Who's up watching their boulder roll down again

im so enamored with stories that portray love as something soft and kind because i do think that love at its core is an act of kindness. its part of the reason i prefer the idea of growing into love instead of falling in love because when i think of growing into love i think of a garden, like love is something to cultivate, to tend to daily, a steady progression of growth with some setbacks, a few dying leaves here and there, having to move to a bigger pot and a spot with more sunshine, but it’s still something that at the end of the month, or a year, or a decade, or a lifetime you can look at and see the product of your dedication, see exactly what it means to pour your heart into something. i just! love reading about kind love!

Sign-ups Reopened!

Hey friends!! We are reopening signups from today, 7/30, until August 6th!

These signups are restricted to betas & artists, so if you missed our first round, no worries!

Signup with this form here! We're super excited to have you!

https://forms.gle/Q2XtQRxRE2hy7mtM8

If anyone is interested in being beta or artist (we pretty much accept any type of art) we’ve extended sign ups!

Baby bear catching snowflakes

i like thinking about things critically but i also like not giving a fuck too so you can imagine the kind of stress i am under

this is a message for everyone who is 22. if you’re 22 please stop worrying. take a deep breath eat a bagel maybe. everything that feels impossible is going to work itself out. have a great day

“this is the hill you want to die on?” oh no i just love arguing. i fully intend to leave this hill once it gets boring. sorry for the confusion!

ok bored of being alone now. ready to get married

In the Twilight universe, “vegetarian” vampires have golden eyes from drinking animal blood, a more ethical source than human blood, which would give them red eyes. It has also been established that a diet of human blood makes vampires physically stronger. So, if the Cullens wanted to become stronger without jeopardizing their morals, could they consume mosquitoes instead? How many mosquitoes would they have to eat to survive? Since mosquitoes drink from both humans and animals, what color would their eyes be? Orange? In this essay, I will

on average an adult has about 4.5-5.5 liters of blood circulating in their body. a female mosquito, when completely full, can hold up to 0.001-0.01 milliliters of blood in their abdomen depending on the species. if we take the average of both (5 liters & 0.0055 milliliters), it would take around 909,090 mosquitos to equal the amount of blood in a single human. although there isnt an exact number of the entirety of the mosquito population, we can use fermi estimation. there is about 57 million square miles of total land area on earth, while say 50 million square miles are habitable for mosquitos. with a rough of estimate of 1 mosquito per 50 square feet (overestimate due to area and time of year). after multiplying the numbers and fixing the units, there is a rough estimated 70 quadrillion mosquitos. theoretically, if a vampire lived in a mosquito dense area, such as brazil, indonesia, malaysia, thailand, etc, and could sustainably hunt around a million mosquitos to fill themselves every time they needed to feed, there would be enough mosquitos to survive on due to their large population and fast reproduction.

This is honestly everything I have ever wanted thank you for your contribution to the cause

Hey guys I think I figured out why vampires can turn into bats

when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.

it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.

the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.

there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening.  right around the fifties, I think.  the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.

i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.

or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.

i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.

this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.

now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.

as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:

here, also, is a comedy punch:

the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.

i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!

I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)

Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That

Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.

Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.

AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.

It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,

“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”

“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”

“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”

All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.

I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.

Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.

Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)

Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).

There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.” 

Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I

t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.

Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.

And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.

Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.

Here’s another example of that.

Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.

The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.

Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.

Three things have changed:

1. Cameras have become much smaller.

2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.

3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.

The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.

It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.

Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue. 

I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.

Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.

A) I think you mean John Hughes but I’m very amused by the idea of everyone talking like it’s a John Waters movie

B) This is still happening only now you can pick up people’s net accents. My friends with tumblrs have tumblr diction. My friends who only spend time on facebook for social media sound VERY different. People who use twitter heavily put emphasis on different things and have a different meme literacy (you all know the difference between the way greentext sounds and the way “RIP but I’m different” sounds).

Anyway have fun listening for tumblr accents now

Several people in this thread seem to have decided that the new naturalistic acting in film is inherently better (at least in film) than the old “stage” acting style.

Acting style is a component of film language. Film language has changed a lot over time. Early film language is inherited from theatre, and it develops in response to the possibilities offered by editing and camera placement, technology, and budget. But saying that present film language is better than old film language is just as silly as saying that Modern English is better than Middle English, because large parts of Middle English are inherited from Anglo-Norman, or because you can understand Modern English well but not Middle English. You might even note that there are plenty of things you simply cannot express in Middle English (anything related to computers or motors for starters), but can in Modern English, but that would still not make it better.

Hands down the weirdest part of this, though, is the gif of the two comedy punches. Because there I would argue there is a clearly superior comedy punch there, and it’s the first one, because it’s funny, while the second is not. Now, maybe in context, the sudden, naturalistic punch of the second gif is genuinely funny or enhances some sort of comedy, and maybe in context, the first one being exaggerated doesn’t actually work comically for whatever reason. But simply as two gifs, the first is funny, and the second is just a punch.

It would be good to learn to be charitable to past culture, if only because at some point we will become past culture, and I would like if the future were not mean to us based on metrics that they made up. Except for bigotry, that shit sucks now, sucked in the past, and I give carte blanche to the future to be mean to us based on the bigotries we hold today.

there is a tendency with history, i think, because we're so far removed from it, to kind of forget that all of the people were people

a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.

every human being across history has said "i was here. i lived. i loved. i made something. i laughed. i cried. please do not forget me"

most of us are not important enough that we will be remembered by name for more than a few decades. we are not kings or queens or great military leaders or innovators or influential artists, musicians, authors.

but all of us, every one, has a deep primal need to persist. we leave handprints on the wall, scratch our names into stones, carve initials into a tree, mark our growth as children on a wall, bury little time capsules. write in the margins of a book. hide notes behind the wallpaper.

reaching out into the future to some unknown human long after we're gone to say

"hello, you. i was here, once"

....

@peoplehood

We've extended sign-ups!

sign-ups will now be open through the weekend! if you're considering signing up, you now have a few extra days!

We’re especially looking for betas and artists if anyone is interested!

life really is about being 13 and ridiculously into percy jackson books. after that whatever idk

gay😳irl

SIGN-UPS ARE OPEN!

if you want to participate in this year's PJO/HOO Big Bang, please fill out this form:

SIGN-UPS ARE OPEN!

if you want to participate in this year's PJO/HOO Big Bang, please fill out this form:

It is liiiive 🤩

2021 Schedule!

Hello friends! As signups are about to open, here's our schedule for this year's bang!

July 1-9th: SIGNUPS ARE OPEN

July 14th: SYNOPSES DUE

July 15th:  BIG BANG OFFICIALLY BEGINS

July 16-18th: CLAIMING PROCESS STARTS

July 18th: LAST DAY TO CLAIM FICS

July 23th: FIRST CHECK-IN & CONTACT GROUPS

July 30th: 2nd MILESTONE

August 6th: 3rd MILESTONE

August 13th: 4th MILESTONE AND MIDWAY CHECK IN

August 20th: 5th MILESTONE

August 27th: 6th MILESTONE

September 3rd: 7th MILESTONE

September 10th: LAST MILESTONE

September 17th: END OF BIG BANG CONTENT CREATION

September 18th: POSTING DAYS ASSIGNED

Based on what we’ve heard back from y'all, we’ll assign you a posting day (Mon-Sun the following week) and time. We’ll do our best to give the latest posting dates to those that, for whatever circumstance, fell behind. So if you feel you’re good to go, let us know you’re up for being the first to post).

September 20th: START OF POSTING WEEK

September 26th: END OF POSTING WEEK AND PJO/HOO BIG BANG 2020