“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” Like this quiz.
Monday, March 23, 2015
"Insurgent" Is Annoyingly Contradictory
Posted by Unknown on Monday, March 23, 2015
If this is a franchise about fighting for equality, why is its heroine’s specialness all about the way she was born?
Theo James and Shailene Woodley in Insurgent
Andrew Cooper / Lionsgate
Like most dystopian YA protagonists, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), the heroine of the Divergent film franchise, is fighting to save her world.
It's a world that, as outlined out in Veronica Roth's trilogy of books on which the movies are based, is highly regimented but conceptually fuzzy. Everyone has been divvied up into five factions — Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite — based on their personality types, but also maybe on biological factors as well? Children are shuffled off for testing to determine their faction/personality type when they turn 16, though they're allowed to pick whichever faction most appeals to them at the big Choosing Ceremony — it's a huge decision, given that factional allegiance takes precedent over family ties. And by the sequel, Insurgent, which is now in theaters, people are able to whip out a scanner to read someone's makeup, which makes you wonder about the point of the whole simulation/ceremony aspect to begin with.
So the faction system, despite helping maintain peace, clearly sucks, placing the surviving members of society into one of five improbable virtuous boxes, with the remnants consigned to the outcast Factionless. Divergent and Insurgent have revolution on their mind, though it bubbles up indirectly, as Tris and her boyfriend Four (Theo James) discover a scheme in which some evil Erudites try to overthrow Abnegation in order to take control of the government. In Insurgent, Tris, now on the run, is initially only focused on revenge, though it's clear there are larger changes in the works. Meeting with Evelyn (Naomi Watts), the Factionless head (and Four's estranged mother), Tris is entreated to help "put an end to a system that says one group is more deserving than another."
Andrew Cooper / Lionsgate
Are You As Well Read As Daria Morgendorffer?
Posted by Unknown on Monday, March 23, 2015
The sardonic teen has been spotted with quite a few books over the years. How many of them have you read?
Sunday, March 22, 2015
13 Hilarious Ebook Covers You Need To See Right Now
Posted by Unknown on Sunday, March 22, 2015
Kindle Cover Disasters is the terrible ebook cover Tumblr you’ve been dreaming about. Judging a book by its cover has never been so fun.
This cover's excellent use of the Papyrus font.
This kitten who has definitely ~seen some things~.
The WordArt you didn't know you were missing.
Flames and a bear and an eagle. Oh my.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Someone Put "Harry Potter" Scenes Into The "Friends" Intro And It's Perfect
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
♫So no one told you magic was gonna be this way… ♫
Tumblr user Jeremiah Rivera got "bored" and made this absolutely perfect remix of the Friends intro, but with the characters from Harry Potter.
And he's actually managed to make Harry Potter look like a lighthearted comedy.
Warner Bros. / youtube.com
It turns out that some of the storylines fit into the Friends intro pretty damn well.
Warner Bros / youtube.com
And it even ends with a cheesy hug moment. Aww.
Warner Bros / youtube.com
Which Book Do You Wish You Could Read Again For The First Time?
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
If only our memories for books were like a whiteboard we could erase.
Everyone has a favourite book.
20th Century Fox
And everyone has that one book which you wish you could read again for the first time.
TriStar Pictures
Maybe you want to reread The Book Thief without knowing what was going to happen, so you could reexperience meeting such rich characters for the first time.
Knopf
Or there's The Little Prince which you might want to reread as an adult so see if you experience the storyline differently.
Why The Sex Scene In "Insurgent" Matters
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
In the Divergent sequel, Tris has sex on her own terms and for the actor who plays her, Shailene Woodley, that was very important. Warning: SPOILERS!
Lionsgate
In the Divergent sequel, Insurgent, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) loses her virginity to her boyfriend Four (Theo James). It's at least the sixth time 23-year-old Woodley has filmed a scene of that nature, but what's significant about this one is that Tris bucks the virgin hero trend that other film series adapted from hugely popular YA novels have established.
Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Bella Swan in Twilight both maintain a degree of power through declining sex. But Tris, on the other hand, not only has sex, she has sex on her own terms.
"It was a really nice choice that Tris was the one who initiates, and not Four, just because in the previous film, Tris had said, 'I don't want to go too fast,'" Woodley told BuzzFeed News in an interview at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles.
Lionsgate
Why I Became a Southern Writer
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
“Young black fiction writers in the U.S. often face a strange obstacle as they try to figure out who they are — it’s called American literature.”
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
I'm a Yankee, born and raised. So why have I set two novels in the South? Nothing obvious about my background explains this anomaly. I entered the world through the Bronx and spent my early years in Yonkers, New York. Before I graduated from high school, I had taken only five trips ever requiring airfare, none further than Kansas. I now live in Brooklyn, that notorious hive of fancy-pants writers.
For a long time, though, the South has had a mysterious grip on me. My mother's family moved from Georgia to Harlem in the 1940s. They never identified themselves as Southerners; in fact, they were eager to shed any traces of Dixie along with their sour memories of Jim Crow discrimination. Yet something down-home persisted. My mother couldn't cook — except for her fantastic bread pudding, mac 'n' cheese, and sweet potato pies, always prepared from memory. She never said "y'all," nor did she have an accent, yet she habitually nicknamed large appliances and family cars "Betsy," supposedly after a cow from her childhood. She didn't go to church except for special occasions, but she claimed to have had a vision of Christ when, hospitalized after giving birth to me, her marriage in free-fall, she experienced a potentially lethal infection on her C-section scar.
As I grew, I became familiar with the stereotype of the South as a hot, poor, religious, racist swamp, the home of Jesus, George Wallace, and BBQ ribs. But closer to home, racism had given shape to my own neighborhood, Runyon Heights: We lived in the last house on a kind of fake dead-end street that ended in an embankment of trees. This same street continued, with a different name, on the other side of the embankment in the adjacent white (technically, Italian-American) neighborhood, Homefield. All of the streets in Runyon Heights that bordered Homefield were like that. And still are. The existence of this mini-DMZ made Homefield a kind of bizarro world for the kids of Runyon Heights. Sometimes, for a thrill, friends of mine and I would sneak over the border and run recklessly through Homefield as fast as we could.
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Frequently back then, as now, current events would bitch-slap the North into the realization that the South does not have a lockdown on any of the bad qualities for which Northerners make fun of it. The Southern-born yet Northern-college-educated and urbanized black people of my parents' generation had a particularly layered and somewhat cynical view of how self-congratulatory Northern white folks could be about their own supposed lack of racism. My mother became an investigative radio journalist when I was 9, and when, in 1980, the U.S. Department of Justice and the local NAACP sued the Yonkers school system for having segregated schools, she and her friends were privately quick to categorize this event as the kind of thing that happens "up South."
That lawsuit against the city (whose aftermath will soon be the subject of Show Me a Hero, a new TV series by David Simon, of The Wire fame) defined my grade school experience. For years my mother covered the story for radio station WFAS, so what normal people might call "repetitive sound bites from her tape-recorded interviews with city officials," I might call "lullabies." Before the feds called Yonkers out for 40 years of racist housing policy, the city frequently tried to re-draw the school district lines horizontally, perpendicular to the city's racial divides. This meant that I changed schools frequently, and in junior high school, practically everyone in my neighborhood got bussed from our centrally located area to the northeasternmost (read: whitest) corner of the city.
Then, as now, the New York metropolitan area at the time was, in some respects, no less highly charged in terms of racially motivated mayhem than say, Birmingham, Alabama. A white mob, 15 strong, murdered transit worker Willie Turks in Brooklyn in 1982; in 1984 police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment; and later that year Bernard Goetz shot four black kids in the subway. Yet another white mob chased Michael Griffith into traffic to his death in 1986. These killers all had vocal supporters. We really did live "up South." Recent events in New York City, like the murders of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, have done nothing to contradict this sentiment.
When bias crimes happen in the North, Americans tend to think of them as isolated events, certainly not indicators of the region's character. It rattles our sense of ourselves as Northerners to think that half a million black folks fled racism in the South only to find different racism in the North. But my parents knew better. That conundrum was the subject of Claude Brown's memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, a book I remember devouring in high school. The distinction must have been even finer for my grandparents; their choice was really between a racist South with no chance for advancement and a racist North where you could get an OK job and your kids could attend slightly better schools — which is what made Yonkers' segregated housing practices and schools so appalling, I suppose. A whiff of Southern fried discrimination in the urban north? Well knock me down and steal my teeth!
Are These Quotes By Christian Grey Or A Serial Killer?
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
Can you tell if these quotes belong in Fifty Shades of Grey or a murder trial?
Here's What The Elves Of Middle-Earth Look Like Now
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, March 21, 2015
Because hot damn.
Galadriel
The Lady of Lothlórien, Galadriel was wise, fair, and perceptive. Fortunately for the Lady of Light, she's an Elf, so she hasn't aged at all.
New Line Cinemas / Via img2.wikia.nocookie.net, i.imgur.com
Legolas
After establishing his reputation as the hottest thing in Middle-earth, Legolas built himself a ship and took Gimli over the sea where they reside in eternal youth, looking fine.
New Line Cinemas / Via forevergeek.com, vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net
Thranduil
King Thranduil, Legolas' father and the most fabulous of Elves, is not someone to mess with. Last seen gracing Bilbo's journey with his Elven cheekbones.
New Line Cinemas / Via i.ytimg.com, img3.wikia.nocookie.net
Haldir
Initially the guardian of Lothlórien, Haldir later roadtripped to Rohan to aid in the filming of the Battle of Helm's Deep. He had to fake a death for dramatic purposes, but is spending his free time eating pizza and ambrosia in the Undying Lands.
New Line Cinemas / Via arwen-undomiel.com, img3.wikia.nocookie.net
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