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3:00 snapshot #1570
On Sunday we cuddled on the couch and watched World War Z.
On Sunday we cuddled on the couch and watched World War Z.
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In case you haven't noticed, I'm momentarily obsessed with a certain band. Unfortunately, I keep writing their name incorrectly.
They are: The Darkest of The Hillside Thickets. My apologies for past instances writing "darkness" and omitting one of the "the"s. They are a Canadian concept band making music inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft.
I came to be aware of them on account of this song being available as Rock Band DLC:
I just bought their album "The Shadow Out of Tim" on the strength of the songs "Nyarlathotep" and "Marine Biologist" (best chorus ever? "He's got a bathyscape...!")
I'm trying very hard not to buy this t-shirt since I already have too many t-shirts and 25 dollars is too much even for one this spectacularly amazing. I would totally buy it at a live show, but I would have to go to Canada, since they refuse to cross into the US since our border security is obnoxious.
Members of the band are also involved in the Caustic Soda podcast, which I tried to listen to once and got annoyed with it. I'm going to try again.
They are: The Darkest of The Hillside Thickets. My apologies for past instances writing "darkness" and omitting one of the "the"s. They are a Canadian concept band making music inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft.
I came to be aware of them on account of this song being available as Rock Band DLC:
I just bought their album "The Shadow Out of Tim" on the strength of the songs "Nyarlathotep" and "Marine Biologist" (best chorus ever? "He's got a bathyscape...!")
I'm trying very hard not to buy this t-shirt since I already have too many t-shirts and 25 dollars is too much even for one this spectacularly amazing. I would totally buy it at a live show, but I would have to go to Canada, since they refuse to cross into the US since our border security is obnoxious.
Members of the band are also involved in the Caustic Soda podcast, which I tried to listen to once and got annoyed with it. I'm going to try again.
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3:00 snapshot #1141 plus keepers on bikes, scary fake forest
Long shadows of big oaks.
The Bird's World department has moved from a golf-cart based transportation system to one based on bicycles. I hope other areas follow suit. (My fantasy is to get a bike truck for pest control use.)
Something very scary has to happen in this location, in our snapshot horror movie.
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3:00 snapshot #1139 plus bonus Pdogs
What's the title of the horror movie we're going to make with my at work snapshots?
"Horror? No it should be something about colonial ground squirrels!"
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3:00 snapshot #1133
Hey
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dragonwrites, is this better? I suppose if I edited the snapshots together in the right order we could make a horror movie slideshow of them.Entry tags:
3:00 snapshot #1120
Let's together try to figure out why another one of my ljfriends dropped me out of nowhere today. Are they sick of the snapshots? Sick of snapshots taken with my iPod? Maybe they were one of the people who added me as a friend during the 365 urban species and are just disgusted with the precipitous drop in quality of this journal. But it's been 6 years! Maybe they don't like my self-deprecating anxiety. They only have eleven friends on their FL so they are probably just paring everything down to the bare necessities (yes I checked their profile--is that stalkery?)
Maybe I should go ahead and make that horror movie that takes place in the zoo--I could shoot it with my iPod!
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Horror is supposed to be pretend
Last night I watched Food of the Gods, a 1976 movie based on a fragment of an H.G. Wells story. Some folks on a remote farm discover a mysterious substance that, when fed to animals, causes them to grow to giant size. Rats and wasps get into the stuff and begin killing people.
This could have been a pretty enjoyable B movie experience, but it lost me about halfway through. Let me explain: the special effects to make the giant rats were charmingly rudimentary and anachronistic, consisting of some big rat-head puppets, and real rats crawling around on scale models of the sets.
The rats on the model house and cars were natural colored (brown) but were clearly tame domestics. They had calm body postures and were placidly exploring the toys they were placed on, while the sound of angry screeching rodents was foleyed in.
The heroes of the film are trapped in the farm house with giant rats all over it, and begin picking the rats off with shotguns. To my great surprise, the special effect used to show rats being shot was actual rats being actually shot. The film is slowed down a bit to make the shots look bigger, but the rats are clearly taking real hits from a pellet gun or small caliber bullet. Flesh pops open and the animals twist in pain and fall away.
I had to track my own feelings watching this. Was it hypocritical of me to be horrified? I have killed innumerable rats. Mostly I gently send them to unconsciousness in a gas chamber, but I also lay deadly traps in their path, and even give them poison--arguably a crueler fate than being shot.
But the rats I have killed were either expressly bred to be food animals, or were destructive non-native pests that we should all feel an obligation to destroy. I have nothing against individual rats: I have owned them as pets, and they are far and away the most intelligent and affectionate small mammal pet available.
The rats killed in Food of the Gods were actors. Filming them as they crawl over a doll house then blowing holes into them with a gun is monstrous. These were tame animals that were bred for entertainment, and in this case the entertainment was to display a real, honest-to-badness painful death.
How the animal handlers working on the film allowed this to happen is inconceivable to me. No one working in the field of animal care could possibly defend it. Then again, it's easy to breed rats, and I can only hope these were bred by an unethical hobbyist, not a professional animal keeper.
I'm sure at some point the filmmakers discussed how they were going to make it look like the rats were being shot. "We'll just shoot them and film it, for crying out loud! They're only rats!" But they are YOUR rats, and by bringing them into the world you are agreeing to treat them with some level of dignity, and protect them from undue suffering. Now I understand why most films end with a block of legalese assuring the viewer that the animals used in the film were not mistreated. It hadn't occurred to me before that such mistreatment was likely to happen in a mainstream movie.
I'm also surprised that the fact of the animal cruelty isn't mentioned on either the wikipedia page or imdb page for the movie. Googling "food of the gods" + "animal cruelty" produces a number of websites with similarly appalled reviews.
Edited to add: Here's a good essay on the indefensibility of really killing animals in a movie (including the gray area of filming a killing that was going to happen whether or not the camera was going to be there).
This could have been a pretty enjoyable B movie experience, but it lost me about halfway through. Let me explain: the special effects to make the giant rats were charmingly rudimentary and anachronistic, consisting of some big rat-head puppets, and real rats crawling around on scale models of the sets.
The rats on the model house and cars were natural colored (brown) but were clearly tame domestics. They had calm body postures and were placidly exploring the toys they were placed on, while the sound of angry screeching rodents was foleyed in.
The heroes of the film are trapped in the farm house with giant rats all over it, and begin picking the rats off with shotguns. To my great surprise, the special effect used to show rats being shot was actual rats being actually shot. The film is slowed down a bit to make the shots look bigger, but the rats are clearly taking real hits from a pellet gun or small caliber bullet. Flesh pops open and the animals twist in pain and fall away.
I had to track my own feelings watching this. Was it hypocritical of me to be horrified? I have killed innumerable rats. Mostly I gently send them to unconsciousness in a gas chamber, but I also lay deadly traps in their path, and even give them poison--arguably a crueler fate than being shot.
But the rats I have killed were either expressly bred to be food animals, or were destructive non-native pests that we should all feel an obligation to destroy. I have nothing against individual rats: I have owned them as pets, and they are far and away the most intelligent and affectionate small mammal pet available.
The rats killed in Food of the Gods were actors. Filming them as they crawl over a doll house then blowing holes into them with a gun is monstrous. These were tame animals that were bred for entertainment, and in this case the entertainment was to display a real, honest-to-badness painful death.
How the animal handlers working on the film allowed this to happen is inconceivable to me. No one working in the field of animal care could possibly defend it. Then again, it's easy to breed rats, and I can only hope these were bred by an unethical hobbyist, not a professional animal keeper.
I'm sure at some point the filmmakers discussed how they were going to make it look like the rats were being shot. "We'll just shoot them and film it, for crying out loud! They're only rats!" But they are YOUR rats, and by bringing them into the world you are agreeing to treat them with some level of dignity, and protect them from undue suffering. Now I understand why most films end with a block of legalese assuring the viewer that the animals used in the film were not mistreated. It hadn't occurred to me before that such mistreatment was likely to happen in a mainstream movie.
I'm also surprised that the fact of the animal cruelty isn't mentioned on either the wikipedia page or imdb page for the movie. Googling "food of the gods" + "animal cruelty" produces a number of websites with similarly appalled reviews.
Edited to add: Here's a good essay on the indefensibility of really killing animals in a movie (including the gray area of filming a killing that was going to happen whether or not the camera was going to be there).
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New Soylent Screen Up!
This time around I review a 1970 British horror movie called THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR. It's a murky print, but a compelling and disturbing idea. Read what I have to say at Blood Blade and Thruster.
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Movie Review
Behind the cut is my review of Prophecy: the Monster Movie. Usually I make my movie reviews friends only, since they don't have anything to do with the themes of my journal. This is an environmental horror movie, so maybe my general readership might be interested. There are some spoilers, but as this is a b movie, they probably won't interfere with your enjoyment of the movie. I do say how you can tell when the monster is going to attack, though.
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( Read more... )