My husband and I went to go see a community theater production of Midsummer Night's Dream, and the advertisement for it said that it would be a modern language telling of the Bard's tale.
And what they meant was that at some points, the actors playing humans (and not fae, who spoke always in the original verse) would speak in plain vernacular English. 'What is happening?!' 'Are you kidding me?' Type stuff. There was even a funny bit after the play within a play where the Duchess tells the actors that their play was notably done, and they all whoop and holler, and one of them says, 'Let's all quit our jobs!' Which was very funny.
But y'all, I can't tell you how disappointed I was that it wasn't Gen Z slang from start to finish.
The dog has one of the Great Old Ones reassuring him with pats and treats tho. If the King in Yellow had played with u and fed u for ur entire life and let you sleep in his berth of unspeakable blackness at night, and then hugged you reassuringly when Cthulhu rose from the depths, you might be able to handle it better too
Eerily similar to an idea that slithered into my brain while I was listening to Nightmind on YouTube at work, except it was Slenderman setting his not-eyes on some rando only to find out they were already marked and getting into a custody dispute with the King in Yellow.
Basically the Character was sent an email that contained part of the text from The King in Yellow, but had done a school paper on it (failing grade, no credible sources), so closed the email after a few lines (which was too late). So now actual books keep showing up in their apartment.
And they know they're cooked, but they've got finals, so they just need to stave off madness long enough to get that (useless) degree, so they basically, each day, sit down in front of the book and spend ten minutes 'preparing to read it' only to 'have somewhere to be', because they 'learned that if it looked like they were going to fully read the text and descend into madness, the King would back off a bit.
They did try just reading a different book with a King in Yellow book jacket over it, but then the next time they went to the campus library, every book was The King in Yellow, so they didn't do that again.
They start adding a bunch of yellow to their wardrobe, because the King liked that.
Then slenderman starts his funny business.
Character is confused. They assume it's to do with KiY, but they're not familiar with this particular tactic.
Slenderman defaces one of the books left by KiY and Character has a full on panic attack because what if the King thinks they did that. They can't throw away 'a sacred text' but they can't keep a text with a symbol not of KiY's make on it.
It was an interesting thought experiment that kept me in dopamine for the rest of the shift.
There was a scene I imagined where, in order to appease the King, Character started installing a bunch of yellow jewelry in their face, and in the process accidentally evoked Slendermans facelessness.
I also imagined it on the premise that even someone who was genre savvy wasn't safe from things incomprehensible.
During one of my many, many YouTube binges, a video was presented to me that was a clip of an episode of Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace. It was interesting and dramatic and I do not remember which scene it was. Not because it was forgettable. I'll get there.
I watched it, thought, 'huh', and then continued back onto YouTube's main page, not realizing that my algorithm was now permanently affected by this decision.
There were more clips of Ruyi. I (--Breaking news, I just remembered which clip was first. it was the one where she's empress already and one of the other harem girls wore imperial red to like, sass her, and then got shut down. There's a reason this wouldn't stand out after a while.) saw more drama. I went to wikipedia. I learned this was a sequel series. I looked up the first series. I learned that the episodes were on YouTube.
So I watched Empresses in the Palace.
I do not speak or understand Chinese, but I was in from the first scenes where Zhen Huan was apprehensive about the harem selection process but still turned down the proposal from Dr. Wen (love that guy. truly the mvp of the palace infirmary).
44 hours later, I'm ready to watch Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace, and am immediately thrown off by the changes they made to the canon of the original story.
Spoilers, y'all.
Zhen Huan has several epic scenes at the end. Concubine Ning (who was called Pai in the translation that I watched. No idea why. Honestly, there were a lot of weird name translations. Hua was translated as Fleur, and all the servants had thematic naming conventions except for Jinxi. Jade and Vermillion. Spring and Autumn. Daisy and Petunia. I suppose to make it easier for the non-Chinese speaking watchers, except that it did not help as much as they thought, especially when I wanted to look them up on Wikipedia. Woof. Anyway.)
Concubine Ning poisons the king at the end, and Zhen Huan gets to tell him how awful he was and also that most of his kids weren't his kids at all, which was great.
And then after his funeral, and after her adopted son Hong Li is on the throne, she visits the Empress and has the 'Deal With It' moment. (If I could - if I had the skill - I would make a gif of that moment and do a freeze frame, shades drop in, snoop daaaawg! It was pretty boss.)
All of that is undone in the sequel.
Instead of being discovered as a murderer obsessed with how the Emperor never loved her as much as her sister, the Empress was thrown in prison for political collusion. Ruyi wasn't made to marry Hongli as a punishment for being rude to Zhen Huan's daughter. Instead he was already in love with her.
Zhen Huan's insistence that the girls keep their interactions professional and above board are immediately undercut by her vindictively using the same political maneuvering that made her miserable for her entire concubine-ship on Ruyi because Zhen Huan doesn't like her aunt.
So it's only cute when she does it, I guess.
I'm gonna push through (eventually. I have other things I want to work on and I can't do that and read subtitles at the same time), but damn.
Rough start.
You know what I want, though, now that I've watched this?
I want a version of this where the women realized that the Emperor was the cause of all their ills and like... unionized.
First things first, I just want to say that I don't know enough about Ariana Grande to care about her in any way, either personally or parasocially, so I don't know why this happened.
Last night I dreamed that I, my husband, a couple friends, and Ariana Grande, all got an apartment together, and that she was just every horror story about roommates mixed with social media friends that has ever existed on Reddit.
She would offer to do the last couple of dishes and then make a video where she pretended she had done all the dishes in the drying rack by hand herself.
She used the main areas for videos without warning anyone that she was doing that first, and several of the set-ups featured the doors to people's rooms, so they'd be caught on film in various states of waking without their permission, and she would 'apologize', and promise never to do it again, but then immediately forget that promise.
She threw out a three hundred dollar pan because it was dirty, didn't understand why I got upset by that, and refused to either retrieve it from the garbage, replace it, or pay for it.
And she also hit on my husband every chance she got. It was very weird behavior.
I DON'T KNOW THIS WOMAN!!
BRAIN! WHY ARE YOU RUNNING A SMEAR CAMPAIGN ABOUT A WOMAN I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT? A WOMAN IT IS SO VERY UNLIKELY I WILL EVER MEET?
I don’t mean to be old but computer used to just have games. U didnt have to pay for em either but if u wanted u could get a little CD that put the game onto the computer and you could play it forever and ever even if the company that made it went to hell and shit. You didn’t even need the internet or wifi or anything. And it was pretty neat
It would be a finished game, too. If you played long enough and did really good you could go to all the places and get all the stuff. You never had to pay more money later it was just there. onn compter
"I hate when the skeletons on decorations aren't anatomically accurate." A Halloween skeleton isn't the same as what's inside you, idiot. It's different. A Halloween skeleton is, like. A guy or something. It's an animal.
If Halloween skeletons had bones like ours instead of hollow bones like that of a bird, they wouldn't be able to play their ribcages like xylophones. You sound so fucking uneducated right now.
hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.
works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.
for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:
We're not caught up, btw, so please no spoilers. I have to watch the Dubs because I have ADHD and need to be doing things with my hands which also require my eyeballs, and I don't speak Japanese.
So the last thing that happened for me was the arc where Deku was off by himself and Class 1A had to pull off a multi-stage rocket to hold him still long enough to convince him to come back to the school, which... my god, I have so many feelings about that scene. It was so good. Such an intricately crafted scene.
Might write an alternate universe of RWBY that changes the parts of it that I felt weren't particularly well-written or supported by the narrative and potential themes later
