Alan Rickman, the late Harry Potter star, is making his mixed feelings about sticking with the franchise known through diary entries published Saturday by The Guardian. The diary entries about Potter demonstrate Rickman’s devotion to his character Professor Severus Snape but also his reluctance to lock himself in to a long-running franchise. As early as […]
After everything that’s happened with this goddamn franchise I’m relieved that still the only bad thing anyone can say about Alan Rickman is, “he apparently had absolutely no musical taste whatsoever.”
It's a banner that you all have been waving, and it's a rallying cry I can stand behind while I continue into this long dark night chasing an ending for this story. ARMOR UP: https://t.co/aq5Q0w5ddupic.twitter.com/d4gH2n4itW
Five years of my life. Three seasons of TV. Blood, sweat, and tears. ……became a tax write-off for the network who owns Final Space.
Yup. That’s it. That’s why it’s disappeared everywhere in the USA. Five years of work vanished. When the license is up internationally, Netflix will take it down, and then it will be gone forever. There are no more physical copies of S1 and S2, and no physical copies of Season 3 were ever made. Your memory of Final Space will be the only proof it ever existed unless you own a copy.
I’ve been trying to process how this feels; it’s been hard because it’s just so absurd. Like a tax write-off, really? Or maybe I’ve become so numb to bad things happening in my life because of the frequency with which it has been occurring that I didn’t really register this sting.
But the stinger has broken off underneath my skin. And now it’s annoying. Look, I get it; this decision was just business. But Final Space will always be personal to me. Some might say to give up and move on, and I have moved on to many new projects that I’m very passionate about, but I will not give up on this story and these characters. I will never stop fighting for Final Space. If it takes years, then so be it! #renewfinalspace It’s a banner that you all have been waving, and it’s a rallying cry I can stand behind while I continue into this long dark night chasing an ending for this story.
-Olan
He’s obviously so upset and I am too. I just can’t believe we treat art like this, and over the past few months I’ve watched in bewilderment as it got worse and worse and left so many artists brokenhearted.
Pirate your movies and TV shows, kids. Especially if they were never actually released on home media. (Seriously, why the hell would anyone not do that?! But here we are.) You can’t trust big corporations to be caretakers of anything and apparently they now do the equivalent of burning down a small library every couple of months.
I saw this movie a month or two ago during a period where I was, ironically, very very much not okay. And yet, for whatever reason I was able to engage with it, enough to end up watching it twice even, and I’m not completely sure why. I guess it’s just a good film? (Spoilers ahead.)
1. So this is basically Cancelled: The Movie. Did Danni learn anything at all from her experience? She says she didn’t towards the end, which is more honesty than I expected from this absolute car-crash of a human being, but I noticed… She kept her highly distinctive hairstyle even post-cancellation, even though it made her more an easy target for the people harassing her. Maybe that was her way of subconsciously punishing herself.
2. Mia Isaac as Rowan is really the highlight of this movie, she’s just totally and unnervingly believable as a teenage school shooting survivor. You can tell that Rowan is a very kind-hearted person who’s just been constantly destroyed over and over, and then by the end she’s not going to take it anymore. Her last scene with all her righteous anger is really good.
3. And speaking of school shootings… god, I’m just never going to be over seeing shooting drills as a normal part of some people’s high school life. That is accurate to reality, right? I’m not American so I’m getting this info from movies and TV but god, what a way to create a generation of traumatized kids.
4. There aren’t really any sympathetic characters in this movie apart from Rowan and her family, and maybe Danni’s parents. Harper does the right thing by exposing Danni but she admits upfront she was motivated mostly by jealousy. And pretty much everyone else in the movie is incredibly vacuous, hedonistic and self-centered. You kind of wonder if maybe Danni would have turned out at least a little different if she wasn’t working in a world that was celebrating those qualities.
5. Danni’s pet guinea pig (named, rolls eyes, Guinea Weasley) strikes me as an oddly important character. No good guinea pig owner would keep just one of them, they’re social creatures who need a companion. If they don’t have any social bonds, they develop depression and can even die. So Danni is keeping this creature in what’s probably a lot of misery, another indication of how ignorant and selfish she is. And on top of that the guinea pig is a metaphor for Danni herself: right from the beginning she’s clearly deprived of meaningful social contact, and so over the course of the movie her mental state starts to deteriorate. Unlike the guinea pig though, she can choose how to act. And chooses terribly.
I went on a photo-gathering trip to London yesterday, while preparations for the Queen’s funeral were in full swing.
The train station was warning people not to join The Queue.
Shop windows were full of Queen Elizabeth images/merch, and also Paddingtons. It infuriates me how Paddington has become associated with the Queen but more on that some other time.
This is not just public mourning! This is M&S public mourning!
Flowers and flags popping up in all sorts of places.
The Marble Arch area was packed with people. I did get this nice picture of a bird though.
Onto Hyde Park. People and police everywhere, and a load of screens and portaloos set up for the funeral.
(other crowds, cops, & the odd yelling person not pictured.)
Found a weird beehive type thing and an unbothered raven.
Apparently this also happened in Hyde Park:
The Holocaust Memorial Garden in Hyde Park has now become a makeshift Queen Memorial Garden pic.twitter.com/1UNG54mXLv
and I’m glad I didn’t see that because I would have lost my fucking mind. Just a really, really shitty thing to do. (The part of me that still has a shred of optimism about human nature wonders if some of those flowers, the ones unmarked by any Queen pictures, genuinely were for Holocaust victims but I suspect not. I mean, I hope so, I just suspect not.)
On lighter notes…
I do like this pic of the Union Jacks at half-mast, it came out really well.
This shot of a plane going past a statue isn’t too bad either.
Oh look more Paddingtons, Paddingtons everywhere. Wouldn’t it make SO MUCH more sense for these to be given to refugee kids who arrive in Britain with no toys?
So Buckingham Palace itself was closed off but the area around it was MENTAL.
The tributes from children I suppose are touching in a way, but only in the same sense any children’s drawing left out in the rain is.
Those photos probably don’t give the full scale of everything but hopefully this video does.
Absolute chaos I tell you. So were the surrounding areas.
Piccadilly Circus looked beautiful but police were everywhere.
There was a moment of silence for the Queen on the train! ON THE TRAIN! Madness. A voice came over the tannoy asking for a minute’s silence but most people in the carriage were asleep anyway.
Got home and was informed shortly afterwards that my grandmother had taken a turn for the worse. Apparently, she can’t even recognise her family members now. It absolutely sucks. But the country won’t stand still for her, will it.
Often there are juxtapositions on the BBC news website that I have to screenshot. This one is about one death vs many deaths but only one is the headline news with the black background.
This also doubles as a Chozen appreciation post, what a dude. “Unhinged trained killer who is also pretty much just a weird uncle” is just one of my favourite character archetypes ever.
(Spoilers ahead!)
This was a good season that very much felt like a final one. Daniel and Johnny are finally friends, they’re healing their relationships with their kids, I’m not really sure where else they can go from here. Unless they revisit the plot with Miguel’s biological father, it is a little odd that it petered out so fast.
Some folks are saying that Hilary Swank’s character from The New Karate Kid (I’ve never seen it, sorry!) might be back in the future and I like that idea simply because Hilary Swank is a great actress and I haven’t seen her in anything for a while. Also this season brought back Robyn Lively as Jessica and revealed she was Amanda’s cousin which was the last thing I expected, so it’s not like they couldn’t do it in an organic way if they wanted.
Fundamentally this is SUCH a silly show, all full of big fights and prison breaks and blatant fanservice but I still love it to pieces because it takes itself so deadly seriously. These guys deliver speeches about karate tournaments like they’re deciding the fate of the human race. It’s amazing. Yeah, I reckon they can pull off one or two more seasons.
9/11 has rolled round again. Everything that happened there is still one of the most terrifying things I can imagine, although maybe not for the reasons you might think. Just like, imagine dying in a horrible way and *then* your death is used to justify years of atrocities. Doesn’t matter who you were or what you thought. For the rest of eternity you’d be at best a statistic and at worst a symbol of nationalism and racism. You’d be warped forever without your consent. It haunts me and it could happen to me, to anyone at any time. Even if you *want* to dismantle the systems that made it happen, it means nothing in the face of war. Nothing you ever did would mean anything.
What a strange day it’s been. One day before my wedding anniversary actually. I saw “Balmoral” trending on Twitter and it turned out to be a news story about how the Queen was in ill health. Lots of wisecracks scrolling down. (My favourite was “She meets Liz Truss and starts dying the very next day, I respect that.”)
Later on today I marvelled at how much better I was feeling post-breakdown, I’m on some fantastic new meds. I decided to fix the TV box since it had been messing up since pre-breakdown and making the image flicker on and off all the time. I got it working properly and immediately, a black screen and an announcement saying “Stand by for a message from the BBC” like I’ve heard in World War II-set movies.
“Holy crap, she’s actually dead!” I told my husband.
She was indeed Actually Dead. But I suppose the Queen isn’t really what I want to talk about. There’s not a huge amount to say, I’ve never met her (a few members of my family have gone to special Palace events where she was there, but that’s all) and she lived a long, charmed life.
Actually I want to talk about my grandmother. She was born two weeks before the Queen was in April 1926. She went through World War II at the same age the Queen did, but in considerably more danger than the Queen was, because she was working class and from a working class area that was very heavily bombed. She ended up joining the Wrens, I think, though I don’t know what she did there. Here’s a pic of her, clumsily colourized by an app:
I just take a weird sort of pleasure in knowing that a working class woman outlived the Queen, I guess. She’s in a care home now on the other side of the country, I plan to visit her soon.
