weiawam

Shadow影 is a 2018 Chinese wuxia film directed by Zhang Yimou. With the colour palette of an ink wash painting, Zhang Yimou creates one of the most memorable wuxias in years.

Resilience and hope

Edward Hopper

Mary Roach. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. 

This is a really interesting read - it’s got a lot of information that I would never have thought to think of (such as - will astronauts eyeballs become different shapes without gravity - weird), but it also has really good chapters about the psychology of space. 

- Fantasy noir: Pour another one, Joe. My dragon left me for some clean-shaven cape-wearing foreign hero with an accent so thick you could hear the fake passport in his voice.

- Existential noir: these are mean streets to have an empty life in, kid. Thinkers nurse a hangover from their disgust of life for fifty years then roll over and die. This is how we run things in our city. Play it again, will you.

- Southern Gothic Noir: look at yourself, boy. They’ve got names for people who carry the Bible like that. They’ve got names for everything around here. And if you don’t get it the first time the walls will whisper it back to you.

– Noir Mythology: She was a priestess at some local temple. One of those temple only people who pray for a pint of bourbon and a life insurance go to. And she had a face that meant trouble, make no mistake. But not after Zeus turned her into a cow. Not after Zeus turned her into a cow.

- Noir meta-Shakespeare: Characters like us, Horatio. We weren’t born to grow old and mean. We faff around, we mix a stiff one, and then we die. But when we die, we die hard and we make sure we bring the whole damn city down with us.

- Noir Milton: Heaven looked high class from fifty feet away but from five feet away it looked like the kind of place meant to be seen from fifty feet away. Stay there long enough you get a double pint of Hell’s Bells. Real hell is my business now. Real hell is how I make my nickel.

- Noir William Blake: She was the sort of tiger a bishop would paint crosses on his front door against. You can’t tell anything from tigers like that. She could have had the sheriff in the back room. She could have been making millions. But you could tell she burned bright in all the right places. Oh, she burned bright all right.

- Noir Dylan Thomas: Alright, old man. Amateur hour is over. You go down kicking and screaming or you don’t go down at all, you get my meaning?

- Noir Keats: Outside, the Autumn smelled of politics: it asked only for the highest types of men and had nothing to offer them but bleating lambs and the song of crickets. The sort of autumn that shares his smokes and his wife with the maturing sun. “I don’t like Spring,” the kid said. “That’s all right, sonny boy. I ain’t selling it.”

Spinning

Now, you also might not know that broody hens will try to hatch anything vaguely egg-like, from rocks and golf balls, to another animal’s eggs.

Thirdly, snakes REALLY like barns for being warm, full of delicious rats, and easy to hide in.

So picture if you will, Year of Our Lord 1350, and some poor peasant in the middle of Hell, Europe has just woken up to all his friends being dead of the plague and a rooster very excitedly showing off their weird noodle children.

Take into account poor Wiglaf here is superstitious, mostly uneducated, and full of malnutrition and anxiety, and you can see how things like cockatrices, basilisks, and people burning various creatures at the stake for being fucking horrifying occurred.

Everything was fucking horrifying, and sometimes it got out of hand.

this person (people?) goes about making 10 minute long loopable ambient noise tracks for every imaginable setting (docks, taverns, forests, airships, spaceships, office buildings, sewers, EVERYTHING) and has over a hundred tracks to offer, and on top of that if none of them suit you there’s a huge feature called soundpad where you can mix and match from their set of hundreds of individual sound effects and music clips to make your own ambient background track