Formerly Known As: undeadfaerie and callmegoddess618 Single mom, hellenic polythiest, feminist, fan, reader, avid viewer....I am many things. Witchy/dodekathiest side blog is goddessdoeswitchery. You can always find me on Discord at callmegoddess618, and at pillow fort at https://www.pillowfort.io/callmegoddess618
Also speaking as an American who recently went to Japan...I'm sure there's a valid health reason they're particular about this but frankly the reason could be that they don't want our inferior burgers in their country *the Japanese burgers I had there are so much better than anything I've had at home and much cheaper*
It's a biosecurity issue. They are not concerned that a foreigner bringing some meat snacks with them will affect the Japanese meat economy or worried that somebody might choose to eat an inferior burger. It's because meat (even cooked, tinned or preserved meat) can carry pathogens that aren't in the country and that they would prefer to keep out of the country.
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baseball is actually not a sport it’s just a documentary of human nature and how we battle boredom. the stuff these teams get up to while they’re waiting their turn.
and it’s hilarious when they pull pranks on each other, like attaching things to other people’s caps:
or the beloved hot foot prank:
or when they decided to put a guy’s pants over his head and make it seem like he was walking on his hands:
or when they opposing pitchers took turns playing tic tac toe every time they got on the mound:
Your tree has been visited by the Flying Tree Doctor and diagnosed with Infested. He has removed the Unauthorized Fucking Thing. Praise be to Flying Tree Doctor.
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
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distressing yet poetic that the Door to Hell is located in a country with one of the most restrictive visa policies in the world. imagine a magic portal to a kickass demonic dimension opened, but you had to cross the world, evade the border guards, and break into a whole ass country just to access it. now THAT is a QUEST.
anyway gimme a story about a demon trying to get home to hell but she keeps getting foiled by immigration control
oh, the Door To Hell aka the Darvaza gas crater is a real place in Turkmenistan fyi. yes that really is its colloquial name. for uh, self-evident reasons:
it's a natural gas crater formed by a collapsed cavern. it's been burning for over 50 years!
I’m a big fan of reenactment archaeology. I think there’s a lot to be said for recreating a scenario to better understand decisions made in generations past. Usually there’s an inherent logic to them.
Which is to say, that now that I have a baby of my own, I understand so much better the common cultural practice in which unmarried women wear their hair loose and uncovered, while married women have their hair covered and/or bound back.
I doubt it was just for modesty, oh no. No, my friends, I see now that the reason for this common practice of mothers binding back their hair is because there is nothing, I mean nothing, a baby love more than YANKING EVERY STRAND OF HAIR THAT COMES WITHIN GRABBING DISTANCE OF THEIR STICKY, SWEATY, AND IMPOSSIBLY STRONG LITTLE HANDS.
It is necessary for my postpartum depression study for the moms to have their hair down (due to our science hats) and the second they put their hair down YANK
Gothic literature must be cursed to forever be misinterpreted by mainstream public because how did this happen
Dracula book: an evil count who only sees the world as a resource to be drained for his own pleasure is stopped by the group of people who deeply care for each other
Dracula in media: a tragic romantic hero, main love interest of one of the protagonists who must be liberated from her dull little life
Frankenstein book: any human has capacity for evil when completely abandoned and shunned by the world and the people who brought him into it
Frankenstein in media: don't play God because it's against nature's laws
Jekyll and Hyde book: repression and only caring about external appearances can cause your worst impulses to indulge themselves in dangerous ways if ignored for too long
Jekyll and Hyde in media: what if there was two of the same guy but one of them was evil and gross?
“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
-Elif Batuman
Dracula: I’m a powerful man who sees the world as nothing but a resource to be drained. My name is Executive Producer. This book is awesome but these Power Of Love idiots don’t understand how Cool and Relatable To Me Dracula is.
Frankenstein: I’m not a Bad Parent. It is the Children who are wrong, they should be more Grateful for the Harsh Lessons I teach them so that they’ll grow up to be Hard like me
Jekyll & Hyde: I run an Aesthetic blog where I pretend I’m a cutesy woodland creature. I’m Nice, I’m So Nice, you don’t even know how Nice I am. I call the police on teenagers loitering in parks
For all you're bitching about Dracula being misinterpreted, there's a huge piece of Dracula that you're ignoring and that is something that isn't uniquely Dracula either, but is integral to the vampire in literature.
Gay sex as a contagion.
There's a REASON Dracula (and Carmilla) are portrayed with sexual overtones, and it is disingenuous to pretend that vampires are sexless metaphors for capitalism or aristocracy. That is a very modern view that completely ignores the fact that Dracula was modelled after Oscar Wilde, and written during the infamous libel trial that destroyed his life and brought homosexuality into wider public awareness at the same time.
Bram Stoker was a closeted gay man who admired Wilde and then had to watch him go through all of that. While writing this book.
This is why you need context of when a book was written and what was going on in the author's world at the time, and who the author was.
Otherwise you get people INSISTING that Dracula was purposely written as a metaphor for something that just so HAPPENS to be relevant right this second, and INSISTING that Dracula the character is "not supposed to be sexy, why do [all you FREAKS, is the implication] think he's sexy, ew!".
You cannot divorce Dracula from its portrayal of the homosexual as a corrupting influence on Good Normal People. To ignore this is revisionist.
The film Dracula was directed by Tod Browning, who also directed Freaks (the latter of which cast many of Browning's former friends from the circus as characters). Tod Browning was a former circus performer who constantly made films about the fringes of society, because that's where he was from, and about humanising those individuals. People were very aware that Dracula was a sexual metaphor--not just for queerness as a contagion but also the immigrant as an outsider. Dracula was made pre-Code, meaning there was allowed to be much more of an ambiguous portrayal of Dracula both as corrupting and sinister monster AND as sympathetic and tragic outsider. If you bother to ever watch the 1931 film, you will notice there is a great deal of accuracy to the book.
Frankenstein was directed by James Whale, a gay man who was actually pretty openly gay during a time when that was very dangerous. It's also a pre-Code film, meaning it's allowed to portray Adam as sympathetic. This film too is fairly accurate to the book, other than making the monster non-verbal and pretty much portraying him in his very early stages. Whale, being gay, empathised with the monster, and portrayed him as tragic and misunderstood--something he knew very well, as a gay man from that era. It's a well-known analysis that the film has queer undertones, and was very controversial at the time because it portrayed the monster as sympathetic, as the hero of the tragic tale, a victim of the greater world refusing to understand him.
The 1931 film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was by no means the first film adaptation, but it is one of the earliest that still survives and (I believe) the first with sound. I have seen it. It is accurate to the book in a degree that has not been possible since the Hays Code went into effect. It preserves the fear of the effects drugs can have on a person, which is actually one of the undertones of the book as well as the commentary on Victorian social organization, particularly the way the upper classes could quite literally get away with murder so long as they were murdering the "criminal classes"--people in abject poverty, and particularly sex workers. The book Jekyll and Hyde is not about "you have to walk in balance with yourself, repression is bad"; that interpretation is based on modern psychological ideas. Repression was seen as a good thing in Victorian society, and in particular Jekyll and Hyde hammers it home that it is a good thing to repress your evil urges, and that drugs will make you spiral out of control immediately and that "indulging" your evil will make it stronger. So it's not just a modern interpretation, it's completely and totally not understanding the book at all.
The truth is that producers did not meddle much in the filmmaking of yesteryear, and they certainly were not the ones writing the script or directing the film, so the idea that Dracula was somehow an avatar they particularly projected on is absolutely just made up nonsense that has no evidence historically. It was beneath them. As long as the movie was making money, that was all that mattered. To that end, horror was incredibly lucrative. And every single adaptation of all three books since the films I mentioned above has actually been adapting that film more than it has been adapting the book. And then subsequent films are influenced by the films that came before. They are not in direct conversation with the books, they are in direct conversation with each other, with society at the time, with filmmaking at the time. You cannot take them out of that context.
To not address the queer undertones of Frankenstein and Dracula and the books they were adapted from is ignorant. To not address the social commentary and fears of drug-use in Jekyll and Hyde is equally ignorant. To not address the fears of grave-robbing and science without ethics in Frankenstein is ignorant.
The interpretations in OP are suspiciously Puritanical in their sterility and a little too relevant to present-day social fears. This speaks to the longevity of the stories, but to insist that those are the ONLY correct interpretations, that somehow someone in the 19th century was commenting on issues in the 21st, is ridiculous and bull-headed. To in particular keep hammering that to see sexuality and sensuality in these stories is Wrong and Bad is not just foolish, it erases that these stories are part of a very real body of evidence telling us what people feared in that time, in that place, and--in the case of Dracula in particular--are part of the history of a marginalised group of people that regularly has their presence in history erased. And you're being part of that erasure in so doing. Maybe don't.
TL;DR: You're wrong and you're being a little homophobic about it tbh. People have always wanted to fuck monsters and frankly it does not matter how uncomfortable that makes you, that doesn't mean those people are "interpreting the story wrong". In fact, they're interpreting it more correctly than you are.
Y'all are also missing the antisemitism in Dracula.
Dracula is Ooh Scary + European + Blood, which, in retrospect, should've put me on edge. It didn't, so I was surprised when I read it (this is incomplete):
Dracula is explicitly described with a hooked nose (classical imagery of Jews).
At one point he literally DRINKS THE BLOOD OF A (PRESUMABLY CHRISTIAN) CHILD, aka the ACTUAL LITERAL BLOOD LIBEL.
The boxes of dirt he transports are said to smell of Jerusalem by one person.
He looks normal, but don't be fooled, he's really the Other. He's good at disguise though.
He is wealthy.
He is from vaguely Eastern Europe, as most Jews at the time in the UK were.
He is fundamentally parasitic.
The cross (a religious symbol of Christianity specifically) keeps him away
It is important to note the context -- antisemitism is on the rise in the UK due to Jewish immigration provoking latent cultural antisemitism. At least one reviewer explicitly interpreted Dracula as being about Jewish immigration to the UK, if I recall correctly. The image of Jews-as-vampires still persists today, and the image of vampires draws a LOT from Dracula.
Bram Stoker is screaming "BEWARE OF JEWS" at the top of his lungs and meanwhile the introduction to my edition goes on and on about Dracula and gender and how he is semi-androgynous because he's not masculine enough (a medieval myth, for what it's worth, is that Jewish men menstruated) and the notes point out that the typewriter was invented in America in 1867 but do not explicitly mention Jews or Judaism in any context whatsoever.
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Also? If it is a contracted position, write down that you are not quitting but are concerned at the change in contract terms. If they wish to renegotiate your contract, you would be delighted to do so.
So, this scene is specifically a fuck off to famously anti-union Disney. But it goes beyond the dialogue.
Look at Puss on Shrek's shoulders. Puss's movement is counter balancing Shrek's so that he stays up there. It's a lot of movement, a lot of animation, for a character who isn't talking. Every time they have to animate that feather in his hat, that's extra work, extra care, extra money, and that's just one element of the work, there. The animators could have chosen to put Puss on Donkey- look at Donkey's relatively small amount of movement compared to Shrek or Puss. But they didn't, they put him on Shrek's shoulders and they animated him.
Why might they do this as a fuck-you to Disney?
Well. Disney is not only anti-union, they are cheap as fuck. There's a lot of recycled rotoscoping in Disney movies in the 1970s because they were cheaping out on the process so they didn't have to pay rotoscopers. There are probably other examples, but, they recycle their own work a lot, and I assume most Tumblrinas have probably seen that video of the scenes from Robin Hood and Jungle Book and 101 Dalmations directly compared with scenes from Snow White and several animated cartoons that the rotoscoping was taken from.
The reason that Don Bluth left Disney to start his own company (not Dreamworks, but, this is the example that I have) was because on The Rescuers, there were a lot of examples of the whites of eyes not being painted in- you can see it a LOT with Bernard, especially in action sequences. Don was told that the reason for this was that it was too expensive. He thought it looked like what it is, unprofessional and unfinished for a company that's allegedly got Disney money and Disney quality, so he went off and did the math and was like, "It doesn't cost shit." And Disney told him to shut up and stop colouring in the whites of the eyes.
So he left. And you can see the kind of "needless" art he did in movies like The Land Before Time and The Secret of NIMH where there's a LOT of attention to detail in the art and in the animation.
We're seeing the same thing here with Shrek and Puss. While talking about union protections for union workers, in a nod intended to stick it to Disney, they are showing animators, "Look. We didn't need to animate this scene like this, you know this. But we did. We spent the money. We're pro union and we didn't cheap out."
me (reminiscing on doing aikido & mma with my sister): i'm not sure if i was ever a good floor fighter. i think it was just bad for my opponents that i was so hypermobile i could get out of locks no person should be able to get outta.
saga: that's true. and we didn't even know why. we just called you 'the wiggler.'
since this conversation last night i've been stuck in a character voice for a gruff middle aged man called The Wiggler. i can't stop sending people voice memos as him....
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There’s a certain folkloric idea that if you die at sea, your soul is sort of. Inextricably stuck in the sea. Because your body is irretrievable, your soul is also irretrievable, down out of the reach of the gods who look at the surface of the world. In Norse mythology, they said that the souls of sailors who died at sea are caught in the sea-goddess Rán’s net and dragged into her domain, a distinct and separate afterlife alongside Hel and Valhalla. Davy Jones Locker. The funayūrei. A lot of cultures agree that once sea has a hold on you, even when your body has rotted and dwindled and been made food for crabs, it still won’t let you go.
Do you think we’re going to wind up saying the same thing about astronauts.
the thing about that weird stuff americans call cheese is that if you heat it a little it becomes an excellent burger condiment despite its failings in every other area. such is the fate of the american cultural product
the American 'cheese' slice was engineered by our best scientific minds (all borrowed from Germany ofc) to melt perfectly onto a burger and for nothing else. Its only purpose is to compliment the one true product of the American people. The hamburger. (also borrowed from Germany)
American Cheese is a processed cheese made of Cheddar, Colby, or similar, combined with Sodium citrate. The Sodium citrate keeps the cheese fats from separating during the pasteurization process.
The patent for processing American Cheese was granted in 1916 to James L. Kraft, a Canadian of German descent who had immigrated to the US in 1904. Pasteurizing the cheese prevents it from spoiling, allowing it to be shipped farther and stored longer. It was actually WW1 that gave Kraft (and his company) their big break, as the US government provided cheese (in tins) to the armed forces abroad.
So no, Project Paperclip here, although the US Armed Forces and Germans were involved. His ancestors left Germany for Mennonite reasons, not because they were Nazis.
Fun fact: His parents spelled their last name "Krafft". He dropped one of the Fs when he started J.L. Kraft & Bros. Company, which later became Kraft Foods.
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