I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on âquipsâ. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. Thatâs all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. Itâs all quips. Every single line. And itâs a masterpiece.
Movies suck when people donât care about the art theyâre making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isnât that funny dialogue exists.
The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but itâs all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as âI want my father back, you son of a bitchâ
people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say âquipsâ when they mean âbathosâ
another problem with quips thatâs a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the authorâs voice, NOT the charactersâ.
steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.
the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.
steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920âČs-30âČs brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, heâs a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, sheâs manipulative, sheâs always watching to see how a joke lands, sheâs always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesnât have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?
the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesnât have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyoneâs day. and it works! the characters have great banter because theyâre striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.
humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you canât get that from a blandly uniform pulp.
I have never heard anyone summarize Westleyâs character so perfectly in a single line
Serious explanation here: sheâs teaching them the instinct of being alert around enclosure openings! For example, if these were wild cats living in a bush, theyâd run the risk of a larger predator running up to the opening and grabbing one of them. The mother cat is also only bapping them lightly without claws, so those slaps are more of an annoyance meant to get the kittensâ attention, and to teach them to keep their eyes out for potential threats.
Top: in 2022, the official webcomic based on the 1993 SNES platformer Plok featured a reference to an obscure cut character from Super Mario Sunshine, Hinokuri (widely known by an unofficial name, âTramplinâ Stuâ, given to it by the community).
Bottom: Hinokuri/Tramplinâ Stu appeared in the gameâs first reveal trailer at SpaceWorld 2001, but is absent in the finished versionâs gameplay. Its model can still be found in the files, shown on the right.
Ok so I was curious about that fucking deathtrap and I noticed a couple⊠oddities.
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Alright so this thing is pretty stupid; Iâm not at all familiar with submersible vessels, But it activated a sleeper gene in my skull from my time being obsessed with a certain video game.
So I decided to check the promotional page for the contraption.
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(Iâm going to put aside the second image, where they state the previous shit they hammered out had a 500 meter depth limit tops (i.e. that they, at best, made something that could get to 500 meters then decided that meant they could handle making something that could handle 8 times that). Thinking about the fact they brag about this so brazenly hurts my head. Back to the topic at hand.)
Ok so google shows âcyclops classâ is not. a thing that exists. But it sure is funny they keep saying that word. Again maybe itâs just my stupid video game brain but that doesnât seem to be used in this context anywhere else. Then I saw the renders.
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Ok the newer one on the left really loves that âsingle eyeâ thing and looks silly enough, but the older one isâŠ. ok. I give up. Thatâs Subnautica. Thatâs Subnautica For Real.
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They built their goddamn suicide death trap based on a submarine in a videoed game.
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No Fucking way. Thereâs no fucking way. Thereâs no fucking chance thatâ
Introduced my 11 yo to the trolley problem and reminded him that ultimately the responsibility for the deaths in the trolley problem is whoever fucking tied all those people to the tracks in the first place.
So he said, “go back and in time and kill that dude before he can tie them all to the tracks” and y'know, that makes as much sense as anything.
If you think about it your grandparents talking to the cashier isn’t actually weird and in the grand scheme of things we’re the weird ones for being afraid to talk to strangers. Like obviously if someone doesn’t wanna talk don’t talk to them. But I’ve made a point recently of giving cashiers and strangers openings to talk to me if they want like saying how’s business today or how long have you owned this shop, or asking how’s things, or commenting generally how hot it is today. Things people can ignore if they want or comment on if they want.
And honestly I think it’s made my life a bit richer. I’m still terrified. I’m still scared of people because anxiety is a hard thing to fight. But it’s just nice to connect with strangers actually. Chatting with the Uber driver about his engineering degree hes getting, learning about the history of a glass shop I visited, chatting with a stranger about his escape from a war zone, telling people I’ll never see again about my dreams I know are unlikely but I’m pursuing anyways, connecting even briefly with other coffee lovers, cat people, babysitters, and wine haters. I almost never see these people again but they make my life way more fun when they take my invitation or I take theirs.
Maybe we do need to talk to other people instead of being on our phones sometimes actually. Not forcefully. And time alone on your phone is a right you have. A good thing in its own right. But you don’t have to be isolated either. It’s nice sometimes to chat with the old lady in line at the grocery store. And she’s not weird for giving you that option.
As a cashier it’s literally part of my job to be friendly and polite, that means talking to people who want to talk, and politely staying quiet when they don’t outside, of the questions I’m required to ask.- I’m good either way.
There isn’t time for any deep conversations but for 3-7 mins (depending on your shopping load) I can at least listen to you and help make your day a little brighter with a smile and a sympathetic ear. Mostly I’m just my weird, tired but optimistic self (when the depression isn’t bad- you’ll know it too because I’ll be quiet rather than chatty). I used to be shy and struggle constantly to talk- I still find certain situations hard, and I can still be awkward and anxious.
But my job isn’t one of the areas I find hard anymore, as tiring as it is to almost constantly communicate there, it is also healing to connect with the people in my community and feel like I’m part of something bigger.
Kids and teens, alike are delighted when I comment on their outfits, hair styles or pins and hand them receipts, tell them they are doing a great job etc
There are some very interesting people out there Just waiting for someone to indicate that it’s ok to talk to you :)
If your scared, that’s ok. baby steps. been able to talk to people doesn’t happen overnight, you can stop if it’s overwhelming, and try again when your ready. But the only way to connect with people is to practice talking and there are people happy to help with that.
I was raised in the “stranger danger” era. And so I was taught, “don’t talk to strangers”. And so that is how my brain formed. That is the way I was raised. Strangers are bad. Strangers are…the public. The public is bad, other people are bad, do not talk to them.
And so when people talked to me, I stared at them. That was my response. Because I’m not supposed to talk to you, you are bad. This is the way I was taught to act when I was 8. And then I was 12 and still doing it. And then I was 16 and still doing it. And then I was 22 and still doing it.
Because at no point did anyone say to me “Okay, time to start talking to strangers.”
So, whenever I was in public, if someone spoke to me, I stared at them. Like I was raised.
And then one day I was walking down the sidewalk somewhere and I thought of a funny joke, so I smiled to myself. The thing was, there was a man who happened to be passing me at that exact moment, and he thought I was smiling at him. So he did the weirdest thing ever. He smiled at me!
And my heart lit up! I thought “Wow, what a wonderful kind soul, I wonder why he did that.” and it took me like, the whole rest of the walk to think about it, before I realized that he smiled because I smiled.
And so I began to practice smiling at people who passed me on the side walk. Like, I had to work at it. I had to notice a person was coming, then be like “Okay, we’re going to smile now. Now how close or far should they be? How long do we wait?” There were times I smiled WAY too soon, and that was awkward. There were times when I waiting too long and they were past me and didn’t see it. There were times I just lost my nerve.
But eventually, it became second-nature. It became more practiced to smile than to not smile. And some people didn’t smile back- and I wasn’t upset! I knew why they didn’t! They still thought I was a stranger, and no one had told them yet that THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO END WHEN I WAS AN ADULT, and I was supposed to MAGICALLY have the social skills to talk to strangers without EVER having practiced it as a child.
Smiling at people also had the side-effect of causing them to sometimes say something. And that was when it finally clicked that I could talk to strangers- I smiled at them, they smiled at me, they said hello, I could say hello.
I am still no master of small talk, believe me. Are some of these conversations very awkward? You bet. But sometimes we really hit it off! Sometimes you really click with someone about a thing. Sometimes you learn that you’re not the only one who thinks it’s stupid that the accessible parking is on the far side of the grocery store parking lot, for example. Sometimes you realize you’re not alone in the world.
my friends hate this video so much i don’t even have to repost it in discord anymore i’ll just be in a voice call and go “wouldn’t it be crazy if the joker could beatbox” and they all tell me to go kill myself
![todays-xkcd:
“Listen, you’re very cute, but if you rearrange the alphabet to put U and I together it will RUIN the spacing!
Alphabet Notes [Explained]
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/95868af940cb1a013f4e867518e6e4a6/321c91794beb23bd-82/s500x750/1a2f5c92e18f9d9a734d390e2c5f8cd26e088886.png)
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