fine, make me your villain

Evansville Press, Indiana, February 5, 1912

it’s a leap yeap

My nightmare: making a typo that people are still talking about over a century later

Happy leap yeap!

Peace and LOVE on planet Earth

adobe is actively pushing to make art styles intellectual property covered under copyright law and artists online are doing shit like this

you guys are all so fucked like you dont even understand what youre doing do you seriously think this is in your favour for the love of god hello am i alone in this world. youre leading yourself to the slaughter

Also, if your problem is AI art: Adobe is also making an ai art generator

Adobe does not want to ban AI art. They want it to only exist in the hands of wealthy copyright holders. They want art styles to be copyrighted for the same reason: so they can make money from owning other people’s work. So they can sue you for drawing something too similar to an art style they own

Adobe is not your friend. Expanding copyright law is far more dangerous for artists than AI will ever be

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

If I had a nickel for every time Bellamy saved Octavia’s life by opening the Second Dawn bunker, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

4x11 | 5x04

RED WHITE AND ROYAL BLUE + Letterboxd Reviews

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE [2023]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

Watching the Red White and Royal Blue movie and god it is just so refreshing to have two adult men fall in love and have the stereotypically fairy tale romantic affair like a politically charged hallmark movie

Like absolutely nothing against teen queer coming of age stories, I adore them and they’re so important but it’s just so nice to have adults falling in love, adults with plans and motivations but still figuring things out a little, real actual adults with hobbies and passions and accomplishments, getting to just be queer and in love and they are the main characters within their own lives

And they’re in a rom-com, a full on rom-com with the cheesiness and the drama and the sweet, fluffy romance where everything is resolved in the end and it’s queer. It never shies away from the queerness, they make out, they have sex, they gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, they make silly jokes and get to adore each other

It’s so refreshing, it’s so nice to have this type of story, this story for the adult queers, a comfort film like to Mamma Mia, that’s full of heart and enjoyment and fun, with queerness at the forefront

TOM HOLLAND photographed by ISAAC ANTHONY The Hollywood Reporter 2023

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE (2023) dir. Matthew López

my body, tearfully: when sleep???

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

my body, weeping: but???? when sleep?????

me: okay, finally now is sleep

my body: no. wrong.

op delete this now

If I had to see this, then all of you have to as well