You spell “trust” using only four letters: T, R, U, and S.
Is it a five-letter word or a four-letter word?
To “count on” something means to trust it, but if you “count on your fingers” to five, you only use four fingers. The five has to be counted using a thumb.
So, you can’t even count on the phrase “count on your fingers” to tell the whole story.
Get this: A young human boy raised in the city by a family of lycanthropes finds himself hunted by a human-hating weretiger.
What is it? A feature film, urban fantasy adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, using the anthology’s episodic structure in a Tarantino style, letting the setting have a strong presence alongside the main story of Mowgli, using side-tales like that of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Toomai.
In honor of the DC Constitutional Convention, going on right now.
When I was in the Navy, I was in a rock band named Draft in Augusta, Georgia. That’s me on the left, playing lead guitar. Adam Pearson was the lead vocalist, Josh Johnson (out of frame on the right) was bassist, and Eric Booher was on drums.
Eric and I had previously been a banjo-and-guitar folk duo called The Drunken Sailors in San Angelo, Texas. It was a fun romp.
Draft played primarily cover tunes, but we had a couple of originals. One of them I recorded after the band broke up, a rock tune about crime and rebellion called Garden.
I hope you enjoy it!
The Damsel-in-Distress is an intriguing trope, the female-gendered variation of the Salvand archetype, which is a character that needs saving. As the most prevalent expression of the Salvand, the Damsel not only informs our myth and literature, it embeds an insidious bias into our personalities, our culture, our politics. It’s a bias that corrupts our judgment, and thus our attempts at justice, like no other archetype.
I’ve analyzed the Damsel before here, to show how it tricks us into perpetuating it by trying to save women from it. After all, the whole point of the Damsel is that “she” needs to be saved: trying to save women from the Damsel trope actually strengthens the Damsel trope. This ironic dynamic leads to a lot of head-desk moments, like when CBS’s Supergirl series failed the Bechdel Test‘s third bullet in a hook line intended to evoke girl power: “It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s not a man.”
Well, a few things have happened over the past couple of years that illustrate this principle neatly and deserve discussion, incidents involving a few of my genre favorites: fantasy (Game of Thrones), sci-fi (Fury Road), and hard-boiled fiction (In a Lonely Place).
