leahazel reblogged
In case you missed it, Slay the Princess finally has a release date, and we've got a fully animated trailer to go with it!
Slay the Princess is a horror-comedy and romance visual novel where a ~mysterious narrator~ (Jonathan Sims) tasks you with slaying the a princess (Nichole Goodnight) before she ends the entire world.
But will you trust him? Will you trust her? Can you trust anybody?
The demo has about three hours of content, so if you'd like to check it out, you can download it from Steam and itch. And don't forget to wishlist the full game!
leahazel reblogged
Alguien me habló todos los días de mi vida
al oído, despacio, lentamente.
Me dijo: ¡vive, vive, vive!
Era la muerte.
Jaime Sabines
leahazel reblogged
I've been watching a lot of Rite of Spring vids on youtube, and since today is the Equinox of Spring, a date I only learned to appreciate after moving to the American Midwest, I decided to make a little selection of performances of the Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One with my impressions :D
A little context: it is well-known that this ballet, choreographed in 1913 by the legendary Nijinsky, was a tremendous flop at the time. While Stravinsky's musical score continued to be played and studied (it was even used in Walt Disney's Fantasia, in 1940), the choreography was lost and the ballet never performed again... Until 1987, when dance historian Millicent Hodson led a research project with the Joffrey Ballet company to reconstruct Nijinsky's ballet. The fruit of that project was a choreography subsequently performed by many ballet companies around the world. Many of those performances are available on YouTube nowadays, and there are even fan channels dedicated to documenting and uploading as much material as they can.
The last act of this short ballet is a solo dance called "The Sacrificial Dance (of the Chosen One)", where a young girl dances to death. When I watch that part I always think the three main elements are: fear, anger, and devotion.
The solo dance below, with the ballerina Beatriz Rodriguez, is from the first performance of the reconstructed ballet in 1987. In my opinion, out of all the performances I have had access to, this is the one that makes me think of fear the most. She looks terrified. Sometimes she opens her mouth like she's screaming or wailing, which not many other dancers do -- look at 03:58, she's the only one who does that, or her grimace at 03:48. She sells the exhaustion and horror like no other dancer I've seen so far, and she set the tone for all the ballerinas that came after her.
This performance by Gaia Straccamore, in 2001, is the one that has always seemed like the angriest to me. It's always very interesting to compare and notice the changes: I think maybe it's because she is so tall, and her form so controlled -- notice her movements are sharper than Beatriz's, her arms and legs straighter, look at the way she covers her face and pushes it back at 00:24, or how far down she goes to gather the fist she shakes at the sky. To me, she looks as furious as she is afraid, cursing her fate. It even makes me see a slightly different meaning in certain steps of the dance. This might also be my personal favorite performance to watch.
Finally, I think there is an air of solemnity and earnestness in this performance by Marie-Claude Pietragalla, given in 1989, that makes me think that this Chosen One, between the terror and rebellion, is genuinely trying. Her gestures and face during the jumps at 02:50 make me think she is not just being overpowered by the religiousness of the rite against her will, like the other ones, but like she's pleading, or praying (for it to end? for her to be able to give herself away?). Being honest, this is not my favorite interpretation, but it was the first version of this dance that made me feel this way, and I think it's striking.
And a personal favorite as a bonus: Margarita Simonova. I'm putting this one here because I really like the performance, and also because I think the poor quality of the video gives it a very interesting effect lol. She's a sacrifice for the Sun god; there she is, shining blindingly in the darkness as she dances in his honor. I think it looks cool, especially at around 4:30 when the sky turns red and she starts moving so fast she leaves a specter of light behind, accidentally gorgeous. I also really like her sense of rhythm and some stuff she is doing with her body: the way she interprets the step at 03:25 is unique as far as I can tell, and gives it a slightly different meaning, IMO. I think some of her choices, like her upturned face as the punches the ground at 03:08, or how she changes the step at 0:36 so that she is not shaking a fist up at the sky like the others are, make me read 'devotion' or a similar religious feeling.
Those are some of the performances that strike me the most, but you can see many others, as well as the full ballet and short documentaries, on YouTube for free. I'll leave you with a thematic YouTube playlist, in case you're interested:
For those who made it this far, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful spring or autumn depending on where in the world you are :)
leahazel reblogged
Writing four weeks before her death, Alice arrives at the perennial question of the nature of the self — or what Walt Whitman considered the paradox of identity — and where it resides. With unsentimental and almost buoyant poignancy, she observes that even as the body fails part by part, we adapt by folding the losses into our consent to reality, the integrity of our deepest sense of self remaining all the while intact:
This long slow dying is no doubt instructive, it is disappointingly free from excitements: “naturalness” being carried to its supreme expression. One sloughs off the activities one by one, and never knows that they’re gone, until one suddenly finds that the months have slipped away and the sofa will never more be laid upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of the new book regretted; one revolves with equal content within the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose.
Vanity, however, maintains its undisputed sway, and I take satisfaction in feeling as much myself as ever, perhaps simply a more concentrated essence in this curtailment.
What allowed Alice to meet her mortality with such serenity was not a physical fact but the single most important psychological and emotional event of her life, which had taken place a decade earlier. When she was thirty-two, Alice had met Katharine Peabody Loring — an energetic young education reformer and activist, whom she described as having “all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman, combined with all the distinctive feminine virtues.”
The two women shared the remainder of Alice’s life, and her family came to accept Katharine as one of them. Henry James admired her “strength of wind and limbs, to say nothing of her nobler qualities,” recognized that she and his sister were bonded by “a permanency,” and came to love the devotion with which Katharine simply loved Alice. (His novel The Bostonians, published four years after Alice’s death, would popularize the term “Boston marriage” — a domestic partnership between two women, financially independent of any man, likely modeled on his sister’s relationship with his sister-outside-law.) Katharine, for her part, assured Henry of her own desire “quite as strongly as Alice’s, to be with her to the end.”
ID: Two black and white photographs of women in 19th century dress, one of them wearing a bowler.
Source: brainpickings.org
Dreamed about a woman who murdered a man while wearing a Wonder Woman costume. And confessed while wearing an ice-themed met gala ttpe gown. With a bare midriff. And fucking hoopskirts.
leahazel reblogged
im just here for a good time but i feel so attacked rn
Hmmm…
Well this is awkward.
And here was me thinking you’d be the court jester.
you died. "from the plague?" you ask. yeah, from the plague.
Figures.
leahazel reblogged
First thing you see after you zoom in is how you die
How you dying 👀
...”Floor sex”?
Yeah, I can cope. :)
"Attempt at humor"
I make a funny-haha post on Tumblr that falls flat and am summarily evicted from the ball pit via clown cannon.
"Marriage Contracts"
...yeah, that tracks.
In the middle difficulty level of The Wandering Village, toxic spore storms are more difficult to fight off and more likely to take casualties. I've lost several people, so my population overall is lower this time than the first playthrough. No starvation deaths, though I came close once or twice.
It's a challenge, to be sure.
christfucker-deactivated2023040
No more zodiac signs. If you were the main character and you finally brutally murdered somebody to show the audience that you are no longer the upstanding young man you were at the beginning and that you had "snapped," what song would be playing in that scene?
leahazel reblogged
Anonymous asked:
This is probably not the right blog to ask, but I'm not sure where else: is there a way to write a convincing hitman? Any obvious do's or don't's?
Well, first off it's important to remember that most of the assassins you're familiar with from pop culture are pure fantasy. There's no real world analog for characters like John Wick, Leon (The Professional), Vincent (Collateral), or 47. They belong to a theoretical tier of professional assassins that (probably) don't exist.
I'm going off a 2014 article from The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, but unfortunately, it's been pay walled sometime in the last 8 years, so this is going to be mostly from memory. The authors classify assassins into four groups: Novices, Dilettantes, Journeymen, and Masters.
Novices are the amateur assassins and hitmen. These aren't really killers for hire, so much as just people who like the idea of getting paid for killing someone. When novice hitmen have ties to local criminal enterprises, it's really easy for police to identify them, because they generally don't travel to commit their crimes. Everyone in the (criminal) community, usually has a pretty good idea who the killer was, and no real interest in protecting them.
Novices who manage to pull off a couple contracts without getting caught graduate into Dilettantes. Again, not a lot to say here, these guys come from a mix of backgrounds. They're not really professionals, but they do commit the occasional killing for pay.
Journeymen are professionals. They may be ex-military, or they may simply be career criminals. As with Novices and Dilettantes, they're likely to stay close to home, which, in turn, makes them relatively easy to identify during criminal investigations. When you're looking at organized crime hitmen, they're likely to fall into one of these three categories. Street level soldiers who get tapped to carry out a killing are usually novices or dilettantes, a criminal enterprise might have some journeymen further up in the organization, at their disposal.
Masters might not exist. These guys have military, intelligence, or specialized backgrounds, they travel some distance to kill their targets, and then they disappear and head home. Here's the problem. All realistic investigation of professional assassins is based examining the failures (something, mentioned in the referenced article.) This means, if someone doesn't screw up, avoids detection, and escapes capture, we don't know anything about them. We only know about the assassins that are stopped or caught. So, let's look at those four fictional characters for a moment.
Wick is a pure fantasy character. He exists in a world with a massive conspiracy concealing a secret society of assassins, that are so well entrenched they mint their own currency. Keanu Reeves is worth watching (in the first film) for his movements, dude moves like someone with a serious combat background. The actual assassin component of the story is just thin connective tissue to tie one fight scene to the next. It's visual art and absolutely worth watching, but not because the writing makes sense.
Leon (Jean Reno, The Professional), is in the range of a journeyman. He operates exclusively in New York, and while it's not (completely) clear how he came to become a hitman, he illustrates some of the problems associated with staying in a specific geographic area. At the same time, not a terribly realistic character, and the idea that the more advanced you, the closer you get to your target is just goofy. It makes for some excellent film, but, if your job is to kill someone, you're not getting paid more to garrote them, than to put a round of .308 through their skull from two blocks away. In fact, you're probably getting paid much less, because your odds of getting out after things go sideways are almost nil.
Vincent (Tom Cruise, Collateral) is probably the most realistic prototype for a master on this list. Through the course of the film, we never get a lot of information about his background, but what little we know is that he travels. His preferred MO is to set someone up as a fall guy for his killings. He arrives in a city, receives his weapons, and intel on his targets, runs them down, and then gets out of town. He has some kind of military, possibly special forces, background. Given he's creating a reasonable cover for his activities, and given that he's getting in and out very quickly, it's plausible someone like that could exist. The most unrealistic element is just that he could carry out so many high profile killings in a single night, multiple times.
47 (David Bateson, also Timothy Olyphant and Rupert Friend, Hitman... all of them), is a bit of a nightmare scenario, but he illustrates something very interesting that has some theoretical realism to it. Now, for those who are unaware, 47 (sometimes Agent 47, or Codename 47), is the player character of the Hitman game series. (Olyphant and Friend played him in the film adaptations.) You can play the character as a complete psychopath, gunning down everyone in your path. There's not much realism in that approach. Beginning with the second game, the series started integrating a scoring system which prioritized killing as efficiently or creatively as possible. Now, creative kills were in the first game, but the only incentive was that they were often far easier than running and gunning. In it's current incarnation, the series has a strong emphasis on finding ways to eliminate targets in ways that appear accidental.
So, we have an assassin who specializes in getting in and out undetected, killing their targets in ways that appear accidental, and travels all over the world. Do you have any how hard it would be to prove someone like that existed?
Now, before I go on, I should point out, there's an inherent absurdity to the games. 47 is a 6'2” tall bald white dude with a bar code on his neck, and no one ever notices when suddenly the sushi chef gains six inches, loses his hair, changes ethnicity and happens to be the last person to be seen near the target who suddenly died of fugu poisoning. It's a running joke in the series that 47 can flawlessly blend into any crowd so long as he's wearing the right outfit.
At the same time, the hilarious thing about that joke is, it's real. When Tom Cruise was preparing to play Vincent in Collateral, something he did as personal prep was to disguise himself in a UPS uniform, and deliver packages in public. This included getting into an extended conversation with someone, without being recognized. This was in 2004, in Los Angeles, he was already a household name at this point. So, while Hitman turns the costumes swaps into a joke, there's a disturbing level of reality to that mechanic, if you look like you belong, people tend to assume you belong.
The original Hitman did have an interesting touch that the later games moved away from: You had to repurchase the weapons you wanted to take with you on each mission. So, there were no forensic ties between his guns from one killing and the next. There's a slight irony because the 1911s 47 carries are a semi-rare variant (AMT Hardballers, usually called Silverballers in game), so he's regularly discarding some fairly expensive, high-end, handguns. At the same time, he's getting paid enough to cover that, though, maybe, a slightly more common 1911 variant would probably be less conspicuous.
So, yeah, master assassins probably don't exist in the real world, and most of the assassins we know about tend to stay close to home, but if an assassin does travel, it would make identifying them significantly harder. Also, be instantly suspicious if your gardener suddenly turns into a 6'2” bald, white dude with a bar code on the back of his neck.
-Starke
leahazel reblogged
so in honor of scott summers dying (he’ll be fine) here’s what happens when x men “"kills”“ emma frost who will, in this case, also be fine, as dying is to x men as breathing is to the rest of us
emma as she’s dying: ororo. ororo listen to me. i have dinner reservations at that one place in paris. you have to make them two years in advance. do NOT cancel my reservation. i will be FINE. whatever happens, the reservation STAYS
scott was genuinely upset as emma was dying and he was crying over her and was like no emma dont leave me and emma, in a mocking voice, like “no emma dont leave me listen to yourself i’ll be back in six months shut up idiot”
ororo: her last words were “is jean also dead? good.” and then she died
emma’s funeral, which is just held at the hellfire club, is just all portraits of emma. especially the nudes. its nothing but nudes. it’s how she wanted to be remembered ororo reading the pre-written eulogy emma wrote for her: emma grace frost was the most kind, beautiful, charming soul on this planet. pietro: raises hand ororo: she wrote this pietro: lowers hand
she wanted me to tell you all she died doing something interesting, like riding an extremely expensive and rare horse, and not doing, in her words, “something stupid like saving the entire team.” which is, of course, what she did. that being said, here is the picture of the very expensive horse she wanted to show all of you, to remind everyone that she was rich, so very rich, and you are not
emma returning from the dead 7 months later strolling into the mansion and announcing I HAVE NOTES ON HOW WE CAN IMPROVE MY FUNERAL
logan: how was hell emma: boring and overrated logan: satan kicked you out didnt he emma: that’s not the point
This is art
if you haven’t played long live the queen: go fix that
Wow, I’ve gotten a lot of dark dialogue options in this game, but never this one.
THE SUICIDE SQUAD (2021)
leahazel reblogged
So I’ve been playing a lot of skyrim lately, because it’s video game comfort food, and I decided it was time for my Redguard Dovahkiin to settle down. (Actually I specifically just wanted to be able to adopt some of the random orphans you meet because I felt guilty about them, but you need to be married before you can do that so that there’s someone at home to take care of the kids while you’re off galivanting).
So I travelled around a bit, chatting up likely looking npcs until I found one I both liked and didn’t feel guilty about marrying (I feel bad if I marry one of the warrior adventurer types, making them be a stay at home mum) and settled on an obnoxiously cheerful argonian called Shavee because her life was frankly shit, and I thought she’d probably be good with kids.
So off I go to Riften to the Temple of Mara to arrange the wedding. I book it in for the next day, realise I didn’t bring anything nice to wear, and spend the night before the wedding robbing every house in the city in the search for something to wear. Eventually decide everyone in Riften has terrible fashion sense and break down everything I stole into raw materials and use them to craft myself an outfit and some jewellery that i’m pretty happy with. I even carefully pick out my fanciest looking sword to wear.
(don’t know why I bothered, frankly, shavee turned up wearing a shirt covered in suspicious stains and weilding a pickaxe, it’s like she doesn’t even care about this marriage)
(also for comedy purposes, bear in mind I play with survival mods that mean my character needs to eat and sleep to live, and I literally spent the entire ingame night on this and forgot to eat and drink anything either and then just downed four bowls of wolf stew right before entering the temple so I didn’t starve during the ceremony. also I discovered during the wedding that I am dying of rockjoint, which I contracted from sleeping in a pile of hay on the floor of a skeever infested cave, so even being six foot tall and jacked can’t make up for the fact that I am exhausted, running a fever, and probably covered in wolf which I spilled because my joints are slowly atrophying, and even the fanciest clothes in the world aren’t going to cover that up)
so I enter the temple, and my finance is there, and Lydia my housecarl, and some random NPCs the game thinks are my friends because I did fetch quests for them
One of the random NPCs is Lisbet. Atfter I did her fetch quest, I then did another quest in which I discovered Lisbet is secretly a cannibal and part of a demonic cult that worships the daedric prince of decay by kidnapping priests, sacrificing them, and then eating their corpses. Raw. I think the raw meat is the sticking point for me here honestly.
I ultimately decided not to sacrifice the random priest to a daedric prince in exchange for one magic ring and all the raw human I could eat, because frankly, that doesn’t sound like much of a deal to me. I was expecting there to be some kind of dialogue choice where I could nope out at the last minute, but it turns out there isn’t one, so after they drugged the priest and tied him to the altar, I just got out my sword and started swinging.
I killed most of the cult (including the town butcher, because I had brought meat from him before and was extremely pissed off that he might have been secretly feeding me humans) but a couple of them got away, which I figured was fine because they weren’t trying to kill me.
Except it turns out, if any of them escape, then every time you see them in the future there’s a random chance that they’ll fly into a violent rage and try and murder you.
Lisbet is at my wedding. Lisbet decides that clearly me marrying this random argonian woman with two lines of dialogue is the happiest day of my life, and she cannot allow me that happiness, when I’ve taken so much from her.
So she tries to kill me. Only she can’t, because I’m stuck in a pre-rendered wedding animation, and also she’s sitting next to Lydia, my faithful retainer and owner of a really big axe.
It also turns out that Lisbet is essential, meaning she can be knocked unconcious but not actually killed because she’s needed for some quest or other. And the minute she wakes up from unconciousness, she tries to kill me again, so Lydia knocks her unconcious again, and I’m stuck, I can’t move, because I’m supposed to be in the wedding animation.
Except Shavee has, not unreasonably, see all this and decided that she doesn’t like me enough to risk getting murdered, and has done a runner, leaving me at the altar, but more importantly, leaving me trapped in a broken pre-rendered animation, so all I can do is stand there at the altar, staring at the space where my fiance was supposed to be, listening to the sounds of Lydia trying and failing to beat a cannibal to death behind me.
Okay, I think, clearly this wedding isn’t going to happen, I’m going to go for the registry office option and complete the wedding using the dev commands. I do this. The priest gives me a wedding ring, and I can finally move again. I chase after Shavee, who has an impressive turn of speed on her, and eventually catch up right by the city gates. I try to talk to her.
Apparently using the console has completed the wedding for me, but not for her, because she still only has the same 2 lines of dialogue she usually has.
Clearly this is working, I can’t leave my kids with someone who can only say 2 things and doesn’t even know she’s their mum, that’s irresponsible.
I try loading from inside the temple. I get the same problem.
Eventually I figure out that I need to use the dev controls to disable Lisbet’s entire existence in the universe.
Shavee and me get married. As the priest reads the vows, I stare at Shavee and wonder why she couldn’t even be bothered to put on a clean shirt. I wonder what kind of mother she’ll be.
Once the ceremony is over, and I’m happily married to the dirty green lizard of my dreams, and we’ve agreed that until I can make her recognise my extremely nice modded house exists I will share her single bed in the unheated flophouse in Windhelm she calls home, I re-enable Lisbet, because I’m worried I’ll forget if I leave it too long.
Fun fact about skyrim, it loads in quite a lot of npcs and objects by dropping them from the sky. I have no idea why this is the case, but it’s objectively the funniest way to load in objects.
I re-enable Lisbet. She falls from the sky, clips through the roof of the temple, and lands in the pew beside Lydia, stands up, draws a knife, and is immedately beaten unconcious.
I no longer care, because Shavee now has all the exciting new spouse-only romantic dialogue options like “Could you cook something for me” and “have you made any money lately”, and I know she’ll be a great mother.
I limp to the door of the temple, while around me the guests not involved in the Lydia-Lisbet murder cycle scream and duck for cover.
I open the door to the temple, immediately collapse and ragdoll down the steps, which is how I discover I am dying of rockjoint.
I limp to the orphanage down the street, adopt two kids, and then finally remember that I’m carrying garlic bread, which as we all know, cures all known illnesses.
When I emerge back into the street, full of the joys of motherhood and garlic bread, I find the town in disaray. Lydia is chasing Lisbet through the streets with an axe and a dragon is circling overhead, burning npcs to death. People are running for shelter, screaming, while the guards try to take down an entire dragon using only the worst bows and arrows in the game.
I decide that as a parent, I have to think of my own safety first and leave them to it.
I head out of the city, intent on returning home and figuring out why Shavee refuses to move in with me. A man hanging around the stables challenges me to a boxing match. For want of anything better to do, I agree.
Halfway through the fight he dodges at the wrong moment and I punch one of his horses in the head.
Two guards attack me while I desperately try to surrender. My kids will miss me, but I’m prepared to go to jail for my horse crimes, I’m an honest citizen. Also my horse crimes seem somewhat less important than the dragon.
The guards refuse to accept my surrender. I am stabbed to death. As I collapse in front of the indifferent horse, Lisbet exits the city, followed by Lydia. The last thing I see before I die is Lydia swinging her axe at Lisbet’s face.
The candlestick, the rope, the lead pipe, the wrench, the gun, and the dagger.
CLUE (1985) dir. Jonathan Lynn
leahazel reblogged
SCREW DEATH!
I know it’s so sexy, spank me grim reaper daddy
pmseymourva
If Gaud Wishes it.
So shall it be.
lemjpanda13
I can’t believe Gaud tried for baby with the Grim Reaper.
Sorry, guys
i want to point out that every single one of these made the game WORSE
"Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out" -- unrealistic, do better Sims.