2024 - Blog Posts
New year Witchcraft 🎇
🪄🪄🪄
Comeback and dedicating this to Michael Jackson! Hope we get to see hints for the third sequel!!! @singmovie
Is it just me or have the games released the past few years either been
Remakes
Incredibly short
Remakes
Terrible quality
Resident evil (also remakes)
Like????
Arkansas man charged with capital murder for wife's death | thv11.com
Recent 2024 Homicide! Would love to.know more! This leaves me with a ton of questions!
In honor of the holly jolly spirit I made this Christmas drawing (also digital this time instead of traditional). For anyone curious what program I used, it’s a free website called Kleki. Happy holidays yall take care.
Happy New Year's, everybody. Hopefully, everyone will enjoy 2024. This is gonna be a good year for everyone! 😁🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉
all my digital artworks of 2024
irony-poisoned (unedited ver.)
irony-poisoned
I swear Finn Wolfhard could be in Smile 3…(Just look at that beautiful smile 😭)
(This is not actually the Smile 3 poster, it’s fan made by someone I couldn’t read the name of..blame my dyslexia 😢)
(Anyways, just think about it…Finn in Smile 3…wouldn't that be something? Hmm-mmm)
My 2024 price sheet!
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"
JULIA by SANDRA NEWMAN (A REVIEW)
quickly: a woman’s daring sex life in a totalitarian regime leads to confinement and freedom (this is a man’s world / cameras and monitors everywhere / facetime before Facetime™ / overalls and soot / a boot in the face / thought control / see nothing, say nothing / “no touching” / people disappear / yes means no / hate means love / Big Brother becoming Big Father / cheese like rubber, bread like leather / child spies / handsome airmen in handsome uniforms / dark windowless underground prisons / government-sponsored torture / nightmares turned reality / all regimes are the same).
This is a retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, from the perspective of the character Julia. Though the landscape was familiar it felt like there were so many new elements to explore, thanks to Newman’s refocusing of the story’s lens. The gray days, civil self-censoring, and grand governmental illusions are still there, but what Newman highlights is a world that is not just anti-women, but anti-Feminine. The daily assault on women and the collective feminine (those faculties we need dearly for introspection, intuition, reception, caretaking, community, and creativity) is relayed to us through Julia’s own story of growing up watched (and touched and used and forgotten). No women’s rights, but no poetry, thinking, feeling, remembering, loving, or caring either, says Big Brother, always watching.
With this new view of the story, the smell of blood is sharper (on the street after a bomb tears off a child’s arm, or in the dungeons where they torture pregnant women and the elderly). The design of Big Brother’s Love (Hate) is clearer (double, triple, and quadruplethink… every relationship is a set-up). The heartbreakers are the moments when the wizard’s curtain is pulled back and the evil isn’t anything special… just a man. Made of flesh and feelings just like any other living thing. Subject to thirst, hunger, pain, aging, and death. How despairingly bleak it is to realize that the causes of your and the world’s tragedies are men who make decisions like kids fighting over toys on the playground.
★★★★
UGLIES by SCOTT WESTERFELD (A REVIST)
quickly: a new friend wakes a teenage girl up to the not-so-pretty world she is living in (new face, who dis! / pretty privilege / mandatory plastic surgery / pranks and tricks as a lifestyle / journeys over the river and through the woods / solar powered hoverboards / dehydrated foodstuffs / engineered plastic and nanotech glues / ecofriendly totalitarianism / the deep deep state / underground facilities / government programming / citizen deprogramming / backstabbing the backstabbers).
Rereading since originally reading it back in 2007. First book of 2024!
Vintage clothing is cool, but what will we do when our entire society and way of life becomes vintage? What if, in an effort to rid society of its ills (war, illness, violence, etc.) we developed a medical procedure that made everyone the same and dulled our sensibilities? Scott Westerfeld isn’t a master wordsmith with a poet’s pen, but that’s not what we came here for anyway. We came for the well-constructed futuristic dystopian universe jam-packed with unimaginable avant-garde technology and the social dilemmas that erupt when humanity and technology collide. There are hoverboards that work by magnetism, medical procedures that can regrow all the skin on your body and reshape your entire bone structure, and surveillance so precise it practically knows what you are thinking.
At the center of all of this is Tally, a fifteen-year-old girl who wants exactly what everyone else in her world has been programmed to want: to be pretty. While she is awaiting the government-facilitated procedure that will make her “the standard” and initiate her into young adult society, she meets a new friend who is also nearing the time of her pretty procedure. Her new friend is a radical, transfixed by the idea of a land faraway called “The Smoke”, where many of the Uglies have been escaping to evade the overseeing technological eyes of their government… a government so secret that some don’t believe it even exists. As Tally is exposed to life outside The Cities, she becomes the focal point of a massive movement of rebellion. This was a fun, wild hoverboard ride through a very futuristic world that felt very grounded in today’s times.
★ ★ ★ ★
more thoughts: SPOILERS!
Thoughts are italicized, spoilers are not:
Some personal context… I originally read the entire Uglies trilogy one summer in 2007. I had a boxed set that included UGLIES, PRETTIES, and SPECIALS. EXTRAS hadn’t come out yet, and I’ve never read it. I vividly remember the 3 book set with the high-fashion editorial style covers. My original copies were lost in what I call “The Flood”, which took a great number of pieces in my literary collection to a moldy watery grave. I found a pic of them on Amazon though.
These covers are SO MUCH better than the current blank generic covers they have in stores and libraries. I plan on rereading the entire series and finshing with a first read of the last book, EXTRAS.
This book made me feel like it was 2007 again, and that I could throw this book down at any moment, step outside, and find my friends waiting for me to go along on one of our adventures playing in the woods that connected our backyards.
The book starts with Tally pulling a trick by sneaking into the highly monitored New Pretty Town to visit an old friend. Tally is a young, simple, coming-of-age girl who thinks just like everyone around her… life is useless until you turn 16 and the government turns you pretty, and then life is great. Until 16, nothing matters and no one takes you seriously. Uglies, as people are lovingly called pre-operation, are expected to be wild, uncontrollable, trouble-making good for nothings. This is why all of their pranks are referred to as ugly tricks, or simply tricks. When you’re a pretty, you don’t have time for such trickery.
The Uglies live in dorms that are bland and interchangeable. The Pretties live in a glamorous city within a city, where life is a party with a formal dress code. Then eventually Pretties undergo a second operation to become a “Middle Pretty” where they move out to the suburbs to have “Littlies”, before turning into “Crumblies” and are moved further to the edges of society. Of course, all this turns out to be well-thought-out propoganda
Tally makes a new friend, Shay, after her old best friend Peris reaches Pretty age and undergoes the operation. He moves to New Pretty Town immediately after, as is customary, leaving Ugly life behind. After busting into New Pretty Town to see how much Peris has changed, she decides it is best to just wait until she has her own operation to see him again. Her time spent with the rebellious and adventurous Shay increases.
Shay teaches Tally how to hack her hoverboard, sneak out of The City, and tells her about The Smoke. A place where people live as ‘Uglies’ by choice, opting out of having the operation to become pretty. Shay teaches Tally the way to the rusting city ruins where Uglies meet up to find the mysterious David who will someday lead those willing to make the journey to The Smoke.
Tally can’t comprehend life lived as an Ugly, and doesn’t understand why anyone would want to forgo the operation to become Pretty. This is why she can’t tell Shay YES, when Shay asks Tally to run away to the smoke with her before her operation. Tally ends up making the journey anyway, alone, after she is manipulated by Special Circumstances (a secret underground division of the government) into betraying her friend and everyone at The Smoke.
Life in The Smoke opens her eyes to the real world that has been hidden from her. Her desire to be pretty wanes, and disappears after bonding with the other residents. She falls in love with David and plans to stay. After accidentally triggering the tracking device given to her by Special Circumstances, Tally leads SC directly to The Smoke. It is swiftly destroyed and all the Smokies are detained. (Cue big breakout scene where Tally escapes custody, tracks down the detainees, and frees them.)
After all the hell she’s raised, Tally ends up developing a plan to help right some of her wrongs, but you’ll have to make it through to the end to see what that may be.
The rest is for you to read on your own!
I’ve read some of the reviews on Goodreads that criticize Tally’s character as being too vain, dumb, selfish, etc. This makes me wonder if the readers with those opinions understood the circumstances of the world that Tally was a part of. Everyone was vain, dumb, and selfish. No one wanted to look under the veneer of their society because there was no reason to. Everything was taken care of. The people in this world were programmed to think that the past was a monstrous barbaric place and that all the world’s problems were solved by the development of ’the Cities’ and the Pretty operation.
I’ve also read some reviews that criticize the fact that Tally’s love interest David is what inspires her to make her big decision to leave the cities for good. I think that is a poor summarization of this character’s journey. After having to make the long journey to The Smoke by herself, Tally endured a process of disillusionment that separated her from her life in The City. She had gone from a place where everything was planned, every move was monitored, and the threat of world catastrophe was linked to how ugly or pretty citizens were. She had never been in real danger until she made her journey to The Smoke. She had never met anyone older than 16 who was not “pretty” until she arrived at the camp, The Smoke. David was just one of the reasons she made her decisions, not the sole reason. In fact, Tally’s journey begins and ends with her trying to save her girl-friend Shay.
I won’t go into too much more detail about the story. It was just a fun read, an adventure, a journey, all those things. So glad to have re-read it, and so glad it held up after all these years. There are plenty of high-speed chases, thrilling escapes, and ingenious hi-jinks to keep you turning the page. And if you’re a tumblr kid like me, there are loads of nostalgia in reading this book again all these years later. It’s wild to think that this never made it to the big screen or as a series on someone’s streaming service.
MILEY CYRUS — Performing ‘Flowers’ after winning “Best Pop Performance” at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards
