Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Wonderful kitteh news. I shall check the Twitters for updates. Skiriki, if someone called MishMei follows that account, it’s only me ??

Here is a good thing: remember the story Kat posted re Katie Roiphe planning to out the creator of the Shitty Men in Media thingy, via Harpers?
Things have probably changed given that the author decided to out herself before Roiphe/Harpers could, but while it was still ongoing, a wonderful person posted this on Twitter:

She kept her promise, apparently, thru PayPal.
She’s one of the Nicoles from The Toast, which of course she is ?

skiriki,

I am glad one kitten is healthy! also good for mother so she does not feel sad

Skiriki,

?????

Morning everyone!

Meant to post on the weekend, but I’m usually absorbed in other things, mostly arting/gaming. But I did manage to sit down at watch all three hours of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film and jumpin’ Jehoshaphats, that movie was crap. Not total crap; the opening credit montage I thought was well done and Jackie Earle Haley played a remarkable Walter Kovacs. But other than those two bright spots, it was a terrible adaptation and at best a mediocre film.

Strap in, cuz I gotta vent about how bad an adaptation this was. But first, I’m gonna check my inner snob at the door: for those that enjoyed the film, more power to you! I can certainly see people coming to the story fresh enjoying it, as the film was serviceable as a shot-for-shot remake of the graphic novel. And it probably goes without saying but:

SPOILERS AHEAD

My problem was that as a shot-for-shot remake (and I had my copy of the graphic novel beside me to see what was used and what was left out), it aped the aesthetics (angles, colours, costumes) but either didn’t understand the characters or figured character was secondary to plot and action, so we got plenty of slow-motion bone-breaking and finger exploding, but bland and dull characters that only vaguely resembled the people I had read in the novel.

Nowhere was this more apparent than with Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre II). I never considered Malin Åkerman that strong an actress to begin with (which is a shame, because I have a soft spot for fellow Canucks), but it was obvious that Snyder had no idea what to do with her character. Reading the novel, she really was the stabilizing force at the heart of the Watchmen; the reluctant superhero who feuded with her vicarious mother and was drawn to Doctor Manhattan lacking a father figure in her youth. Now 35, she’s questioning what she’s done with all those years with a mixture of anger, sadness and nostalgia. None of that comes through in her interactions with Dan Dreiberg at the restaurant. During the scene when she accidentally starts up Archimedes, in the novel she felt so rejuvenated among the gadgets of her old life that she was picking up old goggles and joking about Nite Owl’s utility belt. Instead, Snyder has Åkerman just stand there looking pretty while Dreiberg puts the goggles on her.

Similarly, the alley fight with the Top-Knots is supposed to be a revelation for both characters. It’s the first time they’ve felt power in years, but neither wants to show it, but for different reasons. Dreiberg’s felt impotent and is excited to feel powerful again, but Laurie’s reminded of the life she didn’t choose for herself and laments feeling excited, lighting a cigarette in the novel as if trying to forget a bad romance. So she decides to leave while Dreiberg presses on to his meeting with Hollis. Snyder treats it as just an excuse for neck-snapping and blood-shedding, the pivotal moment afterwards just lazily done in a half-mumbled long shot.

And when passionate Laurie is needed the most, when her mother’s symbolic bottle of Nostalgia perfume is meant to be hurtling towards Osterman’s clockwork fortress and she’s casting her mother’s photographs about the sands of Mars, believing her life to be a joke and her lover condemning all humanity, we get none of that. Just the same flat delivery and green screen effects we’ve got for the past two long dull hours.

I think the lovemaking scene after the fire rescue is the perfect metaphor for the whole mess: caught up in his own visual style, Snyder misplaces the emphasis of the scene. So instead of hitting the audience with the full impact of these two characters finally overcoming their fear of embracing their old lives in the afterglow of the moment, we get a dumb musical montage as an excuse to see Åkerman’s boobs.

And really, it was the musical montages that were the most obnoxious. They landed with a thud each time, eating up time that was vital to fleshing out the characters. The slo-mo shots of Rorschach were just as obnoxious, reflecting an unnerving reverence Snyder seemed to have for the character. Rorschach is important, but as a tragic figure, he’s ultimately an anachronism like the Comedian was, and meets his own foreshadowed end under similar circumstances, while Dan and Laurie come to grips (both literally and proverbially) with new world that’s unfolding around them.

I checked around some forums for other viewer’s opinions and the detractors seemed to entirely focused on the fact that the giant squid was omitted. In my eyes, this was actually something the film version got right: dispense with the goofy monster and let the world’s object of fear be the living Neutron bomb that has just rekindled its respect for life. There’s pathos and tragedy wrapped up in that turn of events that just sits unremarked upon, Snyder opting for a protracted Ozymandias-Nite Owl-Rorschach fistfight instead.

UGHHH!

I’ll give Snyder credit insofar as he tried. Folks long considered Watchmen unfilmable. But it needed to be a character piece when it seemed Snyder just wanted to make a “dark” superhero film. Well, he got his chance and failed in that endeavour too.

Anyhoo, rant over. The whole film just struck me as a case study in the style-over-substance film-making that seems to obnoxiously permeate too many “geek” properties, the DCEU being the worst offender in this score. To repeat, got no issues with enjoying visual style. I just happen to need some decent subtext to chew on with it.

@Skiriki
I’m so sorry the first kitty died, but glad that the second one made it. That kitty is adorable.

Ghazi linked what I thought was a great Guardian piece for why Aziz Ansari’s actions are being called out, why some people are defending him, and how enthusiastic consent is so damned critical.

I know because I had that mindset when I was younger: Women are gatekeepers to sex and men have to wear down their resistance. The quote-unquote “successful” man gets a notch in the bedpost and a story to brag about later. It’s woefully common and the perfect setup for a #MeToo backlash, because it’s one thing if it’s just a Harvey Weinstein or twelve. If it’s the majority of men, then oh shit, we don’t want to be “that guy.” We want to be able to look ourselves in the mirror in the morning and tell ourselves were “the good guys.”

Hell, I remember reading a Daily Banter article where the late Chez Pazienza came this close to that realization, but couldn’t bring himself to face the unpleasant idea staring him in the face:

Like millions of people, male and female, I had sexual encounters that began with reluctance but ended in bed. So who’s to say that reluctance wasn’t interpreted far differently by my partners at the time than it was by me? That same model of feminism also believes heavily in the notion that it’s impossible for someone who’s been drinking to consent to sex. So if this is true, it means that there was a period in which I didn’t have a whole lot of “consensual” sex. In fact, as a friend of mine recently put it, if this particular standard for consent were applied throughout all of society rather than simply in vague legislative declarations and on a growing number of college campuses, New York City would pretty much be the rape capital of the planet every weekend.

Chez then shifts to fret over Paul Nungesser’s future (the guy Emma Sulkowicz–the girl who carried the mattress around–was allegedly assaulted by), as if he was terrified by that moment of self-realization. Chez clearly isn’t alone in that fear.

@epitome

I’m not really plugged into the world of CanLit, so this was new to me. Hardly surprising though… all the back-slapping that happens around Awards season always rubbed me the wrong way. I would imagine that world is so insular that plenty of predators can operate therein.

As for gatekeeping, it actually brought to mind a particular portrait displayed as an introduction to the Canadian Gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was a photograph by Dawit Petros of a black Canadian of Caribbean ancestry posing in a winter coat. An accompanying blurb, he asks the viewer what Canadian-ness is. Is it the trappings, like the winter coat he’s wearing? Is it place of birth? The country he’s known all his life? I considered it a pretty powerful question to ask before setting foot in a gallery containing artifacts offered as quintessentially “Canadian.”

http://www.wedgecuratorialprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Petros_Sign1-788×1024.jpg

If CanLit is considered what was in the running for the Giller Prize or the GG Award, then it’s in trouble. Give me more stuff like Nalo Hopkinson. I read Brown Girl In The Ring for a university course and it left an impression on me. I mean, a coming of age story about generational conflict of Caribbean Canadians set in a believable dystopian Toronto? Talk about badass!

@kupo
Read that before bed last night when I’d heard that summat was going on with Aziz. Got a few paragraphs in with a regular face. The rest I read with morbid curiosity and a look half between a scowl of disgust and the eyebrow raise of ‘this is a joke, right?’

From the end of the article:

I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of intersectionality and all that, they’d stay laser focused on college-educated white men for another few months

As a ‘brown skinned men’, miss me with your faux concern for peeps of color, Caitlyn

They’re angry and temporarily powerful, and last night they destroyed a man who didn’t deserve it

Aziz Ansari got called out, and he’s dealing with it. He doesn’t deny it. It’s been a few fuckin days, he’s not been run outta town or anything. This ain’t exactly Emmett Till here…

Meanwhile, her last piece for the Atlantic is her skewering the arguments made against the accusers of Weinstein and sundry. Tell me this is ‘satire’. Cos, otherwise, what the fuck?

Yay kittens!

I want to clarify something because it might be helpful when it comes to personal history and mental health. This is only my perspective and it comes from how I accommodate what I discover but I hope it can help some people.
When I try to tie research findings to my life it’s about figuring out how to put tab A into slot B in my mind so I can be functional. In many ways I don’t care how I got here I just want to repair the damage and show other people how to do the same. I mostly care about what my family does once they know better and I extend that to everyone.
Is it possible for in-group criticism to an instinctual tendency? That makes sense in a social-impulsivity context.

I found a mouse version of me. I have to go hunting for model limitations like the fact that the poor things have had effectively all the cholenergic interneurons in their dorsal striatum ablated away via chemistry in a treatment when nature has seen fit to leave me at least half of mine after a virtually unknown developmental journey that also has increases and decreases in many other parts of my brain. That will feel much more intense for the poor mouse. And I’ve had a lifetime to build up control of the little urges that result in “environmentally driven motor sequences”. (They separated self-directed from other-directed repetitive behavior). That’s aside from the differences between mice that have arisen since our ancestors were separated.

Is it weird that I want one and want to name it after myself?

Yay for the healthy babby! ^^

In other news, I’ve just ordered my new laptop and it should arrive in a week or two. Unlike this mess of duct tape and explosions, it has a graphics card in it. Which means don’t be too surprised if I spend the first month vanished and the second month speaking in nothing but Portal quotes.

O’Riordan, singer of the Cranberries is dead (for unknow reason yet). Her voice is going to be missing.

@Brony,
If you did get your mouse, what would you name it? Brony? Social Justice Cenobite? I am very invested in this all of a sudden.

@kupo,

Jebus, that article. Brrr. This bit:

I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men.

is so fucking disgusting, on so many levels, to victims, and to “brown-skinned men.” It also makes crystal clear that stupid notion people have: that lefties think only white men are Bad People, and everyone else is Good. Reminds me of how they used to do the “You’re criticising Milo? Don’t you know he’s gay?!” rubbish.

Furthermore, I see your horrible article, and I raise you an even more horrible one. Well, possibly more horrible – it’s hard to tell. I need some cute animals on Twitter now…

Congrats for the new kitten, Skiriki!

(Insert joke about incoming “kitty christening”)