new siobhan dab

All the corrupted namecards from Game Changer episode Deja Vu

i love the very subtle editing for this ep

Listen it wasn’t the most baffling thing in the world when Netflix canceled Lockwood and co even tho it performed well bc let’s be real, Netflix will basically cancel a show if it breathes wrong…

But do you think that Netflix actually canceled Lockwood and co bc around the time it aired they’d aquired the rights to dead boy detectives (a show with a competingly similar premise to Lockwood and co that has Neil Gaiman attached who’s had two very successful shows in the last few years with Netflix and Amazon prime)… because I do.

Like to me that’s the missing puzzle piece of what happened there

I'm seeing and being sent a lot of things like this. So, to remind you, this was what Sandman did in 2022 per Wikipedia:

The Sandman ranked at number one globally on Netflix's Top 10 titles three days after its release with 69.5 million hours viewed.[90] In its first full week of streaming, The Sandman remained the most-watched show on Netflix's weekly Top 10 list of the most-watched TV shows, with 127.5 million hours viewed between August 8–14.[91] The Sandman remained the most-watched English-language TV show on Netflix for the third time in a row between August 15–21.[92] The show had been watched over 393.14 million hours in total by September 18.[93]

The show was the eighth most-watched English language show on Netflix of 2022 spending 7 weeks in the global top 10s.[94]

and we were touch and go on whether Netflix would renew Sandman for three months, because the figure that Netflix cared about was not how much we were being watched but our "completion rate" -- how many people were binge-watching it to the end. And that started out out low, something like 30%, because, it turned out, people liked watching an episode of Sandman and then going away and thinking about it, and then coming back in a week and watching another. So by the end of the 12 weeks we were lucky, enough people had watched all 11 episodes that we were safe, our completion rate (which normally remains consistent and unchanging) had risen to about 70%, and Netflix let us know that we were renewed.

Lockwood and Co, per Wikipedia did:

Lockwood & Co. featured in the Netflix global top 10s for 3 weeks between 22 January and 12 February, picking up 79.91 million hours.[29] It reached Netflix's Global Top #1 Show spot in its second week on the platform,[30] holding the number one spot in 18 countries.[31]

Over the first half of 2023, the show ranked fourth among Netflix UK's original shows, with 113 million hours viewed,[32] and 80th globally among all Netflix titles.[33]

Which is great. But if Sandman wasn't a slam-dunk, that's not a slam-dunk either. It all comes back to people at Netflix looking at all of their algorithms, and deciding whether or not they are going to renew a show. And in this case Lockwood and Co didn't get renewed.

Dead Boy Detectives is a very different kind of show to Lockwood and Co, even if there are superficial similarities. Netflix buying Dead Boy Detectives from HBO Max (who didn't have space on their schedule to release it until late 2025 or early 2026) in February 2022 didn't change Netflix's plans with Lockwood and Co. Netflix doesn't think like that. They release shows, then they look at their algorithms, and completion rate and completion speed is the most important for them (I have no idea why this is). Then they make more or they don't.

Nobody knows whether Netflix will renew Dead Boy Detectives, especially not Netflix. It will come out. It will find an audience or it won't, it will top the charts or it won't, and no matter how well it seems to have done we'll all still be on tenterhooks for two or three months until the final numbers are in, and the mysterious forces at Netflix make their decisions.

If you love it, tell your friends. Encourage them to watch all eight episodes, or to have their computers finish watching all eight episodes even if they don't have the time. That's always going to be the most important number, for Netflix, all over the world: completion rates and binging.

guyyys, who sent my random speculating shit post to Neil Gaiman :/ not cool y'all

Tumblr did, in its "For You" section, because, at a guess, I've been posting Dead Boy Detectives stuff, and it algorithmed it into my feed. This is how Tumblr works, I'm afraid. (And while I mostly mean to be on the Following rather than the For You stream, sometimes it slips.)

#Literally stop tweeting things like "what do you said to them after filming this". It's just a movie, it's pretend. You're an adult you should know that.

because Mindy Kaling fetishies white men

Fuck, I do too. They’re the color of cum 🤤 I just wanna lick a white man again so bad but last time I did that I got arrested 😂😂 he did not like that one bit LOL

i've heard people say that tumblr is a free website but i don't think that's true. it doesn't cost money but you pay in other ways

yes, there are that many really disabled people on the internet actually

When I was less sick I used to think, "It seems like such a large portion of people on the internet are disabled, it can't possibly be that large of a percentage of the population" and then let my ableism demons tell me it was because they were faking (the same ones that told me I was faking, until I made myself really ill.)

But now that I'm sicker and wiser I realize I was logically just wrong because

Anyway maybe this will help you understand and/or explain to abled friends and family.

#Let him cook

Andrew Scott for Buzzfeed Celebs (April 2024)

Dune: Part Two + Letterboxd reviews

thinking about how losing fcg will be so so so devastating to the party but at the same time there is absolutely a part of imogen that is quietly, secretly, shamefully, undeniably so relieved that it wasn't laudna. because it could've been laudna, and it was almost laudna, and it was laudna, and thank god it wasn't laudna.

Ok, so, as most know hobbits LOVE mushrooms, but what if they love ALL mushrooms, even the poisonous ones. What if a hobbit’s body is able to handle more of the poison and it doesn’t affect them at all. And they love it!

And then they nearly give Aragorn a heart-attack when they’re heading to Rivendell. 

Pippin, just being pippin: Look, MUSHROoms!!

The other three, running at full speed: MUSHROOMS!

Aragorn, who is a skilled ranger who knows every plant, tree, and flower to survive: No those are poisonous!

Frodo, who’s mouth is stuffed full: No they’re not. We eat these all the time back in the shire.

Merry, speaking with his mouth full, spitting mushroom everywhere: Yeah, they’re definitely not poisonous. Do you want one?

Aragorn, now having an existential crisis: No, n-no. I’m good.

Sam, mumbling under his breath: Well I wasn’t gonna share anyways.

@penny-anna this seems like your kind of hobbit lore

… OKAY NO WAIT THIS IS IMPORTANT

What if that’s the reason Sam and Frodo survived in Mordor? 

What if all those references to noxious fumes and tainted water and everything were completely literal? They avoided eating anything made there, but they had to keep drinking and breathing. 

What if part of Mordor’s defenses was that it’s literally poisonous to any creature not specifically bred to live in those conditions? What if Faramir was so careful about warning them about drinking the water because he knew it was fatal? What if Sauron’s general lack of concern about shit going down inside his own borders (aside from treachery, which apparently happened a lot) was knowing that any Mortal Man or Elf or Whatever that wandered in was gonna be stone dead in a few days, and his desire to catch any infiltrators on the borders was to keep them alive long enough for questioning?

And then these two hobbits who have spent their entire lives merrily ingesting enough poisonous fungi for breakfast to give Shelob a stomach-ache trot into Mordor and drink the poisonous waters and breath the poisonous fumes and scratch themselves on the poisonous thorns and feel mildly unwell.

Years later Sam gets a pained note from Faramir asking him how the hell he and Frodo survived when all the water is tainted with arsenic according to the survivors of the exploratory party and Sam writes back confused ‘What’s arsenic, it tasted bad and a bit metallic, that’s all I know honestly’ and Faramir goes to rant at Aragorn about how bizarre this is and is really confused when Aragorn goes into full-on flashbacks of watching those four tiny dumbasses STUFFING DEATH CAPS INTO THEIR MOUTHS LIKE GODDAMN CANDY. 

Oooooo, I like that!! And it would make sense after Boromir went on and on about how impossible it was to be able to breathe in Mordor.

Death caps are actually really interesting because they kill you (if you don’t receive proper treatment quickly enough) by destroying your cells over the course of a couple days by, basically, blocking your cells’ ability to create proteins. To my understanding the reason death cap mushrooms don’t poison themselves is because their RNA polymerase is structured differently. So it could just be a simple case of “hobbits are inherently immune to some things that will easily kill a human or an elf”—kind of in a similar way to how there are lots of things that humans can safely eat that we have to keep away from our dogs and cats because that food is deadly to them but not us.

So my first interpretation of the original post was that hobbits can eat deeply toxic mushrooms not because they’ve ~built up an immunity~ Princess Bride style, but because they’re so genetically different from humans that it’s like, “no no no, this mushroom isn’t toxic, it’s just toxic to YOU guys,” the same way we don’t consider grapes or chocolate to be toxic even though those foods are very dangerous to dogs.

Maybe like an evolutionary adaptation to their enormous food requirements: Mammals differ in their ability to detoxify poisons in part based on their dietary evolution. Cats for instance, as hypercarnivores, absolutely suck at detoxifying poisons - their all meat diet means they’ve lost a lot of the metabolic pathways in the liver that other mammals like us and dogs use to neutralise toxic compounds. This is why it’s so easy to accidentally poison cats, this is why you can’t use spot on dog flea stuff on cats; the dog version is about 10x stronger as a dog’s liver starts immediately breaking down the compound so the dose must be higher to be effective, while a cat can’t glycosylate the medication and so it just kinda stays in them unchanged till they excrete it. 

Plants are full of poisons to prevent things eating them, yes that includes lots of the ones we consider safe. Humans, as extreme omnivores adapted to way more plants in their diet than dogs, can eat all sorts of things that will kill a dog because we’ve got a load more metabolic pathways that degrade or modify toxic compounds we eat. Many herbivores, especially ruminants that have extra microscopic helpers to detoxify stuff, can eat things that will murder a human stone dead: deer will eat yew trees ffs. Rabbits eat death caps with no ill effect.

With how much hobbits eat (probably need a lot of energy to fuel their enormous, overworked livers), there’s got to be a lot of selection pressure for not being choosy, and even for being able to handle accumulation of other things like heavy metals just due to the sheer quantity of stuff they consume. Mordor was a polluted land, heavy with toxins usually present only in minuscule quantities in the air and soil, but hobbits eat their bodyweight in potatoes alone every week and are used to high doses of environmental pollutants and just kinda shrug it off as their liver slaps a few methyl groups on things and fires them off to the kidneys for removal. 

Consider this though: Their weird biology makes them stupidly susceptible to something other races are fine with. Like how Sydney funnel-web venom is mildly irritating to most mammals like cats and dogs, but, due to some quirk in primate sodium channels, can kill humans. Everyone gets used to the hobbits just munching away on assorted deadly poisons, maybe flavoured with a little lead, casually drinking hemlock tea and seeing Sam and Merry absolutely lose their shit at someone getting a nettle sting or eating broad beans because “those things will kill you!!!!”.

I mean…this seems completely feasible, if you consider lembas bread, a bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man, Merry ate FOUR whole breads and barely burped, Sam and Frodo ate about a quarter piece of the bread a day plus whatever food they could get their hands on in the wild.