"There Seems To Have Been A Murder."

Hello, that's trully a wonderful playlist! Thanks for it. I strongly recommend "Bored to Death" by Coconut Records - it's like the intro to the whole ATWQ series for me

All The Wrong Questions - fan playlist

Extreme Ways - Moby

Calm Like You - The Last Shadow Puppets

The Game - Deine Lakaien

The Shrine/An Argument - The Fleet Foxes

Black Sun - Death Cab For A Cutie

Brave New World - Kalandra

Familiar - Agnes Obel

Me And My Friends Are Lonely - Matt Maeson

Hi! I made this playlist taking into consideration both atmosphere of the song and its lyrics. Obviously, it’s not like every word in those songs fits into Snicketverse lore, but those songs just remind me of ATWQ, mostly the darker aspects of the series. I hope you’ll like it. I'm also making Ellington x Lemony Playlist right now, so stay tuned. And if you want me to make more playlists for fandoms listed in my bio, I’m open for suggestions. The songs are not only chosen for Lemony’s perspective, but for the other characters too. 

I do not own any of the songs or the book series All The Wrong Questions written by one and only Lemony Snicket. 

Link to my playlist on YouTube

Extreme Ways - Moby //

Extreme ways are back again / Extreme places I didn’t know /  (…) I’ve seen so much in so many places / So many heartaches, so many faces / So many dirty things / You couldn’t even believe / I would stand in line for this / It’s always good in life for this //

Calm Like You - The Last Shadow Puppets //

I can still remember / When your city smelt exciting / I still get a whiff / Of that aroma now and then / Burglary and fireworks / The skies they were alighting / Accidents and toffee drops / And thinking on the train(…) / If he was calm like you / Locked up inside of your loops / Then he’d know for well / That all he had to say was / All he had to say was goodbye//

The Game - Deine Lakaien //

(…) Air full of grief / It is you now / Stuck within / Soul is burning / No chance to win / (…) And the hot sun / Paints the door / Your philanthropist / Sighed once more / Wind was blowing / Air through pipes / Holes in bodies / Mortal crimes / What have you done to the game / Was it a victory, a shame(…) //

The Shrine/An Argument - The Fleet Foxes //

I went down among the dust and pollen / To the old stone fountain in the morning after dawn /  Underneath were all these pennies fallen from the hands of children / They were there and then were gone / And I wonder what became of them / What became of them (…) / I’m not one to ever pray for mercy //

Black Sun - Death Cab For A Cutie //

There is whisky in the water / And there is death upon the vine / (…) / There is a desert veiled in pavement / And there’s a city of seven hills / And all our debris flows to the ocean / (…) / There is an answer in a question / And there is hope within despair / And there is beauty in a failure, / And there are depths beyond compare //

Brave New World - Kalandra //

Witnessing the smoke that’s rolling in (…) / The scent of embers lingers in the air / It`s like a web / There is no escape from / It’s got you trapped / (…) / Never knowing what they demanded / (…) / You want to fight but you’re all divided / It’s not a world everyone can thrive in / Is this the world we were meant to grown in?

Familiar - Agnes Obel //

We took a walk to the summit at night, you and I / To burn a hole in the old grip of the familiar true to life / And the dark was opening wide, do or die / Under a mask of vermillion ruling eyes //

Me And My Friends Are Lonely - Matt Maeson //

I cope smothered in smoke / Deep high, drape my soul in / I know things that you don’t / I’ve met murdering folk / And they took one of our own / They took our innocent home/ (…) / If I leave it does not stop here, no / So is there any treason in the tricky little price I pay?

Three abandoned chapels

adult life is crazy because you can be going through the most devastating and heartbreaking things while still having to go to work and do the laundry and grocery shopping

Pasta is great. It’s like hey, let me take delicious things like butter,or meat, or tomatoes or basil and then let me just fuckin mix whatever the fuck i want in and combine it with some random ass noodles.  That’s basically pasta.  BUT, there’s a big difference between “basically pasta” and “holy shit food of the gods” pasta, and that is that the latter has some rules that must be followed.  10 PASTA COMMANDMENTS COMIN UP:

Always boil pasta in boiling SALTED water. Ever had a dish where you forgot to salt it before cooking it, and no matter how much seasoning you did post saute/sear, it still sort of tasted bland on the inside? Same goes for pasta. Your sauce could be fuckin on point, but if you don’t salt dat pasta water, ya fugged, bruh. 

Always have your sauce ready BEFORE the pasta. Pestos, emulsified butter sauces, bolognese sauces, they should be in their respective sauce pans, heated and ready to go (unless we’re takin pesto or carbonarashit, as those go bad with heat). The worst thing you could do is fuck up and overcook your delicious pasta bc you were too busy making or finishing up your sauce. 

Always TASTE your pasta. I don’t care if the package says it’s ready in 1 minute or an hour, taste your pasta from the boiling water at least 2 minutes in, and every 2 minutes after that. Al dente’s usually the way to go, but you’ll never know when to take it out if you’re not constantly tasting. 

DO NOT strain your pasta, wasting your pasta water and allowing your pasta to cool. Use tongs to take pasta straight up form the boiling water (don’t dry it, nerds) and throw it in your sauce. A little pasta water gets in? no probs, and I’ll tell you why. 

If your sauce is reducing too much, or it’s too tight, add pasta water. It’s salted and hot and ready to go, it won’t dilute the flavor at all, you’re golden duude. golden. 

Finish your pasta in the sauce, allow it to become homogenous, let the sauce stick to the pasta, BECOME ONE WITH THE PASTA BRUH. 

Add cheese last, because cheese get’s weird and fucked up in hot pans, so it’s best to throw that on right before you’re ready to eat that shit up. 

4 oz is a normal serving size for pasta. If you don’t have a scale, that’s basically like the first pic above. If you hold the pasta like such, and the width of the bunch is a little smaller than an american quarter, then ur good 2 go bruh. 

Dry pastas are not better/worse than fresh pasta. They’re legit just made with different flours using different procedures. One isn’t ‘fancier’ than the other u pretentious buttrockets. 

PASTA IS NOT SCARY, IT’S DELICIOUS. These rules look tough, but honestly it’s not that bad bruh. I believe in u. 

and now, onto the recipe I used for my pasta. It’s a restaurant favorite, we always make it on the line because it’s simple, delicious and super filling. 

~

Caciopepe Pasta serves: 1 (lol like id share this with ppl lolol) -

Ingredients-

salt water for boiling (just salt some water, don’t fuckin travel to the beach in hopes of created the most bomb pasta ever)

1 bunch of pasta

2 bay leaves

1 sprig thyme

cold butter (approximately 2/3 cups cut into small pads

parmesan cheese to taste

a shit ton of black pepper to taste

-

Procedure-

Throw some pasta into some boiling water and do that thing where you constantly taste test the pasta to see if it’s ready. In the meantime, make ur sauce u lazy bumbum.

Add a little boiling pasta water to a saute pan over low heat, and whisk/mix in the butter quickly till it’s creamy and emulsified. If it’s too thick, just whisk in a teeny bit of pasta water. Add 2 bay leaves and a sprig of thyme for aroma, remove when pasta’s ready. 

Once the pasta’s ready to rock and roll, use tongs to scoop it up and place it in the sauce. Flip and mix using tongs. Add cheese and crack a lot of pepper. Add salt if it needs seasoning, add more pasta water if the sauce tightens.

and bam, ya ready to roll. 

~ I promise u if you use these pasta techniques, people will think ur literally a GOD. ur welcs. 

Chapter 6: Lullaby in Frogland

Let’s look back. Way back. Back before the dawn of animation, before the dawn of film, well before Ruby or Spears or Disney or Iwerks or either Fleischer Brother. Back to 1835, in a town named Florida in a state named Missouri when a boy named Samuel was born.

Like Ub Iwerks, Sam was raised in Missouri. And like Max Fleischer, Sam’s family took a financial hit when his father’s work stopped (this time due to a premature death rather than the decline of tailory), giving Sam a practical approach to work. He left school at age eleven to become a printer’s apprentice, then moved to his older brother’s newspaper as a typesetter and occasional columnist, writing humorous articles and drawing cartoons. But unlike Beatrix Potter or the animators we’ve covered, visual art wasn’t in the cards for Sam.

He moved to the East Coast to work for other papers, bouncing between cities before returning to the midwest to embark on a career he’d dreamed of since he was old enough to dream: piloting a steamboat. He thrived on the water, and kept writing about his work along the river, but everything stopped when the Civil War closed off the Mississippi. So Sam headed west to work for the same brother who once ran the newspaper, now a politician in Nevada (I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this brother was for some reason named Orion). Sam tried mining, and it didn’t take, but he’d gotten pretty good at writing and set off for San Francisco to get back into his jocular brand of journalism. 

It was here that he had his first success, a short story published in his paper called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. But, like a certain frog we’ve covered in this series, Sam wasn’t huge on permanent names. Within a month, the story was reprinted as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Jim Smiley’s name was changed to Jim Greeley. Until the book version came out, when it was changed back to Jim Smiley. And this whole time, within the story, it’s a mystery whether Jim’s real name is actually Leonidas (it turns out that it isn’t, but it might be). None of this should come as a surprise for Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the names of Josh, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and most famously, Mark Twain.

“I knew you were special.”

Over the Garden Wall is, among other things, a story about the importance of solid communication. After five episodes spent building up our heroes as a group of friends, all it takes is one episode of terrible communication to throw it all away. The specific issues vary, despite leading to a similar result of not verbalizing their thoughts very well: Greg’s youth stops him from articulating his rapidly changing ideas, Wirt’s anxiety leaves him too timid to speak up or too rambling to be clear, Beatrice’s true intentions make her obfuscate the truth, and Jason Funderburker straight-up can’t talk. Or so we think.

This time he’s named for American statesmen George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, which fits the continuing vintage Americana vibe of the series—while I figure it’s a coincidence, it should be noted that Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog was named after American statesman Daniel Webster. Surrounded by other frogs that walk around and wear fancy garb, our frog is more anthropomorphic than ever, standing on his hind legs and dancing along with Greg. But it’s still a shock to hear him open his mouth and sing, a shock that soon cedes to the realization that the frog playing the piano at the beginning of the series is singing the Jack Jones song in the montage that follows.

Lullaby in Frogland is Jason Funderburker’s episode through and through, so much so that it’s the first time we hear of his namesake, Jason Funderberker. This is an episode where Wirt rejects Greg’s assertion that their frog is “our frog,” a plot point that’s paid off in their last conversation in the series. This is an episode where Greg wonders aloud if he can be a hero, sees the frog set off on a diverging path immediately afterwards, and accepts it, because he’s willing to sacrifice his happiness for the good of others. And it’s an episode where the frog returns after a harrowing betrayal, showing that even when all seems lost, there’s still room for hope. Over the Garden Wall (the song) might not sound like a traditional lullaby, but it soothes us into a cold night as the sun sets on the first half of Over the Garden Wall (the show).

Adelaide’s true nature is foreshadowed by Beatrice’s sudden hesitance to bring the brothers to the pasture after several episodes of nagging, but the twist is made tragic by Wirt finally letting his guard down enough to be happy. He sings a completed Adelaide Parade with Greg and joins the dance before collapsing into the most earnest laughter I’ve ever heard in a cartoon. He’s a good enough friend to notice when Beatrice is “uncharacteristically wistful,” and takes a risk by playing the bassoon instead of just giving up. He’s still got growing to do—it’s one thing to blame Greg for getting them in trouble by throwing away the ferry fare and forcing them to sneak aboard, but another thing to literally shout “Take him, not me!” when confronted by the frog fuzz—so it’s clear that his journey isn’t over yet, but he doesn’t even get a full episode of peace before everything blows up.

The whole steamboat sequence flows between simple delights, like saluting the captain mid-chase, the revelation that the frogs love music more than they hate trespassers, and the repeated gags of three gentlemen frogs snatching up flying flies and a frog mother dropping her tadpoles. Everything just feels calm, even when antics are afoot. Wirt gets to save the day with his bassooning, Greg gets to feel rewarded in his knowledge that his frog is special, Jason gets to sing a song after being silent throughout the series, and Beatrice seems, for now, to come to a sort of peace about things after several clear attempts to sidetrack the boys. This is the only episode to feature two major stories instead of one, but the steamer segment is rich enough to feel like a full episode. If only we could’ve stopped here.

All roads lead to Twain when it comes to depictions of steamboats as a go-to American icon, which is why he preceded this discussion of Lullaby in Frogland: I’m not claiming Mickey Mouse wouldn’t have been successful if his first cartoon was about something else, but I’m certainly claiming that we wouldn’t have gotten Steamboat Willie as it was if Ub Iwerks hadn’t grown up in a Missouri whose lore was shaped by Twain’s tales of the river. But while the author’s at the root of the episode’s many influences, I think the most fascinating branch that we borrow from is The Princess and the Frog. 

2009 was a great year for animation, seeing the release of Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Secret of Kells, the surprisingly great Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and the first ten minutes of Up (also the rest of Up, if I’m feeling generous). The first two on that list are my favorite of the year, twin stop-motion masterpieces that I’m always in the mood to watch, but The Princess and the Frog is a brilliant last gasp from Disney’s 2D animation studio. It isn’t the final traditionally animated film they made (that would be 2011′s Winnie the Pooh), nor the final fully sincere princess movie they made (that would be 2010′s Tangled), but it marks the beginning of the end for both trends: for better and worse, the modern Disney animation feels the need to loudly subvert old tropes and wouldn’t be caught dead in two dimensions.

Lullaby in Frogland’s connection to The Princess and the Frog is certainly visible on the surface level: both feature a long sequence starring frogs on a steamboat where a lead character must pretend to be another animal and play a woodwind instrument to get out of a jam, and both involve our heroes seeking help from a wise woman far from civilization (even if only one of these women is actually helpful). But it’s the somber nostalgia factor that binds these stories closer than anything, the knowledge that this is the end of the road for this type of tale. The ferry’s gotta land somewhere, and the cold is setting in as the frogs begin hibernating for the winter, but there’s still more story to tell.

The second story of Lullaby in Frogland is scored throughout by a haunting string and piano rendition of Adelaide Parade, and Adelaide herself is immediately captivating. John Cleese returns for the second episode in a row, but as both of these episodes aired the same night, it feels like a consistent through-line: in the first half, he’s an eccentric who might be a deranged maniac but is actually harmless, and now he’s a witch who might be harmless but is actually a deranged maniac.

Adelaide gets a compelling amount of detail for someone who’s barely in the show. We don’t get any explanation about her fatal weakness to…fresh air? Coldness in general? Either way, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s lethal reaction to water, it’s absurd that someone like her has managed to live this long. She never says what she needs a child servant for, why she has scissors that seem custom-made for this specific curse, or what her spider-like deal with yarn and wool is (she has a black widow hourglass on her back, but also reminds me of the Greek Fates with her emphasis on thread). We never find out how she’s connected to the Beast, whose theme bleeds into her music as she proclaims, without much prompting, that she follows his commands; her goal of using children as zombie slaves seems counter to his goal of turning them into trees to fuel his soul lantern. But this blend of unexplained characteristics and seemingly inconsistent motives only makes her more enthralling to me, because she feels like an actual major villain of another story who we only see a glimpse of. 

What makes Adelaide even more compelling on rewatch is that her scissors, despite their gruesome method for curing the curse, actually end up working. Which means she really did mean to help Beatrice out as part of the deal. At no point does Adelaide lie, and given Beatrice knows she’s bad news as she lures the brothers in, it becomes clear that for all her villainy, Adelaide is an honest witch. I’m always down for baddies that tell the truth, but it’s of particular interest when we compare her to the Beast, whose whole deal is lying. 

The only liar in this episode is Beatrice, even if she wanted to set things straight without hurting anyone; she values her friendship with the boys so much now that she’d rather make herself a servant to Adelaide than just tell them she’s dangerous and reveal that she lied. By the time she’s willing to tell the truth, it’s too late, and not even saving Greg and Wirt by killing Adelaide is enough for Wirt to forgive her. Considering he knows in The Unknown that the scissors he uses to escape the yarn can save her family, he was also listening in on the end of the conversation before entering the house, which means he must have heard that she was willing to sacrifice herself, but that doesn’t matter either. Beatrice gave the boys hope, and no matter how badly she tried to stop it, the encounter with Adelaide transforms Wirt. Where he was once nervous and unsure, and was then briefly optimistic, he’s now sullen and untrusting.

But again, in comes Jason Funderburker, croaking and hopping on all fours once more to bring some light to the darkening series. He doesn’t do much for Wirt, but allows Greg to quickly get over whatever trauma he had about getting webbed up in yarn; he’s remarkably quiet about it, but it’s important to remember that he was betrayed, too. Whether he doesn’t understand exactly what happened or is just quicker to forgive, Greg is fine with Beatrice, allowing us to focus harder on Wirt’s reaction from now on.

It’s all rain and winter for Wirt until the end of his adventure. But the show’s not content to leave him even slightly forlorn: when it gets too dark, he has a frog to swallow a lantern to light the way, and when it gets too cold, he has a brother to cover him in leaves, and when he falls, he has Beatrice to help pull him back up. Even the Woodsman tries to save him in his own way (talk about folks who are bad at communication). Bad things happen, and people make mistakes, but the bigger mistake is allowing that to close you off to others, or to never forgive friends that are genuinely sorry. Our heroes have taken the ferry to the other side, and now the story can shift to one about the folly of abandoning all hope.

Where have we come, and where shall we end?

On top of Jason Funderberker, who’s set up as a major rival to make his eventual reveal one of the show’s best jokes, Wirt gives Beatrice a general summary of Into the Unknown three episodes before we see it play out.

Salamander’s Eyes compliment can only work once in a lifetime. It just did

cause of death: newtina

*spoilers for crimes of grindelwald

newt looking for tina when jacob and queenie arrived

narrow feet

jacob being a wingman

salamander’s eyes

“tall, dark-” “-beautiful”

tina’s jealousy

newt trying to tell tina the truth

newt and tina’s reunion

mr. scamander

newt’s expression when tina called him her fiance

newt + his appreciation for tina’s eyes

newt showing tina her photo

when newt finally told tina he wasn’t engaged

legit thought he was going to turn and snog her after the ‘I’ll think of something’

newt tracking tina

rescue attempt

they’re in love

and I’m dead

painting of joan of arc but she's got a lil carabiner. is this anything.

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.