Meghan Brunner @meghanbrunner - Tumblr Blog

“Spirits and gods were woven into the fabric of ancient life not because of a lack of scientific knowledge, but because our ancestors lived in the larger world; one not designed by humanity. It was a bristling place, it was Nature entire, with all its merciless peril and untamed wonderment. The shelter that our ancestors forged from the living real was far thinner than the bubble within which modern humanity moves. What’s more, the ancients comprehended this far more readily than modern folk do. The fierce, unveiled wilderness was just outside the door of those houses of wattle and daub. Night truly fell in those fire-lit villages. Darkness meant something to our ancestors. Today we have lost this connection because we are quite literally addicted to light. We have washed out all developed areas with constant artificial illumination. Darkness is now often little more than an ambient backdrop to our nocturnal activities.”

— Richard Gavin - The Moribund Portal: Spectral Resonance and the Numen of the Gallows (via forbidden-sorcery)

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

one of my favorite things about fanfiction is how many writers don't necessarily consider themselves fans of the original work. lots of writers just saw the movie or read the book and were like "that was unsatisfying but now I have yet another canon to fuck around with"

highlady-fireheart

gantzllat

Some times fanfiction is a love letter to canon. Some times fanfiction is just a friendly banter with the canon. And sometimes, fanfiction is “11 things the canon did wrong” nailed on the church’s doors.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

just enjoyed the vivid mental image of a 15th cent Augustinian monk standing outside a cathedral screaming at the top of his lungs a homemade buzzfeed listicle of 95 Reasons Destiel Deserved Better

hawthornetaylor

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hawthornetaylor

Hey y’all! Big old Smashwords summer/winter sale seemed like a good time to do a SUPERPOWERED LOVE sale... also convenient because book 10 is due in the end of August, and that’ll be THE LAST ONE EVER! Wooooo! Need to catch up?

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/kateyhawthorne

chief-of-project-e

Irish people; The faeries aren’t real

Irish people; No fucking way will I go in that faerie ring

queer-trans-amazon-deactivated2

#look#you don’t go in a fairy ring and you don’t fuck with a stone in the middle of a field#these are just facts#nobody does it#fairies will fuck you up#Ireland#folklore#fairies (Via @false-dawn)

false-dawn

Look, I don’t believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. That’s just common sense.

ohmeursault

Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.

superindianslug

My general rule of thumb: you don’t have to believe in everything, but don’t fuck with it, just in case.

elocinneem-deactivated20160605

^^^ that part

dduane

This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.

pamisleyphd

The Southwest is like this in some ways. You don’t go traveling along the highways at night with an empty car seat. Because an empty car seat is an invitation. You stick your luggage, your laptop bag, whatever you got in that seat. Else something best left undiscussed and unnamed (because to discuss it by name is to go ‘AY WE’RE TALKING BOUT YA WE’RE HERE AND ALSO IGNORANT OF WHAT YOU’RE CAPABLE OF’ at the top of your damn lungs at them) will jump in to the car, after which you’re gonna have a bad time.

If you’re out in the woods, you keep constant, consistent count of your party and make sure you know everyone well enough that you can ID them by face alone, lest something imitating a person get at you. They like to insert themselves in the party and just observe before they strike. It’s a game to them. In general you don’t fuck with the weird, you ignore the lights in the sky (no, this isn’t a god damn night vale reference, yes I’m serious) and the woods, you lock up at night and you don’t answer the door for love or money. Whatever or whoever’s knocking ain’t your buddy.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

^ So much good advice in this post right here

weirdo-city

I live in the south and… you just… don’t go into the woods or fields at night.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

Shit’s wild and I sound fucking crazy but I swear to god it’s true.

witchy-woman

Every time this post comes around, it’s my favorite to open up the notes and read the stories. Probably shouldn’t have since I’m sleeping alone tonight, but you know, it’s fine. 😂

mistresstrevelyan

Austrian girl here who has lived in Ireland for 5+ years. This shit is LEGIT. I’ve seen it with my own two Catholic eyes.

Sure, visit during the day. That’s alright as long as you’re respectful. But you couldn’t PAY ME ENOUGH to go there at night. These are also the last places where you wanna start littering.

gayantlers

I grew up in southwest Pennsylvania which is a weird mixture of American cultures and environments. I was in the heavily forested mountains (northern Appalachia) but had lots and lots of corn fields and cow pastures. Like the Smoky Mountains and fields of Kansas combined. And being so cut off from a lot of the world, we had our fair share of ghost stories.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you).

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I was walking to a friend’s house one night. It was about 20 minutes down a dirt road with forest on one side and a cornfield on the other. I’ve walked past it many times and wasn’t really concerned. My main worry was coming across a skunk or porcupine. I didn’t have a flashlight because the moonlight was bright enough and I knew the walk really well. Then I saw the eyes. I immediately averted mine (because for some reason that’s how to not annoy it) but they kept wandering back. They were still there, watching. I heard rustling and saw the eyes come closer and I took off running. I got to my friends without a scratch, but I was terrified. I mentioned it to my friend and that’s when I found out it was A Thing. Her parents agreed and shared their stories. I brought it up more and almost everyone knew what I was talking about. It was a phenomenon a lot of folks around town experienced but never mentioned. To this day, I don’t linger around poorly light cornfields at night.

matt-the-blind-cinnamon-roll

@thedevilinthealchemy and I are very old friends. I used to live in the same town as her, in Southern California. One night, a few years ago, we were celebrating the end of finals and the start of winter break, and we just hanging out in her car, killing ourselves with late night Taco Bell. Well, we decide we don’t want to go home just yet, so we start driving. We drive up a canyon, near her place. Now, we both had made this trip many, many times, in daylight and dark. A local tourist trap is in that canyon, and there’s a shortcut to a college campus that goes through that canyon. It was a normal winter night in SoCal.

Well, about halfway through I start to get scared. For no reason. Within the span of two heartbeats I grew so terrified that my palms were shaking and my mouth was dry and for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the wood to the driver’s side.

“Turn around.” I say, quickly.

“Dude, already on it.” Kama said, doing a quick three point turn. I look in the mirror as she’s pealing away and see the creature. It was vaguely humanoid, and hairless, with elongated limbs and pitch black eyes, on all four limbs, loping after us. Now, if you’re in the know, you might be thinking “hey that’s like the creatures from Until Dawn, I call bullshit on this.” Well, Until Dawn was four years away, and it wasn’t even in development yet, so shush.

I rip my eyes away from it and hold on tight as she drives. Then, at the same time, both of us get this instinct and we speak.

“Don’t look in the backseat.” Needless to say, neither of us did. She drove damn near 90 on a dark canyon until we saw the lights of her complex at the mouth of it.

I haven’t gone back in there since, and that canyon got shut down about a year ago due to a landslide and it hasn’t opened back up. I’m a history major, and research always has been my first love, so I go digging. I visit the local history society, talk about my tale. Turns out the whole valley used to belong to a people called the Tativam. One day, after the Spanish arrived, they vanished. Without a trace. We have a graveyard of theirs that we know of. One of my professors was trying to stop the houses that were being built on it. Spoiler alert: he didn’t, and the houses are hella haunted, and nobody wants to live there.

Personally I do think the creature is a wendigo. That chain of mountains is park of unbroken chain that leads right up the Serra Nevadas and Donner Pass.

THE Donner Pass.

You do the math.

poisonousdame

@carolinemb88

dryadgurrl

I’m from Northern California myself, state capitol, and while we don’t have much by way of critters (sure, we’ve got Bigfoot up in the redwoods, but those guys are mostly harmless).

Most of what we’ve got is due to the Gold Rush, and not just the hauntings (though there are plenty of those, a great many of them are theatre ghosts, most of whom are harmless, though some are very particular). What we’ve got by way of Things were brought along on the trail from the Old Country to the East Coast and then along thousands of miles of wagon trail.

We’ve got our fair share of phantom hitchhikers and women in white, but mostly what we’ve got are the Things That Survived The Flood. There was a flood in the early 1860s, one that caused the state capitol to actually be relocated for a while, and when it was over and the floodwaters receded, there was enough sediment left behind that what had been the second floor of buildings was now the ground floor.

There are a handful of places in Old Town that you Do Not Go after dark (despite being safe during the day). When I worked in Old Town, giving comedic history tours, we started from and returned to a restaurant that had a club downstairs (in what had been the ground floor before The Flood) and there was a storeroom down there that got locked at sunset and no one questioned it, but the door to that storeroom was pretty much right next to the portable shed we changed clothes in, and I know, more than once, I heard knocking and scratching and one of my very last tours I got a facefull of wet-plant rot smell (not quite mildew, but not stinky like rotting meat gets) so bad I couldn’t breathe. It’s one of the reasons I stopped doing the tours, really, because I was starting to get the feeling I was being singled out, and I didn’t want to find out what by.

teaboot

When I was like 17, I lived in the woods on the northwest coast of canada. One day, I decided to go for a walk in a part of the woods I had never been to before. Because sometimes I see weird things out there, I made sure to bring my grandma’s dog with me, just running free and off-leash. These are wild woods, too, not parkland, so the only clear areas are deer trails. I stuck along to those because, you know, I don’t want to get lost, and about an hour in I hear this strange whistling. Just a short call- One long, sharp whistle followed quickly by a short, piping one. Now, I’m in a good mood and I figure it must be some new kind of bird, so I whistle back: long call, short call. It whistles again. I’m amused, so I whistle again. Long call, short call, and then just to be fun, I throw in a little trill at the end. It whistles back. It whistles back the exact same pattern. Now, normally that would freak me out, but I was in a REALLY good mood. A really weirdly good mood. So, I whistled again. And when it whistled back to me, I giggled. I… Don’t giggle. Not alone in the woods over basically nothing. The whistle came again, and there was a rustle in the distance. Seeing a shady outcrop, I ran to hide, feeling like I was playing hide-and-seek with someone. It whistled, I whistled back. Another rustle. Closer. I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen the dog in a while. I looked around, and saw him a few feet away, staring point-blank and totally still into the forest. The whistle came again, closer this time, and suddenly my weirdly bubbly feeling was gone. Instant fear. I got the dog’s attention and we absolutely booked it out of there, all the way back to the eight-foot-high gate that marked the start of the wild land. I locked it behind me, and we never went back. I never really had any idea what was whistling with me in the forest. Maybe some kind of mimic bird that had escaped home, or a squatter hiding out there sewhere messing with this kid and their dog. I only just remembered that when I was a kid, we learned about the Tsonoqua woman. The Tsonoqua woman is supposed to be an old woman who lives in the woods. She carries a basket on her back and has long, tangled hair. When children wander away from camp, it is said that she snatches them up in her basket and steals them away forever. But because she has bad sight, she uses her keen ears to hunt, and calls out with a birdlike whistle.

jennarosewrites

@hawthornetaylor and I talk about this all the time. We may not believe in it, but we’re sure as hell not gonna fuck around and find out either.

modernmissbennet

people in period clothing doing modern things is my aesthetic

starsfadingbutilingeron

i can’t believe you forgot the most important one

modernmissbennet

thank you! I couldn’t find that one in google!

revolutionary-pirate

I would like to add Alexander Hamilton himself to this collection.

lionowlonao3

and of course, alexandra dowling using a tablet computer on the set of BBC musketeers

rhube

You forgot my favourites.

gaslightgallows

These are all canon.

charlieism

this is my favourite post

captain-raven-knight

On the Gandalf note, this is also amazing:

May I add this one out of sheer delight?

It cracks me up every time. I love this!

over-the-misty-mountains

They’re updating their relationship status to “sworn brothers”

a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives

adorable pirate Luke Arnold taking photo of his crush star Toby Stephens

skeletonislandtheme

don’t forget this Incredibly Powerful Image from the set of the princess bride

k9effect

THE PRINCESS BRIDE ONE OH MY GOD

thecyndimistuff

my English prof teaching abt cover letters today and me trying not to bring up the luke skywalker cover letter post:

thecyndimistuff

@serialreblogger here you go:

lolotehe

anthonybourdainpartsunknown

corrective action

vague-humanoid

be the change you want to see in the world

dearydeerling-deactivated201904

His name is Onur Albayrak! Here’s the story.

Hurriyet Daily News reports that Albayrak had been hired to photograph the July 5th wedding at Turgut Özal Nature Park in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya. On the day of, when he noticed that the bride-to-be didn’t look like an adult, he asked the groom her age and learned that she was only 15.

“The groom had come to my studio some two weeks ago and was alone,” Albayrak tells the Daily News. “I saw the bride for the first time at the wedding. She’s a child, and I felt her fear because she was trembling.”

Albayrak then reportedly refused to continue as the wedding photographer and attempted to stop the wedding.

The argument soon turned physical when the groom attacked him as he was attempting to leave, Albayrak says. The photographer ended up breaking the client’s nose in the fight, according to local reports.

Albayrak confirmed the reports in a Facebook post, which has been met with widespread approval, attracting thousands of Likes and hundreds of overwhelmingly positive comments.

“I wish this had never happened, but it did,” Albayrak writes. “And if you were to ask me if I’d do the same thing again, I’d say ‘yes.’ Child brides are [victims] of child abuse and no power on earth can make me photograph a child in a wedding gown.”

The legal minimum age for marriage in Turkey is 18-years-old for both sexes, and child marriage is punishable by imprisonment for men who marry underage girls. Despite being outlawed, however, child marriage is still prevalent in the country and remains a controversial political issue.

[Source] – go read the rest!

erikacpataki

this guy is a hero.

btw - let’s remind ourselves, americans, that unlike turkey, in the US the legal minimum age for marriage is only 18 in two states. in alabama, you can be married as young as fourteen years old if you have “parental permission”. in california, you can get married under 18 if you go to counseling, have a parent with you when you apply for the marriage license, and appear before a judge. in some states, there isn’t even a specific minimum age for marriage.

the minimum marriage age for girls in new hampshire is 13 years old.

48 states allow child marriage.

child marriage is not an “over there” problem, it happens right here, legally. any one of us might find ourselves called upon to break somebody’s nose if we encounter something like this occurring. we also have a responsibility to support groups and laws trying to end child marriage in this country.

previouslysaltyfandombrat

And often times, it’s not a child marrying another child. It’s a child marrying a much older person.

Please remember that child marriage is NOT an “over there” or “not here” issue. It’s just not as talked about in the USA.

measureformeasure

shakespeare characters having weird reactions to deaths: macbeth / hamlet / julius caesar

macklesufficient

sorry to be pedantic outside of the tags but i love these as exhibits a b and c of why the “shakespeare is meant to be performed” cliche is real; on the page they look wild but actors know how to read the embedded stage directions

two of these examples can’t be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrude’s line and brutus’ are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesn’t have to be (macduff and malcolm’s lines add up to ten beats indicating that it’s shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)

remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the scene— they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. there’s a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is

MACD: your royal father’s murdered.

(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)

MAL: oh.

(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ...

by whom?

all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor it’s playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh i’ve always found “drowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) .....where?” to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ..........where did it happen?

the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two ‘o’s and a ‘ha’ (they aren’t meant to be pronounced exactly like “Oh” or “Ha”; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what they’re experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every “o” or “ha” or “ah” etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium

it’s a rich moment for actors because in classical text it’s frowned upon to act “outside” of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that aren’t words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. “act on the line” says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeare’s voice), it’s diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than you’re given. but when you’re given the space of ten beats for “ha portia”, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that “ha” into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?

in the same way that lear’s “howl howl howl” is very much not just the word ‘howl’ said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say “oh.”, quiet and childlike, or maybe that ‘o’ is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat

anyway you get what i mean. you wouldn’t look at a blueprint and say you saw the house, you wouldn’t read the sheet music and say you heard the symphony, etc

part2of3

Star Trek DS9 S04E10: Homefront

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

Every time someone tells Worf about Greek Mythology he’s just like “The humans know where Zeus lives. Why do they simply not raid Olympus and slay him for his misdeeds”

keeper-of-the-flames

YES

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

“If a god were to hypnotise my wife into having sex with a bull and giving birth to a Bull Child I would kill that god in no uncertain terms

RIP to King Minos but I’m different”

butchhamlet

macbeth is shakespeare’s funniest tragedy and mr. macbeth is the funniest character in macbeth. he listens to these creepy old women tell him he’s gonna be king and IMMEDIATELY decides the only thing he can POSSIBLY do is kill a guy and then he waffles about it for a full act and finally comes to the conclusion that it’s morally wrong and then HE DOES IT ANYWAY and his entire fucking life falls apart with an inevitability that is genuinely hilarious

butchhamlet

the other exceedingly funny thing is that he doesn’t even cover his ass that well like??? sure the morning right after the murder he gets away with it but even then he almost straight fucks it by killing the guys he framed. and then within a few months everyone in scotland independently comes to the conclusion that he did it ANYWAY because like. WHO else would it have been

butchhamlet

funniest moments in macbeth:

“o? by whom?” (a classic)

“what, you egg” (also a classic)

“twas a rough night”

macduff telling lady macbeth he can’t say what happened because she’s a woman and then spinning around and IMMEDIATELY telling banquo within FULL earshot of ladymac

“that i did… kill them… 👉👈”

macbeth giving the whole “blood will have blood” speech and then going “…….what time is it”

the witches, whom we’ve just seen making a potion of baby parts, saying “something wicked” about macbeth. your king steps onto the scene and these literal actual witches go “oh, bitch? a bitch?”

malcolm’s I Fuck Too Much Speech

and then. when he takes it back. he says “why are you silent?” which implies macduff is just. sitting there.

“take thy face hence”

macbeth absolutely wrecking young siward’s shit and then just going “thou wast born of woman” to his corpse

butchhamlet

in honor of this post getting an absurd and terrifying amount of notes here are my favorite tags

also, for those of you asking to see macbeth as a dark comedy: i haven’t seen a production specifically billed as such but definitely the funniest macbeth i’ve seen is the folger 2008 one which, by the way, is free on youtube! it definitely leans into the horror aspect but it also is just. laugh-out-loud funny sometimes like these actors know how to punctuate their lines to get at that absurd humor! and i’ve watched it twice in like two months

antique-scarecrow

was anyone gonna tell me Macbeth was a comedy or was i supposed to read that here myself?

jenniferrpovey

Okay, look. There’s something modern readers don’t understand, because definitions have changed.

To us, a comedy is a funny play and a tragedy is a cathartic one.

In Shakespeare’s time, a comedy was a play with a happy ending.

A tragedy was a play with a sad ending.

That is it.

Shakespeare was a comedic writer. All of his plays are funny to some degree and I suspect the man couldn’t write seriously if he tried.

A lot of the time modern troupes miss this and play the tragedies straight. They aren’t supposed to be. They are supposed to be darkly, ironically funny.

Because after all, these plays were written to be performed in inn yards where everyone was drunk. That did not necessarily exclude the actors.

A performance of Macbeth that makes you laugh is an authentic, correct performance. One that understands the basic fact that Shakespeare is more like Taika Waititi than Quentin Tarantino.

meghanbrunner

“That did not necessarily exclude the actors.”

I feel this accurately sums up.... everything, really.

biglawbear

Here's the thing about shows like South Park and Family Guy that make their money off of being edgy and offensive. They fundamentally reduce their viewers' capacity for empathy. If I found a joke funny, and you found it offensive, you're just too sensitive. This is directly related to the ride of the alt right and the election of trump. In this essay I will

oceanfoxo

OP WHERE'S THE FUCKING ESSAY

biglawbear

So instead of writing the essay this is exactly what I'm talking about. This shit reduces your capacity for empathy. If you can't understand why people are hurt by a simple joke, nay, think that's the whole point... How the hell are you supposed to feel for someone when they come to you complaining of ACTUAL oppression? It's the foot in the door phenomenon. A little oppression isn't too bad, cuz it's funny, right? It hardens your heart against others

Somebody actually wrote this essay already. It's a Twitter thread about how the alt right recruits teenage boys by getting them to post slightly offensive memes... And then when they get called out and don't understand why the alt right channels their anger at feminists and women and people of color and liberals. According to this thread, boys are being "set up"

Read the whole thread at the link above this is just a snip

"offensive" shows like Family Guy are a precursor to the alt right and you can't change my mind

biglawbear

Y'all this shit so basic even Spongebob one it. It's not about being too sensitive. It's normalizing abuse through comedy that's a foot in the door to greater oppression.

gummywormy

this put into words what makes me so uncomfortable about these shows

demonius-darkblade

mooching off the government is a good thing actually. what the fuck else are they gonna do with the money? buy more bombs?

nerdymouse

If you are paying taxes it’s impossible to “mooch” off of the government. It’s just going “hey, remember that money I gave you? It’s your turn to help me out now.”

kipplekipple

It is always impossible to mooch off the government. It is the government’s job to look after its people.

academicssay

kedreeva

jebiwonkenobi

Once upon a time I worked in this little burger/coffee/ice cream shop and a lady came in one winter and asked if we had a caramel apple drink and we were like ‘well we have cider’ and she was like ‘no I don’t remember what it’s called but this place made a drink that was chai tea, apple cider, and caramel’ and Breezy offered to try and make something for her but she changed her mind and left so Breezy and I were like ‘alright let’s try this’ because we had chai tea, instant cider mix, a shit ton of caramel, instant hot water from the espresso and too much free time.

And let me tell you it was delightful. It tastes like watching the leaves changing color and dancing in the wind. It tastes like picking out pumpkins and gourds and fresh apples at the farm up north. It tastes like witches and freedom.

I make it every year now and this year I walked in the house on the morning of October first with all the ingredients and shouted ‘FALL DRINK’ and my roommates were like ‘????’ so I made them Fall Drink and now every time they get home from work they’re like ‘Fall Drink pls?????’

Anyway I remember literally nothing else about that woman but I’m very grateful to her.

lightrises

for anyone wondering about proportions/etc here’s op’s answer from the repiles:

not-rude-ginger

@gaslightgallows I feel this would be relevant to your interests.

gaslightgallows

I don’t like caramel but I can vouch for hot chaider being amazing.

scifrey

Deareat @simonalkenmayer I feel like this is relevant to your interests.

Also, I do something like this in the crock pot with the overly sweet Growers Pumpkin Apple Cider, chai spices, cloves, a bit of orange juice, and some super dry Pinot Grigio.

Mix, heat, and serve on a nippy night best spent cuddled under blankets with a book.

simonalkenmayer

My friend, you have essentially backward engineered a wonderful winter drink from the Stuart period.

White sack wine, cider, spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger) tea, sugar, and if you want it authentic, a bit of cream or whipped egg. All this is brought together in a low temperature and then stewed for a time. It can also be “pulled”, a process in which one “stirs” the concoction by using a ladle and pouring it repeatedly from high in the air. Makes it foamy and frothy.

Serve warm.

On a cold night, this is a delightful thing. Believe it or not, we also used to make it with a stout beer instead of wine. For a darker richer flavor.

raevenlywrites

Yall I just made fall drink with homemade caramel (because of course I did) and let me just say it drinks exactly like eating an apple dumpling on my god

writterings

sometimes i forget how straight people won’t jump at the chance to watch a show with gay rep in it. i literally said to my straight friend today “oh you should watch this show, it has lesbians in it” and she stared at me for a good few minutes in confusion before asking “uh?? okay??? but what’s the plot”

ninjaikke

#straight privilege#is asking ‘whats the plot’ instead of ‘do they die’

lets-steal-an-archive

tygermama

well, he's got my vote

kitrona

And Seanan gets to handle the CDC? Hell yes.

aerodaltonimperial

YOU HAD ME AT “BRING BACK AND FEDERALIZE VINE”

allsortsoflicorice

I would 110% support the anti-dynasty law.

mothmanismyuncle

i will cover the entire eastern coast in literature and speeches for this man

meghanbrunner

This person had me at taco trucks

gendice

no greek god is inherently and wholly “good” or “bad” because they were all flawed and imperfect in some way with different facets of personality and character to serve as a reflection of society and human nature itself

gendice

oh except for zeus he was a straight up absolute bastard

seven-oomen

fuck zeus

gendice

do NOT.

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