In Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice, the writer and scholar Gustav von Aschenbach decides to take a vacation in Venice and, while there, becomes infatuated with the youth Tadzio. He gradually unravels and loses his sense of decorum, only to succumb to cholera. The novella notably lacks dialogue, so an omniscient narrator does much of the heavy lifting in propelling both the narration and the reader forward.
When it came to transposing the novella into a film, Luchino Visconti used music to fill the role of the omniscient narrator. “Visconti was not only a film director but also a highly regarded director of opera,” writes James Larner in College Music Symposium. “His knowledge of music was extensive and it always played a prominent role in his films—and none so prominent as his use of music in Death in Venice (1971).”
The most widely featured piece is Mahler’s Adagietto from his Symphony No. 5, which Visconti uses to accompany, amplify, and reflect the actions unfolding onscreen. It occurs in four sequences throughout the film. In the opening scene, which follows von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde, on his voyage to Venice, his fidgeting is juxtaposed with the Adagietto‘s growing agitation; his wistful glances to the horizon coincide with more wistful musical passages. While we are not privy to the details of his malaise, Bogarde’s acting and Mahler’s melody fill us in. Mahler is not just an aesthetic choice; the connection extends to the main character. “Visconti was aware that Mann had intentionally given Gustav von Aschenbach Mahler’s first name and physical description,” writes Larner. “Given that, Visconti creates a hybrid character […] and transforms Mann’s writer into a musician, imbuing Aschenbach with biographical details of Mahler.”
Vocal music provides commentary on the film’s action, but “the twist is that the lyrics are in a foreign language or the selection is performed instrumentally,” writes Larner. For example, Visconti uses the fourth movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, which adapts the text of the poem “Zarathustra’s Night Song,” taken, in turn, from Nietzsche’sAlso sprach Zarathustra. The text describes waking up from a deep dream and is juxtaposed with Aschenbach awakening in Venice as the sun rises and he takes in the view. Larner interprets this scene as an homage to the Nietzschean balance between Apollo and Dionysus.
In the novella, Mann writes that Aschenbach wanted “foreign air and infusion of new blood,” which meant “travel it would be then […] not too far, though, not quite all the way to the tigers.” As Larner observes, “The intention is clear. Aschenbach wants a bit of foreign influence to loosen the Apollonian death grip that has created his writer’s block, but he thinks he can control the depth of his descent into his emotions.”
From his novels Candy and The Magic Christian to his work on Dr. Strangelove and Barbarella, Terry Southern sought to expose madness.
In the hotel lobby, we hear diegetic music—specifically, a selection from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which, upon its premiere, enjoyed mainstream success and would thus fit naturally in the lobby of a cosmopolitan Venetian hotel. While the rendition in the film is instrumental, the original operetta includes lyrics about forbidden love and spirits that enthrall mortals, causing them to forsake all reason in the name of attraction. In another scene in the hotel lobby, Aschenbach hears someone plunking out the opening bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise, and it turns out to be Tadzio. This leads to a flashback of Aschenbach in a brothel, where he also happened to hear a few bars of a distorted version of Für Elise. “I believe he is communicating that Aschenbach has moved beyond the intellectual, Apollonian appreciation of Tadzio as the embodiment of pure beauty to the sensual, Dionysian obsession with Tadzio,” Larner writes. “Beethoven’sFür Elise provides the commentary that might have been provided by the narrator.”
Another example of diegetic music is Mussorgsky’s “Lullaby” (Kolïbel’naya), which Visconti presents as an onscreen performance. An elderly woman sings it (in the original Russian) as she sits on the beach. The fact that she performs it without instrumental accompaniment adds to the sense of foreboding. Just as Aschenbach reflects in the novella that his forebears would never have found themselves in his predicament, the lyrics of the lullaby include the line “Our forefathers never saw such a misfortune.” Eventually, on that same beach, Aschenbach slumps in his recliner, wearing a white suit, a visual echo of the lyric of the lullaby, “Your small white body lies there in the cradle // Your soul flies in the heavens.”
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After that, Tadzio walks out into the surf, and the deathly debilitated Aschenbach, as usual, watches him. “When Tadzio points to the horizon and Aschenbach breathes his last, we are given the impression that Tadzio is leading Aschenbach into eternity—and that is certainly what happens in the novella, where Tadzio is described as ‘the pale and charming psychagogue,’” writes Larner. Visconti returns to the use of the Adagietto: Tadzio walks into the surf to the opening of the piece. The crescendo coincides with Tadzio pointing to the horizon and Aschenbach trying to rise to follow—only to die in his chair. Then, as the music builds to a new crescendo, people on the beach realize that Aschenbach has died, and they rush to carry him away.
Beyond his use of Mussorgsky, Visconti fashioned Death in Venice as an homage to German and Mitteleuropean culture. As Larner concludes, “Visconti was able to combine his love of German literature and music and also exercise his creativity.”
French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre may have been life partners, but they weren’t always equals. Jean-Paul Sartre was an accomplished playwright and a major figure in twentieth-century French theatre, with widely studied plays like The Flies, No Exit, The Respectful Prostitute, and Dirty Hands. Simone de Beauvoir, though a respected writer of feminist texts in her own right, had a much more limited impact on French theatre, producing only a single play, Who Shall Die? It is also known by its original French title, Les Bouches inutiles(The Useless Mouths), when it is recognized at all. The play has generally been neglected by all but a handful of scholars.
Les Bouches inutiles was performed on a Parisian stage in November of 1945, the year World War II ended. But the fact that the play wasn’t a sweeping success does not mean that Beauvoir was any less committed than Sartre to grappling with profound questions about a world that had been brutally ravaged by great violence and hardship. Both were writing during a period when Europe had been deeply unsettled by war, and existential philosophers were dissecting the moral dilemmas that presented themselves in this context. In using theatre as her medium, Beauvoir chose to tackle issues of food scarcity and the ways in which human lives are differentially valued in times of crisis.
Her play takes place in the fictional Flanders city of Vaucelles in the fourteenth-century. It’s wartime and the city is under siege by its enemies. The populace’s food supply is quickly running low. The powerful men in charge want to maintain control over the remaining resources for themselves and their soldiers, while sacrificing those in the city who are deemed “useless.” This means that the women, their children, the sick, and the elderly are condemned to starve to death because their lives and contributions to society aren’t seen as worthy of survival.
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.
“The less powerful find that such times of crisis rob them of their illusions concerning their perception of self-definition inasmuch as their perceptions do not coincide with those of the powerful,” writes scholar Virginia M. Fichera in her essay on the play’s philosophical depths for Yale French Studies.
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In an essay for Simone de Beauvoir Studies, scholar Joanne Megna-Wallace regards the play as a feminist work. Beauvoir effectively presents a woman’s perspective through the character of Catherine, the noble wife of one of the leaders of Vaucelles’s ruling council. Catherine is confined to the traditional gender role of a politician’s spouse, powerless to participate in political decision-making. Even so, she asserts her voice and uses the influence she has to save other women. Megna-Wallace writes:
It is significant that in this work the actions of the women are confined to a non-political role. They are without representation on the ruling council, and are even excluded from addressing this body. Like women throughout history, they are forced to rely on the good will of their leaders, and when this falls, to use their influence in the personal sphere.
Les Bouches inutiles is a play worth revisiting in light of long-standing struggles over whose lives are valued and defended. Although Beauvoir remains a controversial figure for her own unconventional personal life, her ideas about gender inequality, disability discrimination, ageism, and large-scale human suffering have never been more relevant.
Title: Hi-Tech Hate Universe:Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, Kamen Rider ZX Character(s): Malcolm Frink, Mikage Eisuke, OC Rating: U Warnings: N/A Summary:‘Frinkonomics’ was the somewhat dismissive way they had written about the manner he had taken advantage of the dot-com bubble, but, in the end, Malcolm Frink had been the one laughing, the new policies ushered in with the new president and the War on Terror providing ample room for both growth and expansion. Length: 841 words Author's Notes: Happy, ah... Happy Presidents' Day? also: external link.
"With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. 'Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,' she said. 'I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.'"
(Tolkien, 1965 Ballantine, p. 468 FotR)
2. Gandalf returns to life, and lies in a trance.
(from the appendices)
"'I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world. There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.'"
Thomas Jefferson was many things: a revolutionary, an enslaver, a horticulturist, and—by some accounts—the “father of American vertebrate paleontology.” Science historian Keith Thomson looks at Jefferson’s study of fossils—which he suggested were not fossils at all—in an effort to win respect for the natural life of North America.
Thomson writes that, in 1785, Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia, a rejoinder to French natural philosopher Count Buffon, who argued that the animals (and people) of the Americas were inferior to those of the Old World. In part, this had to do with the physical size and ferocity of native creatures. Key to Jefferson’s argument was a discussion of fossilized tusks and other remains from an American mastodon that had recently been discovered near the Ohio River.
Jefferson examined several possible explanations for these clearly elephant-like bones showing up in a place far colder than India or Africa. He examined possible solutions proposed by others, including that “an internal fire may once have warmed those regions.” Ultimately, though, he reached a solution reasonably close to a modern scientific explanation: There are different kinds of elephants suited to different climates.
Thomson writes that, for nearly a decade after publishing Notes, Jefferson abandoned scientific work for politics. But in 1796, after he had temporarily retired from government employment, he received a letter from a friend regarding the discovery, in what’s now West Virginia, of “the Bones of a Tremendous animal.” The letter also suggested that the creature “probably was of the Lion kind.”
The fossilized bones of the “great-claw,” shipped to Jefferson’s residence, were parts of a giant, clawed limb. Following his friend’s lead, Jefferson worked on the assumption that this had been some sort of lion—but one with claws at least three times the length of an African lion’s.
1877 was a banner year for American dinosaurs: three major finds in the West turned the region into a "paleontologist's El Dorado."
However, after seeing a drawing of a South American giant sloth fossil—a genus known as Megatherium—he reluctantly acknowledged that this was a better fit. In the paper he published on the fossil, Thomson writes, “Jefferson still seemed to cling to the idea that things would turn around and it would be revealed as a giant lion after all.”
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Importantly, Jefferson’s championing of American megafauna was based on the idea that the fossils were not just the remains of ancient species but the bones of creatures that probably still existed somewhere on the continent. (Fellow scientists of his time used the word “fossil” in its modern sense, but Jefferson consistently referred to the discoveries he studied as “bones.”) He based this partly in religious conviction that God was unlikely to annihilate a type of animal and partly in secondhand stories of enormous creatures from the Indigenous nations of the American West.
While later history proved many of Jefferson’s suppositions incorrect, Thomson suggests he would have been thrilled by the discovery of dinosaur fossils in the American West, even if the creatures they came from were demonstrably extinct.
What did British imperialism ever do for the Welsh miner, the English factory worker, or the Scots shepherd? As it happens, the empire plied them with sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, and spices, once exotic products that became ubiquitous during the long eighteenth century. Low prices, extensive systems of credit, and efficient distribution networks spread the spoils of Asia, Africa, and the Americas across “the geographic and social spectrums” of Great Britain, in the words of historian Troy Bickham.
“[In the 1790s,] Anne Gomm’s little grocery in the small Cotswold village of Shipton-under-Wychwood was typical in that it offered customers a choice of at least half a dozen types of tea, three types of coffee, various types and qualities of tobacco products, several types of sugar, orange peel, confectionery, chocolate and an assortment of spices that included nutmeg, Jamaica pepper [allspice], cinnamon, ground ginger, and black pepper.”
Food was a primary import from the colonies. Bickham goes so far as to call food the “heart of the British imperial experience.” People literally ate and drank the empire, or snorted and smoked it when it came to “Virginia’s Best” tobacco. And these voracious consumers of the metropole helped grow the imperial project: “The English, and later British, penchant for sweet, hot beverages helped to fuel the empire’s expansion into Asia, transformed the ecosystems of large swathes of the Americas and doomed millions of Africans and their descendants to slavery.”
“The food trade was essential to the success of the empire and the military fiscal state that helped fuel it,” Bickham writes. He offers these examples of the wealth flowing in: custom duties “on coffee alone in 1774 was enough to build five ships of the line; the annual duty on sugar in the 1760s was roughly equivalent to the cost of maintaining all the ships in the British navy.”
Between 1650 and 1800, British per capita sugar consumption increased 2,500 percent to reach 20 pounds annually. Tea, into which much of that sugar went, was available from some 62,000 licensed British retailers by 1800. In the early 1770s, more than 7.5 million pounds of coffee, always second to tea among hot beverages, entered the country each year.
Gutta-percha, a natural resin, enabled European countries to communicate with their colonial outposts around the world.
Advertising for tea, coffee, and tobacco consistently placed great “emphasis on where their products originated.” Tea meant China; in fact, an English slang word for tea, “char,” comes directly from the Chinese. Tobacco was associated with the Americas, particularly Virginia. Advertising portrayed the slaves that produced the nicotine-bearing leaf under white overseers: consumers may not have thought about where their pleasures were coming from, but the sources were not hidden from them. Sugar was an exception, perhaps because it was already a known commodity before it poured in from the West Indies, where its cultivation was introduced and maintained under horrific conditions.
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It wasn’t just exotic-become-quotidian stimulants. Imperialism transformed British cookery too. British cookbooks included recipes for curry, mango pickle, pilaf, Mulligatawny, and “Carolina rice pudding,” among many other foreign recipes, beginning in the late 1740s. There was a concerted effort by the authors of these cookbooks to authenticate these recipes, using such phrases as ”the West Indian way,” “as in China,” and “as found in New England.” Or they were at least claiming the pretense of authenticity: curry in Britain “was a distant Anglicized cousin to what Indians ate.”
Gastronomy and trade intertwined to make “some extremely wealthy and others slaves.” Bickham continues: “trade helped to produce the modern consumer” in Britain, with print advertising coming into its own during the eighteenth century.
“Such products as coffee, tea and tobacco did not just infiltrate Britain, as they had in the seventeenth century; they swarmed into virtually every home to become part of the daily routine of most Britons.”
The mass consumption of products from distant places, heedless of the social and environmental costs, has deep historical roots.
Pancakes. Burgers. Sundaes. Display cases of pies oozing filling and tiered cakes topped with cherries. Plates of food ready to eat. The feasts look scrumptious, but the cakes are iced with thick layers of paint, and the pies are luminous with colors more often found at an artist’s easel than a confectioner’s station. Even so, both the desserts and the paintings that showcase them are undoubtedly American creations.
With his luscious oil paintings in bright, rainbow hues, Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) delighted in tricking viewers into thinking they were staring through the display case windows of American diners. Thiebaud may be internationally beloved, but his works are grounded in specificity. As many of his contemporaries moved towards complete abstraction, Thiebaud remained rooted in realism and committed to his subject matter: the United States of the twentieth century. Thiebaud was intrigued by commonplace and ubiquitous experiences, and his paintings display a distinct nostalgia even as they veer away from sentimentality.
Thiebaud’s introduction to art came by peeling through newspapers in search of cartoons. During his childhood, he took to cutting out and copying the strips and eventually, when he was about 15, started to submit his own versions to magazines. This fascination led to him getting a gig as an “inbetweener” for Walt Disney Studios, drawing the intermediary frames in between key frames to allow the action to appear smooth and seamless in projection.
But his tenure at Disney was short-lived; he was fired for being a union man. During World War II, Thiebaud enlisted in the Army Air Forces and worked for the First Motion Picture Unit, where he helped craft topographical models of Japan to assist the pilots charged with the bombing campaign. After the war, and with the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he returned to school, interested for the first time in a formal arts education. In 1960, after earning a master’s degree, he started working as an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. He taught there for the rest of his life, influencing generations of students as he developed and redeveloped his own art and interests. His experiences with cartoons, sign painting, and advertising all influenced the art for which he later became famous.
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Although Thiebaud also painted sprawling mesas, towering cityscapes, and sun-drenched coastlines (inspiring its own California license plate), it’s the depictions of food that are unmistakably his. The barely garnished hot dogs of state fairs and the decadent milkshakes of soda shops have all been immortalized in his artworks. When Thiebaud was just starting out painting, he spent a year in New York City; there he befriended Willem de Kooning who advised him to pick a subject matter that felt genuine, saying: “Find something you really know something about and that you’re interested in, and just do that.” Diners with their dessert spreads, gumball machines with their colorful candies for mere cents, arcade games with their whiff of possibilities—these were, to Thiebaud, real experiences. These were the inexpensive pleasures on offer everywhere.
Thiebaud’s art is both realistic and exaggerated, influenced by everything from classical Masters to abstractionism. Admiring Thiebaud’s paintings, abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newmantold him that “[t]hose European surrealists are boys compared to what you can do with a gumball machine. That’s a real surreal object in you.” But labeling Thiebaud and his art is surprisingly difficult. His paintings are heavy with allusions to Velázquez and Degas, Manet and Eakins, and they’re simultaneously humor-filled and containing a deep sense of time. He admired Chinese paintings, Japanese prints, cave art, and impressionism, and hated the idea of linear progress in art—or regional identity. Born in Arizona and raised on the West Coast, he rejected the label of “California painter” imposed by New York art critics; the very idea caused him to scornfully remark that “referring to ‘California painting’ is like referring to California mathematics.” Instead, he viewed himself as a type of art magpie, lifting ideas that he took a shine to—and freely admitting to it.
In 1962, an exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City mislabeled Thiebaud’s work as Pop Art. Like René Magritte, who repeatedly disowned the label of Pop Art, Thiebaud disliked the term and found it ill-fitting for the type of realistic, paint-heavy work he undertook. However, Thiebaud also later attributed some of his success to that faulty categorization, saying, “I think I was wrongly given fame which I wouldn’t have gotten without that movement. I’m aware of the fact that occurred and thankful for it, except I’ve never thought of myself to be part of the Pop Art movement.” He didn’t like the flat, mechanical look of much of Pop Art, comparing it to advertising (and he thought advertising was more successful at it). Indeed, Roy Lichtenstein referred to his own art, and Pop Art in general, as a type of “industrial painting,” a sentiment with which Thiebaud agreed. On one trip to New York, a gallery representative showed him a silk-screened piece decorated with Coca-Cola bottles and asked what he thought of the work. “Not much,” he replied. It was by Andy Warhol. Thiebaud never revised his opinion.
An attendee views Bikini Figure by Wayne Thiebaud from Acquavella during Art Basel Miami Beach, 2015. Getty
Thiebaud was also uninterested in the dead-end abstract styles where a piece completely separated the viewer from a sense of place or self, reiterating that he was “determined to elude any one-dimensional approach to the description of form.” He might admire a Frank Stella piece for its impact but felt ungrounded without a setting. He described the appeal of his subject matter—ice cream piled atop waffle cones, colorful balls rolling across the canvas—as “sensual impulses,” and he consistently experimented with light and texture in the pursuit of greater richness in his paintings. He was more interested in the greater questions about the human condition, which he felt that Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism disregarded.
Time, however, was also a concern of the setting. Thiebaud was fascinated by how time was reflected, alluded to, or compressed in paintings. As an artist who often painted from recollection, he strove to represent moments and composite memories with his pies, cakes, and gumball machines, remarking that “this is perhaps what makes them seem like icons, in a sense; they’re greatly conventionalized in many ways and yet they may allude to spatial and volumetric associations.” Thanks to these efforts, there’s no fear of becoming ungrounded in Thiebaud’s works. Each work is a window into the twentieth-century United States through the lens of delicatessen counters, fairground foods, and slot machines.
Van Gogh was a troubled soul and master painter who relied on his emotions and color to create art that continues to attract millions of viewers.
Again and again, Thiebaud returned to artists he admired to inspire his own pieces. Based on Degas’s The Millinery Shop, with its fashionable bonnets arranged on hat stands, Thiebaud painted Display Cakes (1963). Similarly, Degas’s L’Absinthe, portraying a couple who dejectedly slouch over their drinks in a bar, inspired Eating Figures (Quick Snack). In his version, the pair, now painted in cheery, bright colors, sits on stools and stares wearily at their hot dogs. Moreover, Thiebaud’s Confections (1962) depicts three tall desserts alongside a short, squat fourth in a nearly identical composition to Giorgio Morandi’s Still Life (1941), with its scene of perfume bottles arranged unevenly on a table. Even as Thiebaud advanced in his career, he continued to find inspiration from artists and artworks he admired and fused those with scenes from his personal life. Several years after buying a new house in San Francisco, Thiebaud painted View from Potrero Hill (1987), which looks out from his and across the cityscape; in doing so, he drew on Paul Cézanne’s The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque, including the iconic smokestacks standing tall above the houses. Even when Thiebaud’s pieces draw from other classical works, they never lose their sense of place or time. When viewers look at his paintings, they always have one foot in the United States.
Toweling Off by Wayne Thiebaud on display during a preview of the 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s on May 07, 2021 in New York City. Getty
Thiebaud’s paintings are decadent. The red franks are nestled in their golden buns ready for consumption. His cakes feature thick layers of paint, swirled to mimic the application of icing. Standing in front of a Thiebaud painting gives a viewer the impression the artist likes dessert. (And he did. Lemon meringue pie was his favorite.) But there’s also a depth to his canvases. Look even closer at one of his pieces and notice the shifting hues that provide the outlines for his subjects as he played with light and object placement, even while referencing some of the most well-known pieces in art history.
Thiebaud was intrigued by the possibilities of still lives, and heavily influenced by those created by his artistic heroes Degas, Morandi, and Harnett. The tableaux and friezes they fashioned created scenes of drama enhanced by their choice of objects. Speaking on the worth of still life depictions, Thiebaud said:
We are interested because the things which happened over a hundred years ago are visually and materially attractive to us in terms of intrigue; how did they curl their hair, how did they cook their soup, how did they make their pies and so on. The remnants of that era are uncommon to us, they seem rather special.
The same can be said for the enduring interest in Thiebaud’s bubblegum dispensers, candy apples, and diner foods. In them, we recognize a time and place that has slipped away.
Thiebaud continued painting until he died in 2021 at the age of 101. He outlived the Pop artists to whom he was compared, as well as many of his critics. His more than seven-decade career inspired others—the photographer Sharon Core reinterpreted Thiebaud by baking the foods he depicted and then photographing them—and provided ample fodder for museums. The Crocker Art Museum in California, for instance, has hosted a Thiebaud exhibition every decade since 1951. His paintings, in their simplicity and through the emotions they evoke, have also been increasingly appreciated by the wider art market. The year before Thiebaud passed away, Four Pinball Machines (1962) set a record for his work when it was auctioned off for more than $19 million.
The recent exhibition of Thiebaud works at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor used the excuse of their own centenary to celebrate the artist’s many years of productivity. In doing so, it became the first to focus on Thiebaud’s artistic reinterpretations, revealing how he shamelessly stole from his heroes and reinterpreted their work in his humorous, luminous, American way. In interviews, Thiebaud refused easy categorization, announcing that “art comes from art,” as he talked across movements and styles; perhaps, then, it’s up to viewers to decide where they want to place him.
Given how evasive Thiebaud was in discussing genres, what a blessing it is for curators everywhere that he spoke so openly about his inspirations for individual paintings; otherwise, side-by-side comparisons might not exist. Whether in the tradition of Degas or Duchamp, he completely reformulated and reinvented the pieces with his own slant on American life. One thing’s certain: although Thiebaud’s America of the 1930s and ’40s no longer exists, his slice of Americana is still recognizable and immensely popular. Any visitors to an exhibition of his can expect to leave hungry.
Upcoming movie to take fans on an unexpected journey through time in telling the story of Sméagol.
A new Spy Report collaboration with Knight Edge Media brings what looks like a leaked, possibly official, synopsis for the upcoming feature film The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. While we cannot absolutely verify if it's a "final" version, the story points hinted at align with previous rumors, leaks, casting auditions, and even things Ian Mckellen has said.
TheOneRing.net reached out to WB for comment or confirmation, but they had nothing to share at this time; nor had anyone in New Zealand.
Film Synopsis
Here is the full text as sent to us via spy report. Reminder, you can drop us inside info (or casual info!) to spymaster ~at~ theonering.net
[envira-gallery id='121524']
Before the Fellowship, one creature's obsession holds the key to Middle-earth's survival -- or its demise. In The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, we meet young Smeagol -- an outsider drawn to trinkets and mischief -- long before The One Ring consumed him and began his tragic descent into the tortured, deceitful creature Gollum. With the ring lost and carried away by Bilbo Baggins, Gollum finds himself compelled to leave his cave in search of it.
Gandalf the Grey calls upon Aragorn, still known as the ranger Strider, to track the elusive creature whose knowledge of the whereabouts of the ring could tip the balance toward the Dark Lord Sauron. Set in the shadowed time between Bilbo's birthday disappearance and the Fellowship's formation, this perilous journey through Middle-earth's darkest corners reveals untold truths, tests the resolve of its future king, and explores the fractured soul and backstory of Gollum, one of Tolkien's most enigmatic characters.
Directed by original cast member Andy Serkis, produced by Peter Jackson, and written & produced by Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens -- the creative team behind the Oscar-winning trilogy -- this live-action movie bridges the beloved films with new characters, returning heroes, and a deeply engaging origin story that resets the stage for, and changes everything you know about the legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Deconstructing Marketing Language
There's a lot to unpack here, so staffers Greendragon and Quickbeam spent the second hour of TORN Tuesday analyzing every word. Watch below or on Youtube.
The most apparently surprising part of the synopsis - a confirmation we will be seeing young Sméagol. Is director Andy Serkis inspired by Young Sheldon, or young Anakin from The Phantom Menace, or even the merchandising hit "Baby Yoda" Grogu?
Another interesting thing is the calling out of Aragorn by name, which implies huge boots to fill for some new actor as they recast the role without Viggo Mortensen. Also of note is the inclusion of Fran Walsh, part of the Oscar-winning trifecta accompanying Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens. They start filming in New Zealand in July for a December 2027 release.
https://youtu.be/bVTmfCZeqqM?t=3660
We will have more analysis in the coming days, but what do you think? Join the live daily chat on Discord.
I should really have written an entry for Kubo Hinanolast week as it was her birthday on 2nd February, but as I write these entries a week in advance, I hope you will all forgive me for wishing her a belated happy birthday now. 🎉💖🍰🎊🎂
A member of our beloved eighteenth generation alongside Sako Yumemi, Akiyama Yuna, Yagi Azuki, and Arai Sae, the cleverly nicknamed Chanhina also joined Sae in the now lamentedly lost UNLAME alongside Sato Suzuka, Shiato Miu, and Kuranoo Narumi, and friends, I am still annoyed about the situation with UNLAME. Whilst admittedly partly annoyed with myself for not going to see them when I had the chance in 2024, I think what frustrates me about the dismantling of this group was that it is now clear they were never really intended to last beyond a year or so. I feel this way in regards to what happened with the contracts for members of ME:I in December of last year also, and this soupy morass of the worst practices of the idol industry with the worst practices of K-pop has left me feeling very unhappy. In a world were more and more agencies are building out their idol groups from "talent" from tiktok, I felt like the members of both UNLAME and ME:I had worked terribly hard to make it to the top ranking of their respective reality TV competitions and get a chance to debut. Throwing that away after a year leaves me feeling very unhappy. And now you know exactly how I feel about that.
In the case of Chanhina and the other AKB48 members of UNLAME there was always their regular activities to fall back on, and with the group wrapping up in January 2025, she went right back into things, confident in her physical strength, so she tells us, returning to regular performances in the theatre. Like many of AKB's recent post-Team 8 generations, Chanhina is passionate about dancing, the fact that she won a top spot on OUT OF 48! being more than enough to assure you of that. Before passing the AKB auditions though, she had also auditioned for Nogizaka46 (fifth generation), Hinatazaka46 (fourth generation), and NMB48 (ninth generation), so it seems a shame that like many recent members, her debut in 2023 was via SHOWROOM rather than the theatre, the first chance we had to see her sing and dance being from a distance on the seventeenth and eighteenth generation anthem, Ano Natsu no Bohatei, a B side on the Type-C release of Doushitemo Kimi ga Suki da. Chanhina went on to make it to the stage during the spring concert that year, and appeared with her genmates on TV also, and, after that, OUT OF 48! and UNLAME obviously happened.
Since joining the group, she has appeared on a great number of B sides as an Undergirl, as well as appearing in the senbatsu for AKB's masterful cover of LOVE Machine, originally by Morning Musume, and Kimi no Na wa Kibou, originally by Nogizaka46, on Nantettatte AKB48—so, in a way, after all this, Chanhina did get her chance to be in Nogizaka.
Spring is coming in fast, friends, and soon we're going to see the seventeenth and eighteenth generations really shape what AKB48 will be in the future.
Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.
We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.
In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.
I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
Imagine sitting in a pod, speaking to a stranger you’ve never seen, separated by a wall … and then getting engaged to them. Six years ago, the idea might have seemed unthinkable. But in 2026, with its tenth season set to premier this week, Love is Blind is Netflix’s biggest hit ever.
Could the Pod Squad be on to something here? Could taking faces out of the equation lead to better matchups in the long run? Actually, maybe it could—at least when it’s women doing the picking. A long-standing idea in evolutionary psychology is that the type of male faces women prefer fluctuates with their menstrual cycle: Supposedly, when fertility peaks, women prefer more “masculine” faces—stronger jaws, heavier brows, a certain ruggedness. During other phases of their cycle, they prefer men with more “feminine” faces. The evolutionary logic? “Masculine” men might make better mates, but “feminine” men might make more reliable partners (like Love is Blind, evolutionary psychology is super heteronormative).
Seems like a clever theory—but as situationships, dating apps, dating shows, and the so-called male loneliness epidemic take center stage in public discourse, it’s worth asking whether these claims about attraction truly stand the test of time.
So, as a diligent researcher and ardent reality-TV watcher (everybody has their vices), I dove headfirst into the literature. It turns out, as far back as 2018—when Love is Blind was just a twinkle in a producer’s eye—we already had a pretty definitive answer. A research team based in Scotland recruited nearly 600 heterosexual women, all in their early twenties. Some were on the pill, some weren’t, and some started or stopped during the course of the study. This is crucial, because if women’s preference for masculine versus feminine faces really does fluctuate because of cycle-driven hormone changes, then we wouldn’t—of course—see those changes in women who are on the pill. And rather than, as most previous studies had done, just asking participants about the dates of their cycles—which can be unreliable—these researchers measured hormone levels directly and precisely, using saliva samples.
They didn't have smartphones back then, but they still had personal ads.
On the same lab visits, the women completed a simple task: rating men’s faces for attractiveness. They were shown pairs of male faces, where one was digitally masculinized (sharper jaw, heavier brow), the other feminized, and asked which man they found more attractive, either for a short-term fling or as a long-term partner. This process was repeated across multiple sessions, to identify any hormone-driven changes in individual women’s preferences.
So, do women’s preferences swing from Timothée Chalamet to Jason Momoa as their fertility fluctuates during the month? Well, the statistics (yep, yep) say—not exactly. While women did tend to prefer more masculine-looking faces overall, particularly for short-term flings, this preference didn’t rise and fall with their hormone levels. Neither did being on the pill—or switching onto the pill over the course of the study—wipe out this Jason-Momoa effect. If anything, women taking an oral contraceptive pill showed a bigger preference for hyper-masculine faces (the theory, of course, predicts exactly the opposite).
Weekly Newsletter
This doesn’t mean attraction is random. Cultural ideals, personality, individual quirks, and physical attractiveness all play huge roles. But it does go to show that your hormones aren’t defining your type. And maybe that’s more interesting. Rather than being at the mercy of invisible chemical tides, our romantic choices seem to be shaped more by psychology, society, and personal history.
So, can the messy, hot-and-cold behaviour we see once the contestants are out of the pods be explained by hormone-driven changes in women’s facial preferences? No. When it comes to attraction, our hormones aren’t pulling the strings as much as we thought. Looks might matter, sure, but love seems to be playing a longer, messier, and more human game.
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