Mai. College-aged, food-obsessed, full-time fanatic and night owl.
Personal/art blog
To Michelle Le R.I.P, thank you for the happiness you gave to all of us, your memory lives on.
Art blog: complexsketh.tumblr.com
macaulay culkin was forced into his career by his father through manipulation, gaslighting and humiliation as well as physical abuse. at fourteen, instead of hitting him back like his father demanded, macaulay called the police and put a stop to the suffering that he and his family were facing. when his parents went bankrupt, macaulay offered up his own money to his mother and siblings and stepped up as the father figure to his five younger siblings. he’s publicly supported lgbt and pro-black charities for decades (x, x) and dedicated a good two pages of his book to naming conservatives and abusers that he hates. he risked his own reputation to defend michael jackson in court and treats michael’s daughter, paris, like his own. macaulay culkin is an amazing person whose made all of us happy over the years, and 2018 WILL be the year we repay him by supporting his hipster lifestyle website.
I want to tell y’all a story about supporting and loving your partner, starring my amazing wife.
I’ve mentioned before that I had an eating disorder for many years, and though I consider myself “recovered” there are aspects of my disorder that I still struggle with today — being quite a bit heavier than my wife is one of them.
When my wife and I moved in together back when we were still girlfriends, I was at my skinniest. She used to pick me up all the time and lift me off the ground, and I’d laugh and kick out my legs ‘cause I was just delighted to have her holding me.
But I started gaining weight as I went through recovery, and where once we were pretty close in size, I began to get bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And she remained her naturally petite self. I began to almost dread when she’d try to pick me up, sure that this time she wouldn’t be able to get me off the ground.
But every time, even if I protested, she’d lift me up and say something like: “See, you’re not so big that I can’t lift you!”
And one time I just blurted out: “But someday I’m going to be so fat you won’t be able to.”
She looked me dead in the eye and said: “No you won’t. Because if that ever happens, I’ll start working out.”
It was the best possible thing she could have said to me, because she wasn’t saying I wasn’t going to get fat
—
neither of us knew that for sure. She was just saying that I was never going to be “too fat” for her.
And every time I worry about getting bigger, I remember that I’ll never be so big that she can’t lift me, because baby knows how much I love being held, and she’ll change her own habits to ensure that I never feel “too big” or “too heavy” because in her eyes I’ll never be “too” anything.
Anyway, there’s a moral to this story: Find yourself a partner who will never consider you an excess. You should never be “too much” to someone who loves you — too big, too loud, too passionate, too awkward, whatever your “too” happens to be. And even as you change and grow (in my case, literally), the right person will be there through the changes, to tell you that you’re always just right for them.
My strongwoman, the wind beneath my wings, the arms under my ass. 😍😍 😍
So much of TV is way too concerned with being Clever™ right now. There’s this pervasive myth that audiences won’t enjoy a narrative climax unless it’s a total surprise. “Predictable” is always used as a pejorative term when it comes to storytelling, but I think that’s absolute crap, because here’s the thing:
Unpredictability is not, inherently, a virtue. Unpredictability can mean: a) you don’t have a clear grasp on who your characters are or what direction they’re growing. b) you don’t have a clear vision for the story you’re trying to tell. c) you don’t know how to tell the story (for example, you have a Point A and a Point B but the middle is a bunch of disjointed time-wasting filler.
“But,” the showrunners cry, “you never saw that twist coming! We kept you on your toes!” That does not make it good. Cleverness is often just smoke and mirrors designed to distract the audience from a lack of substance; it doesn’t guarantee a worthwhile story. I don’t want to be shocked for the sake of surprise - I want to feel like the experience was worth my time.
I want to be introduced to a character, and then I want to be taken on a journey with that character. I want every step of that journey to teach me who they are; what they believe, what they want, what they hate, what they fear, and what they love, so that when they are faced with a conflict or a critical moment of decision, I understand exactly why they do what they do. I’m hoping their choices in that moment will reveal something truthful and powerful and worth knowing about another person’s experience.
That’s what I want in a story. I genuinely don’t care whether it’s clever or predictable or whatever; I just want a worthwhile journey in which every moment of every episode means something - to the character(s), and to me. That’s what makes serial television satisfying. It has nothing to do with shock or intellect or reinventing the wheel, it’s just about telling the damn story in a way that makes you feel it.
I have one hard and unbreakable rule about reading and writing:
If a story is ruined by knowing or predicting how it ends, then it’s a bad story.
As much as I love Incredibles 2 for what it is I’m kind of miffed they didn’t find some way to miraculously bring this jerk back from the dead and make him the villain
According to Wiki and the NSA Supers Database on the special edition DVD of the first movie, this is what it says about Gamma Jack: “Easily recognized by his wave-like hairstyle, he was a favorite of the ladies (his original name being Handsome Jack) and was prone to megalomaniacal impulses, believing Supers to be a ‘superior race.’He chose to save attractive women over and above other innocents and had a particular issue with ‘killing’ female supervillains he was attracted to, but always ended up doing so anyway. These impulses and traits caused the NSA great concern, putting him under close ‘A Level’ monitoring as a result.”
Like…damn. That’s a potential supervillain in the making right there. I know that according to the KRONOS database he was killed by one of the Omnidroid prototypes, but remember, Syndrome’s life signs probe failed to detect Bob simply because he hid behind Gazerbeam’s skeleton (seriously, what??), and the only reason Bob didn’t get away is because Helen later tripped the tracking device on his suit. Considering Syndrome’s tech was flawed enough to completely miss a living human being just because he was hiding, it’s not outside the realm of possibility to assume Gamma Jack could have also survived and just hid out until he figured out a way off the island.
So, I know this is just conjecture, but what if he had somehow survived and managed to make it back home? He would’ve had to change his identity of course to make sure Syndrome didn’t locate him again. But given his views on supers and his “megalomaniacal impulses”, both the supers ban and Syndrome’s attempt to completely eradicate them would’ve not only reinforced his beliefs but also have been the perfect catalysts for this guy to completely go off the deep end and start his own radical campaign against non-supers. “Oh, the regular people of the world don’t appreciate us and want us to either hide in the shadows or die? Well then, regular people should all die or be subjugated by supers” - a survival of the fittest kind of thing. It would’ve been really fascinating to see him re-invent himself and use his charm to work his way up in the world of politics in an attempt to surreptitiously put supers in positions of power so as to dominate the “inferior” part of the population, and then ultimately come into conflict with supers like the Incredibles and Frozone, whose primary goal is to use their powers to help others rather than subdue them, despite the fact that they were wronged by the very people they’re trying to help. Also a super who’s basically bordering on being a creepy ass serial killer but “we have to be subtle about it because Disney”? Sign me the hell up.
Idk, I think it’s a compelling story that could’ve been told, or still could be told if Brad ever decides to just suck it up and make a third film. Just throwing it out there *COUGH*
honestly tho that scene in the incredibles where mr. incredible sees the names of all the old super heroes that used to be his friends / that he knew from Back in the Day and how every one of them has been killed by syndrome is such a chilling scene for so many reasons
like for one, everyone he knew is dead at this point and has been killed on the same island he’s at now and two, its heartbreaking bc that means that almost every hero wanted to try out being a hero again despite the laws against it and wanted to try and help someone out and relive their glory days, only to be straight up murdered like fuck that scene is just so fuckin intense
I think the core of that scene for me is, when you’re insane like me and you go through it frame by frame, you can work out that Gazerbeam defeated the omnidroid twice - the only super we have enough information to confirm did so. I always wondered about his body in the cave, how and why he got the password… But it makes sense. This thing goes haywire, gets an upgrade, and goes haywire again? He must have been hella suspicious! So he does what any good superhero would do - tries to get to the bottom of what’s really happening on Nomanisan Island. During the process he’s clearly caught and wounded but has just enough time to get himself somewhere he can leave a final message, just praying that the next super to come along will find it and break the cycle.
Gazerbeam is my hero.
Incredibles 2 has a lot to live up to
All of this and…
I’m just realizing that the name is No Man Is An Island???? As in, everyone needs someone to depend on and connect with, no one is ever completely alone or should act all on their own.
Also Gazerbeam probably has X-ray vision–so he not only survived long enough to defeat the Omnidroid, he had the ability to see Syndrome entering the password.
Holy guacamole! I should pay more attention, I don’t think I got any of that stuff!
does anyone think about the fact that now mr. incredibles has to live w/ the fact that all his friends getting killed by syndrome could have been avoided if he had just been nicer to syndrome from the beginning
^I was thinking that from the beginning reading this and was shocked it went through so many comments before anyone pointed that out.
Syndrome waited until his machine was almost ready to go before asking Bob to come to Nomanisan. He also was surprised to find out that he was married to “Elastigirl”, which means he likely built his list and went through everyone else before finally deciding it was time to kill Bob.
Also, Syndrome literally didn’t find Bob until the start of the movie. He found Frozone and was stalking him. If Lucius hadn’t hung out with Bob, then Frozone was going to be the next one lured. There’s literally a scene of Mirage realizing that the guy in the car with her target is Mr. Incredible. He wasn’t going through the list, he was stalking and finding every former Super he could, luring them to the island, and then killing them, for the sake of improving his robot. Finding Bob was just a happy accident, and Syndromes obsession with him meant that upon finding a bot that could beat Bob, he figured he’d hit perfection and was ready.
and like, let’s be real here in the intro Buddy was crossing the line the second he showed up, Mr. Incredible mentioned he’d been very nice to Buddy, via signing a ridiculous amount of autographs and doing pictures and stuff, and that he was not going to risk a childs life as a sidekick (albeit in less words). Buddy literally showed up by breaking into his car, and then stalked him all evening until he was arrested. That’s disturbingly obsessive behavior, there’s no amount of niceness that would stop Syndrome, it was an impossible situation. No amount of nice was going to appease Syndrome, the second he faced any sort of rejection from Mr. Incredible he was going to lose it and go supervillain. After his arrest he should have gotten put into therapy, but yknow, set in like. the 50′s. so it makes sense he fell through the cracks when the cracks were a goddamn canyon. Don’t victim blame Mr. Incredible.
all of this ^
also like, the score in that scene is so intense as well. It’s one of the first film OSTs that made a deep impact on me. I could hear it playing back in my head the moment I started reading OP’s post. Just…everything about that movie works so cohesively in every scene, especially the music. Giacchino did such a good job with it
The editing and cutting in this scene is amazing too. Just. Look at how everything was framed and focused on and cross-cut with Elastigirl. It’s SO great.
