The Great American Satan is writing about role-playing games, and it’s enlightening for someone who played these games 25-30 years ago. Erotic and romantic role-play? Never heard of it. We were nerds. We didn’t know what sex was, and no way were we going to game it, since that would have just meant exposing our ignorance.
So I have a solution for G.A. Satan: only let virgins play. Solves everything.
On my flight to Korea, I indulged in some light reading: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I liked it just for the title: a “fingersmith” is a Victorian pickpocket, and the word develops a few other meanings as the story progresses. It’s an incredibly twisty story about a young woman who is brought in to an elaborate con job of a rich young heiress who is the ward of a perverse older collector of Victorian erotica. But the story just keeps getting weirder and darker and more complicated, and it never goes where you expect it to. That’s what I like in my reading: surprises.
And now I learn it’s being made into a movie! And a movie by the perfect director for this story, Park Chan-Wook, who previously made a series of revenge movies, including Oldboy. It’s called The Handmaiden, which is OK and also suggestive, if not as good as Fingersmith, and it’s being translated to Colonial Era Korea rather than Victorian England. There are apparently a lot of things being added that weren’t in the book, as well.
And that’s just the beginning of the surprises. Sook-hee’s narrative doesn’t go at all the way you think it might. Nor does Hideko’s, and unlike most movies telling the same story from different points of views, it actually deepens and enriches everything we’ve already learned. We see her bizarre upbringing; learn the real, perverse reason for those “reading lessons;” discover the true nature of her relationship with The Count. It would be cruel to spoil the many, many surprises that remain, but just know that there are mid-air sex demonstrations with a wooden mannequin; liquid opium; hidden moats; a prominent octopus; constantly shifting alliances; and, of course — this is Park Chan-Wook we’re talking about — at least one person getting appendages cut off. Plus, the switch to Colonial Era Korea from Victorian England adds a fascinating layer of Korean-Japanese ethnic strife, and all the subtle class issues that entails.
They had me at “a prominent octopus”.
Now the only question is…where can I see it? I can’t quite imagine this appearing at the Morris Theater.
Somebody in this world can be ridiculously happy over simple things.
Man, I’ve got to get me some of what she’s having.
Some gamer/anime fan complained about prudish censors painting out the vagina bones
in his Japanese TV shows. I’ve dissected cadavers, I’ve gone through bone collections, I’ve even seen the genitalia of a real, live woman (I know! It was awesome!), but sad to say, while knowing about the pelvic bones in the general neighborhood, I’ve never seen bones in the vagina. I was about to laugh at this ignorant guy, but then…
I thought about it. It suddenly makes perfect sense.
What else would the teeth be attached to?
Clearly, the women of the world have been keeping a deep secret from not just your ordinary run-of-the-mill man-on-the-street, but also from all of the scientists. This conspiracy has to run terrifyingly deep. It has been incredibly thorough in hiding this basic fact from everyone. It was perhaps a little too thorough, making its one mistake in a little zealous editing of anime sexy babes, and the whole story has begun to unravel.
Thanks, gamers and guys obsessed with the authenticity of soft-core porn. You have opened my eyes to the Gynocracy.
Except…the text is disturbing. It’s on the wrong side of the continent. Read this story of a common occurrence around Puget Sound.
Douglass Brown was 15 when he saw a giant tentacle emerge from Puget Sound.
He was in Tacoma, walking down the beach with a girl he liked. Then he looked out at the water.
“I see this arm come out of the water. It was 10, 15 feet in the air,” Brown says. “It looked like an octopus or something like that, and I just took off running.”
I can so imagine walking along the beach with my girl when I was that young, and enjoying the aquatic wildlife. Except that I can’t imagine running — that’s the part where you hold each other a little closer, and sigh romantically.
(Also, I think the “10, 15 feet” part is a gross exaggeration. “Inches,” maybe. But then, one does tend to inflate in those situations.)
All I have to do is follow the formula. Julia Serano explains How to Write a “Political Correctness Run Amok” Article, and it’s very detailed. At last, I shall be published by the New York Times or some other establishment organ that loves those stories about how universities and their students have become too PC and need to sit down and shut up and respect noisy assholes with lots of money, no matter what they say.
In the 1990s, I heard a lot of Smashing Pumpkins music around my house, because my daughter was really into it. I’d ask what she thinks of Billy Corgan now, but it might be a sensitive issue.
Of course, back in the 1970s I hung out with people who listened to a lot of Ted Nugent.
I’d rather not talk about it.
I was reading this treatment for a gender-reversed James Bond-style movie, and it made me feel funny. It also made me want to spend money at the movie theater.
This is a bad thing, right?
Earlier, Skepticon had a contest to see who most deserved a prank HONOR. Despite the fact that I lobbied hard to see the prank PRESTIGIOUS AWARD go to the more deserving Matt Dillahunty, Heina Dadabhoy, or Keith Lowell Jensen, my indefatigable charisma was unstoppable, and I won. I’m like a force of nature, I guess.
Would you like to see a photo of my prank PRIZE? Of course you would, and I’m going to show it to you whether you want to see it or not.
