II II Minor Interests: Fallout II II Benny II He/They/She 18+ II II Art side blog is Insubordinati0n II II Genderfluid II II Tell me if you need anything tagged II SupernaturalâPotCâMaze RunnerâHavenâJurassic ParkâStar TrekâClueâSkylandersâMarkiplierâHTTYDâThe HobbitâGhostbustersâResident EvilâGravity FallsâScooby DooâDead Poets SocietyâHLVR:AIâHannibalâStanley ParableâValorantâKiller FrequencyâLethal Companyâ II II Destiel November 5th 2020 II II Frenrey got 98th place in top ships of 2020 II II
so ummm welcome to my jar:) lemme show you around! theres some holes poked in the top so i can breathe, theres some leaves to munch on, and ive even got a twig! #mytwig
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.
and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"
gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"
my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."
gallerist: "that isn't true."
and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.
so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.
One time I was at a pub trivia night with some writer friends and we almost won but there was a tie. As a tiebreaker they asked us and the other team to write down as many moons of Jupiter as we could in two minutes.
None of us are very into astronomy so at first everyone was like oh weâre gonna lose but there were three of us at the table that night who were either former classics majors or otherwise super well read on Roman mythology and the three of us were like give us that paper right now and we just took turns writing down all of the lovers of Jupiter from mythology that we could.
Speaking of medieval history, it's fun how the popular accounts are all "the peasantry disliked nobles, but typically loved the King and attributed any harmful decisions to bad advisors", and then the rare examples of surviving testimony from actual peasants are like "I hope the King literally explodes".
I've probably posted about this before but it still gets me that Ripley (my parrot) has a special nickname for my spouse, Tev. Like he knows and uses the names of everyone in his flock (me, Tev, Steve, and Cheese. also a couple of our friends and my mom's dog) but because Tev calls him "Ripley buddy," a couple years ago Ripley started calling him "Tev buddy" instead of just Tev. He doesn't call anybody else buddy. He knows that 'buddy' is a special suffix for him and Tev to use with each other's names because they love each other. Doesn't that just melt your fucking heart
My cats have this meow that means "please come with me to fix this" after which they'll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or 'empty') food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem', they look back at me, clear message.
What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.' I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me... the rain. "Please fix this" they say. "Please get rid of the wet"
"Silly kitty," I say, "I can't control the rain." I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.
I hope this is a universal cat owner experience. Every single night he begs me to turn the sun back on so he can watch birds on the balcony. I tell him no, I cannot do that.
But I can turn lights on and off in the house and he's fairly certain I'm just not applying myself properly here.
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail thatâs stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but itâs all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Trumanâs life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic theyâve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesnât the modern day suck? Letâs go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And itâs a lie. Trumanâs life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia theyâve presented is a lie. Itâs an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory thatâs comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but itâs also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. Itâs a lie. It doesnât exist.
I donât know. Iâm spitballing. Iâm biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but itâs very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
eating rice, there's definitely an upper limit to how much you can eat, but thinking about it in abstract? when filling a plate? it's hard to conceive of it. that's what makes it so dangerous
Also people being obsessed with Greek mythology as kids wasnât invented by Percy Jackson. My dad read the Iliad and the odyssey in high school because one of his friends was super obsessed with Ancient Greek lit and he was like âwell I canât let him be smarter and more well read than I am Iâve gotta catch upâ
it bothers me when someone brings up misogyny in shounen anime and people shrug it off with "its designed for teenage boys, what can you expect." like well. idk i think its actually pretty important that shows for teenage boys are normal about women. i mean i think all media should be normal about women but teenagers are impressionable i think we could put a little bit of feminism in the teenage boy shows. it might do some good. you never know.
itâs a pretty well-known phenomenon that you only get a couple seconds with your horror creature fully visible onscreen before it gets âchuckied,â a term coined by yours truly referring to the shift between the first and second acts of childâs play (1988) as the audience gets used to seeing the little chucky puppet moving around and consequently can no longer buy into the filmâs serious slasher tone in the absence of the horror of the unknown. the tuunbaq in the terror and the dogomorph in alien 3 (1992) are also famous victims of chuckyingâjust like how lovecraftian horror usually falls flat on the screen, too much visibility and your scary, amorphous creature will become a very morphous puppet or cgiâd in picture. the easiest way to combat this is of course to keep the creature obscured for as much of the piece as possible; for instance, despite their oppressive presence throughout their respective works, the beast in over the garden wall is shown for less than six frames and the eponymous kaiju of cloverfield (2008) is never properly shown, allowing each to retain their mystery and danger. another route is to simply lean into the campiness of it, like the later childâs play franchise and alien resurrection (1997). in the case of the blob (1958) a mere satirical title sequence song is enough to completely transform a fairly standard creature feature into an enduring masterpiece of hokey fun. the third option to combat chuckying is for the horror creature to constantly transformâthe thing (1982), the fly (1986), and aliens (1986) show their creatures in loving detail, but there is always something the audience hasnât seen yet, something they donât know to brace themselves for. itâs a fine line to walk, of course, but thatâs the nature of the game when you want to turn the concept of the unknown into something knowable enough to bite you
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amandla
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