Hail, the mustelid! Greatest family of the animal kingdom, nay, the eukaryote demesne. They are nigh
universally cute — a charming sausage shape — and often small, but unlike their tamèd brers and
sisters in Canidæ and Felidæ, they have never succumbed to human domestication and demeaning.1
Indeed, they are deceptively mighty for their size; the least weasel, an accurate name if there ever
was one, proudly squeaks as the smallest carnivore on land, and with its mighty jaw can take down a
rabbit ten times its greater, or even, should you believe the ancient Greeks, a basilisk. (So goes
it for the otter, too: a lutra lutra might never look like it has a single thought running
through its head, but show it to a streamful of fish, and you will witness a bloodbath that would
make Tamerlane blush.)
I might myself take a broader view of the term and insert an O in that
mustelid, bringing us up to the dynasty Musteloidea, where not only weasels, martens,
and otters roam, but the mischievous American raccoon, the adorable red panda, and the
e’er-defensive skunk. But the title says “mustelids”, and i am not one to argue with my
fifteen-minutes-ago self, so in our little kindred we shall remain.
A last thing to note before we return to pathetic Prīmātēs, the greatest thing in all the
family, the peak of all the realm of life, the chief reason among chief reasons that mustelids are
the best:
Some Like It Hot (1959). My pick for family movie night. I’ve been accused of
being a bit of a “miserabilist” (i’m sorry, but Synecdoche, New York bangs, and i have no
regrets on making them watch it), so i thought i’d kick the year off with something a bit funny,
a bit light-hearted, and a bit gay, and cor, was this an absolute classic! A comedy from the
fifties about two men cross-dressing to infiltrate a women’s jazz band should be positively
radioactive, but this misses all the potential pipelines of “well, you know, back in the day…”
sewage and instead hits a gold-mine of timeless commentary on gender relations. I’m on Team
Daphne — he’s so much more confident in being a woman than Josephine and does not deserve that
terrible toad man. (And, having seen both this and Rear Window, i can finally weigh in:
Grace Kelly is a thousand times prettier than Marilyn Monroe. Sorry.) An instant 10/10.
“Noöne knows who created skull trumpet (until now)”. Had to click this as soon as it appeared on my feed. There’s really something beautiful about
the amateurism of the early web, how a woman with no formal training in graphic design or
anything of the sort could make all these wonderful, whimsical images, and have one of them
persist into the present day. Rest in peace, Cathy Jarboe, you beautiful diamond, you. 6½/10.
The Master (2012). Mama’s pick for family movie night. Philip Seymour Hoffman is
incredible in this as an L. Ron Hubbard–style cult leader, to the extent that you often
find yourself agreeing with him — i totally get why people join these sort of things now.
Joaquin Phoenix, on the other hand… man, i hate to say it, but i might be falling off the
Phoenix train? He’s always doing that same snivelling Joker thing, even when it’s totally
inappropriate like in Napoleon, and it’s getting kind of old. Joaquin Phoenix Play A
Character With Social Skills Challenge (Impossible). Paul Thomas Anderson directs the shit out
of this. 6/10.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Rewatched with mama.1
Loved it even more than the first time, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. Just a
terribly good-natured film that only sits in obscurity because of its obsequious title. It’s a
shame Tim Robbins disappeared after this — i looked up his filmography and he seems to have been
in bomb after bomb (Green Lantern, Mission to Mars…). 9/10.
Poor Things (2023, but didn’t come out until 2024 here). Watched at the
Tyneside. I’d been eagerly awaiting this since i saw
the bonkers trailer back in September, and it didn’t disappoint. There was a moment 15% of the
way through where i thought i might walk out, but good lord, did it ever win me back over! Bella
Scissorhands goes on a steampunk adventure across Europe filled with childlike whimsy, discovers
herself, has lots of sex, and winds up Mark Ruffalo. Everyone is absolutely brilliant in this —
special commendation to Willem Dafoe as a Scottish mad scientist. Already the strong
front-runner for my favourite of the year. 9/10.
If
Neptune isn’t really that blue, can we at least put it in the club with Mars, where we just
pretend it’s that bright because it looks cooler in movies?
(Top: Ad Astra; bottom: The Martian)
I would like to kick off the second annual Satyrs’ Forest Horny Awards™ with an epigraph from
myself, at the end of 2021, predicting what lay ahead. I wrote, and i quote:
It came out in December and i watched it in January of 2023 — i’m counting it.
Look. Look. I’m not happy about this either. But he got me. That fucking James Cameron boomed me.
I’ve never even seen the first one!
Everything about Avatar: The Way of Water puts our decade-long glut of superhero movies to
shame. The visuals, thirteen years in the making, are indistinguishable from reality. (You will
believe the sexy blue cat people are real, and you will rewatch it three times in Imax and still
never figure out how they composited the scrawny human kid in.) Every tiny anthropological detail
envelops you in the world of Pandora, meticulously constructed by the new god-king of worldbuilding.
But most of all, it’s sincere. There are no tiresome quips of ”well, that just
happened”. The characters never make fun of how silly this all is. It just lets itself be itself.
Some might shunt the film’s story and characters to the back seat, and in many ways, that’s fair:
nobody goes to see an Avatar movie to find out if Jake and Neytiri get a divorce. But that’s
just the James Cameron style, man! He paints with a broad brush, and because of that, his stories
connect with everyone from Chicago to Chittagong. Noöne ever complained about Titanic just
being Romeo and Juliet on a boat, after all.
So, much as it might bug the poser in me to heap praise upon the fourth-biggest film in history,
congratulations to the best film of the year: the one with the smurfs.
I have too many thoughts about Synecdoche, New York and i’ve never been able to organise them
all into anything coherent, so i’ve set a timer for fifteen minutes and i’ll just stop when i stop.
This is going to be a mess.
So, first of all, this film is only two hours long. I say “only” because it feels like four
when you’re watching it. This takes place over, god, what, thirty or forty years? And you feel time
slipping away just as Caden does.
Oh, uh, Caden Cotard is our main character, a hypochondriac playwright with ambitions of dizzying
scale, played masterfully by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’m not sure he’s meant to be a
real person; rather, just as his fictional play (the size of the actual city of New York) balloons
to its own world with its own Caden and its own play, he is just the creation of the unseen Ellen1, one world up, somewhere in between him and Charlie Kaufman.
There’s a moment halfway through that might be the best single second in a movie ever. Caden goes to
Berlin to find his long-lost daughter Olive working as a prostitute — and as he enters the brothel,
the door creaks behind him… sounding just like a baby’s cry.
That shot, when Caden finds out his dad died, and Sammy’s shadow looms behind the curtains like the
Grim Reaper? Brilliant.
The one piece of the puzzle i still can’t figure out is what’s up with Maria. She’s this corrupting
influence on everyone Caden loves, but bears the name of the Virgin Mary — which makes it difficult
to slot her in, as i tried, as the Devil to Ellen’s God. Hm.
It’s funny how Caden never really gets any sicker, but the world around him does. (There’s some
gender identity stuff in there too, but honestly it all seems like the type of thing that could be
attributed to other stuff to me. I don’t think Caden’s literally trans, he just happens to be the
self-insert of a woman.)
That’s my fifteen minutes up. Synecdoche, New York! Greatest movie ever made.
Again, not a 2023 film, but i actually quite liked every 2023 film i watched, and i was annoyed
enough by this one to put it on here instead.
It all started so innocently. It was a family movie night, and me and my mam were in the mood for
something uplifting. I’d asked on Reddit for movies with the same manic exuberance as
The Fifth Element or Elvis, where some strange new colourful thing is thrown at the
screen a mile a minute and the viewer is ripped along for the ride.
Mad Max: Fury Road? Seen it. Mandy? Not in the mood for horror. But
The Congress? Now that sounded interesting. The reviews were coy, but all praised the
psychedelic, mind-bending world crafted by director Ari Folman.
Count us in, i suppose. And so began my journey into hell.
To get the “coveted” Pebbledash Dildo, you don’t just have to be bad. It is, after all, an award for
disappointment. You must have a kernel of a great idea within you, one that is so simple to make
something good out of, and fuck it all up anyway. That kernel can be found in a single brilliant
scene, a diamond within this pile of filmic zirconia.
The premise of The Congress is more relevant now than ever, in this age of digital doubles,
deepfakes, and AI actors. Robin Wright plays herself, who reluctantly
decides to scan herself into digital form, so the studio can use her likeness forevermore without
her having to break a sweat. As she stands among the blaring lights of the scanner, her agent
recounts to her the story of how they first met, bringing tears to her eyes. It’s a genuinely
touching moment, and a springboard off of which so many ideas could dive, a trunk from which so many
stories might branch.
Then it all goes to pot, and thirty years later, everyone is permanently on drugs, and so the film
switches to oh god what the fuck is that get it off get it off get it
off my fucking screen
So Robin Wright, now in a world of terrifying Newgrounds Betty Boop clones, attends the titular
congress, where the CEO of the subtly named Miramount does a Hitler
rally for his new drug. Then she meets generic Prince Charming man, the very person who scanned her
in to the system — an interesting idea that they do absolutely nothing with — and they have ugly
cartoon sex, she gets locked in a freezer for 300 years, and she goes in a balloon to find her
terminally ill son… or… something?
I have never seen a film fumble the ball this badly, and be such an assault on the senses to boot.
You won, Ari. Enjoy the money; i hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life, Ari.
You’ve ruined my night completely.
The Golden Lyre Award for Excellence in New Music: Edinburgh-based Young
Fathers’ euphoric senior album
Heavy Heavy stole the show this
year.
The Broken Link Award for Best Use of Hypertext: The best “miscellaneous thing”
i saw online was Atlas Altera, an absolutely ludicrous worldbuilding project dedicated to the surgical maximalisation of
global diversity.
The Fred Figglehorn Memorial Award for Online Video: Spanning the end of 2022
to the start of 2023, Geowizard’s
“How not to travel America”
series brightened up my day every time a new one appeared on my feed. People are just nice!
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award for Good News, Everyone!: This one may be a wee
bit controversial, but i have to go with
the rollout of a new generation of obesity drugs
(most famously semaglutide) — which not only finally work to combat obesity, but seem to dull
all sorts of other harmful impulses too. One step closer to true freedom of form?
To solve this, while not having to deal with the heaving weight of
jQuery’s ten billion lines of
IE6 compatibility, i made my own little alternative, and carry it
everywhere with me:
What it does, in a nutshell: Use $ to select something matching a
CSS selector, and $$ to select an array of
everything it matches. (This is already available in your browser’s dev tools!) You can
also use it on an element to restrict your search to its children — say,
$(".post").$$("aside"), or some other such fanciful chaining.
.on, meanwhile, lets you listen out for events like so:
$("#my-button").on("click", () => { /* Your function here… */ })
Finally, documentReady is just a nicer name for the frankly obtuse “DOMContentLoaded”.
Enjoy. Or don’t, i suppose. Hopefully it makes your hypertext tinkering just a little nicer. :-)
I must apologise most profusely for not putting the other submissions for Lords of Misrule on the
blog in a timely fashion. They were quite long, and i tended to procrastinate for quite a while on
their inclusion, and so i ended up not bothering for fear of cluttering up the timeline with endless
scrolling past other people’s creations — not a particularly dignified viewing environment for them.
But here they are in all their glory, on the main site:
Iō Saturnalia! Today’s post comes from an anonymous reader in Santiago — to comment, please
visit its page on the main site.
as a kid coming down the portway into the harbourside through here was always so epic: going past
the rugby club, along the seamills bridge, down the hill, past the willow whale, seeing climbers on
the gorge, the tunnels randomly sticking out the cliff looking like something out of minecraft, then
coming around the bend and seeing the absolutely massive iconic bridge so high up. diving into the
short tunnel type thing and then being greeted with an truly odd mix of architecture being the
announcement of entering the city so dramatically. first ashton gate sticks out slightly, and then
driving past the first row of house (the last one before the turn has a waving flag of the spanish
republican international brigades — always fun for us, i am from spain but grew up in the middle of
farmyland severn vale — we always came down via the m5 and even there i remember the giraffe cranes
at avonmouth and the hovis silos), then being greeted with these brutalist tendales towards the
airport, but we would always come off and into the redeveloped harbourside of its modern style and
parked in the (very expensive im told) millenium square car park. the short drive through hotwells
road was always very strange to me because its old georgian and victorian housing sandwiched between
two far more modern areas. the nautical theme with the absolutely massive victorian ss great britain
is also great, it used to have even more colourful flags !
the trip back was still good but never as cool as that experience, just a bunch of huge weed-themed
graffiti on the quarryfaces across the river. will probably look much cooler if the train ever comes
back that side.
It’s that time of year again for the dictionaries of the world to come remind people that they still
exist, and that there is absolutely, definitely a reason for anyone to ever pay for them instead of
going on Wiktionary for free1, by proclaiming a singular lemma to be Word Of The Year™.
They’re not usually very good at it. Irritatingly often they plump for words that were around for
hundreds of years before that year, slang terms that won’t be around in five years, let alone fifty,
or terms with dubious status as words at all. That is why last year, as chief etymologist and
steward of this noble wood, i picked my own — “special
military operation”. In hindsight, i might have chosen something less dour, but that’s the way the
biscuit breaks.
So then, how can you capture the essence of the year that was 2023 in a single word? It has been a
year of political stagnation, social carrying-on-per-usual, but of technological upheaval.
Merriam-Webster thought authentic summed it up best, as a counter to industry plants and
GPT malaise… but i’m sorry, that’s bollocks and they know it. Not a word
from 2023, been around for decades, go straight to gaol, do not pass go.
Oxford, on the other hand, had a rather different, more vernacular choice — one i am inclined to
agree with. The word of the year for 2023 is:
rizz
noun. (colloquial) Effortless charisma, the sort that lets you win friends, influence people,
and get the girls.
I’ll admit, it’s not quite a 2023 word. It first gained steam in late 2022, and was
popularised by the streamer Kai Cenat all the way back in 2021 — but to hell with it! The first
mention in my group chat is January of this year, and it has taken the youth by storm in such a way
that it seems destined to stick around, even if only to call back to the twenties the way
radical might the nineties or groovy the sixties.
It too captures Merriam-Webster’s reaction to the plastic sheen of modern technology. Your friends
might have rizz. The people you follow online might have rizz. But ChatGPT? I’m sorry, Dave, but as a large language model, it is not possible for me to have rizz.
Merry rizzmas, everyone, and a happy new year — let’s hope 2024’s word is as undour as this one!
I hope dearly that Jodie Whittaker gets 9,000 Big Finish stories to make up for the Chibnall years
of Doctor Who. She deserved better.
Abaroth’s World: “An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings,
roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.”
I have officially decided to become annoying and switch to Linux. I can tolerate many things from
Microsoft, but i will not tolerate them taking away my vertical taskbars!
It’s been a long year. That’s the traditional thing to say, but honestly, it’s been quite a
short year for me, and autumn has crept up without me even noticing. That can only mean one
thing…
Io Saturnalia!
It’s time, once again, for our third annual
Satyrs’ Forest Lords of Misrule, where in the spirit of the season, i put you (yes, you) in charge of the site.
If you write or put togeher something — absolutely anything* — and email it to
misrule@satyrs.eu, come Saturnalia (December 17 to 23,
for those who aren’t up to date on their Roman calendar) i’ll put it up on the site, on the blog and
on its own dedicated permanent subpage, etched in stone for all to see.
As in years past, i ask only that you refrain from political polemics and anything that would get
this noble forest in legal trouble. Other than that, the sky is the limit. A video essay on the
occult implications of Gremlins 2? A rant about that new skyscraper that blots out the view
of your favourite billboard? Anything goes. Whatever you — my lords of misrule — want.
You can submit your entries from today until the 16th of December, 2023. Have fun, and
don’t be afraid to get weird with it!
— Xanthe
Gremlins 2 is the hardest i’ve laughed at a film in some time — a movie written and directed
by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
Hello. I’ve been to the Bowes Museum. I thought i might
tell you about it.
Housed in a gloriously incongruous French mansion in the small town of
Barnard Castle1, it was built to house the art collections of the noble Bowes-Lyons — a family lucky enough to
count the Queen Mother herself among their members.
Its collection lies largely parallel to the “main” visual arts: ceramics, fashion, textiles,
furniture, and other such things which must account for function as much as form. Most of it plunges
headfirst into the latter, a bit frilly even for my often anti-modernist tastes, but i did like this
caduceus-adorned wooden cabinet:
The star of the show here is the Silver Swan, a gorgeous eighteenth-century automaton which preens
and sways on a bed of glass water. Unfortunately, it’s broken, and the closest you’ll get to see it
is its dismembered corpse awaiting restoration, so [raspberry noise]. You can,
however, see their exhibition on its legacy, which houses a wonderful collection of modern
animatronics made by crafters and tinkerers from all over the world, like this 10/10 pianist:
There are a few items which don’t fit into the above. They’ve managed to snag some real Goyas,
Canalettos, and El Grecos. (Los Grecos?) They even have Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, somehow
— i assume it’s on loan from London?
