Leon: The Professional (1994) Is A Fine Film (not A Great One), Until You Learn It's Based On Writer

Magically, I endow all of Vivz's female characters with a personality

New guilty pleasure: reading Stella x Stolas fanfics where they don't hate each others' guts, or even like each other, while also listening to this.

2 people forced together into marriage commiserating with each other on how much their situation sucks and growing supportive, affectionate, or even loving each other because of their mutual understanding in spite of the circumstances that got them together is just... kind of beautiful...

(not sure if the song actually fits the dynamic but the vibes give me that)

Having an extremely specific problem after trying a traditional pencil crayon look for an older Tattletale portrait. Somehow, during the slow work from grubby sketch to rendering, she became way too hot. And said traditional art style means I can’t change this with regular digital tools, I have to redraw sections of her face entirely.

That I did with optical colour mixing using hatching and a limited palette.

Do I roll with hot Tattletale or do I suffer?

Fucking up so bad that scenes like this don't exist in the movie is a travesty

Inserting this into The Electric State tag to get people to read the book. So many cool fucking scenes in the book that weren't included in the movie. Such a shame.

Wait… did FNAF profits go to anti-gay legislation?!

Scott Cawthon, the creator of Five Nights at Freddy's, is very open about being a pro-life conservative and has donated significant amounts of money to republican politicians, including Donald Trump. This has been publicly available info for a while now. Despite saying that he would "step away" from his role in the games after this was brought to light in 2021, he still owns the IP and is profiting from all media associated with the franchise to this day.

You know I really do think Five Nights at Freddy's fans should really stop idolizing Scott Cawthon.

I see people in their fucking 20s acting like teenagers over the point of "Oh politics don't matter to me" and like. Open your fucking eyes.

Written by @elsodex and illustrated by me!

So, this took root 1 day to write, me 100 hours to draw and you 10 seconds to read (spend a little longer plz?)

Really proud of this one! I wanted to practice action and experiment with different coloring styles and I thank root so much for being patient as I tried out different things. Root, I loved going back and forth with you over the pages at every stage. I adore how you captured both Talanah's and Aloy's voices as they casually converse while fighting an angry Thunderjaw. Hope you enjoyed the Sunhawk teasing her Thrush!!

Like yeah I get it celebrity drama is blehhhh but everyone aside from Dream didn't want this shit. This is an insane dude blabbering on the internet dragging innocents into the shitstorm that is his fans and influence.

I kinda hate how on YouTube people seems to not give a shit about the truth of what's happening, calling this "drama" a "nothing-burger" or "a stupid/inmature situation", saying ignorant shit like "Tommy should've resolved this privately" "everyone in this drama are doing it for clout" "Tommy is obsessed with Dream" "Tommy is exagerating" like... bruh I can't I swear to god

It feels like no one aside from Tumblr ex DSMP fans actually care about the damage that Dream did not only to his friends but in general too

Very glad to see people who also see the vision

Was it just me, or did Cassian and Mon Mothma have... good chemistry?

after seeing the godawful trailer, I did a reread of the Electric State and i cannot physically understand how the russo brothers did not "see potential" in the story

i'll admit, i underappreciated the writing on my first read! going over it again there is so much richness to the character building and the dread of the atmosphere. There's a vibe that I can only describe as desiccated americana and i love it. The world is rotten and dying, and there is really nothing left to do but go on for going on's sake.

anyway i'm doing a very large essay on Stålenhag's whole body of work, but the Electric State holds a special place in my heart as the first of his books I discovered and the most resonant to me, so i just had to share my thoughts right after the reread.

This is less about the artwork, which i could talk about for ages, and more just a general overview of the story themes specifically!

(Moderate general spoilers? i don't go into much detail, and it's not a story overly reliant on its plot twists anyway)

The hopelessness of The Electric State is rather unique among Simon Stålenhag's works - his other books, set in Sweden, are much more fondly nostalgic, though they of course offer strange horrors of their own - but of a much more physical, immediate level.

The Electric State is different. It takes place in an alternate 90s US even more drowned in consumerism and blind greed than our own. A civilization that is crumbling, not from nuclear war or global crises or meteors, but by its own hand, by capitalism driving itself into the ground. The perfect pleasure machine, the neurocaster headset, leaves people twitching, comatose creatures whose minds lie in vast Silicon Valley servers as their bodies are left to starve.

Michelle does not have the privilege of escapism. She is one of the few left to wander a silent world, an apocalypse without people to see it. She is privy to the horror of watching the inevitable trajectory of a world falling to its death, and feels only recognition that it's probably better this way.

Michelle is never sad about the end of America. She doesn't ever reminisce about how good things used to be, or how we should have "appreciated it while we had it." But she certainly does reminisce.

She has the memory of her foster parents, who derided the government "coddling neurine addicts" like Michelle's mother. She has the memory of her grandfather coughing himself to death in their tiny apartment, irradiated from his lifetime of underpaid work assembling gigantic war drones. She has the memory of her mother overdosing on a drug the government hooked her on during her service in the military. She has the memory of her first and only love, a love which the world hated, how it kept her alive in her foster home of Soest City, and how it was ripped from her by the pastor.

Unlike Stalenhag's other stories, there is no element of nostalgia or quiet undertone of hope. Only disgust for what came before, and quiet fear for what comes next.

The horror of the Convergence, the eldritch machine god hivemind, is not even very relevant to the story - if anything, it's a side plot. When Michelle faces actual danger, it's never from giant robot gods in the mist; it's from cops and hotel clerks, from doomsdayers hoarding guns and a FBI agent hunting her down. She lives in fear of other people, of people who say they want to protect her.

But when she sees the gigantic silent machines wandering through the mists of Oregon, she isn't afraid. It's almost peaceful. The Convergence is beyond understanding. It grew out of the servers where millions of minds seeking oblivion from the world went to escape, and they converged into something unknowably vast who wanders the world in a hundred million thoughtless bodies. It's otherworldly. It does not fear, it does not dream, it does not hope, it does not hate. Maybe that's better.

I was scared. But I also felt something else when that thing stepped out of the mist in front of our car. I can't think of a better word than awe. Like when you suddenly become aware that you've walked into the wrong part of the woods and come face-to-face with a gigantic wild animal. Beyond the grotesque, there was also something else - something majestic.

And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy. Calm and peaceful, they moved past the car and formed a single group again behind us, and soon disappeared into the mist again.