I’d make an Anthology film called Seasons of the Grinch. Each would tell the story of the Grinch’s relationship with Who-ville. Spring would be when he moves into Mt. Krumpet, and the whos attempt to make friends with him (it doesn’t go well, but he does reluctantly keep the dog one of them gave him as gift). Summer would be a faceoff between the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat, who briefly enters Who-ville to do his normal bit of light mischief, and the two end up competing to see who’s the better trickster scourge. Fall would be an update of Halloween is Grinch Night, and Winter would be “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
It would keep the Grinch as a sort of inexplicable monster in the folkloric vein – a creature that isn’t to be slain, but rather out-smarted and perhaps eventually redeemed. We’d develop his character slowly without giving him a reason or excuse to be a grouch (since the lack of a clear reason for his grouchiness is a key character trait of his – removing it destroys the Christmas story’s potency), and hopefully by the end you’d get a story where the Grinch is a very complicated character whose redemption feels very earned. He’s a fuckup, but he’s a fuckup you want to see get his shit together, and that desire is what connects the four separate stories of the anthology – the overarching plot, the true story of the entire film, is of the Grinch finally getting his shit together.
I’d find ways to work in Eucariah and Cindy Loo Who into all four seasons, since they both play important roles in the Grinch’s story (one of the things I don’t hate about the adaptations is their expansion of Cindy’s role in all of this), and the Grinch’s relationship with Max would be fleshed out as well.
Every line of dialogue would be poetic – rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance, all the good shit from Dr. Seuss’s books that adaptations inevitably cut because it would be too hard to reproduce and possibly be off-putting to people because it’s “weird”. And I’d find a good actor with horror credentials to play the Grinch – off the top of my head, I’m thinking either Ron Perlman, Keith David, or Robert Englund.
It would be very weird and experimental and it would never get funding, but hopefully it would do right by Dr. Seuss.
I’ve been seeing a lot of posts lately about the different kinds of American gothic, and I thought Hawaii could use a little representation here as well! Here goes:
~ People come to this island for an adventure. For a life changing experience. And they get it. Each and every of them.
~ In the afternoon, you go to your favorite surf shop. There are two more when you come back the next day. Was there a time before now? Has there ever been a shop without Billabong? Will you ever find the door?
~Strangers come to the beach. They arrive pale and skinny, but they will never look the same again. You send them on their way. They are pink mountains of fat, shave ice dripping from their fingers and flies buzzing in their empty eye sockets. You send them on their way. You send them on their way.
~ It rains. You have prayed many months for it to stop. And then one day the sun comes out, and you realize the rain was the only reason any of you were still alive
~ Is this a pineapple? You have heard this question many times. You attempt to explain that it is not. And you fail. Is this a pineapple? Your legs begin to shake as you defy them, tears streaking down your face. Is this a pineapple? Is this what a pineapple looks like? You are still screaming when they begin their feast. To them, you are the pineapple. And there is nothing you can do to change their minds
~ Another Tsunami barrels towards your island, another tidal wave of death and destruction to rend your home uninhabitable. You spend the day at the beach, and it never comes. You know why, altough you wish that you didn’t
~ Tourists go to visit the cliffs. Sometimes, more go than return. On these days, your local Foodland has a sushi special in the deli. This is a coincidence. This is a coincidence.
~ Uncle Grant caught a fish today. It looked at you with too human eyes, mouth agape. Uncle Grant caught a fish today, and nothing more. The Ocean will never forget, however much you may want it to.
~ It is may day. May day is Lei day, however much it may feel like a maritime emergency. Flowers hang around your neck, and they are getting tighter. We smile with tears of joy. We smile. The flowers consume us. We smile
~ The Alakai Swamp holds our secrets. The Alakai Swamp is getting bigger. We weep for those who are lost to the Swamp, although we are glad it wasn’t us. But in our hearts, we know we will be next.
~ Our neighbors ask to see Uncle Grant. We smile and laugh at the joke. After all, he never really existed.
~ It is Aloha Friday. It is always Aloha Friday.
~ Big Iz smiles down on us, and we smile back. We have to.
~ One day, you are out surfing, and see a dark shape moving under the water. You say it is a shark. You tell your family that you saw a shark. But you know that sharks aren’t that big. You know that sharks can’t move that fast.
~ You live next to the forest that the wild pigs call their home. At night, you can hear screaming coming from that forest. You never go in. You never will.
Being an Eggman fan can feel bittersweet when you like him specifically for his brand of villainy, because you see so much fanart of him, but 80% of it turns him into a non-evil coffee shop AU-esque pal/father figure of Sonic’s.
Io9 has this article about how “weird” it feels to have a Holiday season without a Star Wars movie and… like, look, I’m a fan of Star Wars, but for the past couple of years it’s felt kind of over-hyped. Like, maybe it’s just like this where I live, but for EVERY Star Wars film released in the last three years (except Solo) the stores where I live just went fucking insane with Star Wars merchandise in a way they do for no other franchise. Target became Star Wars central as soon as Halloween was over – sooner, actually, in the The Last Jedi’s case, as an entire aisle of the costume section was triumphantly advertised as being NOTHIN’ BUT STAR WARS. It honestly felt like Star Wars was less a movie and more a new corporate holiday – there were announcements months in advance for the release of new toys, stores made Star Wars sections the way they do for Christmas, Valentines, etc.
And in a horrible business major way, it makes sense. The prequel trilogy proved that Star Wars movies can pull in major money through merchandise, just like Christmas or any other major holiday. Why not make a Star Wars Day? Why not make Star Wars yet another festival devoted to consumerism – a yearly event to further pad the wallets of the rich?
Again, maybe this was just me, but the three years of uber-hype – the years where Star Wars Day might as well have been an official part of the holiday calendar – felt fucking weird. Why can’t Star Wars just be, like, a movie series? I mean everyone bitches about the MCU on this site, but even that franchise doesn’t get hype this way.
Like, I’m relieved. I’m glad that maybe now Star Wars can be just a movie, and not this weird… forced… thing, this cynical pseudo-holiday cult of consumerism, that they were trying to make it be. It’s weird to have a holiday season without Star Wars? Nah, it was weird to see them try to turn Star Warsinto a holiday season. I’m glad they stopped. Maybe now it can go back to being movies.
Since Eeveelutions aren’t about maturation but “evolution”.
I liked the idea of a Croenburg the Fly style trading evolution someone proposed, but gamefreak would probably want something more like the 2E d&D ettercap since they’ve had a lot of abomination style pokemon lately.
Look, a mammal that convergently developed arthropod traits.
The owner of this Blog will be making as much noise at Tumblr Staff about how horrible this ban in on other sites such as Twitter or Facebook.
The owner of this blog will be logging out of all accounts for the entirety of the 17th. Will Not run a queue. Will not even check the dash. Or give the money hungry executives a single page view to squeeze ad revenue out of
The owner of this blog believes in an ACTUAL positive, better, safer Tumblr and well be doing their part to fight for it by logging out on the 17th of December.
Living during the Early Jurassic (~183-179 mya) in the shallow seas that covered most of Europe at the time, Stenopterygius was an average-sized ichthyosaur growing up to about 4m in length (13′). A fossil found in Germany has some incredibly good soft-tissue preservation, showing smooth flexible scaleless skin, a layer of insulating blubber
very convergently similar to that found in cetaceans, and even evidence of countershaded coloration.
While the confirmation of blubber is amazing, and gives further evidence that ichthyosaurs were warm-blooded, the color preservation might actually be even more interesting. The skin pigmentation is preserved in enough fine detail for branched melanophores to be visible under a microscope – a type of cell associated with the ability to change color. So there’s a possibility that ichthyosaurs could actively darken or lighten their color patterns, for purposes such as better camouflage, UV protection, or temperature regulation.
Monsters and Stuff 