Aro of Light

Expect science fantasy, linguistics, fandoms, LGBTQ+. Also spoilers for fandoms. Also stuff about my books and worlds and languages.

[wayfire-official]

Sex should have a secondary gameplay loop where you build bases, manage resources, and expand your territory

[flammableengineering]

polycule

[redstonedust]

it's usually morally correct to make fun of the usa but whenever i hear british people do it it feels kinda tone deaf. idk if we have the high ground here guys. its like your mom making fun of your mental illness like ma'am where do you think i got it from.

[flowerbobatea]

[zootycoon-archive]

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

[loseremo]

[syzygy-yzygy]

THE ORIGINAL? ON MY DASH

[this-too-too-sullied-flesh]

this post led to a series of events that had martin scorsese himself reacting to his alleged movie goncharov and it has less than 400k notes almost 3 years later?

[darkestcinema]

renaissance in the 21st century

[blogitalianissimo]

[tinyphantomsalad]

some more

[kitsunebattleboxer]

the WHAT??

[personification-of-anxiety]

okay, found her

[whenstarsfall]

[whenstarsfall]

some more good replies from the notes

[whenstarsfall]

[camellianswer]

i didnt expect these to hit so hard but then they kept going and going….my god

[tahthetrickster]

my son molag bal who i hate

[lawbutch]

I sat behind the same girl in class all year and I was painfully jealous of her beautiful curly hair and I assumed she had just figured out some hair routine I didn't know, or had more time in the mornings than me, or was somehow more disciplined or just lucky. And then my friend talked to her one day and found out she gets 500$ perms and highlights 3 times a year. The answer was literally just money. The same friend found out that most of our classmates who I thought were just naturally smarter than me went to private highschools that cost 25k a year.

This is all a metaphor to say that there will be times when you feel like other people understand something that you don't, or have some ability that you don't, or are better than you in some way because they've accomplished something you can't. And it's going to turn out that they're just rich and they spent thousands of dollars to make that happen. You are not bad, you are not broken, the system is just fucked.

[booksbybingo]

villains are hard to design. making them ugly is dangerous, depending on what traits you choose to frame as monstrous or undesirable, you could very well end up saying something fatphobic, racist, anti-semitic, etc

but if you make a hot villain then people will get thirsty and demand redemptions and refuse to acknowledge their evil actions, no matter how despicable

Solution: Full body armor and masks. You don’t see people shipping themselves with Sauron!

[safitheartist]

…………..you think?

[macko-99]

…………..don’t look up Sauron on AO3

[arofili]

Nothing fails to crack me up like this post - the vain hope that somewhere out there is some awful nasty thing that there is not also a person whose kink that is, the idea that covering something up won’t make people obsessed with finding out what it looks like underneath, the surface level understanding of Sauron and complete lack of knowledge of the Silmarillion and it’s fandom, the fact that Sauron was canonically hot as fuck, the amount of Sauron erotica I have seen, God this post never gets old

[prismatic-starstuff]

The Poster Of The Comment: You don’t see people shipping themselves with Sauron!

The Very Large And Dedicated Community Of Sauronfuckers In The Tolkien Fandom, collectively:

[silly-jellyghoty]

Point. For those who have not read Sillmarilion, Sauron used to look something like this

[whitetigerdemoness]

[pekingopera]

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

There's this notion that being able to stream professional theater shows will hurt the industry, because people won't go to the effort to support live theater anymore, and this is based on the anxieties of the film industry, but live theater isn't a film. The better analogy is sports.

Look me dead in the eye and tell me that people being able to sit at home and watch The Game -- the fandom that encourages, the ongoing investment over the years, the memories and traditions of Watching the Game with family and friends -- harms the ticket sales of real live go-to-the-stadium sports. Of course it doesn't. Of course all that *is the reason* that people care so much about sports they'll invest a small fortune on not only tickets but often travel costs to be part of it all in person. And the people who aren't doing that *can't* do that and weren't going to regardless, but their at-home participation and investment still boosts the profile of pro and NCAA sports as cultural institutions.

Maybe it's possible to fall in love with film and be immune to the romance of Going to the Cinema such that you'll just freely choose the same film in the comfort of your living room. It's not possible to fall in love with something that happens live and not want to be there to experience it. The consequences of procasts, for theater just like for sports, can only be A) more people motivated to make live theater part of their worlds, aka more money, when theaters everywhere could desperately use more money, or B) more love. Which is worth arguing for because reasons I assume I don't have to defend.

[depsidase]

[weirdplutoprince]

Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of someone else's actions that I am directly impacted and severely affected by

[sunderwight]

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

[adizzyninja]

A humble snubnose eelpout on its way to the whale fall buffet when some nearby humans give it a quick, unintrusive study:

[julianova44]

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!

[depsidase]

[mr-deep-downer]

[sailatina3]

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

[threeninesfine]

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

—J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

[creatingblackcharacters]

"From these made-up horrors, these fictionalized enemies, he had created a villain worthy of the violent bravado that he imagined he would display if confronted by said villain. This web of racist lies was what he needed to make himself seem like a man. He invented a story about bad guys who were out to get him, and he repeated it to himself and others until he believed it. Then he made up another story- of himself as hero, defending himself and his family against this violent threat- and he repeated that one until he believed it too. Brian wrote himself into his own American westen, a world of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. And for a man with no job, few friends, and a family that couldn't stand him, pretending to be a main character in violent American mythology was as close to belonging as he was ever going to get."

Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo

[mommahoney]

Lying Liars

YES!

[gaeliclass]

Law to make it illegal to lie in elections passed in Senedd

Welsh parliament agrees law to outlaw lying in future Senedd election campaigns.

[katiedingo]

I had to check this wasn’t The Onion

[liberalsarecool]

She called it.

Unqualified Republican appointments and GOP 3pstein capitalism have abysmal consequences.

[doloneia]

ok ive seen nolans odyssey and what the fuck was that actually

[doloneia]

Parts that made me tweak in a dim-lit movie theater:

1. Every time we meet a woman or enslaved individual that, y’know, had some semblance of agency in the text, Nolan has just… removed that? Circe’s commanding presence & how she genuinely overpowers Odysseus? Gone. Helen actually stealing the show in Book 4 where she walks down into the room and controls the conversation re: Odysseus & Troy? Gone. Utterly Gone. Lupita Nyong’o gets 0 chance to speak on her own terms and its actually so depressing. Athena doesnt get to do ANYTHING it was actually shocking. Telemachus is instead accompanied by Real Mentor for fuck knows how long. Athena is the one who pushes him to leave in the first place??? But not in Nolan’s adaptation ifg 😭 Also I’m genuinely unsure here but it seemed like Circe & Calypso’s divine status was… nonexistent?? They’re both goddesses but apparently not to Christopher Nolan 🫤

And this treatment extends to Odysseus’ slaves, specifically Eumaeus & Eurycleia (eurynome & philoetius not appearing in this goddamn film ifg). Almost every action taken by Eurycleia in the Odyssey is attributed to someone else in Nolan’s adaptation, she gets 0.2 seconds of screentime, its actually absurd. I think she has two lines in the whole movie. Eurycleia. Odysseus and Telemachus’ nurse. The woman who canonically organizes the doors to be locked during the suitor’s slaughter? Who canonically helps secure Telemachus’ provisions for Pylos? fuckin. Not There. And Eumaeus (who literally perfectly models xenia to a disguised Odysseys while living in extreme poverty) notably Does Not Get To Do That in Nolan’s odyssey, instead he’s like. injured I guess? I’m so fuckin confused as to why that happened, it just made the plot more convoluted. Medon is also just not there at all. Medon who is actually the fuckin best?? My underestimated king??? Where Is He.

2. oh my god everything abt the scene with Polyphemus makes me want to claw my eyes out (except maybe his eye? that looked kinda cool idfk). yknow how polyphemus appears, speaks to the crew, and they let their guard down? how the polyphemus episode represents the world outside of greek customs like xenia? how he fucking talks to them? he talks to them and his neighbors? yeah. in Nolan’s odyssey, there are no neighbors. there is no existential mirror/cyclopean foil to ithacan society. there are no other cyclopes. He doesnt even fucking talk 😭😭 <- i mean he gets one line but the audios so distorted that without captions i had no idea what he said

3. Anticleia reunion scene? Nonexistent. Laertes? Nonexistent. Allegedly still around. Sir Not-Appearing In-This-Film. Book 15 reunion between Telemachus and Odysseus? Nonexistent. Reunion between Odysseus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius? Not there. The fucking marriage bed scene? The goddamn marriage bed? NOT THERE. screams into a bag

4. ODYSSEUS “DIDNT WANT TO RETURN HOME” 😭 they keep fucking saying this over and over again too and. No he very much did. No home means no guaranteed kleos guys. his sons life is in jeopardy but Ok christopher shitlan do whatever the fuck you want, i guess

5. every time i heard them say “our civilization is collapsing” or “they say the peoples from the sea are attacking” or “our age of bronze is ending” not only did i feel my soul die a little more inside but i also kept thinking “man, this sounds a lot like the white supremacist belief in ‘western civilization’ just superimposed onto a falsified image of the late bronze age” and thats because It Is.

strange decisions:

1. boar scar apparently occurred when odysseus was an adult???

2. elliot page’s sinon gets one helluva backstory which i guess was kinda cool if you ignore elliot page getting brutally slaughtered in the first 30 seconds of the movie? not sure how to feel about that

3. travis scott kept showing up randomly which was like. fine i guess? genuinely im not sure what the difference between him & phemius was supposed to be. i didnt even see phemius. tbf i was taking notes this whole time so maybe i missed him? but travis scott shouldve just been phemius idfk why he wasnt

4. The Phaecians are just not there guys and i have no idea why. odysseus’ wanderings are being narrated to calypso?

5. the crew mutinies at scylla instead? odysseus tries to sail towards charybdis??? this was a bizarre sequence

6. no nestor or peisistratus. somehow telemachus sails to the 100% inland palace of menelaus. who needs a chariot when you’ve got a Boat i guess

7. half of my notes just say “what happened to show, don’t tell” because the amount of exposition made me want to slam my head into the wall

highlights:

1. anne hathaway and tom holland had a very good dynamic, i feel like they really captured some of the tension between penelope & telemachus, ie penelope running the house for 20 years and still assuming some of that authority vs. telemachus trying to grow up/assume control of the household/establish his own kleos. loved that dynamic tbh. one of the better parts of the telemachy sections

2. lupita nyong’o was great in the uh. 30 seconds she had on screen. im so serious helen was fucking robbed in this movie

3. himesh patel fucking carried every scene he was in on his Back

4. rare cicones appearance

maybe the real sea peoples was the troy we sacked along the way

[doloneia]

some may wonder. if no phaecians, how does odysseus talk about his wanderings? well ☝️

nolan has decided to merge calypso’s island with the lotus-eaters and the phaecians. Somehow. its basically an amnesiac odysseus explaining to calypso what happened but its really unclear when or how he lost his memory i guess he was too hopped up on lotus

[anthonybourdyke]

keeping these notes because they're very important

i'd recommend "Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past" by Johann Chapoutot

[razielim]

Reminder that we're only at the beginning of wading into a wave of "nazi-influenced popular culture" at this time. It's going to grow in market share and get worse before it gets better, and seemingly eeeeveryone around you will be all "Lol It's just a movie; relax."

You can't stop it, but you can be discerning in your own interactions with media, and develop a strategy to express your criticism to people you trust to have a civil conversation while firmly denying the worst offenders in your life the chance to feed off your outrage.