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  • I LOVE WIKICOMMONS

    You know what’s one of the best unrecognized sources for pictures? Wikimedia Commons. Or, as I like to shorthand it as, WikiCommons. God, it’s such a beautiful resource for images. An entire archive with no BS guessing games; you’re told right away by an indicator if an image is copyrighted or public domain.

    I think what I really love, though, is the nature of the photographs. Oftentimes, they aren’t staged or intentional. They’re contributed by people capturing moments in real-time. It makes everything feel a lot like a time capsule, like you’re viewing small moments across the globe, sometimes in unknown places. It’s all so natural. Plus, all the images are so…aesthetically pleasing to look at. I love it.

    Tonight I was working on an assignment and got sidetracked looking at archived photographs of my city. I browsed every catalogue year like it was going out of style. Sometimes I’d come across an image from 2008 or 2009, for instance, and I’d immediately recall a time where the buildings and everything in them did indeed look like they did on the pictures.

    In other news, I love how you can definitely see where Valve and the Left 4 Dead franchise were influenced from the real life graffiti after the flood. Playing L4D2 always gave me that impression, an article analyzing the storytelling through graffiti confirmed it, and now I can see the real life pictures from when these events were playing out, not just the faded ones that remain today.

    I love public domain materials. Yum.

    This is not an affiliated post. I just love Wikimedia lol ★

  • WHERE ARE ALL THE NORMAL SIMONES?

    This is funny: I used to almost never encounter my name in fictional media. My name is Simone, so it’s a familiar name, but just uncommon enough that you have to be reminded of it.

    The only time I’d ever really heard a character have my name was in the 2002 film S1M0NE (which, funnily enough, also happens to be the year I was born. I also have been meaning to see this film for years). The next time really caught me off guard, and it was while watching As Told By Ginger for the first time, and one of the minor characters featured heavily in a few episodes is also named Simone. That one was a nice, unexpected surprise, since I already adore that show and that gives me a way to connect with it more, lol.

    But lately, man. I don’t know what’s been going on- maybe it’s because I’m scrubbing the indie scene trail a bit more- but I’m getting that same coincidental, déjà vu experience I mentioned in my last post about the city: I’m starting to see my name everywhere.

    Not in recent stuff. That actually would be scary. But in stuff I’ve never encountered before, I’m finding my namesake in the most fucked-up characters in the line-up.

    The first movie was Loving Annabelle (2006). I literally don’t even remember how I heard of this movie; all I know is I was reading the description on Letterboxd, and BAM! Simone is a teacher who gives tongue to her student. Gross?!

    The next one is The Fan (1982). A disturbed girl confesses her love to the pop singer of her obsessions. He doesn’t love her back, she loses her mind! Wanna guess what her name is? You’re right!

    Those two are probably the worst ones. The other few were tame (one actor even had the combination of my and my mom’s given names as her full name, and it was very sweet to see), but mostly just consisted of me being caught unannounced by all these sudden appearances of that name.

    It seems my name has been doomed to be assigned to the most off-the-wall, basket head-cases you could ever dream of coming across. I thought the name was meant to be sophisticated or something!

    This post was typed up after midnight the day it was posted, as apart of the “After Midnight” series ★

  • I JUST CAN’T ESCAPE

    Lately, no matter where I turn, I keep encountering my hometown in some way.

    It’s all coincidental and, at first, unwanted, though now my feelings are conflicted. I’ll read Wikipedia summaries and find out the movie takes place there. I’ll read further down and find out it’s filmed there. I’ll open a video up and get jumpscared by the very distinct picture of the skyline. Earlier today I opened up a video on the inside of an in-flight Boeing 727-200 in 1992 for research and heard over the intercom that my city was their final destination.

    God, I just can’t leave. I’ll leave physically but it’s still there everywhere I turn, haha. I keep getting reminders of it everywhere I go. Even my college town architecturally resembles where I hail from. I didn’t even get the weird, disorienting feeling of being in a new environment back when I was a freshman. I just felt right at home.

    I’m not from a small town, so it’s not like I harbor any resentment for growing up in rural nowhere where you need a car to get around, but I understand what those small town kids feel when they say they want to get away. I wasn’t kidding when I said I want to move away for good.

    I have a deep disdain for this place. When I was younger, I always said I’d come back to give birth, visit my family, and die, but now I don’t even want to do two of those things anymore. I’ve even told my family repeatedly I’ll gladly relocate them to wherever they desire so they don’t have to deal with the city’s antics either. It’s like some weird caricature of itself, like some gross fleshy creature who’s heart is barely beating because of the beating it takes.

    Not like it’s even gonna be there to go back to, anyway. They predict the whole thing’s gonna be underwater by the time 2050 rolls around, so the place I used to call home may not even be around anymore. Good riddance.

    So I consider this just me getting a jump on things before they go all Atlantis. The only thing that’s ever going to drag me back to a place like that is the love I have for my mom. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother going back.

    I’m not the first to leave either, and I definitely won’t be the last. Every year more and more residents leave as tourists and transplants are favored by a corrupt city hall that would rather destroy homeless camps during high-volume seasons so tourists don’t have to know how bad it is. There used to be blatant favoritism to the transplants, but that place is engorging itself with so much greed that it doesn’t even listen to them anymore. It’s starting to treat them like the residents. You won’t get any real opportunity unless you either have money, or you leave. And that’s why so many locals opt to leave. We’re a dispersed, dying breed.

    I know I’ll miss it, in some weird way. We always do. I’m not the first to compare it to an abusive relationship, where you can’t recall any good but you still feel something for it, you know? I think it will move me at times, and it does. I miss the idea of it, more than anything. But what it used to be, back before it was transformed into the grotesque, caricatural pest on life-support it is today, has been gone even before I was born. I think it got washed away in the flood.

    This post flew way off course from where it was supposed to be. At first I was just going to joke around about my repeated encounters with my city everywhere I go, but I realize I never properly wrote this post up. I’ve had this in mind even before this blog was a thing. Maybe instead of trying to ignore the pattern of coincidences, but recognizing it for what it is, the random encounters will finally go away! A girl can dream!

  • MOVIE DISCUSSION: PEARL (2022)

    Title: Pearl (2022)

    Runtime: 1hr 42min

    Rating: ★★★★ ½

    In the midst of textbook readings and school assignments, instead of watching the actual movie I was assigned (“Ball of Fire,” if all one of you is wondering), I instead decided to pull out a film from the catalogue that I’ve been meaning to get around to: Pearl. Before even starting this I had to go ahead and make sure it wasn’t necessary for me to see X (2022) first (which I also have not seen and have been meaning to get around to).

    Basically, it goes as follows: Pearl is a farmgirl who dreams of becoming a dancer in order to leave her countryside life for something more exciting. She doesn’t want to end up like her mother, and she will try to do that by any means necessary.

    First off: This bitch is crazy! At this point I’m not even sure if keeping her isolated helped or hindered her. She didn’t need to be off the farm, but being on the farm might’ve just made the problem worse!

    Honestly, I’m pretty sure Pearl doesn’t even want to be a dancer. This is probably pretty obvious, but the dancing isn’t the goal: it’s simply a means to an end. Joining a dance troupe represents travel which represents leaving. She doesn’t care how she gets out of there, just that she does. That’s why we pretty much never see her practicing or anything. She’s doing what every maladaptive daydreamer does: envision the reality you want to live to the point of forgetting to accomplish it in waking life. I did have to briefly pause and look away at the start of the audition, but it wasn’t the bomb wreck I was expecting, so it wasn’t as bad to sit through.

    Pearl, as we plainly see later on in the film, will even kill if it means escaping the prison which is the life she was damned to live, and the cycle she was straddled to repeat. I have to say, it’s hilarious that you can tell the exact moment the projectionist goes from thinking, “This bitch is hot,” to “this bitch is crazy.” You can really tell he regrets being sleazy with the wrong married spouse even before the pitchfork is driven through his ribcage. Pearl has about the least hesitation I’ve seen from anyone on screen to kill! She’d do it in a heartbeat.

    In some ways I understand where she’s coming from. Was it necessary to kill to do it? Yeah, probably not. But even if she wasn’t a very good dancer, you can’t say Pearl wasn’t dedicated to getting the hell out of there! Even with this contradicting what I said in this post two paragraphs ago, she wasn’t even the worst dancer. She wasn’t stellar, or anything, but I definitely see why they didn’t choose her. There’s probably a lot of plain-faced, hick girls like her who are clawing their way to leave the fields for a life of glamour, and even if it was an excuse in the end, saying that they “had girls like her in the troupe already” probably wasn’t that far off from the truth.

    I was not surprised to find out Pearl had been pregnant. I REALLY thought they were going to allude more that she intentionally caused her own miscarriage, but it seems like it happened naturally. Honestly thank God. I can’t imagine what it would be like for a child to be damned into that kind of environment.

    Another thing: I also fully expected there to be a bit of a role reversal between the main family. So Pearl kills the father, and then the mother somehow survives ALL that, barely clinging onto life for days, and takes the father’s role, and Pearl inherits her mother’s role as caretaker. Instead they all die, which works too.

    Mia Goth has some incredible acting. She has a face that fits historical dramas. I didn’t expect anyone in this film to have perfectly accurate southern accents, so I won’t even talk about that part, but damn that girl can scream. I don’t know how many kudos I want to give, though; I’m writing this in the middle of the “kicking MaXXXine extra in the head” controversy, so…

    Overall, this was pretty good. I don’t think it’ll go down on my list of new favorites or anything, but I can definitely see why it’s so popular. And why it’s featured on so many “female rage” edits on YouTube. Speaking of which, now I have to get around to watching X. The first glimpse of anything I saw in this trilogy was Lorraine’s death from X. I knew nothing about what was coming and subsequently busted out laughing. It’s like she slipped on a violent banana peel.

    But that’s enough for today! I have plenty of assignments to catch up on before I go to sleep. Maybe I’ll browse a bit of my textbook. My eyes are getting a bit heavy, though. I just can’t stay up like I used to anymore!

    This review was posted the day prior after midnight, apart of the “After Midnight” series ★

  • FIRST WIKIPEDIA, THEN THE MILKMAN

    Do you ever go down ridiculous Wikipedia rabbit holes? I treat that page like it’s TV Tropes sometimes.

    It started off with an innocent enough search- I think I was searching up uphappy movie endings?- and I immediately got distracted by the title of one particular film, and then started reading about my city’s history (where the movie was filmed), and an hour and a half later I suddenly had several pages open on infamous mobsters and, somehow, milkmen? Between discovering John O’Hara and his obsession with Yale after learning about the Appointment in Samara parable (with his novel of the same name), to finding out who Starr Faithfull was, I correctly concluded that I need to stop getting distracted during times I’m supposed to be researching for my projects.

    Oh well. I’ll be off to watch some Twilight Zone.