Owl eyes upon ye

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.

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

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 watch this and think "oh how prett-OH WOW" every single time

i wanna adopt them as my grandmas

I used my "smart TV" today and honestly it's an awful user experience

It's connected to the aerial on the roof but for some reason wouldn't show me local channels when the internet went down. Just told me it needed an internet connection. THE INTERNET IS NOT USED FOR THAT FUNCTION. I'm not asking you to play youtube videos!

When the internet did come back I discovered that as well as actual TV, the "TV" function apparently also includes a bunch of... internet channels, I guess? That play 5 to 10 minute youtube-like videos interspersed with ads for cryptocurrency? Incredibly surreal experience. It will play actual youtube, but searching with the remote is a nightmare and Plex (a TV streaming service! Presumably built for TVs!) is glitchy and difficult-to-navigate as fuck through the TV. Basically it's worse at being a TV than old TVs and worse at being a youtube watching device than a computer. Why did we create these. Why did they take over the market. Was it just to show us more ads.

You get there and all the pretty boys look up from drinking from the reservoir and gallop away like gazelle

Oh man living in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and owning a large automobile fucking slaps

Oops wait not my house

Not my wife either

Where’s my automobile where the fuck am I

its fascinating how very very surface level 1920s-ish jazz age inspired aesthetics are very popular (see: hazbin hotel and electroswing and the endless wave of bowtie pinstripe character designs from the 2010s) but the vast vast majority of people who are into that seem fundamentally disinterested in actually engaging with actual jazz age art and culture because that would require engaging with black art

hello hazbin hotel fan. before you is an image of cab calloway. if you cannot correctly name at least one song of his then you will be dropped into a pool of live hammerhead sharks

If you follow Selmers to the poetry society meeting in Night In The Woods, this is her poem. I loved it and the themes of the game, and wanted to use it as practice to see if i can control the way readers ‘hear’ the words through images.

yeah okay ill reblog that

I did a comic of this audio long ago, but now a video of it !! I had a lot of fun doing it.

On that OTHER site

I'm kind of baffled. I do have a Tiktok account, mostly to follow a few specific creators (Dylan Hollis).

But I put up a little content, too. No, absolutely nothing which will show my face, thank you. Just some videos I've taken, mostly nature stuff. Completely innocuous, relaxing videos. Exactly nothing even vaguely controversial. I put up a video every Friday morning.

Obviously this has no following of note, and I'm totally okay with that.

What gets me, though, is that my videos used to be shown to, oh, somewhere between 50 and 100 people. but the last three weeks... none. Zero views. I think one or two people who explicitly follow my account - I have 15 followers, supposedly - have seen them.

And while I don't mind per se, I honestly want to know what's going on. Has my account been marked as controversial for some reason? Are my videos too short?

Just kinda confused by a sudden change in the way that site works.

They’re trying to encourage longer videos so that might actually be it. Lately when I post I’ll get a message about “a longer video will have better engagement” or something along those lines and I’m like “i don’t care? Fuck off and let me post the dumb thing I made.” I give 0 shit about catering to your Al gore rhythms.

I hate this whole needing money to live thing

they live in their own ceiling kingdom

This started out as a joke but then i realised the hight difference is kind of accurate💀