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Netflix did not quite invent nostalgia, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The streamer certainly went to town on it with Stranger Things, which wore the 1980s like a badge of honour: the BMXs, the Dungeons & Dragons, the walkie-talkies. In its wake, a slew of scary tributes to the era appeared, ever-evolving variants seeping through a time-travel portal. The closest cousin was Andy Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It, which also mixed up Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and John Carpenter to great effect and, in Finn Wolfhard, shared a lead (Stranger Things has the book flowing through its veins too). Then there was 2018’s Summer of 84, by Canadian directing trio RKSS, about four Oregon teens convinced their neighbour is a serial killer; and Cody Calahan’s 2020 film Vicious Fun, a 1983-set, neon-drenched comical horror about a young film critic who stumbles upon a therapy group for serial killers. Now Netflix is jumping on its own bandwagon with Fear Street, a trilogy of films set in different eras, directed by Leigh Janiak and based on RL Stine’s books. The first instalment, an entertaining, surprisingly gory, story about the teenage inhabitants of suburban town Shadyside mysteriously killing each other, is set in 1994, inspired by the decade’s slasher films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream. All of these come courtesy of film-makers with misty eyes behind rose-tinted glasses, yet in each lurks darkness: the rot beneath the idyllic suburban facades, itself a callback to the paranoid titles of the period. “Horror has always been socially aware and engaged,” explains the horror historian Dr Johnny Walker, a senior lecturer in media at Northumbria University, and author of the upcoming Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-91. “As a genre, it hinges on shock and, well, horror. Because of that, and because it’s so inherently visceral, it’s fertile ground for exploring confrontational, divisive issues.” But why the 80s and 90s, and why now? For a while that period was deemed best left forgotten, but, says Walker: “The tastemakers who decided that the 80s wasn’t cool are dinosaurs now. It’s the kids of the 80s who are now calling the shots.” And there’s something more interesting at play, too, he says: “Today has largely been an era of populist rightwing governments, globally. And that chimes with earlier iterations of conservatism, certainly with Thatcher and Reagan.” A case in point: Censor, an upcoming horror by the Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond about a traumatised film censor. It is set in 1985 Britain, at the height of the hysteria around video nasties, many of which were banned. Mid-80s Britain under Thatcher, says Walker, was horrendous for many people, and while the moral panic was awful for the horror industry, it created a thriving community of genre fans. “Censor plays with that dichotomy, with what was grim about the 80s but also the excitement that surrounded the video-nasties panic for the adolescents sharing pirate videos in the schoolyard.” This, he says, speaks to why horror is so effective at investigating history, whether it is Censor or Stranger Things making a meal of conspiracies and cover-ups. “The foundations of the genre, the tropes, are able to be repurposed,” he says, “because inevitably in different epochs, there will be governments doing shady things. And with that, dynamic horror is able to flourish because it’s got something to sink its teeth into.” A US poster for Censor plays on its video-nasty roots: a gruesome pair of hands grasp a glitchy TV screen. In that respect it is being marketed with some nostalgia, says Walker, and Censor is certainly indebted to the films Bailey-Bond grew up watching. But it is furious with the climate around them. “Thatcher was really lucky that the video-nasty panic happened,” says Walker. “When you put video nasties on the front of a newspaper. it is a distraction tactic. Telling people not to be scared of imminent unemployment but of video cassettes. The 80s are so often dismissed as consumerism, but Censor takes that superficial veneer and digs deeper, scraping back the MTV-generation gloss.” The same could be said for what the US was experiencing in the 1990s. Director Kevin Phillips’s 2017 film Super Dark Times is set in upstate New York, 1996. It concerns a group of teenagers on bikes, but it is a bleak, unsettling piece about a kid who accidentally kills his friend with a samurai sword, and the ensuing fallout. Set four years before Columbine, it explores a generational malaise, the rise of a more troubled teen psyche. The 80s and 90s are perfect fodder for contemporary horror, providing nostalgia as well as a context that speaks perhaps to where we have ended up today. These are passionate tributes to their directors’ childhoods but dealing in fractured dreams. Good horror always finds the truth. Fear Street is on Netflix 2 July; Censor is in cinemas from 20 August theguardian.com

It’s hard to believe that it took this long for “Rick and Morty” to go to the 1996 film “Multiplicity” for an episode title reference, but here we are now in Season 5, with “Mortiplicity.” However, the premise here is that Rick has created decoys in the aftermath of the Space Beth situation, which is quite smart considering just how often people, places, and things seem to be after him. (In this case, it’s squid aliens. Or is it…) As Justin Roiland’s synopsis for this week’s episode asks, “Who’s even real, broh? Are you real? Broh?” That is the question du jour while watching “Mortiplicity,” and while one can assume they have the correct answer by the final, pre-epilogue scene, the thing about “Rick and Morty” is that it always leaves that lingering question. Who’s real? Who’s a clone? Who’s a decoy? The Dan Harmon-scripted “Mortiplicity” asks these questions again and again (and again and again) in a way that’s both familiar to the series as a whole and a promising sign for this new season. This is far from the first time “Rick and Morty” has gone the “Inception” route with its storytelling. Obviously, there’s “Lawnmower Dog,” the most apparent example. But intricate plots full of repetition and confusion and sweeping the rug out from underneath the audience is the series’ bread and butter. Episodes like “A Rickle in Time,” “Total Rickall,” “One Crew over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” and “Never Ricking Morty” are clear examples of that. “Mortiplicity” is an episode in the same vein as those, keeping the audience on their feet as they try to figure out who the real Smith (and Rick Sanchez!) family is and who the decoys are. Oh, so many decoys… In true “Rick and Morty” fashion, this particular format works overtime to give the audience false senses of security before, again, sweeping the proverbial rug out from underneath them. It also bumps up the ultra-violence that the show never grows tired of. Because while “Rick and Morty” has proven its ability to show gravitas when it comes to loss of life, ultimately, it has fun in treating life as meaningless as Rick believes it to be. And, to be fair, the decoys technically aren’t “alive.” Especially not once they’ve been killed. Which is how you get dozens of decoy Ricks and Morty and Beths and Jerrys and also Summers being killed in increasingly elaborate in this episode. Going from a premiere with multiple plot threads for the family to one solid thruline, “Mortiplicity” opens the way plenty of “Rick and Morty” episodes do: with the Smiths at the kitchen table, learning about what new horrific adventure Rick and Morty are about to embark on. There’s obviously an episode premise in Rick and Morty’s respective proclamations that “It’s a big day” and “We’re gonna kill God,” which sets the scene as normal as it possibly can. That’s the key to the episode, really: Until it gets to the variant and dud versions of the Smiths, it’s so difficult to tell who’s a decoy because of how normal (for this family) they all seem. Which just goes to put Rick’s — both real and decoy — smarts on display once again. But from there, everything becomes decoy — “very different” from clones — family inception. According to what ends up being a decoy Rick, much like the real Smiths, the decoys were made “to go on fun self-contained celestial adventures.” To be fair, that is certainly what is happening in this episode and with these decoys. However, because of the self-contained nature, every other beat of the episode is a Rick explaining to his family that he made decoys of them, as well as the entire concept of this episode. There’s also a couple of beats with a villain called “Mr. Always Wants to Be Hunted” whose deal is that he wants them to hunt him. That’s fun too. Early in this episode, it almost looks like the decoy plot is actually just subterfuge for another installment of Interdimensional Cable. But alas, that’s also a decoy. As squid aliens (the supposed villains of the week) who are upset with Rick (who’s also a decoy) for sleeping with their queen kill every decoy they come across, Summer (a decoy) begins to question if they’re real or if they’re just decoys. (They’re decoys.) From here, things get even more convoluted, as Rick’s (still a decoy) belief that decoys can’t create decoys is soon challenged. And despite the explanation that decoys are not clones, there is a heck of a lot of overlap in the way all of these decoy versions of the Smiths think. That’s really no surprise when it comes to Rick and Jerry — who spends his time as a decoy questioning the logic of all this and cowering possibly even more than the real Jerry, as Rick won’t allow him his own B-story — but it does make for some fun when the decoy Ricks enlist their decoy families to fight each other to the death. As Morty and Rick note, respectively, this episode is also an homage to “Ex Machina” and “Highlander.” Everyone’s a decoy, but there can be only one. (Also in the case of the “Highlander” of it all, this episode features a needle drop for Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever” from the movie.) All of this then leads to decoy Smiths — still constantly under the assumption they’re the real deal until they’re not — deciding to pose as squid aliens to go around undetected and also take out other squid aliens. However, it then turns out that the other decoys had the exact same idea and that there are no squid aliens — which is perhaps the most Mobius strip aspect of an already pretty loopy episode. From this point on, the episode really continues to milk the fact that these decoys are sentient beings with their own emotions and feelings — both to temporarily fool the audience that they’re the real deal and to tease the audience, in general. The most obvious instance of teasing the audience is the drop-in on the decoy Smiths where Rick is in the middle of explaining what happened to Beth’s mom. But there’s also a montage of the various decoys reckoning with the reality as decoys and fates right before they’re massacred. Then there’s the decoy Smiths who savor their last moments as such, with the decoy Smiths who kill them — at least, decoy Morty — wondering if they really had to kill them, because they looked so happy. Later on, there’s also the puppet decoy Smiths — not to be confused with the glockenspiel decoy Smiths, which look like marionettes — which are obvious decoys because of their appearance but feature a seemingly genuine heart-to-heart between Rick and Beth. In that case, it reveals that they were actually wearing “too cute to kill” decoy costumes, which suggests they might possibly be the real deal… but they are not. The least surprising aspect of this episode is probably the detour it takes to the pre-war decoy sanctuary, because if there’s one thing “Rick and Morty” truly loves, it’s getting all of its various versions of certain characters into a presumably safe place just for them… and then ultimately massacring them. (And the fact that the President wants absolutely nothing to do with Rick’s latest drama.) To what end? Well, that’s another question the show loves to ask. As for the question of who’s even real, ultimately, the assumption is that it’s the version of the Smiths (with Space Beth) we see in the final scene of the episode. But considering the rest of the episode, there’s still a lingering question about that one. However, (glockenspiel) Jerry does at least get his B-story with the epilogue. A truly horrific, living-forever-like-the-Highlander B-story, but a B-story nonetheless. variety.com

THE PERFORMER | Rose Byrne THE SHOW | Apple TV+’s Physical THE EPISODE | “Let’s Get This Party Started” (June 25, 2021) THE PERFORMANCE | Over the first three episodes of this dark, 1980s-set comedy, Byrne’s Sheila Rubin patiently patronized husband Danny’s bid for local office. But this Friday, when it came time for the hubs to step up, he instead passed out — literally, in a drug-infused daze. And Byrne made our anticipation of Sheila’s reaction worth the wait. Leading up to that explosion, Byrne shined bright in quieter scenes, such as when Sheila started to suspect that she and frumpy Greta have more in common than the former would ever, ever admit. Or, when Sheila discovered that Danny had hired an old pal to run his campaign. (Just watch Byrne’s face as Jerry spews misogynist mantra after mantra; you can practically hear her skin crawl.) And yet Sheila was committed to the politician’s wife bit, which she supremely played at a country club shindig that should have fattened the campaign’s coffers — if the candidate had shown up. Instead, Sheila would learn, Danny and Jerry joined some nubile “supporters” on a psychedelic beach romp, after which the motley crowd made camp at the Rubins’ home. It was then that Sheila rightly went berserk. “Where the f–k were you?!” she roared, swatting her poncho-clad husband again and again. “I was all by myself all night long, apologizing for you to everybody like some f–king idiot! Do you think I want to be there asking for money, for somebody who couldn’t even show up??” Danny amazingly mustered enough of the right/corny words to calm his missus, but Byrne made clear that a new sheriff was in town. “Do you want this…? Then you gotta step up,” Sheila asserted. And step up… is what Sheila herself then did, slipping off to Bunny’s studio to present Tyler with the purloined video camera. But after catching glimpse of herself in a TV screen’s reflection and aborting one of her motel room binge-and-purges, the aspiring aerobics star isn’t looking to use it on Danny’s behalf. “F–k the campaign video,” she sniffed. “I’m ready to make a fortune.” HONORABLE MENTION | Departing Good Fight star Delroy Lindo saved his best for last, delivering a series of breathtaking performances in his swan song as attorney Adrian Boseman. As Adrian grappled with the horror of George Floyd’s murder in the flashback-themed premiere, Lindo infused his character with unrelenting fury. “Giving in to anger is the only sane response right now,” Adrian seethed to his political strategist Ruth (Dame Margo Martindale), Lindo’s eyes and vocal chords filled with palpable rage and pain. Later, after getting dumped by girlfriend Charlotte (the formidable Tamberla Perry) after a major breach of trust, Lindo deftly laid bare Adrian at his most emotionally erratic. And when the aspiring politico quietly bid adieu to esteemed partner Liz (Audra McDonald) in the episode’s final moments, Lindo was a vision of grace and restraint. It was a classy, elegant sendoff. HONORABLE MENTION | In Treatment‘s Eladio finally sat down with his therapist Brooke in person this week, and Anthony Ramos upped his game as Eladio flirted with a major psychological breakthrough. Ramos had a manic energy at first as Eladio thanked Brooke for inspiring him to quit his job, but he quickly deflated when Brooke started to press him on his true motivations for quitting, thumping his chest and balling up his fists in frustration. Ramos was achingly vulnerable as Eladio sat confused by Brooke’s lack of support, searching for the unconditional love he never got from his mother and touching on some deep-seated abandonment issues. Eladio is smart and self-aware, but he’s also highly sensitive, and Ramos is crafting a fascinatingly nuanced portrayal of a man just yearning to be accepted. HONORABLE MENTION | The evolution of Oscar nominated-actress Sophie Okonedo on Flack, from Robyn’s bawdy, quip-efficient boss in Season 1 to a force of nature demanding closer looks in Season 2, is masterful. This was never more evident than in Episode 4 titled “Duncan,” in which her character Caroline exhibited a wide range of emotions while grieving her ex-husband at his funeral. Adroitly navigating the racism, sexism and classicism of Duncan’s aggressively white first wife, son and friends, Okonedo gave Dahomey Amazon vibes as she donned a golden and regal African head wrap amid a backdrop of judgmental mourners in black. However, Caroline’s brief and defiant eulogy about “an old man from Kintyre, who worked his whole life in PR,” juxtaposed with her weepy vulnerability behind a bathroom stall door, ripped away the steely façade and brought Okonedo’s performance full circle. tvline.com

Holy reveals, Batwoman! The season ender finally introduced Batwing, and teased the arrival of a few familiar foes. The episode kicks off with Black Mask hijacking everyone’s TV to deliver an impassioned speech in the hopes of inciting a riotous mob that will overthrow the government. His demand for anarchy is accompanied by a city-wide blackout, leaving the Bat Team without their trusted technology and relying on old-school tools like walkie-talkies. Filled with doubt about her ability to defeat Circe without the Bat Suit, Ryan writes a letter of resignation as Batwoman. Meanwhile, Black Mask is working on building a super army. If all goes to plan, Gotham police will implode and stir fear around the city, leaving an opportunity for Roman Sionis to emerge as their hero and kill the person he paid to pretend to be Black Mask. He tests his super serum on Russell Tavaroff, the man who shot Luke, and seemingly fails. Tavaroff flatlines and they discard his body. Luke raids his father’s old workshop and stumbles across the drawings he made in which he envisioned a Black Batman. When he discovers a new suit, he realizes his father made those dreams a reality. Batwoman Season 2 FinaleRyan doesn’t think she can beat Circe on her own, so she recruits Alice to help take her down. Their brutal fight with Circe is interrupted by Black Mask, who opens fire. Alice stays behind while Ryan goes after Circe. In a one-on-one conversation, Black Mask reveals why she’s such a bad villain: She has too many feelings. But Alice isn’t impressed with his analysis. “You know who’s a great villain? The Joker,” she tells him before spraying him with snake bite and escaping. At the clinic, Mary is overwhelmed by an influx of patients due to the chaos around the city. She finds Tavaroff still alive and discovers that he’s been injected with a special snake bite mixture that has made him super strong. Awake and raging from the serum, he chases Mary to the roof and knocks her over the edge. But she’s caught in mid-air by Luke… who’s dressed as Batwing! At long last, he suits up as the Bat Team’s newest hero. Batwoman Season 2 FinaleRyan squares off against Circe with restored hope after seeing a flood of Bat-Signals from citizens showing their support for Batwoman. When Circe calls her Ryan, the eponymous hero quickly corrects her: “Call me Batwoman.” Alice rejoins the fight and during a scuffle with her sister, they both fall over the bridge and into the river. While unconscious in the water, Alice dreams of Ocean and gets her chance to say goodbye — even if it isn’t real. She then lovingly strokes Circe’s cheek, which unlocks the real Kate Kane. Finally. After pulling her unconscious sister onto the bank, Alice and Ryan try to revive Kate. It takes some time, but Kate finally opens her eyes and calls for Beth. Their touching moment is short-lived, though, because Gotham police arrive and immediately arrest Alice for her numerous crimes over the years. At her parole hearing, Ryan makes a strong case for herself — a woman who no longer sees herself as a criminal the way that they do. She’s stepping into her power and owning it. The moving speech convinces the board to lift all provisions. Ryan’s officially off parole! The mood is celebratory at the loft. Luke and Mary are relieved to have their friend back, and Kate makes it clear she cannot help Alice until she’s ready to be Beth again. She then requests a chat with Ryan, Batwoman to Batwoman. Ryan thanks Kate for the opportunity to don the suit because it changed her life. Kate, reminding her that they suited up for very different reasons, tells Ryan that Batwoman is hers. She’s got other plans. In a passionate goodbye with Sophie, we learn exactly what those plans are. She’s leaving town to visit her father Jacob (who was arrested and was granted a transfer) and a “friend in National City.” (That friend is Kara Danvers, right?) Update: Showrunner Caroline Dries told EW.com that Kate Kane’s story has in fact ended: “I would never say never… but for now, that was our farewell to Kate.” At the Batcave, Ryan has a great idea for the community center: They can build it above Mary’s clinic. Plus, they still need to track down the case of Batman trophies that were stolen. But before they can jump into action, Ryan has one more loose end to tie up. She visits Alice, who’s under tight security in prison. To her, seeing Alice behind bars is justice for her mother. Ryan ends their tense conversation by saying she hopes they never see each other again. But before she leaves, Alice drops a bombshell: Ryan’s biological mother didn’t die during childbirth and is still very much alive. In one final scene at the river, we see a top hat and a black-and-white umbrella floating in the water, followed by a series of roots rapidly growing. Does this mean the Penguin and Poison Ivy are headed to Gotham? After all, Safiyah did reveal that Ivy helped her create the Desert Rose right before she was killed. tvline.com

A painting of a shoe has taken a major award which was voted for by visitors to an art exhibition. Kiki Xuebing Wang won the John Moores Painting Prize Visitors' Choice at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool with her painting of a loafer. She said it was "amazing" to win, adding: "There are so many brilliant paintings in the exhibition, so I'm thrilled that mine caught a few eyes." The artist received a £2,020 prize thanks to the vote. Ms Wang was also awarded the inaugural Emerging Artist Prize in March, when Kathryn Maple's painting The Common was announced as the main John Moores Painting Prize winner. Sandra Penketh, executive director of Art Galleries & Collections Care at National Museums Liverpool, said it was "wonderful to see that the public share the jury's appreciation" for Ms Wang's painting. "Kiki's work invites the viewer to inspect this seemingly abstract image much more deeply," she said. "On closer inspection, we become increasingly aware of both the texture and colors which make up such an everyday object - a shoe." The exhibition launched online in February while the gallery was still closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. A virtual tour gave viewers the opportunity to explore the approaches to paint selected for this year's show and vote for their favorite. When the Walker Art Gallery reopened, visitors were able to see works in person and continued to vote for the painting that caught their eye. www.bbc.com

Old template!

I learned 2 years Romanian at school so it doesn't happen to me ? ( still happened btw )

Great update as always.

There is much to admire in Naughty Dog’s ultra-dark revenge video game The Last Of Us Part II. And there is much to critique. The devs who poured their blood, sweat and tears into the game deserve praise for its technical achievements. The writers who mangled the story deserve the lumps that follow. Despite its gore and violence, The Last Of Us Part II is a beautiful game, with renditions of post-apocalyptic Seattle and Santa Barbara that are simply staggering in detail and scope. The sights and sounds of this game are lush and lovely, gruesome and harrowing. In terms of presentation, The Last Of Us Part II is easily one of the best of the generation. Meanwhile, the acting is—without exception—phenomenal throughout. Ashley Johnson as Ellie turns in another fantastic performance, with a great deal more of the spotlight this time around. Troy Baker’s Joel has a much smaller role, but he’s as good as ever. And man, both these two are just insanely talented. Watch this live performance of Wayfaring Stranger they put on: Laura Bailey, who plays the third main character in the game, Abby, is also excellent. Sure, her character is fairly loathsome, but Bailey is great. Alas, while the game is gorgeous to look at and listen to, and the acting is as good as any I’ve ever encountered in a video game, it falls apart when it comes to both gameplay and story. The first game didn’t have much going for it in the gameplay department, either—neither game is particularly strong as an action/shooter, and each forces players to spend far too much time tediously picking up odds and ends in order to craft bombs and med-kits, and ammo for your routinely empty firearms. (There’s a setting that makes this somewhat less tedious in the sequel). When it comes to gameplay, both games are fine. Just fine. Not great, not terrible. Just fine. But the first game’s lackluster gameplay was more than made up for by a compelling story filled with complex characters in a gritty, intriguing post-apocalyptic world. It didn’t hurt that it also had one of the best endings in video games, period. It was an ending that deserved to be just that—the end of Joel and Ellie’s story, unresolved and bittersweet. Brittle and precarious and powerful all at once. A happy ending in many ways, but an unsettling one, too. Joel’s was a lie told out of love, but it was still a lie. He kept that secret for the same reason he rescued Ellie from the Fireflies. Because he couldn’t stand to lose his daughter. Not again. That same lie kicks off the events in The Last Of Us Part II, but it quickly runs roughshod over everything we loved about the first game, trampling even our high opinions of the protagonists in the process. What follows is a too-pretentious-by-half story of nonsensical revenge and relentless violence. It masquerades at depth and meaning but fails to deliver either. Better to leave us hanging than take us down this wallowing, nihilistic path of despair and misery porn. Unless you get off on that sort of thing, of course. An Unnecessary Sequel The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Unfortunately, The Last Of Us Part II only follows in the original’s footsteps in the most generic ways. Chronologically, it comes after the first game and it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic America. In every other sense, it may as well be a completely new franchise. At least then it wouldn’t have so badly damaged the characters we came to know and care so much about in the original. In the original, Ellie is a teenage girl who is the only person immune to the strange virus that’s caused this spore-based zombie apocalypse. Unlike every single other human, bites and spores don’t turn her into a monster. We don’t know why. Joel, who lost his own daughter tragically at the outset of the apocalypse, is tasked with bringing Ellie to the Firefly scientists where they hope to use her to find a cure. The Fireflies are freedom fighters. They’re here to help. Or so we’re led to believe. Along the way, throughout the course of the game, Ellie and Joel become like family. It’s not an easy road, but they manage it together and in many ways Ellie becomes the daughter Joel lost, dragging him out of his long malaise and giving him something to believe in and to fight for. She’s spunky and funny and tough, and she awakens a new sense of purpose in the burned out, grizzled survivor. In the end, when Joel and Ellie finally find the Fireflies, it turns out that the group isn’t all they were cracked out to be. The doctors are unethical murderers who decide that it’s just fine to sacrifice the one living person who is actually immune to the disease in order to create a vaccine (a completely absurd, anti-scientific, anti-medicine decision that exposes the Fireflies for the atrocious bastards they really are). Joel decides that sacrificing a young girl to save humanity is absolute crap and rescues her instead, killing some of the guards and doctors in the process. He does what every father would do in this situation—and what every ethical human being ought to do. There is only one correct answer to the question “How many lives would you sacrifice to save humanity?” Your own. Only your own. It’s one thing to take life in order to save someone; it’s another to sacrifice an innocent in the hopes that you’ll save someone. So Joel takes lives in order to save an innocent. It’s unfortunate that he is forced to kill, but he couldn’t stand by and let it happen, either. He had no other ethical choice. Even if—and it’s a very, very big if—her death would have resulted in a vaccine, allowing it to happen would be cruel and immoral. And a doctor, above anybody else, should realize this. Certainly in our own fraught times we should understand just how tricky coming up with a vaccine is—and killing the one specimen that may hold the answer is not only cruel and immoral, it’s magnificently stupid. Joel lies to Ellie about it after the fact, telling her that it didn’t work, she wasn’t the answer. And off they go, riding into the sunset. It’s the perfect ending. In my headcanon, I’m just going to pretend it’s the only ending. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN When Naughty Dog announced a sequel, creative director Neil Druckmann revealed that it would be a game about hate. The first was a game about love, the second hate. Like the tattooed fingers of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. One might wonder at this point, why you’d really even have to separate the two. Light is the left hand of darkness; love is the left hand of hatred. The first game had its fair share of hatred, after all. Unfortunately, the sequel really doesn’t bother much with love. When it does, it’s at its very best, but those moments are few and far between. The first big problem with The Last Of Us Part II’s story is that there is very little about it that justifies its existence. It picks up a few years later, though there are flashbacks of the intervening years scattered about the game. We learn quickly where Ellie and Joel currently stand in their relationship. While the story itself is told in bits and pieces, jumping to different timelines, the basic premise is this: Ellie has discovered that Joel lied to her and she’s mad about it. She’s mad that Joel didn’t let the Fireflies kill her in order to create a vaccine. She’s still mad at him when Abby, the daughter of the chief Firefly doctor, tracks down Joel and brutally murders him, exacting a ridiculously brutal revenge for her father’s murder. And right here, right in this one short paragraph, there is so much wrong that my head hurts even typing it out. First of all, the game seems to want us to think that Ellie is right and justified in her anger and that Joel is in the wrong. Not just about lying but about him saving her in the first place. The game suggests, in so many different ways, that Joel’s actions were selfish and wrong. There is an implicit sense, throughout the story, and especially in the way it attempts to empathize with both its angsty emo female leads, that we should accept that Joel was wrong. That his actions were somehow immoral. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN But Joel was not wrong. The doctors who decided to throw out their entire ethical and moral codes by sacrificing a young girl in the off-chance that they might come up with a cure were wrong. Ellie is wrong to suggest that a person who loves and cares for her should simply stand by and watch as she’s murdered. That’s preposterous. Any parent knows this. Any parent would do the same thing as Joel. And any doctor worth a damn would never harbor such intentions, no matter how many zebras they save from barbed wire. But in The Last Of Us Part 2, the doctor who decides to kill Ellie is portrayed as a good man who helps escaped zoo animals and loves his daughter. And his daughter, Abby, is somehow portrayed as justified in her brutal killing of Joel, and setup as an “equal” to Ellie in the game, given just as much (if not more) screen time by the time the credits role. I’ll get this out of the way right here: Abby’s revenge plot was deeply stupid from the start. At first, I didn’t even realize that this was the avenging daughter of the Firefly doctor because of how thin that rationalization would be. She doesn’t just kill Joel (who saved her life moments earlier, by the way) she makes him suffer. She wants it done slowly. And she does it with the support of a bunch of other people who, throughout the course of the game, are humanized and presented as sympathetic characters rather than the despicable monsters they are. (Later, Abby shows Ellie mercy despite her having killed several of those friends, which is kind of weird given the lengths she went to kill Joel . . .) It’s one thing to get revenge because you watch your surrogate father beaten to death with a golf club, bloody and crumpled on the floor. It’s another to get revenge because someone killed your own murderous father while rescuing an innocent girl who he was about to kill. I mean, really? I get that you’d be upset that somebody killed your dad, but when the reasoning is “he was saving his daughter from certain death” that sort of takes the wind out of those vengeance sails, doesn’t it? Maybe if not for Abby, then for her compatriots who might, given a moment to think about it, consider Joel’s actions self-defense. And sure, you might want revenge, or you might shoot the guy if you run into him and act in a moment of pique, but tracking him down and then making him suffer while beating him to death with a golf club when you’re fully aware he did it to save his daughter? Give me a break. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN I’m just trying to puzzle out what kind of person goes this far out of their way to get bloody vengeance like this. A pretty evil person. Abby is evil right from the start. But the game and its creators don’t want you to think that. They want you to spend half the game empathizing with Abby. The other half of the game they want you to lose whatever respect you had for Ellie. The Last Of Us Part II already makes it clear from the outset that we should have very little respect for Joel and his past choices. Then, instead of creating a sympathetic antagonist in Abby, they make her about as evil as possible and then ask us to see things from her point of view. It doesn’t work. The real victim of all of this is Ellie, however. I used to like Ellie quite a bit, but not by the time I finished this game. So the whole game gets off to a rough start. It doesn’t get better from here. Ellie and Abby are the two playable characters in The Last Of Us Part II. You play as Joel for a few minutes before he’s bludgeoned to death. In many ways, he’s the lucky one. At least we get to remember him as the caring father who saved Ellie and stuck by her through thick and thin. The game can try to convince us that he was in the wrong, but we know better. Joel is spared the next agonizing 25 to 30 hours, minus some flashbacks which are its finest moments (and a good template for what this game could have, and probably should have, been). Ellie’s “death” is much more tragic, because the game proceeds to ruin her character in every subsequent scene, thoroughly destroying any semblance of who she once was and turning her into a relentlessly selfish, murderous jerk. All because somebody thought that a story about a cycle of revenge would be more interesting than a story about wandering through an abandoned museum. I bring that up because to me, the museum bit was the most powerful piece of storytelling in the entire game. In a flashback, Joel takes Ellie to a surprise. She tries to guess what it is along the way, and the two banter back and forth like the good old days. The surprise is an abandoned museum. The first thing you see is a giant T-Rex outside its doors, and if you’re the exploring type you discover that you can climb up its back and leap off its head into the pool below. Maybe you do this two or three times just because it’s so light and breezy and you desperately need a break from grim and awful. It’s such a cool bit of storytelling. It’s so at odds with the rest of the game. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Once inside the museum, Ellie and Joel explore the displays. There are various dinosaurs and astronaut suits, and even an old rocket ship which you can go into and imagine you’re taking off into outer space. You find an old Indiana Jones hat (a little nod to Uncharted) which you can toss onto one of the dinosaur’s heads. It’s imaginative and beautiful. The sequence takes a dark turn in the end, and that juxtaposition of whimsy and terror makes it by far my favorite part of the game. Joel and Ellie are still a team. They have some great bonding moments. There’s some laughs, a good scary bit and it’s done. I wish the entire game had been like this. Moments of beauty and moments of ugliness woven together in a kind of bleak harmony. Some contrast, some variety. Instead, it’s a game about two young women trying to kill one another, while everyone around them also tries to kill each other. You stab and/or break so many necks by the time it’s over, you start to feel a bit numb. It’s a game about hate and don’t you dare forget it. Let’s Not Bicker And Argue Over Who Killed Who The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN After Joel’s vicious murder, Ellie feels like crap. She wants revenge and so does Tommy, Joel’s brother. He sets out first and Ellie sets out a bit later, accompanied by her new girlfriend, Dina. Halfway through the game, you go back in time to when Ellie and Dina arrive in the city, but you play the next few days as Abby instead, seeing things through her eyes. This is an odd choice given how thoroughly we despise Abby at this point, and it never stops being an odd choice. While some of her story is interesting, she really isn’t. She’s a one-note character who, beyond being a murderer, does really crappy things to people she cares about. Abby sucks. A lot. In Seattle, two factions do battle as Ellie and Abby traverse the city, Ellie searching for Abby to get revenge, while Abby looks for her wayward ex-boyfriend, Owen. The Wolves and the Seraphites (nicknamed the Scars) vie for control of the city. The former is a group of former rebels who shook off the yoke of a tyrannical post-apocalyptic government and set up their own quasi-fascistic organization. Only now with burritos! They’ve taken in Abby and some other former Fireflies, like Owen. (They’re not a couple anymore, but Abby and Owen have sex in the game despite Owen’s current girlfriend being very, very pregnant. Because Abby is the worst). The Scars, meanwhile, are a fanatical cult-like group—the kind that shows up in video games like this and in TV shows like The Walking Dead. They’re kind of like The Whisperers from AMC’s zombie drama, as in they’re so over-the-top it’s completely immersion-breaking. The game’s writers must have thought they were crafting a realistic post-apocalyptic group, but the Scars come off as cartoonishly vile and utterly preposterous. Also, the Scars shoot arrows that are far more deadly than the most powerful gun in the game, so that’s a neat trick. Suffice to say, the Scars are a completely implausible group that cartoonifies the sequel in ways that simply didn’t happen in the first entry. There were some very bad people in the original Last Of Us, but I never rolled my eyes the way I did with the Scars. In any case, most of the game—after the opening and before the final act—takes place in Seattle across a three day period. Ellie and Dina arrive in Seattle and start tracking down Abby. During that same period, Abby explores the war-torn city and we see how the Wolves vs Scars war plays out. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Thus begins a story of revenge and violence in which Ellie stabs a couple hundred men and women in the jugular a few times and Abby breaks countless necks. Between the two of them, Ellie and Abby must murder a few hundred people, but of course only Joel and Abby’s father’s deaths warrant retaliatory bloodshed. All those other deaths? No big deal. Oh, and when you kill someone and another AI bad guy finds their body, they’ll call out the deceased’s name like it means something. “No, not Timothy!” “They killed Kenny!” “Brenda!!!” It’s another little touch that’s designed to make the game’s world and people seem more real. It doesn’t work. At all. Hearing Generic Bad Guy call out the name of Dead Generic Bad Guy only made me chuckle and roll my eyes. I’m coming for you next, pal. This shiv’s for you! We have the same half-dozen enemy character models repeated over and over again throughout the game, but I’m supposed to feel something—some sense of guilt, perhaps? Not hardly. I mean, the game doesn’t even give you a non-lethal option and stealth mechanics are severely limited so why not just murder everyone? The Slog Of Slogs The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Meanwhile, pacing is a mess. The Last Of Us Part II drags on far too long with too many encounters, too many dramatic moments and too much redundancy. I’d take a game half the length with just a few more interesting set-pieces to replace all the endless slaughter. There are a few named characters Ellie finds and kills as she tracks down Abby, and at least one of these encounters has oomph (when Ellie discovers that she’s killed a pregnant woman, having just found out about Dina’s pregnancy) but largely this sense that we’re supposed to feel bad for all this killing feels more like something Naughty Dog is hammering into us rather than part of a well-crafted story. I watched a bit of footage I’d captured the other day where Ellie stabs this guy in the neck four or five times and it’s just gross. It doesn’t make me feel bad it just feels completely gratuitous. I simply don’t care about any of these people I violently murder in The Last Of Us Part II, and honestly, neither does Ellie. That may be the real problem with the game’s violence. It doesn’t square with the game’s seriousness or flimsy attempts at some kind of message. It’s so nihilistic so much of the time, you get the sense that there is no message. Nothing learned, nothing gained. No meaning to be found, even when you get to the dregs. Yes, we get a sense that Ellie is traumatized by all the violence. When Abby let’s her go for a second time, despite having just killed everyone Abby cares about (and despite Abby having proven already that she’s the vengeful type so this mercy makes no sense whatsoever) we follow Ellie and Dina and Dina’s new baby to a farmhouse where they’ve cobbled together a new life together. But what appears to be all peaches and sunshine falls apart when Ellie has a bad flashback. Tommy shows up and chastises her for not killing Abby. So Ellie gives up her nice little life and sets off again, to try to kill Abby again. Because Ellie learns nothing in this game. She must have left behind two hundred corpses in Seattle, including all of Abby’s friends, but that’s not enough to sate her thirst for comeuppance, and she doesn’t realize, bafflingly, that it will never be enough. Revenge won’t bring Joel back and it won’t assuage her guilt at how she treated him and it won’t lead to a life of happiness. But off she goes to California. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Many people who aren’t super-fans of Naughty Dog were incredibly upset by the game’s ending. So was I, but for somewhat different reason. We’ll get to that in a second. After her stint at the farm, Ellie abandons Dina and the infant they were raising together to once again seek out Abby, this time in Santa Barbarra. It’s just another way the game makes you hate Ellie. Her pettiness, her bitterness, her endless self-obsession and selfishness. That the game feels it necessary to have Ellie try for revenge once, fail, and then go out again is pretty ludicrous from a narrative standpoint, not only extending the game for no good reason—it’s about ten hours too long—but making Ellie out to be even more unsympathetic in the process. In any case, Ellie ditches Dina (who deserves better, quite frankly) and the child and heads to Santa Barbara. It’s a great location, all sun and heat compared to Seattle’s rain and gloom; orange and yellow instead of green and grey. Once again, Naughty Dog proves that it can craft some truly jaw-dropping environments. Your first moments in Santa Barbara are wonderfully scary and tense. But once again we have another group of wicked bastards to contend with. This group is called The Rattlers. The Rattlers aren’t as psycho as the Scars, but they’re close. They keep slaves and crucify troublemakers down at the beach. In Naughty Dog’s apocalypse, life truly is nasty, brutish and short. Psychopaths and creepy cults are everywhere. This group must have sounded good on paper but to me the Rattlers are just more cartoon villains for us to stab and shoot and blow sky high, this time with a silenced SMG in your arsenal. There must be a more nuanced take on the apocalypse that all these game and TV show studios could come up with, one in which people are complicated, and groups of people aren’t always so different from one another. But so far, only the Jackson, WY settlement seems to be comprised of real people with actual shades of grey. I’d say that Naughty Dog tried to make Abby and the Wolves complex, too, but they kind of botched that when they had them murder Joel in the very beginning. Every subsequent attempt to humanize Abby and her co-conspirators falls short thanks to that misstep. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN In any case, back to Santa Barbara. The sequence starts with Abby and her companion Lev searching for the Fireflies in Santa Barbara. We met Lev back in Seattle. He and his sister were Scars, but they were cast out and were going to be killed when Lev cut his hair. Lev, we discover, is biologically female but wants to identify as male, and the uber-religious Scars think this is an unforgivable sin. It’s a pretty ham-handed attempt at tackling the issue of trans people and tolerance in the game, simply because the Scars are so outlandishly awful. But Lev is a good character and Lev and Abby’s relationship is the one point of redemption in Abby’s entire arc, and one which I wish Naughty Dog had handled almost entirely differently. More on that later. Abby and Lev are looking for the Fireflies so they can rejoin Abby’s old group, and just when they’ve made contact over the radio they’re ambushed and taken prisoner by the Rattlers. You can tell right away that these are Very Bad Dudes. Sometime later, Ellie shows up, following the lead Tommy gave her back at the farmhouse. She discovers the Resort and this new enemy faction after creeping through some very zombie-infested buildings. One thing this game does do very well is make the various spore zombies scary, as much through their terrifying warbling and screeching as anything. Naughty Dog’s sound design is matched only by their graphical prowess. Nobody can discount just how technically and artistically this game succeeds. It’s the writing, the narrative, where everything falls apart. And we come, at long last, to the ending. This Is The End, Beautiful Friend The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Depending on how you play, you either sneak or blast your way through the Resort area until you free some prisoners and they tell you that Abby has already been taken and punished for trying to escape. So you head to the beach as the prisoners go to battle with their former captors (or what’s left of them after Ellie cleaved her bloody path through their ranks). She walks down to the beach. It’s dark. The sounds of combat echo in the distance. The sea is draped in fog. Abby and Lev, along with countless others, are hanging from posts, basically crucified and on the verge of death, skeletal from starvation. It’s as grim and awful as anything we’ve seen up to this point. It’s just that we’re all so very, very numb by now. Another fresh hell stuffed into 30 hours of grimdark violence, atrocity and betrayal. A powerful moment that needed to come much, much sooner. (Honestly, they should have scrapped California entirely and had Ellie find Abby strung up by the Scars in Seattle). Still, it’s probably the first time I felt real sympathy for Abby. No matter how much of a monster she was—a faithless friend, a brutal killer, a small-minded ruffian—it’s tough to see even your worst enemy starved, hanging from a post, dying slowly. And Lev was innocent. He didn’t deserve this fate. Nobody does. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN When Ellie cuts her down, and Abby carries Lev to a boat to make good their escape, and it looks like Ellie has finally realized that revenge really doesn’t make anything better, I was actually pleasantly surprised. There is a beauty in mercy. Even Abby showed mercy—not once, but twice—to Ellie, after all. Abby is not a sympathetic character and nothing the game tries made me like her, but I do want to like Ellie. Ellie taking revenge on Joel’s killer might feel good, but Ellie showing mercy makes her more human. It makes her a better person. It means that after all this blood and death and hate, she could come out the other side as someone who has grown and changed and run the gauntlet of suffering and still come out the other side with her self intact. If she had simply turned around and left her to her fate, I could have accepted that ending as well. It would have been more cruel and Ellie would have been less humanized by it, but at least it would have been a decisive and powerful ending. Or if Abby were already dead, there would have been some poetic justice to that as well. Ellie’s hands would be clean. Well, not clean exactly but cleaner. I’ve heard it said those damned spots don’t come out. But instead, Ellie cuts her down. And they go their separate ways, not friends or allies, but united in suffering and tragedy. An end to the cycle of violence. Something like resolution, however bitter and incomplete. Only, no, not quite. We need some mud-wrestling, don’t we? We need to see the women get down and dirty. We need that sweet, sweet misery porn. What follows is the single worst moment in the entire game (aside from forcing us to play as Abby for fifteen hours of it, or the total character assassination of Ellie). Instead of cutting her down, showing mercy, Ellie decides that actually she still needs to get revenge. Wouldn’t want all that stabbing practice to go to waste, right? She’s going to stab this woman, who has been starving to death hanging from a pole, until she bleeds out and dies. Only, not really. Nope. She’s going to stab and slash her a few times and then let her go again. Fun times. This is really how I want to spend my video game time. Have Mercy The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Now, a lot of people are angry that Ellie didn’t end up going through with it, that she spared her sworn enemy. They hated Abby and think that a satisfying ending required Abby to die, and Ellie to kill her. I think that’s rubbish. Sure, it could have worked in different circumstances. If Ellie and Abby had met on equal terms, for instance. But this “I’m going to save you and let you live, oh never mind time to die, oh never mind again you can live” nonsense is just bad writing. Revenge can be fun. John Wick does “fun revenge” very well. I remember watching Braveheart for the first time and William Wallace’s revenge was thrilling. But the moral of the story in serious works of fiction is that revenge is bitter (not bittersweet) and never quite plays out the way you’d hoped. It creates a cycle of violence that hurts everyone caught up in its wake. Hamlet is consumed by his desire for revenge—prompted by the ghost of his father—but in the end it just means that everyone dies, including innocents like Polonius and Ophelia and, though she’s perhaps a little less innocent, Hamlet’s mother as well. Revenge, like that green-eyed monster, jealousy, is dangerous. Something to be avoided if at all possible. Even justifiable revenge—think A Time To Kill—can lead to all sorts of problems. What this game needed in the end was grace. The kind of strange, unsettling thing that comes over someone when they suddenly realize something profound and choose to take a different path. When Ellie sees her emaciated enemy hanging from a poll and, instead of feeling gleeful satisfaction, feels only horror and pity, she acted with grace and mercy and, in that moment, became the person we hoped she would become. It was never about killing Abby. It was about Ellie finding her own redemption. And then they throw it all away. Two angry, beat up, half-dead murderesses slicing each other over and over again in the shallows, blood and saltwater spraying everywhere, until suddenly Ellie gives up and let’s Abby go. Again. I’m not one to usually criticize games for their violence, but this felt exploitative to me. And redundant. All that potential for mercy and grace lost. Ellie already let her go! She already came to the conclusion that she should let Abby live when she cut her down! Why go through all that again? Why have this horrible, violent, senseless slasher fight if, at its conclusion, Ellie simply let’s Abby go again? The ending could have worked with mercy or revenge as the outcome, but apparently the writers had trouble making up their minds about which direction they wanted to go, and decided to try and have their cake and eat it, too. The result feels sloppy, repetitive and frustrating. More than anything, this game’s ending needed to not beat around the bush. Either cut her down and let her live (mercy) or have Ellie take revenge (leave her to die) or have her already dead when Ellie gets there (chance). You can’t have it both ways, all ways, whatever. If you want to end the game with a knife fight, do that. But don’t make Ellie cut her down first. Have them meet as equals. It’s too much like Indigo Montoya helping the Man in Black up the cliff just so he can kill him. Only not in the least bit funny. The last scene, when Ellie returns home to an empty farmhouse, Dina and her baby long gone, is better. A fitting reward for Ellie’s selfish, self-destructive obsession with revenge. A game about hate, sure, but even more a game about loss. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN Not everything about The Last Of Us Part II’s story was terrible. I loved all of Ellie’s flashbacks with Joel and Tommy. I might have even enjoyed Abby’s if her character deserved it. As I noted further up, I also very much enjoyed the sights and sounds. Graphically, few games I’ve ever played can compare. For all its violence and misery, The Last Of Us Part II is a true beauty. Sound design, though, is what really makes it scary. When the game bothers trying to be scary it succeeds more often than not. Gameplay gets bogged down at times by the lack of a full-fledged stealth system and somewhat dense AI, but there are still some exhilarating sequences and combat, while far from my favorite, can be tense and exciting. There’s simply too much of it, like there’s too much of just about everything here. Too much crafting, too much scavenging (though remember there’s an option to make that more tolerable), too much story and too many hours of game to get through. For all my complaints—complaints I genuinely found made me dislike this game and everyone in it more and more the longer I played it, and the longer I stewed over it after—I still had something resembling fun while playing. I finished the damn thing, which is more than I can say for a lot of games. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN I also really enjoyed the entire frightening intro sequence with Yara and Lev, and those characters in general. If only Abby had had some sort of dawning realization about Lev and her relationship with Lev made her better understand Joel’s actions. She could have let go of some of that hate. If Abby had realized that protecting Lev from Isaac and the WLF was basically exactly what Joel was doing by rescuing Ellie from her dad and the Fireflies (only he knew Ellie a lot longer) we might have actually had a story with some interesting dynamic character arcs. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wish that The Last Of Us Part II had never been about Joel and Ellie at all, and that the entire thing had been the story of Abby and her desire for revenge and how that transformed into understanding and forgiveness for her father’s killer as she grew into the role of protector and surrogate mother for Lev. She could have found empathy along the way, and chosen to spare Joel’s life, sparing Ellie her own story of revenge and horror, and saving all four characters in the process. Perhaps a game about hate could have turned into a game about love, after all. The Last Of Us Part II SCREENSHOT: ERIK KAIN P.S. This was a strangely challenging review for me to write. I didn’t get a review copy so I was late to actually playing it, but even after I finished the game I had a hard time putting pen to paper. I finished my first draft of this review weeks ago and then found myself unable to come back to it. I’m not entirely sure why. In one sense, it’s because the game left me with such conflicting feelings. It’s clearly a very good game in many ways, and yet also sort of horrible at the same time. And even though I ultimately found the tale of revenge and violence too pretentious and not nearly as effective as its creators hoped, I was still haunted by it. It had emotional resonance even while not really standing up to scrutiny. So my apologies for the very late review, but sometimes that’s how it goes. Writer’s block is a helluva thing. forbes.com

A direct clash ?

Have you ever stared up at clouds and tried to see shapes in the formations? Photographer Lân Nguyen channels that energy into images that mix silhouettes with colorful cloud-dotted skyscapes to create dreamy scenes. Nguyen’s Instagram is filled with eye-catching images that blur the lines between fantasy and reality by mixing differing foreground elements with clouds to produce one-of-a-kind images. The clouds’ colors are enhanced in Photoshop to make them “pop” from the background, and Nguyen adds dark silhouettes to give the shapes he sees new forms. Nguyen’s concept is simple but well-executed. It hinges on tapping into the child-like part of everyone’s brain that once made imaginary worlds out of clouds in the sky “What started as just posting sunset photos that I’ve captured with my phone in 2017 quickly turned into uploading creative and unique images that no one has ever seen before,” Nguyen says. “I always try to find beauty and uniqueness in common scenes or objects, this results in images that you probably know me from like the cloud/moon rose or cloud heart.” Images like Nguyen’s are likely popular because they provide a sense of escapism. In a world that is still struggling with a challenging time, many could certainly use a chance to mentally get away from it all. petapixel.com

@Lil Wald Hello, This wiki might help you : https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page And if you can explain what are you asked to do in this exam?

Imgur link : https://imgur.com/a/AHmOt5f PSD link : https://bit.ly/38NF8pe Font : AbandoN Feel free to edit it

Photo courtesy of Netflix The new year will also be filled with new content coming to Netflix. The global streaming platform will see the loss of various core titles like “The Office” in January, but it will also drop a wide array of shows and films for viewers to satiate their quarantine entertainment needs. Classics like the 2007 hit “Superbad,” starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, and 2012’s “Spring Breakers” will be made available throughout the month. The much-anticipated “Pieces of a Woman,” which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, will make its streaming debut Jan. 7, as well. Netflix originals are also set to launch through the new year, including the recently acquired “Cobra Kai.” The show premiered in 2018 and dropped its second season last year, but only made its Netflix appearance in 2020. Season 3 is expected to release on New Year’s day. See the full list of titles below: Jan. 1 17 Again (2009) 30 Minutes or Less (2011) Abby Hatcher (Season 1) Blue Streak (1999) Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) Catch Me If You Can (2002) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) Cobra Kai (Season 3) Cool Hand Luke (1967) Dream Home Makeover (Season 2) Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987) Enter the Dragon (1973) Four Christmases (2008) Fred Claus (2007) Full Out 2: You Got This! (2020) Gimme Shelter (2013) Good Hair (2009) Goodfellas (1990) Gothika (2003) Headspace Guide to Meditation (Season 1) Into the Wild (2007) Jenni Rivera: Mariposa de Barrio (Season 1) Julie & Julia (2009) London Heist (2017) Monarca (Season 2) Mud (2012) Mystic Pizza (1988) Running Man (Season 1) Sex and the City: The Movie (2008) Sex and the City 2 (2010) Sherlock Holmes (2009) Striptease (1996) Superbad (2007) The Creative Brain (2019) The Departed (2006) The Haunted Hathaways (Seasons 1-2) The Minimalists: Less Is Now (2021) The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) Unknown (2011) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) What Happened to Mr. Cha? (2021) Jan. 2 Asphalt Burning (2021) The Netflix Afterparty (Cobra Kai Special) Jan. 4 Korean Pork Belly Rhapsody (Season 1 – New Episodes Weekly) Jan. 5 Gabby’s Dollhouse (Season 1) LA’s Finest (Season 1) Nailed It! Mexico (Season 3) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) The History of Swear Words (Season 1) Jan. 6 Ratones Paranoicos: The Band that Rocked Argentina (2021) Surviving Death (Season 1) Tony Parker: The Final Shot (2021) Jan. 7 100% Halal (2020) Pieces of a Woman (2021) Jan. 8 Charming (2021) Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons (Season 5) Lupin (Season 1) Mighty Little Bheem: Kite Festival (2021) Pretend It’s a City (Season 1) Stuck Apart / Azizler (2021) The Idhun Chronicles (Part 2) Jan. 10 Spring Breakers (2012) Jan. 11 Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy (2021) Jan. 12 Furtive / Al acecho (2019) Last Tango in Halifax (Season 4) Jan. 13 An Imperfect Murder (2017) Jan. 15 Bling Empire (Season 1) Carmen Sandiego (Season 4) Disenchantment (Part 3) Double Dad / Um Pai no Meio do Caminho (2021) Henry Danger (Seasons 1-3) Hook (1991) Kuroko’s Basketball (Season 1) Outside the Wire (2021) N Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie (2014) Pinkfong & Baby Shark’s Space Adventure (2019) The Magicians (Season 5) WISH YOU : Your Melody In My Heart (2020) Jan. 16 A Monster Calls (2016) Radium Girls (2020) Jan. 18 Homefront (2013) Jan. 20 Daughter From Another Mother / Madre solo hay dos (Season 1) Sightless (2020) Spycraft (Season 1) Jan. 21 Call My Agent! (Season 4) Jan. 22 Blown Away (Season 2) Busted! (Season 3) Fate: The Winx Sage (Season 1) Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (Season 2) So My Grandma’s a Lesbian! / Salir del ropero (2021) The White Tiger (2021) Jan. 23 Love (ft. Marriage and Divorce) Jan. 26 Go Dog Go (Season 1) Jan. 27 50M2 (Season 1) Accomplice Penguin Bloom (2021) Jan. 29 Below Zero / Bajocero (2021) Finding ‘Ohana (2021) The Dig (2021) Jan. 31 Fatima (2020) variety.com

Courtesy of HBO SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the second season finale of “His Dark Materials.” Fans of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Lin-Manuel Miranda included, have known all along that Lee Scoresby was sailing his balloon towards certain death. But that didn’t make his and Hester’s (Cristela Alonzo) demise any less difficult to watch. In Monday night’s finale, Lee and his faithful dæmon went down all guns blazing under a hail of fire from Magisterium troops, giving Jopari (Andrew Scott) just enough time to find the bearer of the knife and pass on his crucial message. With Lyra (Dafne Keen) kidnapped, Will (Amir Wilson) resolved to rescue her, and Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) gathering angels on his side for the coming war, Miranda says the season-ender should leave viewers reaching for the tissues, but that it also provides the perfect set up for an even more ambitious closing chapter. Here, Miranda talks with Variety about shooting Lee’s death and what might be in store for the third and final season of the HBO drama. What was your reaction to watching Lee perish in such dramatic fashion? Can I tell you a secret? I haven’t watched the final episode because it hasn’t aired in the States yet. I did watch the U.K. post all the crying emojis and I did go through it in person. Often you’re shooting out of sequence, you’re shooting at the whims of weather or schedules or locations, especially on an effects heavy show like “His Dark Materials.” But we were able to film the Alamo Gulch sequence sequentially. We started on a Monday and I died on a Friday, so the playing of it was very organic and I think that paid off in terms of the performances. It wasn’t the last thing I filmed, but I’m really grateful that we were able to shoot it in sequence because I just think it helps in terms of where Lee and Hester get to by the end. Where they get to is a place of ultimate sacrifice for Lyra and her cause, capped off by that heartbreaking line from the books, “Don’t go before I do.” We always felt an extra responsibility when we are quoting the books directly, because those are lines that have been circled and dog-eared and highlighted and made into fan art by generations of fans at this point, so you really want to honor them and get them right. What I remember the most from “The Subtle Knife” was, “Don’t you go before I do” and “We’re helping Lyra.” It’s this notion that Lee continues to center himself and is able to make the ultimate sacrifice because he reminds himself of a greater cause, which is his love for Lyra and what she has to do for the world. It’s a poetic ending which completes Lee’s arc in a way? It’s a beautiful thing. The arc of Lee is someone who is kind of a drifter, who finds a sense of purpose through his love for this kid, who he sees a bit of himself in. This is a really bright kid who has been dealt a bad hand in the parent department, and he’s just going to do everything he can so that she can go forward. How was it to shoot those final moments opposite your dæmon? It took me back to the genius of Philip Pullman who created this notion of dæmons. I think it’s two things. One, from a storytelling perspective, it’s brilliant because no one’s ever alone. Even in his final moments, Lee has someone to talk to and there’s a dialogue to be written, and you get a sense of those people. Then the other thing that’s sort of a brilliant side effect of this innovation of Pullman’s conceit that every human has a dæmon that is their soul, is that it’s two deaths we’re mourning: we’re mourning Lee’s death and Hester’s death. That was so overwhelming as I read the U.K. reactions. It was about half, “No, Lee,” crying emoji, and half, “No, Hester,” crying emoji. We’ve gotten to know and love both of them. And then to make matters worse we see Jopari die in his son’s arms about fives minutes later having been reunited for the first time in years. It’s a triple knockout. I was not thinking about that during the death scene because from my perspective Jopari goes forward; I was holding down the fort so that he can keep moving. But that’s going to be the part that makes me cry when I finally watch it because I haven’t been witness to that. You shared videos of yourself and Andrew pretending to be Sam Neill from “Jurassic Park” and then a photo of the two of you napping in a caravan. You two seem to have formed quite the rapport. We had a wonderful time working together. We’re both theater kids and the fun thing about those sequences was we were way up in the Welsh countryside. Normally, when you’re filming in a studio, you have a base camp, you each go to your separate trailers and you have your own little space. There was no luxury of that when we were filming those final scenes, we are in a rented Winnebago belonging to a local person up there because it’s just too treacherous a journey all the way back to base camp. It was this pink, very flowery Winnebago and we’re like all right, let’s dry off from the mud and have a nap. I also think being that far in on location, you also kind of shut out the outside world, and you really only focus on the work and that’s been one of the great gifts of playing this role and being in Philip Pullman’s world. As my life has gotten more hectic, working on the show is like a holiday for me. I just get to go fly a hot air balloon and learn how to fire a gun and do stunts. It was just the most fun thing to get to live inside this world I loved so much. It has been confirmed that the show has been renewed for a third and final season, meaning it will have a shot at tackling the final novel on Pullman’s original trilogy, “The Amber Spyglass.” How significant is that? Well, listen, it’s very significant. I’m really excited that they get to finish telling the story. I’m a huge fan of these books, I remember being so bummed that when they made the movie of “Golden Compass” [and it] wasn’t going to get a sequel. The fact that they get their chance to finish telling Philip Pullman’s story is really exciting. That third book is so ambitious, I can’t wait to see what they do with it. It’s certainly the wildest of the three, Lee and Hester even make a return of sorts in a different form. Have there been any discussions of that taking place in Season 3? Nothing has been written in stone or finalized, but I’ve always told them this is enormous fun for me and I serve at the pleasure of Bad Wolf Productions. If they see fit for Lee and Hester to return in corporeal or non-corporeal form, I’ll answer the call. But they just got the green light, so I don’t even know how much exists and is written yet. variety.com

Season 13 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” will kick off with a virtual brunch designed to celebrate the new season and the new Queens. The event will take place on Jan. 1, 2021, to coincide with the season premiere. Season 11 contestant Honey Davenport will DJ and Bianca Del Rio will make a guest appearance in a five-minute comedy set. The brunch will be hosted by Season 12 winner Jaida Essence Hall. After that, attendees will get to meet the queens of Season 13, and be treated to “more stunning looks and surprises from the fabulous new cast,” teased VH-1. Fans will have a chance to enter and receive an exclusive invite to the event at newyearnewru.com . Entry closes on/by 12P EST on 12/30, and final winners will be randomly selected and notified via email. There will also be an opportunity to ask the new queens a question. Randy Barbato, Executive Producer, revealed, “This season’s queens are the biggest characters ever, competing in some of the most outrageous challenges in Drag Race herstory, including a game-changing season-opening twist, the world’s first “disco-mentary,” three RuPaulmark holiday movies and so much more.” “With the dedication and cooperation of our talented queens, cast and crew, we were able to safely produce this season in the midst of a pandemic. We hope that the joy we all experienced while making it will be felt by our viewers,” said Tom Campbell who also serves as Executive Producer. Early Monday morning, VH1 released a short preview of what lies ahead in Season 13, including that Brooklyn Drag Queen of the Year, Kandy Muse, arrives first in the Werk Room, declaring, “Being the first bitch to walk into the competition is such a dream. I am so excited to be here and any bitch who walks in after me [gets] second place.” Audiences also met Joey Jay, a dancer who hails from Phoenix, Ariz., and boasts “unmatched rhinestoning skills.” Jay admits this is the third time she has auditioned for the show, and adds, “I am the dumbest bitch you’ll ever meet.” A new twist on the format also showed that these two queens had to face the music and judges RuPaul, Michelle Visage, Carson Kressley and Ross Mathews for a lip-sync. In the new set up, the judges are separated by plexiglass, keeping in line with COVID-19 safety protocols. The Season 13 cast was announced earlier this month, and features the first Trans man contestant. Gottmik, a Los Angeles-based makeup artist is the first out trans man to compete on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is produced by World of Wonder Productions with Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, Tom Campbell, Steven Corfe, Mandy Salangsang, RuPaul and Tim Palazzola serving as executive producers. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Season 13 will premiere on Jan. 1 at 8 p.m. on VH1. variety.com

Toată lumea este binevenită să întrebe aici, deoarece suntem deschiși pentru toti. @ThunderHDzXD Vă dau un exemplu de data aceasta, dar data viitoare trebuie să faci eseul înainte de a întreba, deoarece nu facem freelance. {$CLEO} 0000: repeat wait 0 until 0AFA: 0B63: samp unregister_client_command "autoputhelmet" 0B34: samp register_client_command "autoputhelmet" to_label @autoputhelmet while true wait 0 if 1@ == 1 then if 00DF: actor $PLAYER_ACTOR driving then 3@ = Actor.CurrentCar($PLAYER_ACTOR) if or 3@ = id_nrg500 3@ = id_fcr400 3@ = id_pcj then say "/puthelme" end end end end :autoputhelmet if 1@ == 1 then 1@ = 0 printf "AutoPutHelpmet Off" 4000 else 1@ = 1 printf "AutoPutHelpmet ON" 4000 end cmdret Trebuie sa cauti id-ul vehiculului unde ai voie sa pui casca si sa îl modificati în cod-ul meu de aici http://weedarr.wikidot.com/veh

Salut, Nu facem freelance aici. Iar, te pot ajuta cu acest exemplu și trebui să termini singur. {$CLEO} //-------------MAIN---------------// thread "ShortCuts" :cmd_1 wait 0 if SAMP.Available else_jump @cmd_1 0b34: "fh" @fh 0b34: "fb" @fb :cmd wait 0 jump @cmd :fh say "/findhouse" cmdret :fb say "/findbiz" cmdret ret 0 Acest tutorial vă poate ajuta să instalezi compilatorul:

Tutorial pinned.