Read/watch Later - Tumblr Posts
Oppenheimer review (spoilers spoilers spoilers)
The good:
Cillian Murphy is truly giving the performance of a lifetime. Christopher Nolan wanted an actor whose eyes could tell 80% of the story and by god he succeeded
The movie is gorgeous, just visually stunning and rich and immersive
It's a complicated, slippery, story that resists easy definition. It was brilliant in keeping Oppenheimer a cypher even to the audience, in refusing to resolve any side of the nuclear debate. It's a meaty, chewy philosophical web of a movie I'm going to be thinking about for awhile
The not so good:
Christopher Nolan I am begging you to talk to one (1) single woman
It is hilarious to me how Florence is being trotted out as the second female lead of this movie when she was in it for 5 minutes mainly to be naked
Emily Blunt has her one #girlboss scene but you know what would have made it land better? Literally any work done to set it up. When Oppenheimer goes "don't presume to understand relationships you're not in" that felt like the movie realizing at the last second it had done absolutely nothing to build their relationship other than some scattered discrete bits and going "well how dare you want to know" and nothing ticks me off more than a piece of media that judges you for daring to want to watch it
You could easily cut 30 minutes from this movie and lose nothing. I don't care if you're making an operatic grand masterpiece, no movie needs to be more than 2 and a half hours
I saw a review trying to claim that the masses of interchangeable white men was a choice to demonstrate the tide of history or something and I'm sorry but no, all it did was cheapen any emotional impact of anything these characters did since I had no idea what they had done before
The thing I am probably beating a dead horse about a bit:
It is deeply fucking weird to me to write a movie about the inner turmoil of a Jewish man building a weapon he thinks will end ww2 and not deal at all with the fact that he is Jewish and a lot of the people working with him are also Jewish. Sure, there are a couple of passing references, but they carry no more weight than if he had said "I'm from 86th Street" or "my mother had red hair". Oppenheimer was a secular, assimilated Jew one generation out from immigration, who had family still in Germany and who faced antisemitism at every stage of his career. You cannot tell me that this brilliant man caught up in his own brilliance, trying to build a world destroyer, would not have at least woven into his web of self deception and justification the fact that this could protect his people from an existential threat. That the many Jewish scientists working with Oppenheimer would not have had complicated feelings about working for a country that barely tolerated them, trying to create a device of mass death, wondering if this will be enough to protect their people, responding to an attempt at complete extermination with actual extermination, all wrapped up in a big package of nationalism and the war effort and, yeah, scientific progress to the point that it might as well be magic or a miracle. It is impossible to overstate the impact the Holocaust had on Judaism, and maybe if you start to explore that it becomes the entire movie, but this movie didn't even try. I just wonder why bother mentioning Oppenheimer was Jewish at all - they clearly fictionalized a lot of other elements, and Christopher Nolan certainly isn't the person to handle this issue. But to act as though being Jewish is completely disassociated from wanting to defeat the Nazis is disingenuous at best and actively intellectually lazy at worst
My favorite part of the evening:
Girl in the bathroom after the movie: "They dropped JFK's name like they were talking about fucking Bruce Wayne in the DC villain origins story"
still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
Photo ID: a screenshot of a tumblr user’s tags reading: #dracula daily #bram stoker: accidentally write a horror comedy with queer main characters #dracula End ID
———————————————————————
Now I’m not coming after this person or naming them cause it’s not their fault at all but I am begging y’all to understand the queer allegories are not a mistake. They are not a coincidence.
This isn’t a fuddy old timey white man accidentally walking into making an incredibly queer book.
Bram Stoker was most likely a closeted queer man. He started writing Dracula a month after Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, who was someone he knew personally. He and Walt Whitman wrote very homoerotic letters to each other. It was rumoured he had a massive crush on his boss, Henry Irving, who he wrote a biography on and who he heavily based Dracula’s appearance on (sans the hairy palms and pointy ears lol)
That is the context Dracula was written in. So when Mina and Lucy are galpalling it up, when Lucy’s three weed smoking boyfriends seem very close, when Dracula is jealous and protective of Jonathan and wants to stay up all night talking, please don’t run away with the idea that those are coincidences, or that Stoker was somehow blindly stumbling his way through this.
He knew. It’s on purpose.
— If the meds were switched, then when I got them mixed up, I… I accidentally switched them back, so… I gave Harlan… — The correct doses, yes. But not accidentally.
KNIVES OUT (2019) dir. Rian Johnson
Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman
no Male Author Moment has ever made me cringe quite as viscerally as the ending of Grapes of Wrath and that was a full decade before I found out about this
i think it should be illegal to not allow an adblocker on your site and im not kidding
The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.
Musicals as John Mulaney quotes:
Wicked:
Heathers: The Musical (and Mean Girls):
SIX:
Rent:
Dear Evan Hansen:
Legally Blonde:
ANBU LEGACY 5.1 - @anbu-legacy
With kind permission of the authors
Full cloth binding with title hot stamped on the spine.
case materials 2,4 binders board and cardboard (covers) coated book cloth, black (covering material) silver heat reactive foil (hot stamped title)
inner book Munken polar, 100gsm (book body paper) Chiyogami paper (endpapers)
Format: ~A6 (10,5cm x 14,8cm)
Episode 211: The Copyright Conundrum
In Episode 211, “The Copyright Conundrum,” Flourish and Elizabeth welcome prolific fic writer and copyright expert @earlgreytea68 back to the podcast to discuss her new Fansplaining article, “How U.S. Copyright Law Fails Fan Creators.” After giving a little primer on copyright, trademark, fair use, and how they all intersect with fandom, EGT discusses the ways current U.S. intellectual property law is unequipped to deal with non-monetized creativity—and how the system fails everyone but the big publishers and studios. They also discuss copyright and AI, and whether copyright claims have the potential to take down LLMs and AI tools.
Click through to our site to listen or read a full transcript!
And an exciting note: this episode has a sponsor!! Ellipsus is a new collaborative writing tool that lets you and your co-writers/editors/betas create different drafts and merge them together. They are very anti-generative AI, and they reached out to us because they have roots in fic fandom. Ellipsus is currently in closed beta, but if you use our SPECIAL LINK, you’ll go to the top of the list. We’ve really enjoyed testing it out—and we hope this can supplant Google Docs (ugh) in our fic writing.
The whole world through queer-coloured glasses
Sometimes reading new scholarship coincides perfectly with the discussion I read here, on the blog. You have read discussion about fan perspectives on queer representation and on the fanfic lens and another take on the latter (or in other words, how to be gay).
Frederik Dhaenens writes research about gay representation on television. Their work dicusses both queer stories and queer readings which is what brought these previous posts to my mind. In queer readings, the audience was examined.
(The) regular television viewers seemed to be aware of the strategies of queer deconstruction. DHAENENS, FREDERIK. “READING GAYS ON THE SMALL SCREEN.” JAVNOST – THE PUBLIC 19, NO. 4 (2012): 57–72. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009096.
However, these texts only briefly touched on queer readings that were of not explicitly queer stories.
Another example (of the distinction between the focus group with the heterosexual and the homosexual participants) is the way many gay participants stressed the necessity of identification with gay characters or at least the fun of assuming a character being gay. DHAENENS, FREDERIK. “READING GAYS ON THE SMALL SCREEN.” JAVNOST – THE PUBLIC 19, NO. 4 (2012): 57–72. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009096.
Audiences are adept at reading into the text but there are also more and more queer stories. However, an analysis of queer reading practices could look at these interpretations less as separate ones as they can co-exist. After all, many of us might have experienced reading everyone else around the canonically queer couple as also queer, haven’t we?
Szabo Dorottya
anonymous:
I just discovered your mdzs pronunciation stuff and it’s super helpful!!! Especially to an english speaker, it’s so helpful to hear everything pronounced slowly! Would you ever consider doing more but on Chinese basics? Like tones, or differences between similar sounds? (But please don’t feel obligated! Just a suggestion bc I find your pronunciation super helpful :)
hhhhh the file was too big for tumblr :’) even after I exported it at medium instead of standard quality, so i made a soundcloud after all aha…. it’s downloadable, even!
anyways! chinese school with cyan? :D transcript with helpful links under the cut.
previous chinese pronunciation posts with pinyin if you want to go back review them armed with new knowledge to practice: mdzs names 1, mdzs names 2
Keep reading
When us Queer folks yell about getting more shows with Queer characters we mean what Mike Flanagan is doing with Fall of the House of Usher.
People be gay. Period.
There's no fanfare. No crisis. No trauma. No ticker tape parade. It's often not the point of the story. The characters are Queer and the earth has not shattered. Some of them are boring, some are the worst people in the world, some are even nice. They are just Queer.
I want the Sci fi, the fantasy, the horror, the period romance, the procedural, the rom-com, etc.
(Side note: this show is insanely well written and directed. Like I absolutely know what's going to happen in each ep, but my word, it's so wonderfully woven together.)
P.s. Carla Gugino is just never not a pleasure to look at. Whew!
thinking about how mike flanagan's first netflix series ended with the crain family together, both in death and in life
and his last netflix series ended with the entire usher bloodline 6 feet under, buried side by side (with lenore in the same row as madeline and roderick instead of the row below with frederick and the others) but no more a family in death than they were in life
the haunting of hill house and the fall of the house of usher feel very much like two sides of the same coin - a home built with love will stand for centuries, but a house built without that foundation will crumble and leave no survivors
The Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River superimposed on a map of Europe