This is the most random place I have online. Here is where I'll dump random photos of family and things that interest me, thoughts that wouldn't fit on Twitter, and other shiny things that happen to snag my interest. Also, I will reblog any pictures that pop up on my radar and stand out to me.
zaturnz-barz-deactivated2017071 asked: oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.
Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?
As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.
The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked.
According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion.
The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story.
One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised.
IIRC “Judgment Day” was part of the inspiration for the excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”
Tumblr is my favourite social media site because this place is literally uninhabitable for celebrities. No verification system, no algorithm that boosts their posts, it’s a completely lawless wasteland for them
Except Neil Gaiman.
Neil Gaiman goes on Tumblr to avoid writing and honestly, same.
Let this be our July 2021 reminder that Hobby Lobby stays a truly dangerous, disgusting company and you’d do well to get your craft supplies from just about anywhere else.
They also announced recently that they would no longer carry Halloween items because it sends an un-Christian message, and that decision obviously doesn’t hurt or inconvenience anybody, but it’s eye-opening because Halloween decor, crafts and party supplies outsell those of any other holiday, season or even, yes even Christmas, so think how hardcore a big corporate brand has to be to put such a dated, fringe conviction over their largest profit season.
I knew someone who used to work at Hobby Lobby who told me a lot of the higher ups at her store and several of the other local stores were still die hard believers in that bullshit Mark of the Beast conspiracy about retail barcodes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with that policy.
Hobby Lobby purchased thousands of ancient artifacts smuggled out of modern-day Iraq via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in 2010 and 2011, attorneys for the Eastern District of New York announced on Wednesday. As part of a settlement, the American craft-supply mega-chain will pay $3 million and the U.S. government will seize the illicit artifacts. Technically, the defendants in the civil-forfeiture action are the objects themselves, yielding an incredible case name: The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae.
In 2010, Steve Green, the Hobby Lobby corporation president, travelled to the UAE to inspect a shipment of cultural material; and despite warnings from an expert in cultural property that the objects in question were likely from looted archaeological sites in Iraq,executed a contract to purchase 5,548 artefacts for $1.6 million. From 2010 to 2011, dealers in the UAE and Israel shipped parcels of looted cultural material to three different corporate Hobby Lobby addresses in the US. Each shipment of cultural material was sent without the required customs documentation and under shipping labels which falsely declared that the cuneiform tablets and other cultural property were “ceramic tiles,” “ tile samples,” and “hand made [sic] clay tiles (sample) manufactured in Turkey”.
Yeah, that wasn’t an accident. He was smuggling that shit. Poorly. Because he was caught in 2011 and that incredible case up there happened in 2017.
i can understand the use of large house for a family but what do those single rich fucks with the goddamn true mansions do with all that space exactly? like let’s table all valid criticisms of the spending and constructing of them aside and just focus on what exactly you do with that space
As a real estate photographer I can tell you with a confidence that most of that space is entirely unused. Extra kitchens which have never seen a meal, billiards rooms with untouched felt, an office that no one has ever worked in, a second, or third family room, that no family member has spent any significant amount of time in. I once shot a place with a walk-in closet so large the dude had an 8-person dining room table in the middle of it.. like.. no one is hanging out in your closet homie.. maybe downsize?
this is a fantastic answer, thank you for replying. sadly it confirmed my fears that these people are all insane
Traditionally mansions and manors had a lot of space because they were the lifelong homes of multiple generations of a family (the lord and lady, their unmarried children and heirs, and various widowed aunts and in-laws), dozens of servants, and rooms or even wings set aside for a constantly rotating cast of guests who had travelled days or weeks to visit so of course they were going to stay a while.
Now there’s just Hank, Kate, Keighleyee, and their sterile palace.
There was also the Social Obligation Space issue. Take the Regency period, for example, because that’s where my expertiese is.
Travel was expensive, uncomfortable, tiring, and time-consuming. Multiple guest rooms were genuinely necessary if you ever wanted to see anyone who didn’t live within a few miles because if your family spent two days coming to visit they weren’t going to turn around and head home the same day. Social visits of multiple weeks were the norm, and even a month or two wasn’t excessive if you really liked each other and wanted to hang out.
If you were rich, there was also the House Party/Family Function/Rural Ball/Whatever obligations, where politeness actively required you to have room for everyone to sleep over. Not only that, they were all going to bring personal servants, and you had to be able to sleep them too. Anyone with the budget was socially obligated to maintain a number of spare rooms for both rich people and servants.
(An important indication of the Deeply Impoverished state of the Dashwood ladies in ‘Sense and Sensibility’ is that they have only one spare bedroom, and are thus very much socially isolated because they can’t accommodate more than one visitor with no servants.)
In addition to this, impoverished relations, widowed sisters or daughters with their children, aged or disabled servants and an endlessly changing number of maids, valets, nurses, governesses, etc might need to be housed temporarily or permanently at any time. Visiting lawyers, men of business, sick-nurses and attendants, midwives/doctors specialising in childbirth, uninvited relatives or even just benighted travellers were also infrequent but unavoidable guests.
(Sense and Sensibility again - Henry Dashwood was required by social and moral obligation to give his widowed stepmother and three half sisters a home. If they’d decided to stay at the house permanently, he and his wife would have caused a serious scandal by evicting them, which is probably why Fanny was such a bitch to them from the outset. She didn’t want them to stay and had absolutely no other way of stopping them)
There was a time when at least six or seven spare bedrooms was a bare minimum for fulfilling one’s social and moral obligations.
That time is not now. Now it’s just weird and wasteful.
@elidyce do you mind if I ask how hotels fit into that equation? Hotels first came about in the 700s so why wasn’t it socially acceptable to have your visitors go stay in a hotel?
@wolfoflightandearth I think I know this one! Okay, here are the points that occurred to me.
1. The big manor/mansion houses were the country house, usually on an estate. There was almost never a hotel within range, out in the country. There might well be a posting house or an inn, where travellers could stay, but they were lower-class establishments and it was rare that an upper-class person would condescend to stay in one unless absolutely necesary. In situations where a hotel *was* nearby (say, an estate close to Bath or another watering-place with accommodations appropriate for the wealthy) a person might well put up there and ride or drive over. But that would apply to people who had initiated the visit - if you had invited someone to visit, you had to put them up in your house or face social disaster UNLESS propriety forbade them to sleep under your roof. For example, if the guest was a single gentleman visiting a household of ladies not related to himself, it would be polite to avoid any appearance of misconduct by sleeping in an inn or hotel. A man courting a daughter of the house might well put up even in a lower class country inn if the house was not big and populated enough for his presence to be considered unexceptionable.
2. Expecting your guests to pay for their own lodging was inappropriate, except in cases where propriety would otherwise be offended. If you invited someone to visit, you were responsible for providing food, housing, stabling, the lot. That was why poor (or miserly) relations were likely to show up for long visits. They could stay ‘at rack and manger’ for weeks at a time at the expense of the house’s owner, and it was considered rude to tell them to leave.
3. The only time it was socially acceptable to let family members stay at a hotel instead of your home, IIRC, was if the house was full and any single men got pushed out to put up elsewhere with the understanding that this would allow them to get up to shenanigans away from the eyes of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other censorious persons.
4. Ladies could not put up at any but the most expensive and strictly respectable hotels unescorted by a man, and even then, she was expected to have at minimum a maid or dresser in attendance, as well as a chaperone if she were young or unmarried, and it was almost unheard of to take a child to one. (Unless an older, usually male relative were, for example, escorting a young person to school, and had to break their journey at a respectable hostelry) No lady of quality would ever even ENTER an inn unless a) travelling a long distance and stopping to eat/sleep under the care of a male relative, or b) some emergency required it.
When i was writing my shitty high school novel, i genuinely had no idea what to fill the bad guy’s giant opulent penthouse mansion with. I gave them the hobby of collecting expensive minimalist furniture for their future children and wrote their main foyer like an ikea show floor.
