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I'm curious. Tag this with your sexuality and what your favorite M/F ship is.
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Request drawing: Gollum ♥ Being tortured by Mirkwood elves. Brutal creatures.
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One of the things that always drives me insane is seeing people try to work out coherent chronology and continuity of the Mad Max series, and the thing that makes me crazier is when people push back on this by being like "it's a dumb movie about crazy driving and explosions! it doesn't NEED to make sense!" because in reality the lack of a defined chronology or continuity is a feature, not a bug, and the reason for it is not that the movies are too dumb to be held to that standard, it's that the movies are much smarter than anyone trying to Figure Them Out give them credit for
The short version of my explanation is that, in the Mad Max series, "Max Rockatansky" does not exist any more than "Jack" is a single boy who slew a giant, jumped over a candlestick, and went up the hill with his sister Jill
The long version is that the Mad Max series is a narrative within a narrative, with the movies being legends and campfire stories, an oral tradition of the storytellers of the wasteland, all of whom are, to some degrees, unreliable narrators because they're telling stories of things that happened a long time ago from their point of view, if they happened at all. The events of the movies are likely either exaggerated or outright invented whole-cloth in the same way that the myths and legends of antiquity were. "Mad Max Fury Road" is the founding myth of the Citadel, and if the Citadel is Rome, then Furiosa is their Romulus.
At some point, someone founded Rome, and the character in that legend may have been based on a real man, but how that man aligns with the myth is almost immaterial. The myths and legends of antiquity, crucially, all took place in what the ancient world would consider "the ancient world," in a mysterious far-off time period when the gods still mingled with mortals. Whether Max or Furiosa or Immortan Joe or any of the characters we see in the movie "actually existed" within the movie's world is as irrelevant as whether The Real Herakles at the root of the legend was actually the son of Zeus. In the story, he is.
"Max" as a character exists on the screen because a lot of the real stories in that world involve mentally unstable loners with obvious PTSD showing up, helping people out of a situation, and then leaving without telling anybody anyone about himself, and the oral histories and myths reflect that. "Max Rockatansky" is a stock character whose general identity and loose backstory is retroactively ascribed to any characters in any legend who fit that basic description.
To try to figure out the chronology and continuity of the Mad Max movies or the associated protagonist is like trying to figure out how it's possible that The Big Bad Wolf is killed in both "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood," or determine in what order Prince Charming married so many different fairytale heroines or why he never mentioned any of his past wives.
And, for the record, just to be clear so it doesn't seem like I'm overthinking this-- this is shown explicitly in the narrative, the second movie uses The Campfire Stories as an unambiguous framing device. The filmmaker behind the series has outright stated this is an intentional choice he made. This isn't just me taking the car explosion movie too seriously, this is the explicit text of the series
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Genly Ai
Genly Ai and Estraven
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Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."
Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
- for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)
- Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.
- If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.
- As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."
- The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.
- Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.
- The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.
- For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.
- All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).
- Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.
- Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.
- Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.
- One phone line per family was the norm.
- Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.
- A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.
- And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.
- Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)
Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
- these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.
- The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.
- due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.
- they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.
- Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.
- Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.
- Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.
- Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.
And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.
- Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.
- This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.
- Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.
- Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.
- At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.
- "Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."
- Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.
Next tell them about calling "collect" and the commercials it spawned in the 90s.
Oh, right.
If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn't have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.
Eventually, this got automated-- you'd call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.
Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.
Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges-- "If I give my name as 'Charlie' it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck', decline the charges and call me back." Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.
Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase "It's your dime" is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed "Here's a quarter. Call someone who cares.")
Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.
Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities-- sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*-- and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the "phone booth" got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.
*this was a staple of Superman comics. I can't remember which movie it was, but there was a scene where Clark pulled at his tie then suddenly realized it was a MODERN phone booth-- a kiosk-- and that wouldn't work.
- Landlines were household numbers, not individual numbers the way cellphones are. (occasionally a teen might have their own line but this was rare)
- Kids were expected to be able to answer the household phone reasonably politely from a young age.
- As a kid, I got drilled on "I'm sorry, she can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?" to obscure the difference between Mom is busy, Mom is in the bathroom, and I am home alone and thus at risk.
- Managing the long curly phone cord took skill. If you stretched it around a corner, it would sweep things off tables. The spiral would invert in places, making it look ugly and move less predictably.
- Kids were expected to memorize their home phone number from a fairly early age. (not as much to call themselves as to tell an adult if they got lost or otherwise needed help)
- You could have an unlisted (not in the phone book) number in most places. Single women sometimes put their first initial instead of their first name.
- Schools sometimes made phone trees for efficient spreading of information like snow days (for schools too small to have that information on the radio). They were written-out paper trees where one person would call the next two or three, and each of them would call the next two, and so on.
- Babysitters were sometimes left with the number of the restaurant the parents would be at, for emergencies.
And all of this is for later landlines, from the 60s-90s. Before then, things were different!
- Party lines. The first several decades of phones being common, they did not have a single dedicated phone line to each individual house, because that would have been too expensive. Instead, there was a single phone line that went to every house on the street. Every house had a different ring pattern so you could tell which house was being called, but anybody who misheard it (or was nosy) could pick up their phone and listen to anybody else's phone conversations any time they wanted to. There was usually a slight click sound as they picked it up, but you might not be able to tell. This was another reason for using phone booths for any sensitive conversation.
- Calls were connected by a living person (almost always a woman). You told the operator who you wanted to call (which might be a name, and might be a word+number, like "Pensylvannia 6-5000" of the famous song) and they would physically plug in a cable to the phone line you wanted to reach. There were automatic switching machines starting in the 1880s, but most places didn't have them until fairly late--the last manual switchboard in the UK wasn't replaced with a mechanical one until 1960. And even if your area had automated calls for local numbers, a long-distance call would require an operator. On early phones, you got the operator by picking up the phone; once you had an automatic switching machine, you had to dial zero, but there was always an operator on duty and easy to reach.
- Operators, redux. A large apartment building or office building might have separate lines for each apartment or major office. But they didn't have separate phone numbers for all of those different extensions! Instead, they would have an operator for the building whose job was to connect people. This led to answering services. If a person lived in such a building, they could pay to have the operator take messages for them when they weren't home.
- Monopoly. Pretty much all telephone lines in a country would be owned by a single company, in the US it was AT&T, sometimes called "Ma Bell," because it had originally been called the Bell Telephone Company. AT&T was forced to de-monopolize in 1982, leading to the development of competing phone companies.
- Billing. Local calls were included as part of your monthly bill, but long-distance calls were billed as separate line items, so you could look at your bill and tell every single long-distance call from your phone that month. And it added up, so people did look a lot of letter-writing. You'd call long-distance for an emergency or big news, but people rarely called long-distance just to talk. Instead, they would write letters.
- International calls. International calls were crazy expensive.
- For quite a good run of time there, the phone lines were their own distinct thing, which ran along the same poles as the power. So quite often, the power to your house would go out, but your landline could still make calls. You could in fact call the power company about the outage.
- A lot of that wiring is still physically there afaik, but modern landlines are VOIP and generally run through your modem, so when you lose power you also lose phone, which has definitely given cell phones a clear utility boost.
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Actually got the pens out. Doing some A5 drawrings to maybe sell with a bunch of my Hollywood Special 1-6 comps
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Widows.
Fiona Wachter/Lydia Petrovna from Curse of Strahd
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dude im not applying to your job on squeamix dot com.
everything fucking sounds like this now i guess
Poob has it for you
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Look Below for pictures (and slight description for those unfamiliar)
You can vote/pick one based on what ever criteria you want. Which one you like best/ think you'd like, Which one you know, anything.
The Poll isn't for anything in particular beyond fun and just in general wonder what people think of these.
Though feel free to say where you are from in the tags / or comments if you reblog.
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one of the most challenging skills i've had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i'm proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off
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i am so charmed by sammon pillow
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Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.
With Choreography by Krzysztof Pastor and Music by Wojciech Kilar.
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this is a poll for a movie that doesn't exist.
it is vintage times. the powers that be have decided it is time to remake the classic vampire novel Dracula for the big screen once more. in an amazing show of inter-studio solidarity, all of hollywood's hottest elite are up for the starring roles. they know whoever is cast will greatly impact the quality and tone of the finished production, so they are turning to their wisest voice for guidance.
you are the new casting director for this star-studded epic. choose your players wisely.
Previously cast:
- Jonathan Harker—Jimmy Stewart
- The Old Woman—Martita Hunt
- Count Dracula—Gloria Holden
- Mina Murray—Setsuko Hara
- Lucy Westenra—Judy Garland
- The Three Voluptuous Women—Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Lauren Bacall
- Dr. Jack Seward—Vincent Price
- Quincey P. Morris—Toshiro Mifune
- Arthur Holmwood—Sidney Poitier
ORSON WELLES ORSON WELLES ORSON WELLES
Sorry usually I do my character analysis first but OH MY GOD ORSON WELLES
Okay. Okay. Okay.
So two things about Renfield: he is old and he is STACKED. The book says aetat 59 and Jack won't stop telling us how he is built like a brick house. Seward is slender and Renfield is NOT THAT. (Did I vote for Welles on body type alone? YES. But he also has the acting chops so I'm not mad.) Renfield looks at Dracula and is like "guess I'm gonna fistfight God." Like.
It's important that Renfield be physically powerful. That's a lot of what goes into Seward treating him as homicidally dangerous. It's also thematic - Renfield has all the physical power but Seward has all the institutional power and this informs their dynamic HUGELY.
The other important thing about Renfield is that he is disarmingly civilized. He is soft spoken and methodical and polite and refined and a lot of the horror comes from the dissonance between his refinement and what he's actually doing. He's upper class - he runs in the sane circles as Arthur - but also wholly disenfranchised by his mental illness (both in how the system and characters treat him and in the compulsions he is driven to). And I think Orson Welles has that. The veneer of civilization over a madness within (I'm thinking like the Third Man).
(Do I think Vincent Price can deck him with a right hook - knocking him down but not out? Yes. Yes I do. The trouble with Peter Lorre or Conrad Veidt is that I think Price could take either of them. Seward very much cannot take Renfield in a fight and that's important)
And I guess the third consideration is that he's very much a parallel character to Jonathan Harker - a cautionary parallel. So if you don't buy my Orson Welles argument you probably want someone who looks as much like Jimmy Stewart as possible. (See, if we'd cast Keaton then Veidt would be appropriate!) Out of this set that's probably Karloff? Who's also BIG so he works.
Let Renfield be stacked! The DILF fandom (Jack Seward) needs this!
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was tim okay though