Then Jason never kills again.
A Thought From Rewatching Hannibal
Will's lawyer, Mr. Brauer, is the unsung hero of season two. He stone-cold does not give one solitary fuck, EVER. I have to assume that the shit he has seen would end a lesser man. He opens an envelope containing a severed human ear and calmly tells his serial killer client that, "I seem to have gotten some of your mail." Forget ice water in your veins, try liquid nitrogen.
I assume some of this is his nature, and the rest is just being a criminal defense attorney in the absolutely bonkers fucking Mage: The Murdering world Hannibal is set in. You're just like, "Totem pole of human corpses, eh? Must be Thursday." And then you bypass your hip flask and go for the other pocket, where your crack pipe is, because you always need something a little stronger on Thursdays.
I must not buy. Buying is the purse-killer. Buying is the little-dopamine that brings total bankruptcy. I will face my wishlist. I will permit the limited time sale to pass over me and through me. And when it has expired I will turn the inner eye to see its impulses. When the mania has gone there will be nothing. Only $ will remain.
I’m rereading Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones and… I forgot how much it’s a direct critique of corporate / unregulated capitalism? I mean. It literally ends with the people seizing the means of production, ejecting the colonizers, & imprisoning the CEO in a glass paperweight
Oh, and connected to that, Dark Lord of Derkholm is also a novel which asks: what if the person who stumbles into Fantasyland isn’t some wide-eyed bookworm child, but one of the Koch brothers?
Then it cheerfully places us 40 years past that inciting incident, and as a result, Fantasyland is now a colonized Disney property on the brink of societal collapse and (as we learn near the end) approaching a total planetary death.
It is actually impressive to me how realistically Jones depicts Mr Chesney mining money from every single aspect of the Tours that he can. Some writers would have stopped at “Mr Chesney runs the tours”. Jones keeps going, and it gets increasingly monstrous… and also, terribly believable, because nothing that Mr Chesney does is any worse than things we’ve already had done to ourselves. The worst of Mr Chesney’s evil is how banal it is, and how used to it you can become.
The moment, near the end of Chapter 19, where Blade realizes for the first time that the system he’s grown up with is terribly unfair is really worth noting:
Also, in case you think I exaggerate regarding “a Disney property on brink of planetary death”, remember that one of the final money-making schemes we discover is literally the stripping of all magic from the planet… since importing it to “our” world has short-lived but marvelous effects. In other words: yes, fossil fuels! (Barnabas even dubs magic the “superfuel”, and is quite blasé over the part where stripping all the magic would lead to the extinction of much of the world’s life, since a lot of it needs magic to live.) So the end-game of Mr Chesney’s Tours really is to strip Derk’s world of its life force and leave his planet a dead husk… for the sake of a short-term profit which all goes into one man’s pocket.
*stares in climate change*
I know Diana Wynne Jones had several sequels planned to Derkholm, and I would’ve loved to read the ones she never got a chance to write, because she also makes this point that: recovering from the physical & mental ravages of this kind of exploitative system takes time. The one sequel-ish novel we did get, Year of the Griffin, explored that in a very smart way, where the mentality and aftereffects of unregulated capitalism and colonization are still affecting people’s lives, even as they work to build a healthy alternative way of living.
As a writer, Diana Wynne Jones was critical of exploitation. And always, always she was critical of selfishness. It was perhaps the cardinal sin, for her, and the one trait she gave to all her villains.
So it is no surprise to me that she was critical, to say the least, of those who would replace kindness, empathy, and the human heart with a single-minded sociopathic profit motive, to the detriment of all other human lives around them.
“Chesney” was supposed to rhyme with “Disney”, too. There was a fan letter on her site back in the day where some asked.
Let's just look at Alice. Okay? The world needs more Alice.
So let's look at her.
I think people should look at Alice some more.
Let us continue looking at Alice.
In the mid-2000s there was a brief fad in Australian government messaging where they went out of their way to insult the public as much as possible.
This fad eventually died out after the tourism board attempted the same style of messaging in the UK, causing a minor scandal which led to the head of Tourism Australia, Scott Morrison, getting the sack.
The first time we drove past the “don’t drive like a cock” sign, my mum looked at it was immediately SO confused - after all she’s a good semi-conservative Christian woman. My brother and I knew it right away but for the next half hour she guessed literally EVERY other word for cock (don’t drive like a rooster, chicken, hen, chick, bird, fowl, poultry) trying her goddamned hardest to make the sign make sense until my - at the time - eleven year old brother got fed up and yelled COCK at the top of his lungs from the back seat.
My mum was FURIOUS - we weren’t even allowed to say “heck” - until she realised he’d just been telling her what the sign was, and for the rest of the three hour trip our good semi-conservative Christian mother proceeded to amuse herself by muttering “cock” under her breath and giggling like a teenager every time she did.
We still bring it up every now and then. So that particular advertising campaign has been making my family laugh for over a decade.
This one was always my favourite, though:
Reblogging to make sure this excellent story is seen
They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones
It’s about PayPal. This is all about fucking PayPal
He’s still pissed they fired him. He’s still pissed they didn’t like his idea of calling PayPal X
20 years and he has not learned a single thing. He’s still throwing a tantrum about people not liking his bad name suggestion decades ago
oh DANG what a treat. for those that could not make comic con it appears A SCARE IS BORN complete panel was recorded. with chuck and erin a. craig, johnny compton, silvia moreno-garcia, and catriona ward. really good talk about proving love through horror
Autism: I need this specific routine to be followed for me to be in peace and working
ADHD: I need extreme flexibility and opportunity to work on what i want in different days
AuDHD: Okay, so, i need... A general routine, like, okay, i cannot funcition without a routine, right?, But after two (2) days, i cannot function with this specific routine, i need a little change, but if it's too much change i will literally cry right NOW
The latest from the Matic meme:
"Two thirds of the earth is covered by water. The rest is covered by Matic on Defense."
Someone also called him "giocatore sontuoso" which auto-translates to "sumptuous gamer" and that's definitely the title of my one man nerd burlesque act.
"As long as you're working miracles," a fan recently said to him, "can you speed up the service on the Metro?"
Also, as a midfielder he generally plays defense and a slang term for a strong defense is "a wall". A journalist recently interviewed Matic and the official team socials put up clips; the comments filled with "She's just interviewing a wall."
Matic plays for Rome but comes from Serbia, and when asked if he preferred Italian or Serbian food, he said Serbian.
His Italian fans, albeit mournfully, declared "If the professor eats Serbian we all eat Serbian" and "I didn't know walls could have food preferences."
His teammate Paulo Dybala, the Jamie Tartt to his Roy Kent, simply commented with the Italian equivalent of "Say it ain't so." Which is a little rich coming from an Argentinian never photographed without a maté cup in one hand, but whatever gets the fanfic written, Paulinho.
The fans have taken to calling the ship Dybatic.
Understand, these are not fans in the sense that you and I are fanfic-writing, ship-having fans. The football fans, the fans who are there for the football, have begun shipping them and came up with a ship name all by themselves.
Can't blame 'em, though.
[ID: An image of footballer Nemanja Matic, a tall man with very close-cropped hair, with his arm around footballer Paulo Dybala, slightly shorter, who has his hand on Matic's chest. Both are in AS Roma uniform kit, and the photo is visibly taken during a game.]
i for one am eternally grateful to live the golden age of Dead Dove : Don't Eat fanfiction cause I can finally read about my poor blorbos being put into 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖚𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖘 without having to vouch for the moral compass of my entire lineage
when you and your friends are joking about how there's going to be a mattel cinematic universe now after barbie was so successful only to realize that's exactly what has already been in the works for the last few years
note: blumhouse is thankfully no longer attached to this one
The American Girl one in particular confuses me.
There have BEEN American Girl movies. There have VERY MUCH been American Girl movies.
They did Made for TV movies for Samantha, Felicity, and Molly, and then the Kit movie had a theatrical release that had like, Abigail Breslin as Kit, and like, Chris O'Donnell and Joan Cusack and stuff. All four of them got Best Friend dolls and some extra outfits and accessories in the catalog.
But I have to assume it didn't go GREAT, because they stopped doing the movies for a while (which was probably also related to the recession), and switched focus to some direct-to-video and direct-to-streaming stuff after that, with more of a focus on the Girl of the Year character dolls.
Most recently, they'd announced one for last year's Girl of the Year, Corinne, apparently filmed it, and then it looks like it may have vanished in relation to the whole HBO Max debacle? Also the later American Girl specials (which had far less fanfare and less in the way of new merchandise) for Maryellen, Melody, and Julie recently vanished off of streaming services.
So I'm not really sure what it is they're thinking they'll accomplish here? And I'm not sure how you'd do some kind of pan-American Girl movie, without doing some kind of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure kind of thing? It's not like Barbie, where there's not really an existing story.
(Also a lot of the dolls adults will remember playing with have been retired and aren't sold anymore, so I'm not sure who they'd be marketing this to.)