beneath the heavens

I’ll be real I don’t know much about Phoenix Wright. But! I do know a lot about birds.

The mighty ptarmagin! Practically a feathered rabbit, these magnificent creatures are built for the snow.

Look at those boots! Wonderfully feathered. They spend most of their time as little snow lumps.

In fact, they’re very well known for the above phenomenon.

In the time it took scientists to discover it, let it be a planet for 76 years, take away its planet status, say it might be a planet again, then change their minds, Pluto never made a full orbit around the sun.

Due to it taking 248.09 Earth years for Pluto to circle the sun, we won’t see it complete an orbit until March 23, 2178.

Quarantine Man

The Taiwan CDC with a Disinfectant Gun

Hepatitis but a Boy Band

Syphilis with Gender (女) and other Bio Information

Varicella (chicken pox) and Herpes Zoster (shingles) as Children

The Plague, but Hot Lady (also with bio information)

Fuckboy Influenza

Measles, but Hot Guy

Lyme Disease with a Mech????

And, of course, COVID-19 in all their gender neutral glory.

There’s more but I hit the image limit. I’ve got a couple articles about them, too:

Tsutsumagushi Disease

Chikungunya Fever!

MERS

Pertussis (whooping cough) with a horrifying (almost body horror) headpiece and flute

Dengue Fever, the image of which literally made me stop breathing for a moment when I first saw it

Japanese Encephalitis (as... idols, maybe?)

And Zika Virus (so pretty! and for what???)

And some higher res images of the ones from the video (Legionnaires’ Disease, Viral Gastroenteritis, and Rubella). Unfortunately, I could not fit Rabies because of the image limit.

We always take Mondays off! A piece I did for the cover of @offthecourtzine, which is available here til 21/sept/2020.

‘The people that are coming to Comic Con, they’re there because they’re true fans. They love these characters. They want to see what’s new. What’s next. What are you going to show us? So, wouldn’t it be great to have Tom Hiddleston come out as Loki? We called Tom up. We explained what we wanted to do. He was completely on board: he loves that type of thing. And from there, we figured out how do we get him on stage.’ 

The movie is captivating, but the book is twenty kinds of terrifying, even now, ten years after I first read it. As disturbing as the movie may have been to some, the things Selick added really serve to cushion just how horrific the story really is.

First of all, the character of Wybie does not exist in the book. Coraline is facing all of this nearly alone, with her only help coming from the sly comments of the cat, a warning from the circus mice, and the stone given to her by her neighbor, presented with no comment but that it “makes the unseen seen.”

Second, the Other Parents are never quite as warm (and, dare I say, normal) as they are in the gifs above. They’re described as having paper-white skin and the Other Mother’s hair is said to move on its own, and her long, red, claw-like nails don’t ease any uncertainty that she is absolutely, positively up to no good. The first time Coraline meets them, they (and the rest of the Others) seem to be playing roles (for whatever reason, Coraline does not seem to pick up on this), like they all know what to say and what to do and are simply waiting for Coraline to make her move in their terrifying play world. This is shown to be partly true when the Other Parents tell her they know she’ll be back soon after she refuses the buttons - this time, to stay.

Third, the Other Mother commits atrocities that really should not have been in a book for anyone not fully grown up. She physically deforms the world around Coraline to slow her progress in their game beyond any mild traps the movie portrays, and, instead of turning the Other Father into the wandering pumpkin-thing seen in the film, she simply ceases to use him and throws his body away in the cellar, leaving him to rot with whatever bit of sentience he has left. She begins to lose her touch, as Coraline gains the upper hand. Her world doesn’t just become a nightmare - it falls apart completely. No creepy but oddly cool bug furniture here, just the house that now appears to be a child’s drawing. Whatever the Other Mother is (a beldame, but something tells me she’s much more ancient and powerful than that), she does not give half a hump about what she has to do to ensnare Coraline. Destroy the supporting characters of her twisted creation? Done. Allow herself to be dismembered to ruin Coraline’s life in the normal world? Not even gonna bat an eyelash.

On a final, personal note, imagine eight year-old me, ignored by my parents, absorbed in the story and identifying with Coraline from the start. Imagine me finishing this bloodcurdling book and immediately thinking of my basement, where there is still a locked door that my grandmother swears up and down is nothing more than a storage room, but has not once in my (or my mother’s) lifetime unlocked.

A decade later, at the Opening Night of the Coraline musical, I was sitting next to Morgan, Merilee’s youngest daughter, and told her how her not being scared had made the book happen. And she said “I was terrified. But I needed to find out what happened next. So nobody knew.”

A Decade of Tom Hiddleston on Stage and Screen (2010 ~ 2019)

“Kill your darlings” was an expression Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch came up with, to tell young writers not to fall in love with a particularly fine passage. He wrote,

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

you ever have just like, a really bad idea

(+ these hilarious comments)

Bonus:

The spider kids get another loser uncle