Posts made by Aria

@tinuviel ....Are all men scared by their own farts? Is that a thing? I thought it was amused by their own farts.

My dog is pretty much the best thing ever. All the time.

But today....

Today, he has startled himself with his own farts. Not once, but twice. The first time, he jerked himself out of sleep and looked back at his butt, confused. The second time, he full on stood up and trotted several steps away from his dog bed before looking back to see what sort of horrible thing was clearly chasing after him while he laid vulnerable and unsuspecting.

And now I cannot stop laughing.

Signed,
Aria, a very mature and responsible adult who does not have the sense of humor of a fifth grade boy.

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

@arkandel I'll have to track those down in my city. For me it isn't so much the reclining, it's the enforced bad posture the way they push my shoulders forward. What kind of a sadist designed those?

Depending on where you live, you're looking for Alamo Drafthouse, Movie Tavern, or Studio Movie Grill. They have full service, too, with bar and restaurant menus.

Regal Cinemas and their affiliates (United Artists, etc.) has the reclining seats. They sell them as the "RPX Experience" tickets.

@coin said in Good or New Movies Review:

@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:

@thenomain Tread carefully, Theno, or I will bust out my gender theory analysis of Frankenstein and start waving it around. I mean, I have to do something with the ten pages I wrote on that shit.

Sounds interesting(?)

It's a lot of me rambling while tying in Shelley's loss of her children with the themes of monstrosity and monstrous creation presented in the novel, as related to life being created by a male character using corpse parts -- the antithesis of birth.

@thenomain Tread carefully, Theno, or I will bust out my gender theory analysis of Frankenstein and start waving it around. I mean, I have to do something with the ten pages I wrote on that shit.

@coin and @Roz -- Yeah, that's.... entirely possible. My high school English education was very odd, as my school decided to switch the sophomores' honors class to the juniors' honors class curriculum one year. As a result, we had two grades supposedly studying the same material for one year of overlap and not enough textbooks to go around. Like.... literally, we had sets kept in the classroom and we weren't allowed to take them home. As a result, we ended up reading a lot of things that parents were willing to pay out of pocket for (short, inexpensive novels) or things that were out of copyright that my teachers could make handouts of for us to take home, which is how I ended up studying Paradise Lost at 15 and read "A Man for All Seasons" -- which I've yet to meet anyone else who's ever studied it -- but to this day have only read excerpts of Moby Dick to compare to scenes in the fucking movie. (No, that is not a joke.)

@coin said in Good or New Movies Review:

@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:

@coin I've not read that one, so I can't comment! But I probably should, since it's one of my favorite genres.

Pretty surprised you haven't read "The Lottery".

I dropped out of college for various reasons in 2005, and when I went back, it was as a part-time adult student with a full-time job. There were many years of my reading list being dictated to me in the form of a syllabus and a good bit of pop culture I simply didn't have time for, like, at all. I still haven't seen Breaking Bad, or Sons of Anarchy, or anything past the first season of The Walking Dead. You kind of miss a lot with a schedule like that, and I'm only now just starting to fill in some of those gaps. <shrug>

@arkandel Ohh, I was more referring to the timing of the 300 movie coming out in the US and it being all about a band of valiant white boys fighting back the evil, monstrous hordes of brown people from the Middle East all in the name of 'freedom'.

Kind of like how Taken, much as I enjoyed that movie, is essentially every middle-aged white American dude's dad fantasy of fighting like a badass to save his wholesome daughter from the sexual depravity of a sheikh. Like, the bad guy is literally a sheikh with a harem of drugged up white slave girls.

I'm just sayin'.

@coin I've not read that one, so I can't comment! But I probably should, since it's one of my favorite genres.

@arkandel said in Good TV:

@derp I had the misfortune of reading through the comments section on a Troy review when I was curious about the show. A lot of posts were about 'Hollywood rewriting characters for affirmative action, lol, they made Achilles bisexual'.

Motherfuckers, have you read the Illiad?

....Not to mention all the times the Greeks laughed about how white and pale the Babylonians were, what with covering their skin from the sun. Y'all can keep wanking off to the xenophobic, hyper-masculine Miller version of 300 if you really want to, but uhhhh, Hellenistic Greece was full of brown boys who loved the D. #sorrynotsorry

@thenomain -- If we're talking about the height of the genre and not modern American Gothic literature....

It's important to remember that one of the defining characteristics is the intense use of the setting to define the narrative, to the point that it almost becomes a character unto itself.If you want a modern visual example, think of those long establishing shots in True Detective, through the swampy, dilapidated, isolated areas of Louisiana and how that comes into play. (Seriously, Cary Fukunaga is fucking brilliant at using setting to create atmosphere and his version of Jane Eyre is one of my favorites as a result, even though others more accurately follow the storyline from the novels.)

In British Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th century, this usually results in the story of a young woman facing the mysterious and quite possibly supernatural in a castle, an abbey, or a mansion (think The Mysteries of Udolpho or, if you'd like to use a modern film equivalent, Crimson Peak, which I also recommend). This generally evokes an overall atmosphere of corruption and of decay, of something sinister and inherently wrong hidden behind a facade of beauty and, often though not always, class and wealth.

American Gothic literature, by contrast, was often set against a backdrop of the wild and the unknown, which makes sense given how -- from the colonial mindset -- unsettled and deadly anything outside the very narrow centers of 'civilization' were. A lot of early American Gothic deals with themes of survival, the animalistic nature of man, and being driven to madness by extreme situations. You're also more likely to see direct -- and for the time, very shocking --- violence as well, as opposed to the looming threat of it. Edgar Huntly pretty much centralizes all of those themes into a single novel and even though it's not especially well known, had pretty profound effects on the writing of, say, Joyce Carol Oates and even Poe, though of all American authors in the genre, Poe relies most heavily on the British Gothic tropes.

This obviously changed and developed over time, as Southern Gothic literature -- which now makes up the bulk of the American canon -- also has profound themes irony, social issues, and warped communities, too. But.... that's the start, and The Witch does that really, really, REALLY well. I cannot recommend it enough, even if the 17th century dialog takes about ten minutes to get used to.

@surreality The worst part is, they weren't even boning. They're young and recently had a baby (whose crib they put against my bedroom wall, so I hear their kid cry at 2AM before they do, FFS), so if Sunday morning meant Gram-Gram took the baby to church and this was their only chance to have sex? I'd politely ignore it out of sympathy.

But no. This just seems to be what the neighbor lady puts on to sing to -- loudly -- while she's cleaning her house. Including vacuuming. We don't do loud shit in our house past 9PM to avoid waking your kid up. Maybe don't do loud shit in yours before 9AM on a weekend so you don't wake me up.

I cannot second @Auspice's recommendation of "The Witch" enough. It's so, so, so good....

Like, to the point that I contacted my favorite professor from several years back, who I had for multiple courses.... including "American Gothic" as a subgenre of literature. Given the rotating cycle he teaches that class on, I was pretty sure he was running the course the year it came out. So I sent him what amounted to a five paragraph analysis/sales pitch as to why he should go see that movie and why he should seriously consider offering it up to his students as a potential extra credit assignment that semester. Last I heard, he's teaching it in this year's cycle of that class, because it really holds up as an amazing example of the thematic differences between the British and American versions of gothic horror.

Dear Neighbor --

Sexy "we're gonna get our freak on" funk is not for first thing on a Sunday morning, FFS. Let alone at volumes that woke me up from a dead sleep through two rooms worth of walls. I kind of hate you.

<3,
Aria

@apos My brain is going a little swimmy trying to follow all of this, but that's likely because it's late and I've had a headache for almost eight straight hours now....

What I am taking away from this is a lot of "making social skills relevant" and I cannot tell you how incredibly happy I am about that, particularly as someone who has spent hundreds of XP on the damned things in order to fit both the concept my character came with and the idea of 'good leader'. I have had little cause to use most of those skills outside @actions thus far, but such is the pitfalls of pretty much any social system on any MU* ever.

@auspice said in Good TV:

@aria said in Good TV:

I'm two episodes into "Troy: Fall of City" and I can't decided whether it's objectively just not very good or if my recurring sentiment of ".......You cancelled Marco Polo but decided to pay for this?" is just spoiling everything for me.

I AM STILL SO ANGRY ABOUT MARCO POLO BEING CANCELLED.

esp because I mean hasn't Troy been done over and over and over and over

Yes. Usually badly. And while I realize there's mythos there to depict... I dunno... you could make three goddesses seem slightly less random and lame??

@apos I'll be honest -- I feel obligated to do tasks because I'm the head of an @org, I have goals for that @org, and one of the only real ways to achieve them is through a massive investment of resources that can only be earned through +tasks or bought with silver.

But the only way to increase the amount of silver my House has is by increasing our weekly income, and the two ways of doing that are... buying domain skills with resources earned by +tasks or by a massive investment of resources earned by +tasks into various aspects of my House. The economic system is a circle that keeps coming back to the same place again and again and again.

I also find them incredibly dull, even with RP attached, because there's only so many times I can write letters/have a scene about "I'll trade you this lumber I have for your fancy sheep." If the +task system allows for skills purchased to affect the sorts of tasks that can be done and the number of resources they generate -- hopefully in quantities a bit like the current +support system -- I might try to hug your face.

@derp said in Dead Celebrities 2018:

@ifrit said in Dead Celebrities 2018:

DJ Avicii, 28

Whaaaaat?! Nooooo!

On the one hand, that is way too young and I loved his music.....

On the other hand, the dude apparently drank so heavily that he developed pancreatitis by the time he was 21. How much do you have to fucking drink to wreck a major organ by the time you're 21?! Like, I am legit trying to quantify that and failing.

I'm two episodes into "Troy: Fall of City" and I can't decide whether it's objectively just not very good or if my recurring sentiment of ".......You cancelled Marco Polo but decided to pay for this?" is just spoiling everything for me.

The man can be v. pretty and behave like a sad boner at the same time, guys. These things are not mutually exclusive.

@mr-johnson said in RL things I love:

@aria said in RL things I love:

@mr-johnson said in RL things I love:

@aria said in RL things I love:

B-b-bbbut @Auspice ! You made his boner sad.

That's practically a war crime, you heinous bitch!

Nobody wants a sad boner. :<

As a mostly-straight woman who really likes dick, can confirm. I generally prefer happy boners. Perky, even.

9/10 straight women agree: Happy boners best boner. Angry boners come in at number two, and way at the bottom of the pack, nobodies favorite: Sad boners. Poor, poor sad boners. No body wins with a sad boner. T-T

Studies confirm that sad boners are the source of 98% of half-hearted "I was just trying to be polite!" handjobs.