Secret cinema found beneath Paris.
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor: “Do not try to find us.” (via)
SECRET, MILDLY THREATENING UNDERGROUND COUSCOUS CINEMA
I WANNA GO
LET ME JOIN YOUR KIND, UNDERGROUND MOVIE PEOPLE
nO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE CINEMA WAS HIDDEN BEHIND AN UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGN THAT LEAD TO A CHECK-IN DISK WITH A FULL CCTV HOOKUP THAT WOULD TURN ON AND RECORD ANY UNREGISTERED VISITORS. AND IF SOMEONE SNUCK IN? A TAPE OF BARKING SECURITY DOGS WOULD BEGIN TO PLAY.
BEYOND THE CRAZY FRONT DESK AND THE MOVIE THEATER, THERE WAS A STOCKED BAR AND TABLES AND CHAIRS, MEANING THAT AFTER CATCHING A FLICK IN AN ILLEGAL PARISIAN CATACOMB THEATER, YOU COULD THEN EAT COUSCOUS AND SIP A COCKTAIL NEXT DOOR. THERE WAS A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICITY SYSTEM SET UP, AND AT LEAST 3 WORKING PHONE LINES. THIS SHIT WAS LIKE A BOND VILLAIN.
BETTER YET? IT WAS RUMORED THAT THE PLACE WAS SET UP BY THE UNDERGROUND FRENCH ART GANG UX “Urban eXperiment”, WHO NAVIGATES THROUGH THE PARISIAN UNDERGROUNDS AND ILLEGALLY RESTORES ABANDONED WORKS OF ART, ALONG WITH HOLDING FILM FESTIVALS IN THE BASEMENTS OF GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. THEY EVEN RELEASED A SHORT FILM ABOUT THEIR WORK RESTORING THE ICONIC PANTHEON CLOCK OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR. NO ONE SUSPECTED THEIR INVOLVEMENT, UNTIL THE CLOCK BEGAN TO WORK AGAIN AFTER 60 YEARS OF RUSTING.
IF YOU DON’T THINK CATACOMBS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HANG OUT IN THEM ARE SOME OF THE COOLEST FUCKING THINGS IN THE WORLD THEN I IMPLORE YOU TO EAT SOME COUSCOUS AND RECONSIDER.
My earliest memories are of comic books, and of my father. He’d bring me to this little bar called The Dead End in Fox River Grove, where I would sit quietly in the corner, going over the pages of the same few comics again and again, looking for new details in the stories and the art. On the drive home, I recall the car swerving. I also recall him hitting me, throwing me to the ground.
The first comic books I bought on my own were a stack of Iron Mans from a little shop not far from the one-bedroom apartment I shared with my mother. From time to time, I’d add to this collection, shepherding and obsessing over it like only a five-year-old could, spreading it out on the pullout sofa I slept on. I constantly pleaded with my mom to buy more comics. Sensibly, she usually said no. When she did say yes, I always picked Iron Man.
As with the Robert Downey Jr. film adaptations, the original Iron Man character is defined as much by his intellect or technology as by personal troubles. Starting in 1978, with issue No. 120, in a story arc known as “Demon in a Bottle,” David Michelinie, John Romita Jr., and Bob Layton took Tony Stark’s billionaire playboy attitude and added the specter of alcoholism. The story begins with Stark flying first-class, pondering his life as he asks the stewardess for a fourth martini. When questioned by her, he rationalizes that he’s is drinking for two men, his civilian persona and his costumed identity.
Read more. [Image: Bob Layton/Wikimedia Commons]
Think of a book special to you, and how much bleaker and poorer your life would be if that one writer had not existed—if that one writer had not, a hundred times or a thousand, made the choice to write.
You’re going to be that one writer, one day, for somebody you may never meet. Nobody can write that book you’re going to write—that book that will light up and change up a life—but you.
Mothafreakin’ Disney’s Gargoyles, Season 2, Episode 4, “A Lighthouse In The Sea of Time.”

I know, right?
(via theirishcowgirl)
sometime I just think about how easy it would be to market superheroes toward little girls and I am filled with rage
like do these people not realize how fucking easy this shit would be
there’s the dazzler she’s like a popstar and a superhero do you know how many 4-12 year old girls would dig that shit
there’s the wasp and her superpowers are seriously like zapping jerks, flying, and being cuter than everybody else. also she’s a famous fashion designer. and she’s better than you. (like she shrinks and stuff too but mainly her power is being better than you)
she-hulk is like this nerdy chick with the power to get bigger and greener and be spontaneously tougher than everybody in the vicinity like I don’t even know a little girl who wouldn’t slit someone’s throat for the ability to be stronger than all the boys when they pissed her off
little girl likes magic? scarlet witch
little girl likes science? invisible woman
little girl likes spies? black widow
little girl likes aliens? karolina dean
little girl likes bionic arms? misty knight
little girl likes flying horses? wow. guess who has one of those? valkyrie. valkyrie does.
My point is that’s it’s so fucking easy so chop-chop, Marvel, get on it. Seriously, I went ten years of my life thinking superheroes were boys. That’s ten years of you not profiting off of my inability to refrain from buying even the crappiest merchandise you offer if it has a character I love on it. Little girls are an enormous market; they will buy all your shit if you just suggest to them that maybe they’d like to.
or you could just keep on not profiting when you could be making money selling literally any object that has enough space to plaster a female superhero’s face on it. that’s cool too.
Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talks 2009)
Tell me again, what did you say about representation not being important?
This gifset goes perfectly with an article I just read. This is why media representation is so important. Because it brainwashes our children to not even see themselves in their OWN stories.
Just read Adichie’s new novel Americanah, which I highly recommend. Great book, and not too much weather in it.
Images: POC featured in shots from the crowd at Laketown in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Exposure of images has been altered to compensate for the low saturation point of 3D movie shooting as well as generally crappy cinematography.
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The second Hobbit movie was pretty terrible. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But this is not a post for me to talk about how Peter Jackson has ruined his reputation and thrown out everything that made the Lord of the Rings great. No, this is a post to point out the one good thing the movie did - better than the production team of the LotR movies and better than most fantasy movies I have seen.
For those of you who don’t know much about Tolkiens original mythos, it was pretty racist. The men of Middle Earth, which is not all of the whole of the world (arda), are white. There are other areas, whose people are described as ‘swarthy’ or 'having dark complexions’ and their military tactics and clothing are taken pretty much directly from East Asian, African, and South-Asian cultures. These races are all, at the time of LotR, sided with Sauron or Evil in some way. In the books, people with these ancestries are pretty universally no good. Here is a page with a good summery of all of the really problematic things as well as the common defenses you might here.
Now, someone could choose to take a very strict to canon approach and say that the population of Lake Town would not have been so diverse, based on Tolkien’s writings. If such a person has voiced such an opinion, though, they probably shouldn’t have gotten to this part of the film because this film was so far from the canon of the books that if this is what you are complaining about kindly rethink your life.
But even, theoretically, if Peter Jackson hadn’t decided to replace his brain with all the Oscars he won for The Return of the King and had made a Hobbit movie that was about as true as to Tolkien as the LotR movies were and even half as good, I still think there is absolutely no reason to choose to preserve that level of racism and racial exclusion in a fantasy work.
The choice to not only include POC in this crowd (however badly the crowd acting was directed), but have them front and center is important. Not that POC had any speaking roles, but they were there, in Middle Earth, playing everyday, non-evil people.
Visually, I personally was plenty represented by the likes of Aragorn, the people of Gondor or the Dwarves (though more female characters would have been nice), so I can’t say what this might mean to a fan of the movies, books, or world who was previously rather conspicuously missing, except under blatantly ethnic-coded costume battling against the heroes in the third film.
But seeing all of the things still going around about Frozen (a fantasy film set in a real-ish place at a ??? time with plenty of historical and geographic inaccuracy that has to reject actual history to not have POC) and Tangled (a fantasy film set in a make believe place at no set time with no canon to reject and no POC) I thought I would point this out, because I hadn’t seen anyone do this yet.
By the way, I think overall, both Tangled and Frozen were infinitely better films than this pile of horse poop. In like every way (this franchise is 5 movies running without passing the Bechdel Test). So it’s even more remarkable that it managed to outdo so many speculative fiction movies on racial representation.
(I will be happy to be proven wrong if someone can find a shot of POC in the LotR movies. There may be some amongst the heavily armored and hidden riders that are impossible to make out on a computer screen…)