Okay, I finally saw Hamlet performed live yesterday, and let me tell you some of the production choices were *chef's kiss*
King's ghost wore a crown, but upside down,
There was an open grave on the stage the entire play, that leads to to a trapdoor stage exit. Hamlet exited the stage by falling into it no less then 5 times
Everybody was dressed in modern clothes and Hamlet wore a jacket, but as my friends cleverly pointed out to me, he only wears it when he "performs" the role of the prince. When he's alone or with Horatio, he dons it off
Speaking of Horatio, he was kinda just there for a lot of the play? He lurked in backgrounds of a lot of scenes. (Or in foregrounds. In the beginning scene with Claudius and the queen he just sat on the chair at the front of the stage and ate lunch)
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrived, Hamlet has only done the jacket half way, and shook their hands with his one arm that is in the jacket
When Rosencrantz told Hamlet the actors have came with them, Hamlet's demeanor changed from snarky to completely overjoyed and he kissed him on the mouth for a full minute
When the actors for the play in the play were supposed to arrive, 20th century fox music started playing
Hamlet forces Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to pinky swear
When Ophelia was returning Hamlet's letters, she also returned a vinyl that he gave her, that he later breaks into pieces in front of her
When Polonius talks about how he used to act, he demonstrates his 'acting skills' by re-playing his death as Caesar, immensely overplaying it. Contrastingly, his own death an act later is quick and lacking fanfare. He simply utters "He killed me" and falls to the ground dead, making it his probably shortest set of lines he had in the play.
During the meta-play, a wedding cake is brought onto the stage, that the actors in the meta play use as a prop. Once the cake was discarded aside, Claudius sneakily stole a bite from it.
Claudius spat on old king's grave after his attempt at prayer
In the scene in Gertrude's chambers, Hamlet arrived shirtless and he had letters written across his torso that spelled S Y N (meaning "son" in my language, but the middle y had a dot over it, allowing it to be read as "sin" in a sort of double-language wordplay)
Also, Ophelia switched languages when she was singing her last song
The stage got progressively messier and messier with each act (mostly by the dirt from the grave)
The first gravedigger put on one hell of a singing performance
Hamlet took Yorick's skull and put it on a chair at the from on the stage, watching the audience until the very end
And the choice that rendered me speechless, that is, turning the lights completely off after "There's only silence" and have that be the last words of the play.
Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix (1991)
unironically how i felt during the time i took a final exam so sleep deprived i kept drifting off every few seconds and had to dig my nails into my arms to stay alert enough to finish it, also every blowout showdown emotional trainwreck argument with my mom
a wonderful ao3 author note
that childhood abuse survivor feel when you see a healthy family and part of you is happy that not everyone had to suffer like you did but the rest of you is just in this deep agony looking at what you never got to have
no! healthy relationship will kill the character! he needs an unhealthy codependent romance with a side of power imbalance to live
people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.
i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)
at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)
i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.
this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.
to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.
now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?
the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?
the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.
the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.
what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.
what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.
that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.
the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.
the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.
when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”
every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.
keeping sirius alive in my fic just to make him a fucking wreck in the bg core✨
asenora, is it "shit" or "shite" that'd be the go-to for british teenagers in the 90s ;-; ?
this is basically my greatest fic-writing struggle rn, i speak american eng and have alr given in to the irresistible pull of "holy shit" (the phrase "holy shite" made my eyes water) and "bullshit" + am currently holding myself back by a Thread from "dogshit" (it's a ron pov and i just KNOW he'd overuse this if it was a part of his vocab)
my advice to american authors is to exclusively use "shit".
"shite" is used in ways which don't quite work by non-british/non-irish writers almost every time i see it, to be honest.
and the reason is that it's actually surprisingly complicated for such a little word. it's not an entirely straightforward synonym for "shit" - the usage heavily depends on context and the context heavily depends on things like regional dialect and factors [such as social class] which are often intertwined with it.
for example, in some parts of mainland britain "shite" is considered milder/more jovial than "shit"... so describing a film as "complete shite" is saying that it was so bad it was good and you enjoyed it, and saying "oh shite, i'm late" means you'll have to rush but you'll be fine.
in others, however, it would come across as stronger than "shit" - and so you'd be saying that you hated the film and had a terrible time, and that you're going to miss your plane.
"shit" - in contrast - means "shit". context clues can fill in how strongly it should be taken.
[my other profanity-related advice to american authors is to take however much swearing you think the characters would do and quadruple it...]
damn this game just keeps getting more complex
OOB dungeons are super interesting! i used this tutorial to get here (shoutout this creator, he's my goat most of my glitches are from him):
i'm working on another area a little further down, i really wanna get there it looks pretty
also, DON'T TRY OOBING WITH SITTING GLITCH. i did! but it was such a headache, i don't recommend it at all
^ finally this genuine glitch happened to me, which i found kind of funny- i logged out normally and i came back to this
What’s something about Ron Weasley as a character that you think is underrated?
That Ron is really, really funny, and that his sense of humour isn't a sign of immaturity or gratuitous comic relief for the reader's sake, but an absolutely essential part of what both Harry and Hermione value in Ron as a character as an antidote to their own tendencies (moodiness and seriousness/anxiousness, respectively). Ron makes bad days bearable to get through for the people around him. I think people mistake Ron making jokes for a lack of emotional awareness, but I actually think it’s the opposite. By the series end Ron is literally the most emotionally well-adjusted of the central canon characters. That line about Peeves’ poem right at the end of DH when the war is won (“Really gives a feeling for the scope and tragedy of the thing, doesn't it?”) is a) brilliant and b) such a great manifesto for how Ron’s outlook on the world — not humour as emotional avoidance, but humour that sits within all the grief and pain and suffering, and makes it that bit more bearable. So yeah Ron Weasley’s love for chuckles is Important and Overlooked and I will keep saying it til I am blue in the face
verisimilous on ao3 ➳ they call me the CDC the way i run the Collaborative Delulu Center
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