my my, what a lovely soul you have

i think at the core of her character is how her strong sense of (what she believes is) justice clashes with the coi's methods. it's not clear if she truly thinks the punishment fits the crime, but she is very much the one feeding convicts to the blood ocean and it's been eating at her for a while now

HOWEVER. ava is particularly vitriolic about filament station. she goes out of her way to bring it up twice, in conversations that have nothing to do with it, and her tone is. oh man. she also outright says that simon doesn't deserve to live for what he did and seems to really believe it, judging by how she refuses to replenish his oxygen reserves before sending him back

which is to say, filament station may have been personal for ava

she's constantly lying to simon (outright or by omission) about his survival and freedom, but doesn't put any effort into making it believable, and i don't think it's because she doesn't care if he survives or not. it feels more like she's been told to lie to convicts for the sake of the mission and she just can't pretend anymore

if the subs are numbered sequentially and all used on the same moon, at least four other convicts died on ava's watch, and she had to tell all of them that yes, they're the first one down, they'll be free when they return, they'll no longer be pariahs

tl;dr she has to lie all the time and she's bad at it

she only talks to simon through some kind of barrier, like the comms system or the porthole window so he (and by extension the audience) never hears her voice unaltered, which is a very neat cinematic detail re: the lying and miscommunication

cares about her crew but isn't necessarily kind to them

holds onto 'it's bigger than me' even though it's coi propaganda because it makes sense to her

her last name might be ellis, but it's just speculation based on this possibly being the list of personnel on ava's ship

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.

Eye of the Storm, by Harut Danielyan, 2025

what that means is that I have a folder on my computer with the name of my url with an index.html file in it, and when i click on that file to open it in a browser I get a simple page with a list of years and months. selecting a specific month will send me to a list of the posts i made or reblogged in that month, similar to tumblr's own archive page. the contents of the post including images are stored locally on your machine.

It can also make a separate index file that organises posts by tag, which is great if you're a consistent tagger, but it will list every single tag you've ever used so it can take a while to find the tag you're looking for in the list if you're a habitual tag commentator. generating the tag archive also takes a while depending on how many posts have to be processed.

you can make it back up any blog as long as it's not set to private. I have backups of both my main and sideblogs and it keeps them in separate folders.

it's had some trouble going all the way back to the start of my main blog in 2012 just by sheer volume of posts, but by making it fetch posts from one month at a time I've been able to go back to 2015 (that's tens of thousands of posts), which was good enough for my purposes.

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around

As a janitor, I have been in some WEIRD spaces. Backrooms-level incomprehensible architecture, disorienting floorplans, buildings that just make no fucking sense. And I'm typically there alone, late at night. This movie captured the sense of being in places like that perfectly. I don't wanna go to work tomorrow because my main building is in a weird business complex and has an unsettling layout and I'm there alone! At night! I'm going to spend the entire time feeling like I've noclipped straight out of reality!

The thing is that the backrooms are a character unto themselves here. Whatever may inhabit them, it's the place that shapes the story. It creates itself out of memory and copy, never quite right, always familiar. Clearly as much love and attention was given to the set itself, placing props in just the right way and setting up walls at the best angles to create the uncanny valley, as would have been given to a living actor. The backrooms felt alive.

Although the last 1/3 or so of the movie was a complete tone shift from the first 2/3, I did enjoy it. The beginning felt like one of the original kanepixels backrooms shorts. That last bit felt much more...standard horror fare. Which didn't surprise me given that this was a movie from A24. I have an ongoing beef with big-studio horror movies, because to me they feel like (as I put it in a previous post) a pan of cookie-cutter beheaded gingerbread men. You can track the story beats. That doesn't make them bad, they're often very good and even excellent. I love a lot of big-studio horror. The thing is, I can still acknowledge that they are...samey. Predictable. Appealing to the widest possible audience.

Backrooms isn't trying to appeal to that wide audience and you can see it in the reviews. It's aiming at an audience that knows about the backrooms as a concept from Kane's work and/or the wider sea of backrooms media. It's aimed at an audience willing to be quiet and put down their phones, an audience willing to let the environment tell a story, an audience willing to let questions go unanswered and accept that not everything will be explained.