this doesn’t do it justice!!! look at this beast! i went to see it a year ago and its a phenomenal experience, 10/10!!
it lights up and everything, all the different parts are making noises - like there’s classical music AND rock music layering over each other, old talk shows and just radio static! god i love babel so much!
and what’s even better is that the higher up you go, the more modern the machines get - like it’s old radios at the bottom and iphones/ipods at the top and they ALL still make noise like can you IMAGINE
anyway yeah if you get a chance to see it definitely go see it!
As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can’t argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.
In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.
this is so rogue but does anyone have the poetry template that went semi-viral on twitter a while back? it was designed for kids but someone gave it to their mother who has dementia and she wrote a really moving poem about her experience.
the minute I posted this I remembered enough of the prompt itself to find it and now I’m trying not to cry at work
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on a totally different note is this response from a kid, which is also beautiful and imo no less profound. and shows how the prompt can be interpreted so differently.
will die being annoyed at how the reputation of the locked tomb series on here became that it’s the silly lesbian series with meme references in it and not what it is, which is an exploration of an immersive world that plays on and subverts expectations of its own genre, expertly manipulates narrative voice to control the reader’s knowledge and perception of that world, and with each installment expands the scope of the story in ways that constantly keep the reader in a limbo of feeling like they simultaneoulsy understand more than ever and also absolutely nothing, forcing them to put together puzzle pieces based on the point of views characters’ limited knowledge and slanted opinions.
sure, the first book’s narration has a bit of a percy jackson tone to it, which lends itself to some humorous moments that seem like surface-level attempts at meme humor when screenshotted and posted online. but i think people tend to assume that’s the be-all-end-all of tamsyn muir’s authorial style, when in reality she uses that tone as a tool to set up the drastic shift to a much darker place about 1/3 of the way through the book. and then drops it entirely when switching to other POV characters with a much different personalities in the second and third books.
the narration style of the second book is gruesome, horrific, flowery, gothic, and high-minded, because the point of view character is much better-read than that of the first book, has been immersed in necromancy her entire life, and takes herself very seriously. the second book also uses the second person—a decision i wasn’t sure how i felt about until the reason why was revealed and i got chills all over.
if people would actually engage with the books beyond the instinctive feeling that stories created by and focused on women are somehow less serious, skillful, or worth their time, they might be surprised! at its very core is a good story, told in ways that brilliantly play with language and storytelling methods. i have never seen anything like it.
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