32. They/them, but okay with masculine pronouns. Bi. Kobold enthusiast. This blog contains OCs, furry art, and trace amounts of shitposting. https://linktr.ee/wearybat
finally completed my outfit for Alias Chicane! thought I'd better give it a test run before heatwave 3.0 hits us... a dapper chap from the 1920s! please disregard my extremely not period appropriate stove
ArtFight attack for @/localhermit! I can’t pass up the opportunity to go back and draw characters I initially designed/others have adopted from me in the past. It’s nice revisiting them and translating their design + personality changes to my current style :^)
This guy’s a sleazy televangelist type now and I figured it’d be a real fun excuse to mimic like an early aughts TV broadcast sorta vibe. I can smell the CRT static already…
I'm not a man. I'm not a woman. I think... I'm just me. And that's the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced.
This has been… a wild and very emotionally challenging Pride Month for me. To cut directly to the chase, I'm transitioning into being nonbinary, and believe you me, that's both freeing and quietly terrifying. Watching almost thirty years of assumed personal identity fall away beneath you is, honestly, one of the scariest things I've ever experienced.
I've been openly a bisexual man for years, so I'm not not queer - but at the beginning of the month, a high-profile writer I've long looked-up to came out as trans. Obviously, I was super excited for them, but to my own surprise, I also felt a lot of envy. This wasn't the first time I'd experienced this, but I decided I should, in good faith, seriously inspect my feelings about my gender.
What followed was about a solid month of serious introspection, challenging my assumptions of gender about myself - it was easy to come up with justifications for my envy, but it was harder to believe them. I've never had an issue with being masculine, but I found that I wasn't as comfortable with the label "man" as I once was - and I wasn't sure what that meant for me.
Talking to many of my queer friends was helpful - and enlightening, knowing not only that I wasn't alone but that many of my anxieties were shared. Since then, I've told many (if not quite all) of my friends and my family - and almost everyone has been incredibly supportive.
The last time I publicly came out, when I announced I was bisexual, I waited for five years because I was worried about what friends and family would say. This time, I don't want to wait that long. I'm an enby, and I'm so nervous about that, but I want to learn. I don't know if this is an end destination for me or not; hell, I'm only just now realizing that gender is so much more infinitely complicated than I thought it was. But for as scary as it is, I also feel like it's the right thing for me, however it shakes out.
I'll... probably post some less, uh, angsty art about me figuring this out, but... this has been a really challenging Pride for me. I have a lot of questions about myself right now, and not as many answers as I've used to in my past.
Ironically, the being-on-fire thing? Not a metaphor for a heatwave. Still a metaphor, but y'know, not for the obvious thing that's the real-world problem rn.
Just got back from watching Disclosure Day with the family for Father's Day, and man… talk about a movie that's thematically dense but is just, like, not hitting. And, like, the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get.
So, welcome to The Kobold Talks About Movies Hell, thanks for coming, snacks are in the corner. Next slide:
I want to start by, like, giving credit where due. On a thematic and formal level, Disclosure Day is firing on all levels. The cinematography is so tight as to be unreal, and the color grading? Oh, Mac, can we talk about the color grading? I've been dying to talk about the color grading all day. The way that ignorance is tied to cool colors while the warmer hues are used to indicate truth and empathy is so good. Love that. The shift from blue to yellow to red is great, solid if heavy-handed stuff.
Seriously! Look at that use of color! Fuckin' fantastic! Michael Hatzer and his whole team a fuckin' prize! Or, like, at least give them their due for some solid work.
And thematically? The film's cool! Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a film very much about faith through the lens of aliens, and Disclosure Day keeps that legacy strong by examining the way that faith functions. If anything, I think there's a really cool thesis to be written about how the film basically uses a UFO conspiracy plot to argue that empathy is an idea that is fundamentally compatible with the moral model of the universe put forward by Boethius or St. Augustine. (Hell, you have an almost literal scene between symbolic!God and symbolic!Devil hashing it out at the half-way mark, arguing that empathy is both core to faith and a crucial part of what it means to be human.)
But. But. And you know this "but" was coming - the film falls flat for me. I don't rate movies, but if we use the classic star format, I think it's safe to say it's a perfectly two-of-four film, middling not out of a lack of quality but out of being messy at the fringes. It's a film about empathy that seemingly is so interested in the discussion of empathy that it misses the mark to actually be empathetic. And some of that is due to the plot being torn between finding humanity in its characters while also needing to be a Summer Blockbuster in the most predictable sense.
Much of the movie is a traditional Spielbergian action flick, where the Interpid Heroes™ must uncover the Truth™ while Evil Conspiracy™ attempts to stop them, and that undercut much of the inherent empathy that Disclosure Day was asking the audience for. Colin Firth is a real culprit here, bouncing back and forth between being an almost cartoonishly evil Bond-villain-esque figure and a teary-eyed, Milton-esque fallen leader sort. While the film attempted to create sympathy by having Blunt's character see "through" him, I think the placement of that at the film's halfway mark ultimately undercut the dramatic pacing of the film, dropping what could have been the single most dramatic moment of empathy from the film before the third act reel even begins.
Colin Firth is a very good actor, but holy shit, if this was absolutely, absolutely not the role for him.
Frankly, being about faith, aliens, and empathy, it's hard for me not to compare this less than favorably with the other major film of this genre this summer, Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary wrings a great deal of empathy out of even its most heinous characters by simply giving them grounded motivations and asking us to understand their behavior - like, Eva Stratt is not a good person, but we sympathize with her because, man, this is clearly hard for her to do and she is not enjoying the hard choice she has to make here.
This woman would have had Noah Scanlon's ass out of the building by 5 p.m. and have been perfectly believable in the process - all I'm saying.
There's other pacing issues, too - Wyatt Russell's character could largely have been cut from the film without impact, Eve Hewson's role felt like it was there mostly to offer heavy-handed thematic explanations of the plot (though the knife scene was admittedly excellent), and you could have condensed Firth's and Henry Lloyd-Hughes's roles into the same character to condense things. But I think, at heart, the problem with Disclosure Day is that it feels a decade late to the party. The sudden dramatic reveal of the news story breaking online, the military tensions with North Korea, Russia presented as a major threat… these are all plot beats that leave Disclosure Day feeling like a 2016 spec script that languished for a decade before being picked up.
I think, ultimately, Disclosure Day feels like a profoundly neo-liberal film in that way. I could gesture at the way that the plot leaves open the consequences of what would happen upon revealing a conspiracy of its scale (or, perhaps more cynically, what wouldn't happen), but that feels too Cinema-Sins-y, disregarding how the film is very much about something more than its plot. More than that, it feels like it's so obsessed with the way the message is revealed that the characters are just vessels for the themes. The way that the whole world falls quiet watching the news, the way the story breaks via viral channels, the way no course of action other than "listen" is suggested, all pull the movie away from being brave enough to have empathy and challenge and instead position like a chastising parent, asserting a moral high ground.
I'm sometimes worried I'm not openly queer enough. I'm bisexual, but I do tend to keep that on the down-low. For Pride this year, I just want to remember that ultimately, I'm good enough, and that I shouldn't let my worries define me. I'm bi, I'm being me, and that's reason enough to be proud.
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
janainaart
origamiaround
annaxmalina
snowghoul
areudirty
