Currently watching an episode of BBC’s Spooks from 2005 about Americans illegally abducting foreign citizens in the name of national security and a crazed American dragging the US and the UK into war with Iran on false pretences. 20+ years ago. America was always America. Empire is always empire.
A graphic asking people to support MJ O’Neill for Bandcamp Friday. It features 3 music releases - a 25 song compilation called Highlights and Tinted Lashes that is on sale for 25 dollars, a compilation of remixes called When She Was 22 that is on sale for 15 dollars, and an album called Scatterlings that is on sale for 15 dollars. All three feature experimental electronic dance music.
It’s still Bandcamp Friday until 5pm today, Queensland time. This means 100% of any money you spend on my music on Bandcamp goes directly to me for the next 8 hours. I’ve made lots of music, so I thought I’d spotlight three of my releases that people tend to love :)
check it: mjoneill.bandcamp.com
Can’t put it any simpler, hey. Truth inescapable.
And, right around 9/11, they took a book that was all about ‘let’s do the right thing even tho it won’t really help us personally at all’ and made it into a rah rah bunch of movies of WE MUST FIGHT TO BE AWESOME AND SAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL HOMELAND FROM THE BAD ORCS. Just bullshit. Makes me sad.
Like, the whole climax of the book hinges on a dude that basically EVERYONE thinks should be killed but who NOBODY kills because it wouldn’t feel right. Like, they only succeed because they refuse to do what is sensible or satisfying or tempting and actually do what is right. THAT’S THE POINT.
Recurring theme of LOTR on the page is ‘you do the right thing even if doing the right thing will fuck you over and get you nowhere’ - Elrond, Galadriel, Faramir, Gandalf, Frodo all basically say it. And, they changed it to ‘we gotta do the right thing because our homeland is beautiful’ and fuuuck.
Just saw someone quoting Sam’s ‘there’s good in the world Mr Frodo and it’s worth fighting for’ and got mad all over again about those stupid-ass LOTR movies. Honestly, pro-war bullshit made from a book that’s as anti-war as anything ever written.
I am old and there’s no getting around that.
my9games.com
Huh and yet it seemed like such a winner of an idea
It’s gonna be very funny and very awful if China and Australia go to war at like 1159pm tonight
It's one of my favourite passages and I just reread the whole thing this week haha. But, really fascinated by what you've pointed out. Just thinking about how inscrutable Gandalf is. It feels like he isn't, because he's observed so closely by those around him, but yeah, not a lot of his inside.
You are mistaken, but you make a very good point. There's a very specific passage when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell that is Gandalf looking at him and wondering what will become of him but I *really* had to search the memory banks in my head to find even that.
Oh whoa that’s actually pretty good
I’ve only ever seen a mime pretend to be trapped in an invisible box :(
I cannot express how little I care about finding out some privileged dude's take on what it would be like to be a girl growing up in a misogynist, fascist society.
Haha, wow, they really waited until all that goodwill was super soured huh
A shark. Maybe.
Btw, if you’ve ever struggled with reading Lord of the Rings, try reading it as the six books he put together instead of the three it was bundled into. It makes way more sense and flows way better as six sequential novels rather than three epics, in my experience.
To be clear: This is awesome. I genuinely love that Tolkien did this and I dream of a movie or prestige tv adaptation that is as wilfully anti-epic as the books.
Gandalf’s fight with the balrog? He tells you about it later. Aragorn struggling with Sauron with the Palantir? He references it later. The ents storming Isengard? Merry and Pippin tell you about it later. Helm’s Deep lasts like 11 pages. Dude spent more time on Frodo getting lost in his backyard.
In the movies, Jackson has the Pathways of the Dead have a bunch of glowing green ghosts and a big speech from king dead guy. In the book, they basically never really see a ghost at all and one says like three lines. They *almost* do, they’re *almost* there, but no appearance is really described.
Rereading it for the fourth time in my life, I had the most fun I’ve ever had with it just appreciating how wildly ‘unadaptable’ Tolkien made it. His writing is *beautiful* but nearly all the ‘epic’ stuff mostly happens off-screen and you’re told about it later or half of it’s invisible.
I think it’s really funny that, if you read the appendices of LOTR after the rest of it, it retells a shorter version of the main story you just read in like three different ways. Like, Tolkien knew exactly how to condense his book but absolutely refused to do that for you unless you worked for it.
Amazing.
every single time these politicians say “keeping people safe” and “community safety” and “keep Australians safe” the context will tell you that colonised and racialised people are not fully human to them, and nor are women and children.
see, it makes sense to use Claude - a cluster of interacting large language models - for something like this because - as everyone knows - all truths like "is this school full of children a danger to israel?" are contained solely in the record of human expression and not in the world itself
Everything about the LNP in Queensland is smash-and-grab. Trans youth ban, Olympic stadium, this. All will be legally overturned but the LNP want to do as much damage as they can before the courts catch up. Very sad. Very frustrating.
I consider this to be generally true of anyone in a media/art industry above a certain success bracket, too.
It’s honestly pretty solid chances. Gunn has shown to be a pretty decent producer, Lindelof has done better and better work post-Lost heyday, and the cast is awesome. My only area of concern is ‘my characters love war crimes but also are sad about war crimes’ Tom King being involved.
I’m really annoyed at how good it looks because I don’t want to like it
