@following-the-drum / following-the-drum.tumblr.com
#Merry crisis
Winona Ryder in Dracula (1992) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.
Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.
The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”
people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”
another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.
steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.
the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.
steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?
the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.
humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.
I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line
I fell victim to one of the classic blunders (drawing a load of fan art when I should have been working)
I'm ✨ALIVE✨ (at least temporarily) and I brought you some ✨PICTURES✨
You might remember our definitely-not-Strahd guy Kirill.
That's him again! My fellow @lacyfishhh seemed to miss this fella, so I drew him as a birthday gift for her.
the passion of lovers
When shipping is still as wild as when you were a teenager 🤣 I'm the dark blue one...
"well what happens if you have EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA in that lovely Victorian gown? hmm? huh? check and mate; modern clothing is superior!"
you fool
you underestimate the amount of dignity I will sacrifice on the Internet to be educational
because guess what? I got food poisoning in full Lucille Sharpe cosplay (with historical undergarments) at a friend's Halloween party last year
so I can tell you that, if you get intense diarrhea in a Victorian gown, you beat a speedy retreat to the toilet- and yes, post-1850s, there is a very good chance it WOULD be a flush toilet in many locations, but sub in "privy" if you like -you hike everything below the waist without regard for wrinkling, you arrange yourself on the toilet so that the crotch seam of your drawers is as wide open as humanly possible, you do not stray far from aforesaid toilet if you can avoid it, and at your earliest convenience you excuse yourself from public society to go home and change into more convenient loungewear for the duration of your affliction
kind of like you do in modern clothing
no, I would not say that the hiking of skirts and propping-open of drawers takes longer than unbuttoning and shoving down modern jeans/panties. no, nothing got soiled in the process
so now you know what happened when Victorian ladies got the shits. you're welcome
("but what if you're poor??? what if you're at work??? this is just rich people-" what do you do if you get diarrhea at work now? and don't think you can distract me from the fact that this question is generally meant as a smug, Well You THINK The Dresses Are Pretty, but ACKSHULLY... style of "gotcha," and therefore primarily brought up re: upper-class clothing)
this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby
they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:
“I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you”
They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!
Oh man, It doesn’t end there.
This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:
It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“
This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?
So they started calling it her.
They nicknamed her Oppy.
They told her to take a selfie not long ago.
After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.
And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet
Was play her a love song
I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.
In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!
Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.
Anyway dragonfly for admiration:
Calico pennant by nbdragonflyguy
Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.
This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.
You can read more about Leave No Trace here.
A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.
“I am not so special as to cause ecological destruction by building a stack of six or eight rocks”
if even one in 5 people in this photograph of zion national park thought this what do you think the lack of ecological destruction would look like you daft and selfish isotope
semi-related question - does this mean one shouldn’t be taking rocks from beaches? (just general rocky beaches, not anything special like the hawai'ian ones or such) i occasionally go to the beach to look for nice rocks because laughs in autism. should i stop doing that and take back the ones i have, or is that not so much of an issue?
i FEEL like it wouldn’t be so much of an issue here since the rocks are already on land and are going to get moved around anyway, but given the subject came up i’d appreciate insight from people who know more than me. thank you :)
@demifiendcruithne It depends on where, but unfortunately removing rocks, sand, and shells from beaches is often illegal in the US. I know it’s also illegal in a lot of other places. Just like rock stacking, it would be fine if just one person were doing it, but when thousands are taking stuff from beaches, it contributes significantly to erosion.
It sucks that certain aspects of enjoying nature are off limits now, but there are just too many of us and too few protected natural spaces left. If it’s not kept in check, there will be zero left.
how do conservatives think talking to children works? if a four year old came up to me and said “i’m a cat!!” i would say “really? what makes you a cat?” and they’d say some shit like “i have claws >:)” and i’d be like “oh wow, you do have claws. but wait, i thought cats had pointed ears!” and they’d say “they DO!!!” and then i’d pull up a picture of an elf and ask “is THIS a cat?” and they’d yell “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
u wouldn’t say “fucking hell, Emily, get it together. this is the real world”
cackling at this, can NOT believe it's a real, actual quote. it reads so much like one of those clickhole pieces
Okay, I love all the Nandermo content we got from 'The Roast,' but where are all the gifsets of The Baron going into berserk mode?
