“Unlike Godzilla, Pacific Rim doesn’t try to be serious even when it’s being serious. Characters have names like Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. The film requires you to believe that the best way to battle a giant monster is to build an even larger robot to fight that monster. Much of the Act 2 drama derives from inter-pilot tension airlifted from the Val Kilmer scenes in Top Gun. It’s the polar opposite of the Godzilla school of drama, where everyone is a total professional who has absolutely no personal goal besides Saving The World. In Pacific Rim, Idris Elba is Rinko Kikuchi’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and two of the last Giant Robot-pilots in the world frequently get into sneering fights over who’s the bigger badass, and Charlie Day is a scientist. So, for all these reasons, Pacific Rim is a movie that I’ve heard perfectly smart people describe as “stupid” or “silly.” The problem with this line of thinking is that, really, that every blockbuster is pretty “silly,” in the context of Things Adults Should Care About. Godzilla is not less stupid than Pacific Rim just because people frown more. […] The difference, I think, is that Pacific Rim glories in its own silliness. There’s a flashback scene where Idris Elba rescues a little girl, and when he emerges from his giant robot, the sun shines upon him like he’s the catharsis in a biblical epic. There’s a moment when one giant robot swings an oil tanker like a sword. Then it grows a sword out of its wrist. Then it falls from space to earth. There are real complaints to make about Pacific Rim, I guess, all of them fair and most of them pedantic. I know a lot of people who have issues with the story. (“Why didn’t they use the wrist-sword earlier?” is a popular one.) Conversely, I don’t really know anyone who minds the story in Godzilla, possibly because everything stupid that happens is prefaced by Frowning Watanabe saying “This is why the stupid thing that’s about to happen makes sense.” Godzilla wants so badly to make sense. Pacific Rim wants so badly for Ron Perlman to wear golden shoes.”
— Darren Franich, “Entertainment Geekly: A call for an end to serious blockbusters” (via rahleighs)
People talk a lot about Sam’s lack of autonomy in his own
life, but it’s also interesting how often that correlates to the times
he’s literally been sold, bought, or otherwise leveraged as currency.
Off the top of my head:
– Mary’s deal with Azazel- trading
not-yet-alive-Sam’s blood and future for John’s life
– Dean’s demon deal- trading his own soul to
obtain Sam’s soul and life.
– Michael reviving Sam from Anna’s attack- Dean
demands that Michael ‘fix Sam’ which he agrees to do after they talk. He says
that Dean is not his only true vessel (in the same ep that Anna says Sam is
Lucifer’s only true vessel) and that they are destined to say ‘yes.’ He brings
Sam back from the dead in preparation for that final fight, for Lucifer.
– Dean’s deal with Death in season 6×11- trading a
service of serving as Death (and the amusement that provides) for Sam’s soul
and the service of Death putting it back in.
– Cas breaking Sam’s wall- to keep Dean occupied.
He says that he will ‘save Sam, but only if Dean stands down’- he uses Sam’s
sanity as an object for the service of Dean not attacking.
– Gadreel possessing Sam- when he was still
‘Ezekiel,’ he wanted a vessel to stay in to recuperate (service). In return, he
said that he would heal Sam’s body from the inside (service).
–
there’s the obvious 13×11 where he is actually auctioned
off.
– Lucifer bringing Sam back- to give as a gift/sign
of goodwill (object) to get closer to Jack.
The imagery associated with the above examples is also
interesting. In every example, he is
laying down- in all except for the baby one, it is because he is in a position
of no power: either too sick to move, dead, or tied down while others negotiate
over his prone body.
There’s many more times when his autonomy is taken away. But
this on-going pattern of his body/soul being traded without his consent implies ownership to a disturbing
degree. Normally that power is vested in Dean, but it’s also commonly co-opted
by Lucifer.
It’s also interesting that whenever Sam tries to trade for
own his body/mind/soul, it is refused. None of the demons would trade with him
to save Dean, when Soulless Sam still wanted the soul no one would work with
him, trading his body for the trials ultimately fails, Cas won’t extract all of
Gadreel’s grace from Sam’s body because he values life more, offering his soul
to Casifer doesn’t do anything, offering to take the burden of the mark doesn’t
do anything. When he casts Lucifer into the cage, the ‘trade’ is accepted- but
this is a plan sanctioned by the ‘good guys.’ Whenever Sam attempts to leverage
himself without the explicit permission of Dean, he fails.
Any self-initiated exchange fails, but when he is traded by other people? When he is the passive
object to be negotiated over? Those measures all succeed. It’s just another
marker of the lack of control he has in his own life. And by repeating this
pattern, the narrative perpetrates the idea that Sam does not have ownership of
himself, either.
I just had to explain what I was cackling at to my roommate. It automatically passes the Laugh Rule.
She found her reluctant fiance, Erstad, brooding out on the rainy moors.
“Is that a baby rabbit?” she asked, observing his huddled form.
“IT’S SIX BABY RABBITS AND YOU CAN’T TOUCH THEM,” replied Ernstad, contriving to look twice his usual size and at least three times his usual fierceness.
y’all ever see a sibling interaction in media and just know….it was written by an only child
It’s weird when sibilings apologize in the movies. Because sibilings only apologize when they did something really really bad, like murder someone or something, otherwise the sibilings just casually start to talk to each other as if nothing had happened.
Remember a few months ago when it felt like every single website in existence updated their privacy policy? That was because of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation from the EU.
Another part of GDPR? Right of access / right to data portability.
What this means is that if you ask for it, companies are to give you access to your data so that you could theoretically move it to another service. Many companies have done this by allowing you to export your data and download it. Even if a company doesn’t provide an automated way, you should still be able to contact them and they should provide your data – it doesn’t have to be automatically generated and downloadable.
Tumblr does provide an automated way to export your blog. This should be done individually for each sideblog as well, if you want. (These are instructions for the website – not the app.)
Go to your blog settings page, ie https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/<your-blog-name>.
Look for the Export section (currently at the bottom)
Click the “Export <your-blog-name>” button.
Depending on the size of your blog, it may take a while to generate the export. It will say that it’s processing, and you can reload the page and come back later to check if it’s done.
When your export is processed and ready, the Export section will have a button to download.
Once you’ve downloaded the file, extract it to a folder on your computer. It will contain:
A media folder with images, gifs, videos, and audio files.
A messages xml file. Your messages are in here, even if it doesn’t look “human readable” and is gibberish to you, I promise. There are tools that will “beautify” xml to make it more readable.
A posts.zip file. Extract this and you’ll see an html folder that has an html file for each of your posts.
Holy shit they finally did it.
BTW, the size of the export varies wildly based on how much media content is on your blog. I’ve got a main and a sideblog with a little over 6000 posts each, one a bit heavier on text, the other skewing more towards photosets and the like. The zip files are 3 gigs and 11 gigs respectively.
DarkestElemental616 