[robertfagden]

okay well when you say it like that it makes it sound stupid

[astriiformes]

Inspired by my walking past a home built in 1754 in my new neighborhood, which isn't even the oldest building in the city. As someone born and raised in the Western US (where we do have some very old buildings, contrary to popular belief, just not in the middle of most cities), it made me curious!

When was the oldest extant building you can reasonably walk to from your home built?

20th century

19th century

18th century

17th century

16th century

15th century

14th century

13th century

12th century

11th century

10th century or before

Remaining time: 3 days 13 hours

(Use your judgement for definitions of "extant," it doesn't have to be used for its original purpose but my intention is a building that could theoretically still be used, not just the remnants of one.)

[hiitspussyhands]

Should vampires be bigoted? Was the daughter they got killed insensitive to her father's trauma? Why don't these ancient monsters have my exact same progressive 21st century values? Must be bad writing. Was the abusive noblewoman relatable? Were everyone's pronouns respected? Was all that incest and torture really necessary? Are the murderers my friends?

[naropinosa]

[blowjob-bandit]

Yahoo deletes my porn but leaves me this.

[serialkillerbettycooper]

the problem with shows that aren't riverdale is that they don't have betty cooper in them. they don't even have jughead.

[speaknowtaylor]

air? salty

the door? rusty

bedsheets? twisted

plans? cancelled

meeting? behind the mall

you? never mine

[hoziernatural]

[o-craven-canto]

Alternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped:

catastrophe -> contraverse cephalopod -> capitoped chlorophyll -> viridofolia democracy -> populimpery homicide -> anthropoctony homosexual -> equigamic kilometer -> millimensure interregnum -> mesarchy magnanimous -> megapsychic manuscript -> chirography motorcycle -> ergatorote microscope -> parvovisor oxygen -> acidofex polyamory -> multierasty television -> remotoscope universe -> monostrophe

[future-crab]

Imagine being Anais Mitchell and writing a song about the rhetoric of fascism so incisive and prescient that 10 years later an actual fascist would use that exact rhetoric down to the highly-specific phrasing in his presidential campaign. But also it took 10 years for the project you wrote that song for to move from living room shows to concept album to theater workshop to off-Broadway to Broadway, and its Broadway debut ended up coinciding with said fascist's successful bid for the presidency, and now it looks like your song that you wrote in 2005 is a super unsubtle reference to that one particular and highly-topical politician.

Frankly if I were her I would have started killing.

[krsonmar]

She performed at Parents Weekend during my first semester of college. She was nobody at the time and my college was a tiny little hippie college no one knew about and someone knew her and got her to play for us. She sang some non-Hadestown songs and then told us about "this folk opera she was working on" and it was about capitalism and art and Orpheus was totally not a stand-in for how she felt guilty about neglecting her husband while she was working lol!! but he was written as a soprano like her and the villain was Hades who was a parallel to this businessman we won't name who keeps running for President even though he never gets anywhere near it 🙄🤭 and of course he has this gorgeous younger wife who's too good for him 😉 and he keeps running on this platform of "building a wall to keep out the immigrants" 🤣 and he's written as this deep baritone and he calls his followers "his children". His song is like a catechism where they go back and forth about what their belief is, and she sang it for us in her soprano voice, just her and her acoustic guitar. She has this high, kind of cherubic voice and wore these cowgirl boots and would do this stepping thing with them to keep the rhythm, and I very distinctly remember her warbling in her almost childlike voice in our tiny auditorium, "And that's why we build the wall, my children, that's why we build the wall!"

My roommate bought a bunch of Anaïs's albums from her and had her sign them at her little merch table after the show. She played them over and over and got kind of obsessed, so maybe 10 years later I was bored at work and wondered, "Whatever happened to that singer?" I Googled her and several results were about this musical she had written. Hadestown was in the middle of a successful tour of Canada, and their next stop was the West End of London, where they hoped to build up enough buzz to make a bid for Broadway after that.

Jump a couple years later, and I am about to celebrate a big birthday with my family in NYC...so of course we're gonna see a Broadway show. I waffled between Avenue Q, which I'd wanted to see for years, and Hadestown, which was new and getting some really good reviews, and finally decided on Hadestown.

I said to my mom and sister, "Remember that singer at my college Parents Weekend performance?"

"Oh, the lady with the voice and she did the stepping thing?"

"Yeah, remember she talked about writing a musical? I got us tickets to that!"

We just managed nosebleed seats in the highest mezzanine, and the performance was excellent. A week or two after I bought the tickets, the Tony nominations for that year were announced, and Hadestown got a slew of them; if I had waited another week or so, I'd never have been able to afford the tickets. I got to see the original Broadway cast and Patrick Page was freaking delightful. That number sounded so good in his deep, deep baritone, and people's reaction to it in 2019 was...very different than it had been in that obscure little college amphitheater in 2007.

In 2007 we sort of smiled indulgently at a super-indie folk singer with cowgirl boots and a big dream about a folk opera, and had a good laugh at the absurdity of this businessman and his bizzarro little plan about building a wall and when was he going to quit running just because he could afford to?

In 2019, watching that song performed on Broadway by a veteran actor and a chorus of professional actors with award-winning sets, three years after the inconcievable election of that stupid businessman and all the vile actions and change in the mood of the country that happened in his first term, but not knowing we were a year away from the start of the COVID pandemic...people in the theatre sort of looked around at each other uncomfortably, like wow...damn....

And it made the ending of the play so much more impactful.

[hylialeia]

she didn't have to kill him in the first paragraph goddamn 😭

[guccifloralsuits]

If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself

Emily Wilson you’re goated

[ladytharen]

She absolutely destroyed Nolan in this review O_O

"Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion."

and

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem."

Well, that tracks for a Nolan film -

"The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting."

Yikes -

"If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat."

The lines she calls out in this section will probably make a least a couple of my friends laugh incredulously -

"I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."

....oh my GOD, EMILY -

"The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt."

And deepest respect that she didn't fail to mention the film's colonialism in production. You can tell she added the very last paragraph saying "'thanks for maybe getting people interested in classics" only because an editor begged her to say something - anything - nice about the movie.

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Joyland (2022)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Remaining time: 2 days 22 hours

[godlessondheimite]

rare genuine w from threads

[queensinchains]

SHARP OBJECTS (2018) 1.01 | Vanish

[insomniac-arrest]

I think if we all try really hard we can make Patricia Widow’s Bay the next top shelf blorbo

FINALLY sopping wet tragedy of a woman

[dogpuppy]

[glamfellens]

"he can't write women" is crazy because its not like women are aliens or whatever but i guess men dont see women as people so it all adds up huh!!!!

[glamfellens]

perhaps i am missing something but i just dont understand how this is an issue that is struggled with by men. i know i answered my own question above but sometimes i'm floored by the stupidity of it yknow.

[glamfellens]

and then these guys will sit at the top of best selling lists and be considered giants of the genres they write for. its fine i guess