Past Imperfect

holy shit

prev I think his problem is that he's a lazy entitled hack, honestly? Remember those parody horror adaptations from a few years ago, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I think Flanagan is just as lazy but less self-aware. He doesn't really see the problem with taking a Shirley Jackson or Stephen King original concept, tacking his own crappy half-formed idea onto it, and repackaging it as a creative adaptation. Flanagan isn't really adapting these original works. Adaptations are supposed to use the original material as a springboard into some new creative work. For example, in A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley adapted the story of King Lear into a new story about a misogynist landowner and the cruelty he inflicts on all three of his daughters. Smiley's adaptation took the source material into account. She used Lear's pride, his patriarchal entitlement, his alternately callous and grasping behavior towards his daughters, and the sorrow and bitterness that drove them into conflict with each other. She maintained much of the character and plot detail, and where she kept it she made sure to account for its effect on the story. Smiley also built something new. Her adaptation focuses on the perspectives of Regan and Goneril, who in her version are heroic survivors. She also highlights the consequences of Lear's selfishness for the land itself. This theme was certainly present in King Lear, but she brings it to the foreground, and transforms it from a war of succession into generational environmental depredation. She also opted to change emotional incest into actual explicit incest, because she was interested in exploring patriarchal abuse of women. Similarly, it would be interesting to see a version of Carrie whose mother is a tradwife influencer attached to a megachurch. Imagine the shower scene as a viral video staged by her mother! Who knows if that would be good, but it would be a creative exploration of the themes from the original: misogyny, shame, exposure, bullying. It would also involve using details from the original - the mother's inability to see her daughter as a person - to explore these themes in a new way. If you "adapt" original work without acknowledging the source material or connecting it to a fully-realized new idea, you're just appropriating. You're using the reputation and quality of a more famous original work to add luster to your own thin premise. It's clear that Flanagan doesn't respect the source material. He turned his Shirley Jackson "adaptation" into a paean to the transcendent love of the nuclear family. He doesn't care about what these original works are trying to say. He just likes the vibes. Spooky British Manor! Spooky Vampire Island! Spooky Telekinetic Girl! It's hard to ignore the source material and use it effectively to build something new (imagine a version of King Lear where he's presented as a good dad), but it doesn't seem like Flanagan is even trying to present a novel idea. His works are atmospheric and competent, but they're just a hash of horror tropes. His Netflix series were more like a collection of vignettes than a cohesive story. This idea is an interesting one, but it's not Carrie, and it doesn't sound like he really plans to think through the horror implications of "a mother who tries to create a private utopia for a sensitive girl who turns out to have telekinetic powers." I think Flanagan doesn't see the difference because nobody ever told him that being a horror auteur is about more than gorging on the classics and then huffing your own farts.

that Brian Eno quote about how whatever you find most repulsive about a medium (film grain, record scratches/fuzz, CDs skipping) will be the first thing you try and emulate once that medium is obsolete because it's "the sign of a moment too powerful for the medium assigned to contain it".... man.......

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” -Brian Eno

THANK YOU Just make your own movie, Mike!

Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.

Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life

...please don't be telling me there are Even Wider Cars that we aren't seeing in Europe? Because the humongousness of some of the cars people are trying and failing to cram into our parking garages here in Sweden already causes disasters, frankly.

Oh, Swede Sweden child....

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.

the sick times is another great publication for keeping up with long covid news! it also occasionally publishes information about related conditions

Thank you! And re: your tags yeah I agree it sucks that most of the best info about this stuff is indeed On Facebook.

Thank you!

I saw a post on a terf blog before I blocked it from someone being like "Ummm is anybody else really concerned about the rise of antisocial kinks like pissing" and it made me laugh so hard I almost did a little antisocial kink myself

The notion of pro-social vs antisocial kinks is itself hysterical to me. As though there's no way to be abusive and exploitative in an orgy, as though there's no way to achieve immense intimacy and care by peeing on each other. Nothing needs to be intrinsically anything. Everything is a function of the people involved. And like not to Devil's Sacrament you but how are you even measuring the relative growth of piss kinks at all, I NEVER see that shit