'd watched at that point and most of what was available. Here's the original LJ-imported-to-DW post. Please enjoy this dive into ~~an alternate reality~~ a moment in time when season one of Supernatural was literally All There Was.

Some notes if you'd rather read them afterwards

Obviously at this point all I have is the exported file rather than the original vidding files (as this was at least 5 computers ago) so 2006 quality is what you're getting, including some slight wonkiness with jerky video and slightly odd cropping (I was screencapturing the video, which explains both the slight borders that occasionally appear - I got a lot better at cropping later - and a few instances of jerkiness as my 2006 computer struggled to render the video). The credits also include my original 2000s-era LJ name, which some of you may remember.

IIRC, I was making these earliest vids on a really old copy of Adobe Premiere that I had absconded with from my college computer lab in the 1990s.

Watch on Vimeo

Also posted on AO3.

If you want a 12 Mb download in 2006 quality, you can download it here!

Also, an interesting bit of context on the 20th anniversary vidding project - I discovered recently that I uploaded a bunch (most? all?) of my older vids to Vimeo in 2016 on the private setting, so apparently I was planning a *10th* anniversary vidding project, but got derailed somehow. What is time.

gremdark

I had some long days at the end of this week. On Thursday I took a job that was listed as a para position in a classroom alongside a teacher and assistant. When I got there it emerged that they actually wanted me to teach a first grade class alone, last minute, without plans and with no other adult in the classroom to lean on. In a class usually run by three adults.

I did it, and no one got badly hurt. One girl got a little pencil prick and bled a bit, but that was the worst direct child-harm. The little boy who normally has his own one-to-one para needed redirection about every thirty seconds, but I managed to keep things fairly calm and tear-free while getting through all but one of the emergency make-do lessons the very kind teacher next door printed for me. One student was determinedly destructive, which eventually forced me to break a long streak of not removing students from my classrooms. I hate doing that, but I tried everything else first.

Sometimes at this job, I'm thrown into a situation where I just have to tell myself that I need to do the best I can with the skills and tools I have. From a surprise solo teaching gig with zero premade sub plans, I ended up with a roomful of alive, uninjured children and a couple stacks of semi-complete worksheets. That's not a bad result, even if I'm not as polished at lower elementary instruction as I hope to eventually become. Everything is practice.

The funniest moment of the day was when a teeny six year old boy looked down at his subtraction worksheet and back up at me, scrunched up his face, and said in his birdlike little voice, "Ms. Gremdark, why are you such a bastard?" I did a strategic lip bite to keep from laughing. It was an absolutely hilarious delivery.

Today, things worked out so that I was in the classroom directly across the hall from Thursday's, teaching K-5 music. The music teacher had planned her absence well in advance and left an absolute holy grail of sub plans. She had detailed teaching scripts for each class, bonus suggestions for if material ended early, and all kinds of supplementals to cover various contingencies. As a result things went very smoothly. I taught 5th and 2nd grade music in the morning, then saw 4th grade and Kindergarten after recess and 3rd grade just before dismissal. It was a nigh-perfect day, even with the usual shoving matches and tattling and stolen pencils. I've started bringing a little bluetooth speaker in my bag, and I use it to play a specific jazz album when classes are doing ""silent"" solo work. It's a very effective strategy, though it was no match for post-recess Kindergarten energy.

3rd grade was the most challenging. One boy repeatedly asked me if I was a virgin. "That's not a question we ask people at school, Name. Focus on your worksheet." Later in the class, the same boy asked to go to the bathroom, then flooded it. According to his teacher, he's done that several times this year.

My favorite moment of the day happened in the 4th grade class, which the sub plan had warned me would be "chatty and high energy." Sure enough, I had to raise my voice more than I prefer and separate several people. The older kids were doing a webquest about Black musicians. The jazz album brought the chattiness down to a low rumble. Then I had to spend a good fifteen minutes intervening in a situation where two girls were bullying a third girl, calling her names and trying to make her upset. It was clearly an established pattern.

I finally got the instigators separated on opposite sides of the back of the room, but by then the girl they'd been cruel to was crying. She'd already been stuck on the worksheet before the bullying picked up steam, and of course it's so hard to figure out a confusing assignment when something else is upsetting you. I sat with her for a bit and made sure she knew that I would tell her regular teacher what happened and that there would be no consequences if she couldn't finish it by the end of class. That made her feel better about taking a breather in the "calming corner." It took about twenty minutes, but she emerged with dry eyes at last and settled in to work out the tricky part of the worksheet.

Just as I was about to walk over and see if I could help without embarrassing her, two little boys looked at each other and crossed the room to talk to her. These two had previously been very high energy and done a lot of roughhousing, but now they made sure to speak quietly and kindly to their classmate. They invited her back to where they were sitting and folded her into their little group. I was touched to see how gently a previously loud and rough group of kids met their classmate's anxiety and stress with compassion. I didn't need to say a word to that group for the rest of the period. With their support, she finished the worksheet just before the end of class. I made sure to tell all three that I was proud of them before they lined up.

That's one thing I love about teaching. For every kid I see acting out cruel patterns they've adopted from adults, I see more making choices like those little boys and using the tools they have to do what they can for the people around them.

Current Mood: touched
Current Music: Mint Jams (The jazz album with magic child quieting powers)

troisoiseaux

Updated round-up of all the Shakespeare plays I've seen (live and filmed); I've linked to existing reviews where I posted them on DW, but there are a bunch I never wrote up (or only wrote up in the 2024 and/or 2019 versions of this post) so those are here. Pre-dating to end of 2026, as I do plan on updating as I go...

( As of 2/20/2026, I have seen 40 versions of 18 Shakespeare plays )

hrj

On the positive side, it all got fixed within a few hours.

I've been commenting lately that I felt like my home repair budget was fairly safe because I'd replaced every significant appliance in the house at some point since I acquired the house. (Fifteen years ago. 15! Can you believe it?)

Well, I forgot about the garage door opener. But it didn't forget about me.

I'd just gotten my bike out this morning, then when I went to close the garage door behind me, it made a lot of sad noises and declined to close. Examination showed that several of the side-rollers had jumped out of their tracks. (I'd known that one was out of the track for some time, but I couldn't man-handle it back in and it didn't seem to be causing problems.)

So. This calls for professional help. But first it called for securing the critical garage contents because the door was stuck open and I live on a well-traveled street. That having been done, I went on Yelp, located a relatively local garage door repair company, and got scheduled for a window within a couple hours. OK, good sign.

I solved my anxiety about the lack of door closure by doing yard work in the front yard until the repair guy arrived.

In addition to the roller misalignment (which is now happening on both sides of the door, thanks to my efforts to get it to fail closed) the cables (which evidently get winched up by a heavy-duty spring) are tangled on the spindle rather than being neatly wound on their designated place. So the immediate problem could be solved with brute force: prying the roller track open enough to force the roller back in; disconnecting the cables and rewinding in the correct place. That was going to be about $500 labor. Ok.

But, he says, look: these cables are corroded, and one of the heavy-duty springs is rusty. Furthermore, you really should use rollers with longer shanks, because these have a risk of popping off their sockets on the door. (I'm sure my description is not helping anyone visualize this.) So, he says, I'm going to recommend you replace pretty much all the door-lifting hardware. That's going to be a couple thousand.

I wince, but I can see the truth of everything he's saying. So he goes to work on all that and gets it all back in working order. And then he says, "So, you don't have to do this, and I don't get any commission or anything if you do, but the motor on your door opener is 20 years old, it isn't really as powerful as it should be for how much you use it, and it's probably going to fail within the next couple years.

So that was a couple more thousand. But now I have a fancy garage door opener that talks to my iPhone and includes a security camera. And maybe--just maybe--now I really have replaced the last appliance that came with the house when I bought it. Unless I've forgotten something else.

serrico

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: full

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
手 part 26
挺, quite; 捂, to cover; 捉, to grab ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

词汇
袋, bag; 口袋, pocket; 脑袋, head; 塑料袋, plastic bag ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
应该还挺安全的吧, it should be quite safe
媳妇，拿个袋, get me a bag, old lady

Me:
听他说的话，我只好捂脸了。
谢谢，不用塑料袋。

pauraque

Opening in the days of the Harlem Renaissance, the first page of this novel states the culmination of its story: A door-to-door cosmetics salesman shot his eighteen-year-old mistress, and then the salesman's wife crashed the funeral to try to stab the girl's corpse. Why? The reader wants to know, and so do many of the characters. The book offers answers only indirectly, taking a sprawling path into the characters' pasts, where their families came from, and the intergenerational trauma of the slavery era that's still in living memory at this time.

The prose style of this book really worked for me and did a lot of the heavy lifting of drawing me into the story. It's lyrical and artistic without ever sacrificing readability. If there's a bit you don't understand, you will understand it in time, but first we have to go back to the beginning of another character's story and circle back around to connect to the main plot—and it does always connect. I think this is the meaning of the title; the book is not about jazz music, but it has the shape of jazz in the way it can state a melody, wander off and explore for a while until you've almost forgotten what song it is, and then return very satisfyingly before passing it off to another player in the ensemble.

I found this book in a free box and then it sat on my shelf for years (shout-out to

lebateleur, my read-books-we-already-own accountability buddy!). It has a lot of underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes from whoever had it before, pointing out themes of dehumanization, rehumanization, and the necessity of deep context for understanding. They underlined "Something else you have to figure in before you figure it out" and also wrote it in pen on the title page. On multiple pages they wrote "Jazzonia" in the margin, by which I assume they meant the Langston Hughes poem.

Jazzonia (1926)

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

calimac

Why aren't people referring to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as "the Andrew formerly known as Prince"?

rekishi

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pshaw_raven

Earlier this month, Kickstarter backers got access to the early release of Selini, a week before it went into general early access. I've been playing a lot since then, on what the dev refers to as the "great bug hunt." I still recommend the game and I'm excited about it but I'm done with the EA version for now.

I've been playing pretty obsessively. The game has no written language and no dialogue. It does have a visual hint system that will show you, often, what your next objective ought to be. But since this is EA and full release is something like eight to twelve months in the future, it's still kind of rough. What's got me to the point of being "done" is running up against a wall where it feels like whatever I need to do to keep going is either not in the game yet, or I'm somehow misreading the symbols. I've done several things that it looks like I ought to do, but nothing happens. There are some other elements that I know I ought to do, but which are actually impossible at the stage I'm at.

For example, there's a puzzle, with four symbols arranged on four posts. There's a hint screen elsewhere in the room, showing the symbols arranged a certain way. Moving the symbols into that order does nothing. In fact they were already in that order when I found them. There's a lamp you need to light, but no way to actually carry the spark to it, as there are no ways to recharge the spark midway and you run out of time before getting anywhere near it. There's a boss somewhere, I think. A series of red paths appeared on my map, but following them did nothing.

I've played much earlier builds of this game and run into a similar problem. One early build had a puzzle like the four symbols that I spent a long time trying to figure out, only for the dev to admit that wasn't really set up and there was no solution. He is, however, very responsive and on top of things, and every single day there's been an update to the game. One day, there were two updates. I have no doubt he's doing his best here.

I'm just going to step away for a while and go play something where I don't feel like I'm beating my head against a wall. I get the feeling I'm not alone in this, since the final achievements are still showing that less than .01% of players have them, and the fact that I somehow already triggered the credits to roll by defeating a boss ... that respawned? What.

Anyway, good game. Wait for the full release. I'm dropping it for now and hopefully getting some of that time and brain power back, LOL.

I have bagels to make today, along with a pot of chicken chili. I've been writing every day but I need to start putting the fragments into a more coherent story.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Boston - More Than a Feeling

kat_lair

***

Kat Reads Books

The Judge, the Jailer, and the Thief by Gemma Walker: Alex is freshly out of prison and has a heist of a lifetime to pull, if she can just repair the relationships with her family and also her ex girlfriend who she needs on the team. Rebecca is an ambitious judge waiting on a promotion that needs some encouragement to happen, all the while supporting her girlfriend of 20 years prepare for the celebration of the fancy tower building she's the architect of. Jimmy, a disgraced detective, wishes to regain his glory days or at least not lose them, except there's a documentary crew poking about an old case of a thief he and Rebecca put away a long time ago... Okay. Here are the things I enjoyed about the book: everyone was believably imperfect. The plot was complex and pulled it off pretty well, like I saw one of the main twists coming, but not the other. No big deal made out of the queer rep. The writing was pretty engaging. Here are the things I struggled with: I didn't really like any of the characters. The final decision Alex made endeared her to me more, but up to that point everyone was just... willing to do and say unpleasant things for reasons they justified to themselves. The omniscient pov was also something I haven't read in ages so it took a while to get used to it and the 'head hopping' was frequent and happened in. every. scene. It also made all the scenes really long because 'x said this, feelings/thoughts description' followed by 'y said, another feelings/thoughts description' etc ad infinitum. Most of the scenes were people talking instead doing, and everyone's emotions went from one end to the other like ten times in each scene. And on one hand, that's realistic as our emotions obviously fluctuate but on the other, we are rarely that fucking conscious of it so to have it described every time that she was delighted and then scared and then excited and then apprehensive and then and then in every. single. conversation. was exhausting. The core plot was good and I liked the found family theme, but then not to even show the central heist in detail from Alex's pov felt like such a cop-out. I gather there is a sequel coming, I am ambivalent about picking it up but I also want to know what happened to some of the characters, e.g. entirely unclear if Rebecca ever got any comeuppance or not. Argh. In summary, the book could've used a tighter edit.

Kat Watches Things

Our Flag Means Death season 1: Has anyone not seen this yet? Just me then. One of those things that I knew I would enjoy but just hadn't gotten around to. Two men in their middle years find a way to break out of their society imposed boxes, deal with their trauma and freedom to be themselves. And also find each other. Oh and they're pirates (yes both, how dare you) with a delightful ragtag found family crew. Also everyone is queer. An extremely satisfying watch as a queer middle-aged person especially. The two leads did a spectacular job. I will get to the second (and final) season eventually, just not sure I'm emotionally ready.

Kadonnut: Joulupukki (Missing: Santa Claus): A cute children's movie from 2015 where four kids are invited to visit Christmas land and have to find the missing Santa Claus who has been kidnapped. Or has he? It was pretty fun with the different elves, some stilted acting but okay, like exactly what one might expect. Bonus points for the rap battle that was genuinely funny.

Pastori ja Ruma Kuusi (The Pastor and the Ugly Christmas Tree): A short film about a new pastor/vicar who wants to bring people together to decorate a Christmas tree outside a shopping centre. Predictable but I really enjoyed the guy who played the vicar, he was fun.

Despicable Me 3: A rewatch but still good. I love Minions and I cannot lie. Gru unites with his twin brother, loses and regains his job, shenanigans. The Minions!

Hotel Transylvania 1-3: First was a rewatch and involves Count Dracula working through his human related trauma because his daughter falls in love with one. Second was also a rewatch and centres on Mavis and Jonathan's monster-human family and whether or not their kid is a vampire and if that matters and to whom. Adorable. The third movie in the series I hadn't seen and focuses on a family vacation on a monster cruise where the captain has an ulterior motive which may or may not involve Drac's heart... It was fun but the romance aspect felt a little forced. I did enjoy all the details about the cruise and how everyone was spending it. Out of the three, the second movie with its family/identity focus is my favourite.

Code 46: This was in BBC iPlayer's Valentine collection, said 'dystopian romance' and so J and I clicked on it randomly for background watching and then ended up going WHY THE FUCK IS SHE DOING THAT and YOU COULD DRIVE AN UBOAT THROUGH THE PLOT HOLES. I mean... We enjoyed that part. The movie itself... Okay, in 2077, for reasons, a lot of the population is in vitro fertilised/grown in identical clone batches (yes, I know, it does not make logical sense, ignore the actual science). So if you want to procreate the old fashioned way you have to do a genetic screening first to check that you're not genetically related and in violation of Code 46... Anyway. The story goes that a fraud investigator enforced with an empathy virus, arrives in Shanghai to figure out who is smuggling out insurance papers that are the only way to travel between highly protected population hubs. He falls in love and sleeps with the perpetrator instead. All within like 24h. Already unbelievable. And then... Everyone makes absolutely batshit decisions, the Code 46 sure is violated, the woman bears the ultimate consequences, there's a super uncomfortable consensual non-consent scene that both of us made 'ewww' faces at and... Idk. This sure was a film I've watched. Is all I can say.

Mulan: Rewatch, still one of my favourite Disney movies.

Mulan, the live action remake: Possibly a part rewatch? At times I felt like I'd seen it before and at other times not so no idea. I... Didn't mind it. The cinematography was gorgeous and the changes to the story (the dragon was a phoenix, the love interest was not the captain but just another soldier, there was a hot witch) were understandable and worked decently. I liked that the love story didn't get anything beyond a flash of abs and some hand touching really. I did come out of this eyeing the Mulan/Xianniang (the hot witch) interactions with interest.

Zootropolis: Probably a fifth rewatch. No regrets. Still love it.

***

kore

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sovay

The pattern of my days has tended toward craptastic, but

theseatheseatheopensea has been writing incredible fills for prompts that I left in

threesentenceficathon, most recently the one I threw out originally for an episode of TNG I hadn't seen since childhood. The latest pebble

rushthatspeaks has brought me from the internet is a black cat Tarot whose particular standout is the Hanged Man.

fleurdelis41 sent me Jewish dance cards and

ashlyme a suite of Stanley Myers' The Martian Chronicles (1980).

spatch introduced me to Beans. I have been re-reading Robin Scott Wilson's Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (1973), the anthology in which Le Guin explains how her brain plotted out the characterization of her novelette "Nine Lives" (1969) without bothering to let her know in advance:

Together with this glimpse of the situation, the character of Owen Pugh presented itself, complete and unquestionable, and indeed, at that very point, pretty enigmatic. Having a character really is very like having a baby, sometimes, except that there's a lot less warning, and babies don't arrive full-grown. But one has the same sense of pleased bewilderment. For instance, why was this man short and thin? Why was he honest, disorderly, nervous, and warmhearted? Why on earth was he Welsh? I had no idea at the time. There he was. And his name was Owen Pugh, to be sure. It was up to me to do right by him. All he offered (just like a baby) was his existence. Any assurance that this highly individualized, peculiar, intransigent person really was somehow related to my theme had to be taken on trust. A writer must trust the unconscious, even when it produces unexpected Welshmen.

I don't think anyone has ever made a Morden-and-the-Shadows vid to the Pack a.d.'s "Cardinal Rule" (2011) and it's a crying shame.

Current Music: The Pack a.d., "Body Parts"

vriddy

I remembered an old fic snippet from yonks ago, a terrible BNHA fic called Plucking that I apparently already mentioned over 2 years ago hah. This used to be a stress relief fic in which Hawks endures a no good very bad time anytime I was having a rough time. In 2023 I was apparently staging a rescue for him since I felt better, but looking at the end it looks like that might have been an hallucination, whoops. I wrote "Post anon?" in the notes because I guess it is extremely heavy on whump and angst but heh.

Anyway, it didn't seem like it had been migrated when I moved to Scrivener so I went back hunting into my 4tw files. And wow I found some other stuff that also missed the migration. Mostly written 2022-2023 if I believe my tracking spreadsheet haha. See, when I started writing I had a directory per fandom which made sense in theory, except that then I wrote like 200 fics for BNHA including several multi-chapters, and 2-10 fics for other fandoms. Things got better organised in 2024, apparently (or more like I gave up and created a new directory called BNHA (2024)), and I was good at migrating existing WIPs into BNHA (2025) when the year changed but some stuff got lost in the pre-2024 reshuffle. Several seem like 60-90% finished :0

I checked other fandoms too and found maybe one or two mostly developed concepts for Mairimashita Iruma-kun which I haven't written for since 2021 and it's making me a bit nostalgic... I think I never ended up writing up a post about it, but this was a fandom I tried the "Save The Cat" outlining method for and it utterly broke my brain and the story. Beat sheets don't work well with how I think, it seems. BUT this also reminds me I should have handwritten notes for that full outline and I wonder if I could try to revive that story, too... Like it was a fake dating OT3 and I don't know how I tried to make fake dating work for 3 people!! Maybe I can salvage the heart of it and do something with it? I haven't watched the canon in years either, apparently I stopped watching the anime in the middle of season 2... but that also kinda makes me want to catch up!! Especially since the official Mafia AU also made me nostalgic for the original characters recently. Although I seem to have paused my manga reading for that as well. I think it might be common for me to kind of drift off with "episodic"-style series, but hey maybe that means it shouldn't be too hard to pick back up either.

Anyway I find myself with more ongoing WIPs than I expected!! I think it'd be cool to slap an ending on the ones that have a good chunk written already. There's a couple that are so nearly there for BNHA that I had to check if I didn't somehow post them without remembering, despite the unfinished sentences and couple of bits with brackets lol. [ first kiss description here ].

Current Mood: surprised

calimac

You know the theory for how to get a piece of cake or some such cut evenly between two people? Ask one of them to cut it and the other one to pick. That will give the cutter an incentive to cut evenly and not cheat.

But what if - I was thinking while slicing brussel sprouts in two for B.'s dinner - what if the person doing the cutting isn't very good at slicing exactly in half? Then the cutter will be cheating him/herself.

lettersmod posting in

unsent_letters_exchange

Gentle reminder: Please disambiguate your relationship nominations (include the fandom in parentheses behind the relationship)! This will help your nominations get approved faster.

If there are duplicates, wandering tags, or other errors in the tagset, please let me know.

Clarifications

Character &/Reader nominations will not be accepted. Please nominate only canonical characters or broadly defined original characters. Feel free to re-nominate as Character &/ Any, or Character &/ Original Character.

Please nominate under Crossover Fandom or they will be rejected:

Inception
Arthur (Inception)/Tommy Conlon
John Blake/Eames (Inception)

Dune Movies
Paul Atreides/Anakin Skywalker

Bullet Train (2022)
Tangerine (Bullet Train)/Sergei Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)
Tangerine (Bullet Train)/Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)

The Fall Guy (2024)
Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)/Nikolai Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)
Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)/Sergei Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)

nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
手 part 25 shǒu
挪, to move something; 挫, to fail; 振, to shake ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

语法
3.5 (part 2) 才 meaning "only, just"
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
待遇, treatment; 期待, to expect/look forward to ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
现在学生也真是的，挂科重修这种小挫折都受不了, students these days just can't take little setbacks like failing and retaking a class
[no 才 of this kind that I can find]
仅仅因为她天生和别人不一样，就该受到不公平的待遇吗, just because she was born different from other people, should she be treated differently?

Me:
你帮我一下把东西挪下。
你真的练习了才两个月了吗？

snickfic

Wuthering Heights (2026). Young woman is torn between her love for the best friend she grew up with and her wealthy new-money neighbor.

I enjoyed this a lot. Emerald Fennell's visual spectacle is always on point, and in particular the costumes and sets are fantastic. There are a bunch of amazing set pieces, and the artificiality of Linton's mansion and the wardrobe he gives Cathy vs the organic squalor of her home and childhood were really effective IMO in contrasting several different binaries at once. I loved every single ridiculous dress. I was also really into Cathy and Heathcliff's starcrossed love. Heathcliff is so gone on her, and even when he's trying to be manipulative, he mostly comes across as desperate. (When he approaches Linton's ward Isabela in hopes of making Cathy jealous, he is the most gentlemanly ravisher you have ever met.) And Cathy is clearly equally gone on him, even if she gets in her own way sometimes.

I think the script could have used some work. For one thing, several secondary characters' motivations were left as exercises to the viewer (Cathy's father and especially her companion Nelly); like yes, I can form theories about why they did what they did, but maybe a little less subtlety here is in order. Also, just to make Cathy and Heathcliff feel a bit more complex as characters and/or to just make their relationship more toxic or at least complicated. Honestly, my main criticism here is that Fennell, against all expectations and especially considering her work on Saltburn, doesn't go nearly as weird and batshit as the story could support. The visuals yes, the character dynamics no.

Overall, though, a good time. I ship it and immediately went looking for fic. (There were 15 fics in the tag, half from before the movie even came out, and half the new ones were crossovers. RIP.)

--

The Tunnel (2011). An Australian mockumentary about a news crew that goes into abandoned subway tunnels underneath Sydney looking for a story.

I'm always interested in mockumentary horror, as opposed to your standard found footage, so I was excited to check this out. Unfortunately, the longer I sit with it, the less I like it. First of all, the whole point of the mockumentary aspect is to add depth, context, and contrast to the found footage, but IMO the interview clips here were almost extraneous. There were one or two nice moments, like when they have the anchor listen for the first time to what another crew member in the tunnels had heard through his head phones, but there was very little else that we couldn't have gotten from the found footage itself. The news investigation framing all felt a little off as well; the supposed pretext for going into the tunnels feels a little overheated. "Politicians fail to give updates on big proposal" does not feel like the red flag for a huge scandal, and various other aspects that were treated as potentially newsworthy just weren't, IMO. Also, surely the most terrifying part of underground horror is the threat of getting lost? I was astounded by how little a concern this was in the movie, even when they were running around without any care whatsoever for where they were.

What really killed this for me, though, was the gender politics. As with so many found footage type movies, there's one female character, the news anchor, and everyone else is male. (Why is this????) There are repeated assertions from the guys both in the found footage and the interview segments that the anchor doesn't know what she's doing, doesn't deserve her position, and probably is fucking the station director. And what do you know, they're right, several people die because of her ambition and poor judgment, not to mention how she goes into crying hysterics several times. In 2011!! Just brutal.

There's a behind the scenes doc about the movie that I managed to watch five minutes of, and before I turned it off, it was entirely about what genius fundraisers the creators were, and how they "disrupted" the Australian film funding model by "inventing NFTs before they were big." (They raised funds by ~selling frames of the movie to donors.) So... yeah.

The movie isn't entirely without merit; there's some great found footage moments. If you just want to watch people stumble around underground being chased by unknown monsters, you could do worse. But a very qualified rec.

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Prince of Darkness (1987). Per Shudder, this John Carpenter movie "follows a group of quantum physics students in Los Angeles who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan."

NGL, I watched this because I really really wanted to see a movie about the liquid embodiment of Satan, and now I have, I guess. This was just bad. There are some memorable moments; I loved the dripping fluid floating upwards and that the canister (OF FLUID) was locked to "only open from the inside." The dream transmissions for the future were honestly rad. The bugs and creepy-crawlies everwhere were really effective sometimes. There's also a fun sense of claustrophobia as the night goes on and things close in around the characters. Also, frankly, the devil and Jesus as extraterrestials who came to take over and warn Earth, respectively, was neat! I wish the movie had gone harder on that!

OTOH, the eventual romance began with the guy being such a creeper that I was sure he was being set up as a villain, and then he's a big old sexist to her right before he asks her out, and I hated that. The demon instapregnancy was so predictable and tedious. One of the guys repeatedly has homophobic comments made to and by him, and also he's weirdly racist to one of the girls, and this is all for no apparent reason except as a characterization note. And overall the movie was just slow and lacking in charm. I would love to see this exact premise from someone who was actually good at writing characters.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they were interested in specific elements of the plot or if they're a John Carpenter completionist.

musesfool

In what is likely the only time I will be all "USA USA" about these Olympics (or basically anything these days), the US Women's hockey team won gold in OT over Canada! 🏅🏅🏅🏅🏅

Hilary Knight with the game-tying goal with 2 minutes left and the goalie pulled - she became the all time leading US scorer at the Olympics! GOATed! (She also got engaged yeserday{? I think it was yesterday? to a lady speed-skater} so she's having a time in Milan!) And then Megan Keller won it in OT - right through the 5-hole on Desbiens (who I do feel bad for - she had herself a game today after getting pulled in the previous US-Canada game)! What a sick goal!

(I don't think the overtime in a GOLD MEDAL GAME should be 3-on-3, but at least they were scheduled to play a full period - no shootout in the gold medal game.)

Of course, I was supposed to be working so people kept emailing me and calling me and I couldn't be like, "Don't you know the US women's hockey team is in OT against Canada in the gold medal game!??!" so ugh. work.

In other news, last night I was struck with a mighty strong craving for an Orange Julius, and i had an unopened 11 oz bottle of OJ in the fridge so I stuck it in the freezer, and then this morning I pulled out the blender to make it, and I think the part that defrosted enough to get scraped into the blender was all water, because it had only the vaguest of orangey taste. But I have the other half of the bottle left, so I will try again tomorrow. I'm sure nostalgia is playing a part, but there was something so amazingly good about an Orange Julius at the mall when I was in high school.

*

Current Mood: excited

Susan

My motor cortex learning to play Dark Souls

Supernatural vid: Life is a Highway (the 20th anniversary vidding project)

Happy weekend!

Shakespeare round-up, 3rd edition

Joys of Homeownership

Co-sign

第五年第四十一天

Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)

the reference formerly known

The hard part might be done?

Embark

Kat Consumes Media

JILL SCOTT TINY DESK THIS IS NOT A DRILL

Barely even human body parts will give yourself away

Finding old fic snippets

evens

Nominations Clarification 1

第五年第四十天

movies: Wuthering Heights, The Tunnel, Prince of Darkness

the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

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