nico

found the sketch tidying up my desk

a medieval style digital drawing of an androgynous brown-skinned knight on horseback on a hill, stabbing a long gold spear into a blue dragon on the ground. the knight has a gold halo behind their head and wears a suit of silver armor with a nonbinary flag striped tunic and a trans flag as a cape. their horse is white, with blue tack with trans pride trim. there is black gothic text at the top and bottom of the image reading “A world without trans people has never existed and never will.” there’s an ornate pale blue border around the image, filled with pink and blue scrollwork, gold hearts filled with colorful flowers, a smiley bat, two smiley moles, and two smiling frogs holding up trans flags.

a world without trans people has never existed and never will

thank you that is very kind! it is indeed just a hobby i do on my morning or evening walks 😁

dinosaurian?

thank you !

i love cormorants there's something especially dinosauresque about them

love these!!

hah indeed!

she is quite astonishingly bad, it's almost endearing lol

found the sketch tidying up my desk

other night i was having ramen next to two 20somethin guys visibly on a first date
one of them was like "so what's your favorite food" "uhmm..nothing special, i don't have a preference" "ah hmm.. and what kinda shows you like?" "whatever's on..."
like that for like half an hour i was like girl, run

as in the first one, the costuming and set design are top notch, but that's all moot when it is all just so awfully shot

As long as you're mine is very forgettable because —sorry gays— but Bailey has the charisma of a, well, hay bale and him and Cynthia don't have much of a spark
Goldblum does what he usually does, it's ok - Yeoh really cannot hold a note and doesn't do much with her character

all in all, eh

while Couldn't be happier/No Good Deed/For Good are easily top 3 interpretations, the other songs fall flat
I was looking forward to Wicked Witch of the East because it's a very climactic (albeit understandably problematic) scene in the play, but through baffling directing choices it's a non-entity

Ariana has a couple funny bits, but she doesn't quite shine as much as in part I and Cynthia isn't given much to work with outside the big songs, which of course, she nails
the two new songs are entirely forgettable and don't even feel written to showcase their respective stars' talent

the second act of the musical is a mess, everyone knows that, but at least it moves at a brisk pace - i hoped the extra hour would allow for deeper characterization but everyone is just as one-dimensional as on the stage and there's no reason or rhyme as to why anyone does what they do

i was very pleasantly surprised by part 1, but this was..eh..
felt aimless, moved from song to song with little narrative thread to tie the whole thing together, looked quite awful (which made even big numbers like No good deed fall flat) and didn't give C+A much to do outside the musical numbers

so effective!!

love seeing wood engraving matrices

cool stuff i saw at the M. C. Escher exhibit

also she did the thing I love some glindas do (Megan hilty notably) where they go up on the "un" in "there are bridges you crossed you didn't you crossed ⬆️un⬇️til you've crossed" it's great

Ariana did some nice subtle Ariana-circa-yours truly-isms on Couldn't be happier, it was great

We have six new prints by the brilliant Kento Iida in the shop:

www.blackdragonpress.co.uk/products/ken...

it probably hit way different when it originally came out vs if you see it for the first time now after decades of slashers, slasher parodies, heightened slashers, reinvented slashers what have you and the reification of Jason as a popculture monster but yeah it's a very interesting watch

i watched Friday for the first time not long ago after putting it off for so long (as a slasher fan, a bit of a mystery why i did that); it is so interesting cause it was absolutely nothing like what i expected it to be from decades of pop-culture osmosis

a detail but also it's beautifully shot

I've never seen any of the sequels or the remake for that matter - even with all its issues, the original is unbeatable

also, big fur coat

(not the soundtrack but Orlock's characterization and Skarskard's interpretative choices)

come to think of it i think Nosferatu (2024) borrows a lot from Candyman?