Mild Amusements

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
Coming out of Tumblr retirement to issue a necessary trigger warning for BIRDS OF PREY: Disappointed to say I did not enjoy this film. Yes, the character work was great, the actors really brought their A-game, especially Margot Robbie. The fight...

Coming out of Tumblr retirement to issue a necessary trigger warning for BIRDS OF PREY:

Disappointed to say I did not enjoy this film. Yes, the character work was great, the actors really brought their A-game, especially Margot Robbie. The fight choreography was stellar and entertaining. But I feel the trailers did the film a great disservice (much like SUICIDE SQUAD before it). This is not a fun action romp. This is an extremely dark story. Ewan McGregor as Black Mask is the most unsettling villain since David Tennant as Kilgrave.

Gendered violence is baked into the plot, purposely, but I could have done without it. Or at least a warning so I didn’t almost bolt from the theater during a particularly nasty exchange which left a female character (a glorified extra) partly naked and crying. Besides that scene, just off the top of my head, the film has an implied sexual assault, an attempted sexual assault, and several torture scenes with strong undercurrents that sexual violence is imminent. Oh, and a throw-away line indicating Harley’s dad sex trafficked her from the age of six.

That scene from the trailer where Harley looks like Marilyn Monroe from GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES? It isn’t a fun musical number but a hallucination brought on from being back-handed too hard while tied to a chair. 

Yes, vengeance belongs to the women at the end of the day but there was no need to make the story about this. At all. Especially in such a ham-fisted way when MAD MAX: FURY ROAD showed you can deal with these issues without traumatizing the audience. It felt like an over-correction to SUICIDE SQUAD failing to portray Joker and Harley’s relationship as domestic abuse. Go see it if you want, but please go in knowing it is very triggering if you’ve ever been in an abusive situation. 

Birds of Prey Trigger Warning TW: Sexual Assault Warner Bros DCEU Harley Quinn
tehbadgerinquisitor
creme-meme

rethinking about Doc Oc’s villainy reveal in Spiderverse again

it wasn’t just the fact that she was gender-swapped that made her reveal so surprising, but her whole vibe made her villainy reveal so much more shocking because the combination of her wrinkles, her crows feet, her soft smile, her wacky hair, her huge nerdy glasses, and her general appearance as a punk Ms Frizzle remix, it was all the more extraordinary that this well established spiderveser villain didn’t immediately look like a villain, and yet when she revealed her identity it was so obvious, completely subverting our standards for what ‘villainy’ is, so when the tentacles came out of this kind-looking lesbotic sex symbol, we all just went

image

they got us. the art and design team played us like a violin in a Niccolò Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B Minor and we ain’t even mad

plush-anon

#nothing beats the moment of ‘and i for one cant wait to watch’#i had picked up that she was Not A Good Guy but it came across as more#science nerd more into the science than human consequence#but that line suddenly flipped it to someone who knows the consequence#and she fuckin loves it#GOD WHAT A GOOD CHARACTER (via @linddzz)

didney-worl-no-uta

Doc Ock’s reveal was the best villain reveal ever since Toy Story 2′s Stinky Pete

packetdancer

I also love the strong implication (though never outright stated) that Doc Ock and Aunt May have some kind of history together, just like so many good villains in a rogues gallery have some kind of tie to their nemesis.


Peter: “Let me guess, your friends call you Doc Ock?”

Doc Ock: “My friends call me Liv. My enemies call me Doc Ock.”


Later, when Doc Ock smashes through the door of the Parker house:

May: “Oh, great. It’s Liv.”

zetsubonna

I loved the shit out of that because it’s revealed in the basement lair that May is a genius engineer herself and helped RIPeter design his gear, including the suits and the webshooters.

They were probably colleagues, you guys.

Oh my god, they were colleagues.

into the spider verse spider-man aunt may
ryanhatesthis
mitochondria-eve

UM EXCUSE ME THOS E ARE FUCKING PIXELS HOW

street--trash

Seize the Day was a calendar program made by in 1994 by Buena Vista software. It features graphics that at the time, were revolutionary because of the way they handled color cycling. These images were static bitmaps, but by changing color values, they appear animated. What is also impressive about these images is that they had full day night cycles built in, rendered also through color cycling.
A few years ago, a html5 version was made. A copy was uncovered online and there is a way to use the program through DOSbox. As well, one of the original programmers for the project, Iam Gilman, has thought of the idea of remaking it, open sourced, for modern machines.

xeppeli

thanks for writing a more elaborate explanation. i’ve seen these pictures be spread like wildfire without mention of the technology behind it.

queenofthegeese
tilthat

TIL of the “Tiffany Problem”. Tiffany is a medieval name—short for Theophania—from the 12th century. Authors can’t use it in historical or fantasy fiction, however, because the name looks too modern. This is an example of how reality is sometimes too unrealistic.

via reddit.com

incorrectdiscworldquotes

“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”

–Terry Pratchett, probably

jeneelestrange

Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time. 

There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay
Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY

brunhiddensmusings

people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like

tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar

tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up

tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts

ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?

our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin

iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.

romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!

ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?


melusineloriginale

Adding my personal favorite: people in medieval Europe took baths.

wetwareproblem

India had ways of processing iron for weatherproofing that we still can’t match 1600 years later.

dr-archeville

Truth is stranger than fiction, and history is weirder than you think.

ayellowbirds

this post gets better every time it comes across my dash. To provide some more: those Romans also had vending machines, automated puppet plays, doors that opened to the sound of horns when you lit a fire in front of them, and working steam engines. All invented by one dude, Hero of Alexandria.

madamehearthwitch

People generally want to think that the Dark Ages is the sum of the entire history of the world.

forumgamer

Charlemagne had a frigging PET ELEPHANT, sent as a present by the Caliph over in Bahgdad.

Emperor Frederick II. (around 1200) crossed the Alps with his own private zoo, including giraffes, in order to impress and dazzle his Germanic subjects, and it frigging worked. He also introduced legislation that a doctor was not allowed to also sell medicine (to prevent obvious charlatanery), but had to write a recipe for an apothecary to then redeem, which is a system STILL IN USE in Germany and other countries. He spoke several language, was tolerant towards his Muslim subjects in southern Italy (you read that correctly) and was opposed to trial by combat on reasons of it being unfair and irrational. Oh, and he wrote a book on ornithology. 

Ancient Persians knew how to make frozen desserts even in summer, thus basically being the inventors of ice cream.

Medieval monks had an efficient way of testing for pregnacy (by pouring the urine of a woman on a toad, which, if the woman was pregnant, would change colour…).

meganwest

One of my favorite things to do is to send posts like this to my brother, a historian. He had MANY potential additions to this thread, but my favorite:

My pet peeve is that everyone thinks that nobody traveled in the middle ages.

I have a letter from a monk at Ripoll, near Barcelona, sent to a monk in Fleury (Central France) asking that they return a book they had lent. The book was first obtained in Pavia (Italy). The monk wanted it back really fast because he hadn’t asked for permission from the librarian to loan it.

This was from around 1020. The more things change … 

cheeseanonioncrisps

The Ancient Egyptians had an efficient pregnancy test as well. They’d get a woman to wee on some barley and wheat seeds, and if they sprouted it would mean that she was pregnant.

There was a study done on this in 1936 and apparently it had a 70% accuracy rate, which isn’t a patch on modern pregnancy tests but is very impressive for a civillisation that hadn’t invented the wheel.

Stone age people took surprisingly good care of each other. There have been skeletons found of people (homo sapiens and neanderthal) with physical disabilities that would have prevented them from providing for themselves who still lived fairly long lives and were buried nicely. Because it turns out even prehistoric humans thought that people had a right to life whether or not they were ‘useful’.

They also had a primitive form of surgery that involved drilling holes in people’s skulls, we think to prevent migraines or something. Whatever it was, it must have worked at least slightly, because we’ve found skulls with multiple healed over patches, meaning that people survived this and then kept coming back.

Not to mention language. I don’t know why this in particular is so hard for people to grasp, but if you’re talking about homo sapiens then there is literally no reason to assume that their language wasn’t as complex and fluent as ours. For that matter, a lot of what we in Europe think of as ‘the stone age’ was happening at the same time as the Ancient Egyptians were building pyramids and having a whole civilisation and shit.

You might as well present them as speaking only in grunts.

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