Posts made by insomniac7809

@Rinel said in Good or New Movies Review:

ETA: I never watched the sequels, so how are they dealing with the whole, uh... replacement thing that happens at the end of the original film?

Up in the air is all we can say for now. Helen will be featuring in the 2020 film (she's been recast, from what we've been told); I think the idea is that she's become part of the story, but not a replacement.

She didn't feature at all, or even get a mention, in either of the released sequels; neither of them really seemed to understand what the first film was doing with Candyman-as-legend, and just sort of went with Candyman-as-ghost-or-some-shit-maybe.

They weren't good.

@Rinel
Okay, I feel like I must have come across much more harshly to the 1992 Candyman than I meant to. It is, as I've said, a personal favorite in the horror genre, which is itself a favorite film genre. I know exactly what scene you're talking about, and yeah, it's a really well-developed, thoughtful commentary on the material it's covering. I'm not dropping the P-word (I know that some people have; I wouldn't but it's not really my place to say; obviously Peele and Monkey's Paw had enough attachment to the property to secure it), I'm just saying that I really think a take on the material from the other side is a really cool opportunity.

Like, I don't try to read every piece of media as a direct allegory or a code; the joke about how it can be more than one thing wasn't really a joke. But just looking at the trailer for the new one...

The opening clip is a mixed-race, mostly-white group of teenage girls calling on the Candyman, with the one black girl involved showing up afterwards to witness what happens when they dredge up that old pain. The location is a gentrified Cabrini Green, with the whitewashed exterior of the church hiding a broken-down interior full of the sort of Candyman graffiti we saw in his shrine in the first film. We have a few people from the older generation, including Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams) from the first film, who remember what happened thirty years back. Our protagonist is an artist whose history traces back to the first film, who finds himself obsessed with the Candyman story and uses it to create an exhibit featuring imagery of lynching victims (I really don't subscribe to 'interpret art as 1:1 symbolism code' but come on) and we have a scene where he looks in the mirror and sees Candyman reflected back at him...

And okay maybe you're the one over-analyzing 152 seconds of trailer footage did you ever think of that but seriously I am stoked to see this one.

@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I do think that self-diagnosis (or "self-assessment" is a better term) has its place
when you approach things from a perspective of struggles and strategies.

If you struggle with the same things that ADHD brains struggle with, the strategies that help ADHD brains may help you too, even if your struggles are actually caused by something other than ADHD. In many cases, the label is less important than finding tools that help you.

Totes (GD "totes" doesn't ping Chrome's spellcheck), and while I see how I might have suggested I was, it wasn't my intent to say people shouldn't self-assess. Like I said, we can share sympathy and coping strategies whether or not someone has a diagnosis, and a lot of the same shit is likely to be helpful (up to and including 'this is a brainmeats issue not a failure of character').

I'm just saying, when it comes to things like "<lived experience> seems different from what's being described, I'm confused about whether or not I have this," I wanted to be clear that the response here has to be "I cannot say whether or not you do, because I am not a doctor even a little tiny bit and if I was then a diagnosis in these circumstances would be a gross violation of ethics."

But as you say, that in no way interferes with the exchange of strategies, struggles, and sympathies.

@Rinel said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

But now I'm more confused, lol. I rarely miss deadlines, but that's because I tend to cram at the very last minute. Maybe I have mild ADHD? Talking about this is really weird because, like... some of the stuff is me to a T. All the time. Messy (more like absolute disaster) of a room, papers always everywhere, scattered, disorganized, make fancy plans and never go through with them, always forget to send thank you cards, bills pile up, etc...
But, like, at work? I'm fine at work. I mean, I get distracted constantly, but I get shit done on time, even though deadlines are really stressful. I don't know if this means I just have a mild form of the disorder or if being undiagnosed for 30 years means I developed coping strategies that let me function albeit miserably.

So, hm.

On the one hand (this is important) we are not healthcare professionals seeing you in person and it's a long-established truth that a layman or first-year student reading a medical textbook or the DSM will learn to their surprise that they have goddamn everything. We can't give a diagnosis.

On the other hand, what we're talking about and what you're talking about sound like a lot of my experiences, and it seems likely you have it too. Most psychiatric disorders are on a spectrum in any case, so sometimes teasing out the exact difference between a mild disorder and a personality trait is as much a definitional issue as anything, yeah? And if it is similar enough, we can at least share sympathy and coping strategies. (Although I don't recommend looking for those from me.)

And yes, as mentioned, a lot of us manage deadlines by using the stress-panic to cram it in at the last second. (Little anecdote: in college, I had one professor who was always annoyed with me because he kept getting A- papers from me that would've been a solid A if they were just proofread. The reason they weren't, of course, was that I'd finished the essays three minutes before class started and set them to print in the lab I passed on the way.)

Personally, I often do a lot better at work than otherwise because "do X thing in Y situation by Z time" is direct and manageable while "sort your fucking life out" is vague and undefined and open-ended and I'll get to starting it as soon as I'm done watching YouTube and shitposting on MSB.

And yeah, 30-odd years of coping strategies are a whole thing, which is why it's easiest to get an ADD diagnosis as a kid. It's a been a whole level of fun for me that, being resistant to medication or therapy already, I get psych people assuming an ADD diagnosis in my thirties means I'm cruising for drugs.

@HelloProject I've mentioned this before on the site, but I know one black online RPG player who only plays white because of the time a white dude saw her PB and paged her about how glad he was that there was another "street" character for his kung-fu crack-smoking gangster lesbian to play with.

The PC was a lawyer.

Def. I mean, I also hope it's a good horror movie. Which it should be; they have a solid team working on it.

Have you seen the trailer/short film Nia DeCosta tweeted out? https://twitter.com/NiaDaCosta/status/1273293842113089536

It can be more than one thing!

Slightly more seriously, yes, you're absolutely right; the horror is, in a large part, that Helen is forced to actually live what she's been ignoring, or treating as an object of academic study. One that, even when she was aware of it, was always something over there. (There's the one scene where she's walking out of the police station after she's identified the "real" Candyman, where she's making comments about the fact that the police didn't give a shit until he attacked a white person from the right part of town. It's her black best friend who's trying to brush it off and move on with their lives. "Yes, white girl, I know, take the win.") You have a recurring thing where we're contrasting Helen's First World Problems (worrying that her husband's flirting with students, getting into pissing matches over dinner with a tenured professor) with day to day life in the projects that she visits to get material for her dissertation.

I'm not saying that Candyman handled things badly. It is, as I've said, one of my favorite movies ever made. It had something to say, and it said it really well; Tony Todd included "truth to power" in the tweet he sent out to give the new movie his blessing, when he thought he'd been recast. (A class act, even more so when I know that they absolutely wanted him back in the title role.)

I'm just thinking about the fact that what it was saying, it said from the position of a white writer/director, through the lens of a white middle-class academic who approached the story as an outsider. I'm really interested to see the story continued from the perspective of a black creative team, with a black protagonist; where this is their history that the story is about.

So I've been thinking a lot about the new Candyman film for the last few days and I'm gonna brain dump a bit
The premise of the property is that Candyman is an urban legend where, if you say his name five times while you look in the mirror, he appears and kills you. In-fiction it's an urban legend in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago, which hadn't been demolished and gentrified when the first film came out.
The story is that he'd been a black painter who'd been commissioned to make a portrait of a landowner's wife, and the two of them had an affair. And when they were found out, he was gruesomely murdered.
And the conceit of the film is that he exists as the story. He is, in-universe, a boogeyman kids talk about to give themselves the creeps. You have a story of a lynching, and a direct parallel between that and modern-day black people in the inner city who've been left abandoned.
But our protagonist, our viewpoint character, is a white grad student.
So this is one of the things you see a lot in horror, where the monster is an intrusion into the everyday. Back to Dracula, where instead of having the courtesy to stay in the decaying castle in the Continent like a proper Gothic fiction menace, he follows Harker home to (then-)contemporary London and starts victimizing and corrupting our pure Anglo-Saxon women.
You see it a lot in horror, when you're looking for it. Our protagonist is from the modern, rational world, and being attacked by something out of the superstitious worldview. Frequently there's an exposition scene where our protagonist needs to get help from someone who understands the rules they have to live with now, who's foreign, or crazy, or ethnic, or maybe just countercultural or female.
So Candyman (which is, to be clear, one of my favorite movies ever made) is a story about black people who have been abused, but as the Other. Our viewpoint is the white middle-class academic woman menaced by a black bogeyman.
(Even in the sequels--which I'll otherwise not speak of--the protagonists are the direct descendants of Candyman's mixed-race child, they appear and present entirely as white women.)
Which is why I'm really looking forward to seeing an interpretation of the property where our writer, director, and protagonist are black. See the take on the story from the people who live it, not just the outsider who gets dragged into it.

Oh christ I remember the "BUT WUT IF ITS A DOOD" panics back when.

I still sometimes think of the one guy who told me it was a male biological imperative on Icons In the Foyer. (A sort of JavaChat WORA.)

@RightMeow The really good ones are when you see it in West Virginia...

But yeah, here in PA? Half of the southern border is with Maryland, which was loyalist but only kinda. (Their state song is still a call to secession complaining about the tyrant Lincoln.) The other half is West Virginia, which at the start of the war was just Virginia. Our heritage was getting invaded by traitors and being the place where they got slapped down.

@bored said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

But worrying about this stuff does not actually seem to be supportive of the community it's purporting to be supportive of, since you're basically promoting policing gay portrayals and witch hunting for impostors. Surely there's better things to be doing than worrying about two clearly very straight dudes RPing as big-titted schoolgirl besties?

I mean, there's better things to do than play sexy pretend elfgames, probably.

More seriously, yeah, there's a line to walk here. Scrutinizing a person's portrayal of their own demographic can be discouraging. So can seeing someone running around as a caricatured spank/schlickbait of themselves.

Also, in a feeble and ill-considered defense of my gender, it's not just dudes who MU* a gay member of the opposite sex as a fetishy stereotype.

@Prototart said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Except this is optional.

technically, so is life

@ZombieGenesis said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I think most people in this hobby are happier just to sit back, mock, and feel generally superior to those around them.

It does seem popular. We should have some sort of form for that.

@Jeshin Yeah, and that's something I'm sympathetic to, overall.

But usually when I've seen it in the wild, it's from the same people--or at the very least the same demographic--that was pushing the "pedophiles in the shrubbery" fears. The idea being, apparently, that Children Aren't Safe Unattended In These Fallen Days, not that their generation lost its collective shit over Stranger Danger (while not actually being more cautious around the youth pastor or the little league coach).

@mietze My irritation comes down to the fact that, in my experience, the demographic that bemoans the Lost Age when kids could run around unattended are the same people who are convinced that any kid out of line of sight for five minutes will be abducted by one of the pedophiles that hides behind every hedge and under every rock. (It's safer for kids than it's ever been, Karen, you just watch too much cable news.)

@Jeshin said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

I just want to know if I'm a bad person for liking the s' instead of s's

It makes you a good person.

It makes you a righteous person.

Strunk and White's overhyped pocket book is a collection of idiosyncratic preferences boldly presented as universal truths and stodgy rules so removed from the English language as it's used that the authors keep breaking them even as they present them.

@bored said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I'm not sure the 'back then but not now' is even true, it's just less obvious (mostly). Of course, all light skinned people (even in groups that white people don't necessarily agree are white, see even Ashkenazi Jews) benefit from not physically looking black and being targeted for that reason, but when you get into things into wealth and education etc., it's hardly uniform, even today.

Well, now we're getting into a whole thing about race and class, because yeah a lot of working-class neighborhoods around here still have a lot of people with Irish and Italian surnames, but plenty of them are a more or less even mix of both and that's if you want to try and untangle the two.

Still very different from what my grandparents grew up with, where a significant chunk of their neighborhood was speaking Italian at home (or beating it out of their kids, figuratively or otherwise) and celebrating St. Patrick's Day by wearing orange and throwing rocks at the Irish.

Like, no one's going to peg my parents as an "interracial" marriage. We're all white. But there are a few Italian words that still show up in family conversations, and plenty of Italian foodstuffs that are still a part of regular consumption, and like most people of Italian descent stateside, we do it with an accent that drops the vowel at the end of words. This is because most Italian immigrants came from the southern part of the country, and that was how the prevalent dialect there worked until Italy really got the language standardized. There is a defunct Italian dialect that exists today mostly in how Americans in the tri-state area talk about cold cuts. I think that's pretty cool.

The Italian, Irish, and German diasporas to the USA are a really interesting topic, IMO.

The short version is, these days we're all white, but back when we really weren't. The diaspora communities in the United States have formed their own unique identities over the last century or so over waves of immigration, even if the communities of European descent are becoming less of a distinct identifier as the cultural identity is absorbed into generically "white." Which, yes, often means that celebration of whatever heritage just turns into a drinking holiday in ethnic drag.

But at the same time... if the X-American culture has a tradition that we've developed and maintained that looks weird to the inhabitants of X, well, what do you guys have to do with it?

The 'time' thing has been interacting with quarantine in a weird way.

On the one hand, everyone else is FREAKING OUT that they've been stuck for months now, but for me, like, is that a thing? Y'know, time passing. Whatever.

On the other hand, without work forcing me to know what day it is and which of those days I need to be somewhere else, I have come adrift. Days start and end. My life is vaguely measured in podcasts.

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I don't know what's different between a few pages explaining a culture and literally an entire WoD book that does the same thing, except it's a whole ass book.

Every big-ass WoD book on one of the splats is a deep dive into a two-page spread that contains the splat's general deal, and every two-page spread is building off a three- or four-word hook that the splat is built around.

I can read Clan Book: Daeva if I feel like it. But "sexy Anne Rice vampire" covers what I need to get started.