Please, Reblog! IIt’s Called Self Defense. Apart From Having Here, In The US, One Of The Highest Cases

Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?

I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.

And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!

The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)

Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.

And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.

Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.

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The runoff for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats is January 5th. This will decide who will control the Senate, and if Georgians deliver for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock the same way they delivered for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they will deliver control of the Senate to the Democrats. Why does that matter? Well, if Republicans and Mitch McConnell retain control of the Senate, they will be able to effectively suffocate anything and everything that the Biden Administration is planning to do in order to heal this nation from four years of Donald Trump. Republican control of the Senate will immediately kill any hopes we have of progressive policies getting through Congress and to President Biden’s desk and will prevent the confirmation of Biden’s appointees. It means that Mitch McConnell will be rewarded for the brazen hypocrisy of filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court just days before the November election.

Georgia, we need you again. And we know that we can count on you. If you were part of the remarkable voters that flipped Georgia from red to blue and elected Joe BIden and Kamala Harris, don’t forget to vote on January 5th. If you didn’t vote because you didn’t think it would make a difference, it did. And you can still make a difference. If you live in Georgia, you have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote in the runoff election. But don’t wait…do it now! You can do it online, right here, and it only takes two minutes. If you weren’t old enough to vote Donald Trump out of office on November 3rd but turn 18 before January 5th, you also have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote! 

Georgia was instrumental in electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and, more importantly, evicting Donald Trump from the White House. On January 5th, America needs you one more time. Take the power of Senate control from the hands of Mitch McConnell. It will make Mitch McConnell sad. Don’t you want to make Mitch McConnell sad? VOTE on January 5th. You can still register in Georgia until DECEMBER 7th. 

We’re sorry that you have to put up with two extra months of campaign ads, but we appreciate you and we know we can count on you, Georgia. Register until December 7th. VOTE ON JANUARY 5th!

Hulk [2003]

We're gonna have to watch that temper of yours. The third era of superhero films struggled with the question of what a superhero mov...

My review of Ang Lee’s Hulk.

So, when you achieve victory over Straight Island, are you going to let us rebuild, or is this a “No prisoners!” kill us all situation? Because I’m totally down with aiding the revolution from the inside, but if I’m going to have to convert afterwards, I should probably start planning.

Being gay is natural? Okay.

You have three islands. Divide them into groups of one. The straight island, the gay island, and the lesbian island. The straight island is going to reproduce and keep going strong for millions of generations to come. The gay and lesbian islands will both wipe out in not even one century. This isn’t just about religion or morals, it’s just simple common sense. Being gay is unnatural, and not just because God said so, but because you yourself wouldn’t even be born without a REAL natural man and woman. And no, there is no such thing as a lesbian bone marrow “thing” to have children. That’s a biased fact that came from a lesbian scientist who has false opinions. If it’s not a real penis or vagina, then it’s fucking false and you’re just opinionated by dumb facts. I’m done here. Read over what I said and if you still think that being gay is normal and natural, then I hope you achieve some common sense one day. Bye

Yeah, "routines" suddenly make way more sense to me, and I totally see what my routine needs have always been.

i think a lot of neurotypicals misunderstand what “routine” means in the context of autistic ppl needing routine. they seem very fixated on the idea that routine means doing the same thing at the same time every day (eg always eating at 12, always showering at 7, idk, stuff like that) and they don’t seem to get that while yes, those are a kind of routine that some autistic ppl need/like, it’s not the only thing. 

like for me, for example, it is way more important that the songs i listen to play in the right order and that the right kind of audio is on in the background when i do different tasks than it is that i do said tasks at a specific time of day. the routines that are important to me are about how i do things, not when. but nt ppl don’t understand this. 

why is this important? bc i have had So. Many. neurotypicals tell me that the reason i’m depressed/anxious/not feeling well is that i don’t have enough of those when routines in my life. that obviously if i made sure to always shower at the exact same time of day i wouldn’t be depressed. that obviously if i made sure to always get up at exactly the same time, no wiggle room of even a minute, then i wouldn’t be anxious. “because you’re autistic!” they say, “and routines are important for you! you’ve even said so yourself!”

and then they proceed to not take the actual reasons why i’m feeling unwell seriously, because obviously if an autistic person isn’t living minute by minute according to a schedule that dictates their every move then that has to be the cause of all their problems. 

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen paperback classics that were hand-picked by you! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on December 29, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Reblog if you utterly and without hesitation support gay rights

It’ll mean a lot to my friend, who’s having a tough time with bullies lately.

Practical F/X vs. CGI in Willow

I finally caught up with the 1988 George Lucas / Ron Howard fantasy yarn Willow, and it's a blast. Not quite a classic, but spectacular, imaginative, thrilling, and charming in a way few blockbusters are.

The highlight for me - besides Val Kilmer's delightful rogue The Mad Martigan - is a battle sequence in a castle, where Martigan is basically taking on a few dozen villains on his own using a variety of tricks and tactics while Willow is busy trying to get his sorcery to work. There's a lot of other elements at play here - the villainous Princess Sorsha trying to figure out if she loves or hates Martigan, sorceress Raziel is stuck in a goat form, and trolls have encased all the inhabitants of the castle into stone and are still lurking around somewhere. It's a terrific scene as it is, but then Willow, trying to ward off a troll, accidentally turns it into a gigantic two-headed dragon known as the Eborsisk. And it's fantastic.

Later on, there's a scene widely praised at the time where Willow turns Raziel from a goat into an ostrich, a turtle, a tiger, and finally her own form in turn. It was the first CGI Morph in film, and led directly to The Abyss, which led to T2, which led to Jurassic Park, until now, when studios spend $250 million to make over-budgeted cartoons with live actors pasted in here and there.

Which got me thinking on the CGI vs. Practical Effects debate, since this is a nice example of the same effect being done both ways. Thinking about it, I think in both cases it was the right call.

The troll-to-dragon transformation is done with a combination of go-motion (an advanced version of stop-motion developed by Phil Tippett for the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back) and animatronics. The effect is choppy and ugly, and the result is unsettling and creepy. It looks wrong, something that should not be.

It also necessitates cutting back to Willow's reaction shot. That's one of the things that makes the scene so good, really - Warwick Davis's look of "What the hell did I just do?" elevates both the horror and humor of the scene.

By contrast, the CGI morphing is smooth and fluid. It's no more or less realistic, but we're talking about magic here, so realism isn't exactly the goal. But this scene isn't Willow accidentally turning one monster into another, much more horrific monster; it's about Raziel becoming her own form again, and about the beauty and wonder of magic. It also allows the scene to take place in longer takes, but we don't especially need Willow's reaction until Raziel is herself.

Reversing the effects wouldn't have worked as well for the story - the smooth transformation would have looked like just a cool effect with the troll-to-dragon rather than horrifying (CGI can do a great many things well, but creepy just is not one of them), and Raziel's wouldn't have had the same sense of wonder and beauty with the grotesque look of go-motion. (The AT-ATs or ED-209 are exactly the sort of thing Go-Motion is good at)

Unfortunately, go-motion has largely gone extinct in the CGI era, as it's thought to be less "realistic", though I'm somewhat unconvinced given how cartoonish the effects look in mega-budget films like Days of Future Past (a phenomenal movie, by the way) or Amazing Spider-Man 2 (not a phenomenal film). Like makeup effects, bladders, models, matte paintings, and even celluloid film itself, go-motion is the older, harder method, but there are stories told better. Sometimes, like King Arthur in Excalibur, storytellers should charge into battle using the Old Ways.

On the other hand, sometimes you want a T-1000 to wreck up the place, and gotta bring in the computers.

Practical and digital are both tools, both with their function and form in stories. I hope going into the future, film makers remember the old methods and use them, and that cynical, f/x savvy viewers remember what beautiful things can be done with the new methods and don't dismiss them out of hand. (myself included)

Giveaway Contest: We recently reached 50,000 followers, and as a way of thanking you, we’re giving away FIFTY (50!) vintage paperback classics by Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Jane Austen, and so many others! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on January 20, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

That was superbly written.

I applaud your incredible tenacity in fighting such a horrific, painful fight as far as you could. And even more so, that you’ve worked so hard to help both present and future victims. If it’s time for you to back down from this part of the fight, then it’s time. But you’ve helped bring these horrors into public focus, and helped build ways forward so that one day, these evils can be struck down.

You are a hero. Thank you for everything you’ve done, and the best of luck to your future endeavors.

Why I Just Dropped The Harassment Charges The Man Who Started GamerGate.

I’m not editing this, so I apologize if it’s long and rambly and messy. It needs to be. I’ve been measured and silent and obedient for so, so, so long, but if I’m going to write about denied humanity it needs to be like this. You need to see unsanitized, reckless honesty just as much as I need to write it. Targets of mob abuse take a risk every time we’re brutally honest in public, so we usually don’t, but I’m too frustrated to give you PR and I’m working against the clock. If I’m gonna get hurt for an update in my court case, it’s about fucking time it happens on my terms instead of his.

I just hung up from what I hope will be my last phone call with the District Attorney assigned to my case, and I choked back tears as she told me that I’d conducted myself with grace through this whole nightmare. I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m writing this and examining it as I go through the fog of someone with PTSD. I don’t know if the tears are out of frustration of having sunk a year and a half into this awful system for seemingly less than nothing, or if it’s out of relief.

My ex, who we’ll call Creep Throat because seeing his name makes a knot of anxiety rise in my throat, will be notified soon that the charges were dropped, but not why. I’m sure he’ll launch another salvo of flat out lies and spun truths to make it seem like the last year and a half was a byproduct of me “asking for it”, that the courts saw through it, while making him seem like a downtrodden hero of free speech. He managed to do that with previous court dates, leaving out things like a judge flat out stating that she believed he had physically assaulted me during the last time we had sex, and that he’d gone through my friends social media feeds of the day afterward to prove that I wasn’t “acting like a victim” by spending time with friends.

So, instead of just watching this happen for the who-knows-how-manyth time, I’m going to talk about it. It’s not really about me as much as it is an attempt to dispel some common bullshit assumptions the average person has about the justice system, and what it means to “press charges”.   

One of the biggest myths that needs to die is that your first response to being abused should be to go to the police and seek justice. Leaving aside the fact that the police flat out murder unarmed citizens for their race all the time, and that sex workers are likely to be incarcerated when reporting crime done to them, and a myriad of other things I can’t get into, I have a certain amount of privilege and a well-documented case. I have one of the most public abuse cases out there, it started a hate movement that’s swept up my industry and hurt dozens of bystanders, and got international media attention. A lot of people don’t think of it in terms of domestic violence, they forget where the flashpoint of GamerGate came from - you might not even know the man responsible’s name. To make matters worse, I was unable to speak up during that time period out of fear of reprisal from the judicial system (more on that later) and watched as he was washed out of history (along with a lot of other people targeted). I was on my own on this front, until the Boston Magazine article was posted by a journalist who had been following everything and speaking with my ex. Shortly after, I got a call from the DA telling me that I shouldn’t have been told to simply go offline, and that she knew we had a very strong case worth prosecuting.

So why am I dissolving it then?   

Ironically, getting a restraining order against Creep Throat was the least effective thing I could do in terms of getting him out of my life for good, and for protecting myself. I’ll discuss the hot mess of problems around that experience at a later time. Without getting into a long, complicated blow by blow, every time something happened or the case was updated, he’d run back to the mob and make promises and jokes and pleas for more money. The mob would respond by going after me, my family, and anyone else they decided was involved. The mythology surrounding me would expand, conspiracy charts would “prove” I am secretly rich and really deserved it all along, and inspire more threats, stalking, and abuse. The cycle repeated itself endlessly. People kept getting hurt for being close to me, for a poorly worded restraining order that did nothing.

This cycle was so vicious that I even vacated the order myself once he appealed, hoping to make it end. I gave him the legal relief that he’d asked for. It might sound weak but I’m not made of stone, I’m a scared person trying to escape her abuser in spite of the fact that he’s created a self-perpetuating faction within my own industry to continue to punish me for walking away. It wasn’t about him fighting a powerful evil woman, or gaining his oh-so-crucial right to sic a mob on me, it’s always been about punishing me. It was about using it as a way to hurt me further, so when I gave him what he ostensibly wanted he actually *showed up to object to my motion to vacate the order and hand him a win*. The court dismissed him, and the order has been dead for months, and yet he’s back on Kotaku In Action chumming the waters about the oral arguments they’re hearing on a nonexistent order next month.

He gets paid, he gets attention (he even brought a date to court once), and the cycle continues. All the while, shit gets worse and worse for me and my family. The simple fact of the matter is the criminal justice system is meant to punish, not protect. I don’t care about seeing him punished - I would rather he get better. And they’ve done nothing to protect me - it’s only made things worse and become another weapon in his arsenal, and the arsenal of the people out there way scarier than him.

This is the last email I sent to my DA.

It was a reddit thread that showed up in my Google Alerts for my name, that I had set up to help grow my indie dev business before all this started like so many people in my industry. The title was “if eron goes to jail, I will hunt zoe quinn down and rape her”. Alerts and direct contact like this, specifically discussing the court case, was only escalating and becoming more common. I’m used to things like this at this point, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect me. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect anyone close to me who becomes collateral damage in this sick crusade my ex started against me. The continual escalation only ever increases the chances that someone will make good on something like this. Trying to get the law to protect me has only continually put me in harm’s way.

Why, then, would I ever want to sign up for more years of my life spent flying back to Boston, a place where it’s not safe for me to be, to continue another chapter in this nightmare? Why would I want to keep digging at a giant scar?

“Establish legal precedent!” you might think. I did too. Then Elonis v United States offered little hope that a court wouldn’t skirt the issues of how domestic violence manifests online. Then Steph Guthrie and her co-defendant lost their case, the transcripts showing equal parts “she was asking for it” and “how did this get in there i am not good at computers”. Going to court is like rolling the dice, the precedent you established isn’t up to you, and I didn’t want to risk becoming a tool in the next Creep Throat’s arsenal if we lost. I have have worked with enough lawmakers, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and judges at this point through our work with Crash Override to know that education is sorely lagging behind on these issues, not to mention the cultural biases that come with any cases like that.

You probably know that judges and juries can be biased and hold backward views and assumptions, given that you’re a human in 2016 reading this blog and have probably seen at least one news story about a cop getting away with murdering an unarmed black citizen without so much as a trial. You may have seen it in any reporting on how unlikely it is for rape survivors to see justice combined with how backward everyone is about talking about it. This is at least partly because the US has a very specific idea of who is worth protecting, doubly so when the person in question is being victimized while marginalized.

When you seek charges, you’re on trial as much as the other person, if not more. The “asking for it” defense is alive and well even in 2016, and you have to be a “good victim” in order to give your case the best shot it has. “Good victim”, when it comes to women in domestic or gendered violence cases like mine, tends to mean a lot of loaded, even conflicting things. The courts do not favor a lot of women simply for being who they are - women of color, trans women, sex workers, I could go on. Even beyond that, you have to be well behaved and silent about the proceedings, or risk pissing off the judge and giving the defense attorneys ammo to work with. Even my Cracked article was waved around in court by my ex’s lawyers, citing it as “the most disgusting thing that happened during GamerGate” despite my almost one foot stack of threats and photos of me that people had printed out, jizzed on, and sent to my family. The defense, so far, had hung a hat on trying to prove I deserved all of this.  

I have been open about my depression and my history in sex work. I have not gone out of the public eye during all of the abuse, and I don’t regret that. I believe in standing up for sex workers and people living with mental health concerns and anyone else I can, and I don’t know what would have happened if I had kept my mouth shut when I was targeted two years ago. But this comes with a cost - everything I have said and done will be held against me and spun by my abuser. The cost of being who I am in defiance of the abuse was sacrificing being a good victim.

The spin is even more successful in these cases, because of how disconnected judges, lawyers, police, and juries often are from the internet. One told me to simply give up my career and stop going offline if I didn’t like the abuse. He barely bothered to look at my huge stack of evidence before declaring he had no idea what the internet was about and didn’t want to know.

All the while, it’s hard to explain the indignity of having to sit through this and try to be a “good victim”. To sit in the same room as the man who did this to you and so many others and not appear too emotional or shaken, because the last time you said “uh” too much it became “proof” that you were lying instead of reliving trauma on command. To hide your anger and your outrage and your hurt so you don’t look like you’re seeking revenge, but to also not hold back TOO much because then you look robotic and unaffected like you haven’t been in fear of this man or in fear for your life for almost two years. To have to sit silently while everyone messes up basic facts of the case because they can’t tell the difference between usernames. To leave little bloody half moons in the palms of your hands from squeezing your fists tightly to try to look like you aren’t shaking from being in the same room with him.

What good does any of this do for anyone? It’s been almost two years now, and I desperately want to move on with my life. Even if I did win, I doubt locking Creep Throat away would do anything. Even putting aside my huge misgivings with the US prison system, he’s not going to change. The people who support him would see him as a martyr. I’d probably be looking at years of appeals and court dates and apologizing to my family for MRAs screaming at them in the middle of the night.

I’m tired. I have been trying to pick up the pieces of my life for almost two years at this point, and I’ve done a lot of healing, a lot of building what I feel like are more workable pushes to improve the lives of people being abused online, and a lot of self-improvement. I’m getting to a place where I’m kind of ok even while the abuse hasn’t slowed down. But every time I have to touch this festering part of my life, it drains the energy out of me. I have less energy to do casework at Crash, less energy to meet with tech partners to tell them how to do better and the ways they’re fucking up, less energy to make my goofy video games about feelings and farts, less energy for my friends and family and loved ones that have been helplessly watching me torn apart by this man for years.

In my opinion, it’s not time yet. I’m not the right person to win this fight or set this precedent. It’s too early, and I’m a messy complicated artist who has a hard time keeping her mouth shut while she watches other people hurt. I’m not the platonic ideal of a good victim because I’ve had a long past. I don’t even have any faith in the system to not totally fuck it up every step of the way even when it’s working as intended. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m less useful to the world as someone who fought this case, win or lose, than someone who can throw all hope of winning away to be honest with you, to educate you, to try and call for reform so I can set the next girl up for a spike instead of falling on my face. That’s even assuming the process doesn’t kill me - I’m still someone who was already living with depression, that now has complex PTSD on top of it.

I’m scared of posting this, but I’m tired of hiding and keeping my head down and plodding along. I know it’ll kick some shit up, everything does, but I also know he’s going to try to twist this stuff like he always has. I’m tired of letting him control me. I’m tired of being afraid of being honest. I’m tired of watching people hand out “just go to the police they’ll protect you” while I silently scream and bite my tongue, because I know the advice-giver is giving horrible, ignorant advice. It’s so much more complicated than that, and if someone decides to go to the cops about their abuser they should be doing it with a more informed and prepared plan than I ever did. They shouldn’t have to have their lives hijacked for years to find out that that’s what they were even risking in the first place. I wish I had those two years back. The least I can do to make that right is to be honest and open with the world while trying to reduce the cost of maneuvering through these systems. The least I can do is try to succeed at getting my life back where the courts have utterly failed.    

I won’t ever get my life back, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live in the meantime. Hopefully the next girl won’t have years stolen from her in the first place.

And again, sorry if I’ve put my foot in my mouth through any of this unedited brain dump. It’s been a really, really long 2 years and I am more than a little tired.