It has been over half my lifetime since I read an in depth history of the Spanish civil war.

Anyway, some anarchists I used to roll with criticized Stalin for turning against the Spanish Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, killing some and abandoning the othera. I thought at the time, "what the hell? Why would the Communists betray those who were fighting against their common enemy? I see some of the historical basis for fighting the Anarchists within the USSR, but why in Spain, when the fascists were by far the biggest problem? It can't have just been " Stalin was a bad dude", that's not how it works. So what were the material and political reasons for that betrayal? Was it even a betrayal? (I am looking for the ML perspective on this more than the anarchist perspective because I've heard plenty of the Anarchist side and not the "tankie" side)

Cud & Tith’s Death and Dismemberment Thursday Movies April Fools x Easter Edition: Cud Converts to Christianity! Neo-Noir Max Payne (2008) (1h42) & Assassin 33AD (1h49m) starting at 4:20 US EDT

In honor of April Fool’s and Easter, we will be watching future Catholic saint Mark Wahlberg (famous for Mark Wahlberg’s 40 day challenge aka Lent) in the Neo-noir Max Payne (2008) (Unrated and bloodier cut) adaptation of the 2004 videogame, followed by Evangelical Christian thriller (really, an unintentional comedy) Black Easter: Assassin 33 A.D (2020) (Directors Cut).

(I would like to note that I ran these movies by Tith and she was horrified, but encouraged me to follow my hearts).

A note: timezones hard, feel free to use https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ or something similar to do timezone conversions to your local time

We will be using Blorptube tonight: https://blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine. IMPORTANT NOTE: please use a good VPN whenever visiting Blorptube due to how peering works.  You can read more about Peertube and potential security concerns here: https://hexbear.net/post/3471120

Disclaimer: There are technical difficulties getting these added to TankieTube right now.  Inshallah we will have them uploaded by showtime ( )

Max Payne (2008) (Unrated)

An adaptation of Remedy Entertainment’s video game series of the same name, this film was visually striking to my childish gaze when I was but a young cuttlefish.  Let’s see if it holds up.  “Max Payne is a detective assigned to the NYPD Cold Case Unit. He lost his wife Michelle and infant daughter Rose in a horrific murder; since that day, Max has been consumed by the desire to find his family's killer.”  The plot proceeds along pretty standard noir story beats.

The movie made a tidy profit and was ranked #1 at box opening due to in my opinion deceptive advertising.  It had a star-studded cast including (in order from least to most cancelled): Ludacris and Nelly Furtado, Mark Wahlberg, and Mila Kunis, but not even their combined star power could save it from the haters at Rotten Tomatoes who gave it a 16% rating.

How does this relate to tonight’s theme?  Great question!  See the attached image of Mark Wahlberg talking about Lent in an interview.

Content Warnings for Max Payne (2008) (Unrated) (1h42m)

Violence and gore: severe

• There’s a lot of killing and shooting
• The unrated version adds more blood (somehow they got it down to PG-13 for the theatrical release by scrubbing out the blood!)

Sexual violence: None

Other:

• Drug use is a prominent theme
• Dehumanization of people who use drugs
• Copaganda
• Sad ending
• Fragile reality, hallucination

Doesthedogdie: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/31030

UnconsentingMedia: https://www.unconsentingmedia.org/items/11221

IMDB Parental Guide: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0467197/parentalguide/

TankieTube link to movie: https://tankie.tube/w/3gKPNpMvC5mZXS9zTezUjz

Assassin 33 A.D (2020) (1h49m)

The plot: A crew of racially diverse (tokenized) must go back in time to stop a small group of Islamic extremists who are hell-bent on destroying The West by preventing Christianity from ever existing by assassinating Jesus Christ before he can be publicly tortured to death and resurrected. Jesus may save, but who will save Jesus?

Commentary:

Incredibly bad Christian Evangelical Time Travel movie that is also surprisingly clever/fun with its time travel.  It’s incredibly racist, Islam-hating, Judenhassianly-antisemitic, ableist, and they also somehow try to be woke about every single one of those which makes it even worse.  It’s so bad that they could not find a single middle-easterner to play in it (unless you count the Greek guy and the iϟϟntreali woman (I will count him but not her, in both cases to piss off the euros)).  

This movie is horrible, but it is also amazing.  Watch at your own peril. It's made by white AmeriKKKan evangelical christians for white AmeriKKKan evangelical christians.  As such, lethal levels of racism, tokenization, other bigotry, and kkkringe lie inside. LETHAL.  This movie is not a movie of honor.  Nothing valued is here.  This movie is best shunned.  What is in this movie is frightening and repulsive.  Those who made it made holy stigmata in the palms of their hands, those who watch it are cursed to bear those stigmata as well, and to bleed out or die of infection from their wounds.  THIS MOVIE HAS STAINED THE SOUL OF ALL WHO WATCHED IT. YOU WHO COME AFTER US, TAKE WARNING.

end bit

(It’s not that bad, I just have standards and like being melodramatic sometimes.  It’s not supposed to be funny but it really is.)

Content Warnings for Black Easter: Assassin 33 A.D (2020) (Directors Cut)

Violence and gore: mild

• People die brutally in a sudden car crash out of nowhere at the beginning of the film.  This is probably the scene that is the single most likely to severely someone’s PTSD.
• The survivor of the car crash is left severely injured, disabled, grief-stricken, and comes close to killing himself. If either of those seem too heavy you can basically just show up 10-11 minutes late and those scenes will be over

Sexual violence: None

Other: Severe.  Cartoonish, but it’s chauvinist as fuck

• Racial tokenization
• War on Terror caricatures of Islam
• Judenhassian Antisemitism
• Brown-face

Doesthedogdie: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/122566

UnconsentingMedia: No Entry

IMDB Parental Guide: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8064418/parentalguide/

YouTube link to the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUkeQM_QsCA

Since we're having a Posadist revival

I've been into a few bookstores while wandering around and have seen exciting novel interesting books in the genres of horror, sci fi, and even fantasy (a genre I thought had been self preferentially done to death). And it's cool! I want to read these! But I am no longer a crippled child with ample time to read, so if I'm going to spend money on books and then spend a bunch of time reading I damn well want it to be worthwhile. This has led to me snapping pics of books so that I can download them instead later and give them the old up-to-3-chapters-to-hook-me try, and then at that point if I like it I may as well just read the eBook and not buy the book at all. Not a terrible way to do it tbh! But there's still the time investment problem and there's still the problem of the books or plots getting terrible later as the author injects more of their terrible worldview into the mix.

My issue is that when I'm reading a blurb on a book from an author I don't already know is good, I have no way to know if it's going to be interesting, innovative, and good, or if it's going to be mediocre slop. I have no idea if it's going to be full of shitlib tokenism and selective peace-policing. I have no idea if it's full of anticommunist brainworms or not. I have no idea if this is a tropy snorefest.

Googling for reviews online is surprisingly not as helpful as I'd have expected! I suppose I could turn to social media to see what people in general think, but the credibility is immediately undermined by how vapid and superficial BookTok's taste is (does it tokenize minorities? Then it MUST be good even if everything else about the book is dogshit!) or by how much Reddit loves Brandon Sanderson (have you ever heard of Mistborn it's the best series ever). I can't take these sources seriously for recommendations anymore because they've burned me.

Fuck the so-called "Weϟϟt", and marg bar amriKKKa

Album description:

On September 22, 1980, the Iraqi military under the command of Saddam Hussein, unprovoked, supported and heavily armed by the Western and Arab worlds, invaded an economically devastated and militarily weakened Iran following the events of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Through a brutal campaign of violence, terror, and the illicit use of chemical weapons against civilian populations, the Ba'athist dictator sought to quickly conquer his oil-rich neighbor in order to fulfill his nationalist fantasy of becoming the region’s dominant power. Despite facing crippling economic sanctions, a substantial lack of proper military equipment and training, and the world's major powers collaborating against them, the Iranian people retaliated and held their ground throughout one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history and prevented Hussein from taking even one inch of their land.

This album is dedicated to the myriad Iranian soldiers (many of whom were young volunteers) and civilians who lost their lives as a result of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, as well as the countless Kurdish victims of the Al-Anfal genocide. May they rest in peace and remain forever free from the failures of mankind.

Notes:

The title of this release is derived from the moniker used by Iranian forces in reference to the first battle that took place in the city of Khorramshahr / خرمشهر‎. Due to the heavy loss of life sustained by the extreme and brutal violence carried out by the Iraqi army against both Iranian soldiers and civilians alike, the city which was once home to many of Iran's upper class families became known as خونین شهر (transliteration: Khooninshahr), the City of Blood.

In Narrow Graves - The title of this track references a line from the poem " A Poem for War / شعری برای جنگ" by the acclaimed contemporary Iranian poet Qeysar Aminpour / قیصر امین‌پور, whose work is renowned worldwide for its innovative prose and compelling anti-war themes.

Halabja - As implied by its title, this track was inspired by the horrific events that took place on March 16, 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja, Iraq during the final days of the Iran-Iraq war. The opening lyrics, "come and see", allude to director Elem Klimov's eponymous masterpiece, which captures the horrors of war with an unsettling and harrowing realism very few filmmakers have been able to achieve.The lyrics "a silent city" are a nod to the stunningly beautiful collaboration album by the legendary Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider, whose title track also serves as a requiem for the events that took place on that dark day in Halabja.  

Song Lyrics: Beyond the filter Of this stifling mask Through the noxious fog Of mustard gas Past the barbed terrain Mined and vast Lies the playground Of blood and ash Where Saddam's dogs Shall breathe their last As we advance And push The bastards back Like choking rats In an iron grasp Their weakened battalions Succumb to Our violent wrath

Bullets burrow through Flesh, skulls, and jaws On gushing wounds Death tears and gnaws Men's intestines suspend From barbed wire Caustic sprays of Machine gun fire We wade through A mire Of guts and limbs In a void absent Virtue or sin Where Western arms And an upper hand Prove futile against A child who would Die for his land

For the innocent Lives consumed By the jaws Of Sarin's fumes With malice We incinerate The cowards and Their puppet state

For our children Burned alive While aboard IR655 Slaughtered by The U.S of lies We send their pawns To their grim demise

Every corpse Adorned with lead Every sundered bone And severed head Every drop of blood That is shed Paves the path to Avenge our dead

Blood demands blood

Alone, against the world We stand And vanquish all Who invade our land

Through a hail Of grenades and scuds We reclaim The City of Blood

The West And their puppet Saddam Are no match For Mother Iran

By the blood of پارس خلیج فارس Forever ours  

This is from Smiling Friends S01E01. I think the character's name is Allan. I think this would go well with beanis-on-the-cross.

CW for show if you are curious

Major CWs for suicidality if you do watch it. Someone recommended it to me without any CWs and I was a little shook but also it was a funny episode.

Soy hates my intestines, gluten as well, but I saw some new meat alternatives at a fancy grocery store so I am once again attempting to wean down from animals.

I found some pumpkin seed tofu and some fava bean tofu at the fancy grocery store. Cooking experiment, procedure done with both kinds of tofu:

Tofus were frozen, but I thawed them in the fridge for a day before cooking. Cut them into bite sized cubes

Put pan on stove with spices and oil. Turn burner on to mid heat. When hot, put tofu in. Wait a while. Take tongs and use them to flip the tofu cubes..

The pumpkin tofu cooked fine. Stayed intact, got to a food safe internal temp. In contrast, the fava bean tofu kept sticking to the pan and leaving a layer behind when I flipped it, and that layer burned. Meanwhile, it never reached 165 degrees F. I think it was wetter as the pumpkin tofu was prepressed

Eventually in frustration I just macerated the fava bean tofu into crumbles, left it on high and covered for a bit to make sure it hit the food safe temp, called it done and scraped what wasn't ash out of the pan. I've been adding the crumbs to daal to make them palatable/tolerable. Based on this experience I think I should stick with pumpkin, but I need as much variety as I can get in my already limited diet so I'd like to make the fava bean tofu work too. It also did not seem to really take the spices I put in as well and was overall more bland.

This has to just be a skill issue. What did I do wrong? I was basically trying to cook these as if they were meat; was that conceptually the wrong approach? Seems to have been because they're more delicate.

Neither of these tofus have tried to claw their way out from inside my body, so at least if I can figure out how to cook them they could be viable.

Is there any reason NOT to switch to ProtonVPN from Mullvad?

Use cases: privacy, torrenting without getting a DMCA letter.

OSs: Linux, Mac.

I know there was a reason I didn't pick up Proton years ago when PIA got bought by Kape but I don't remember what it was. I'd read something on /r/VPNTorrents but that place has since been banned so I can't refer to it again.

Subtitle: Let the Right Oldsferatu In

A note: timezone shit has gotten weird lately with the end of daylight saving time in the US.  Please refer to https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ or something similar to do timezone conversions to your local time

IMPORTANT NOTE: please use a good VPN whenever visiting Blorptube, or anywhere else on the internet, for that matter.  Protect your privacy.

We will be using Blorptube tonight: https://blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine.  It is still recommended to use a VPN for peertube.

The theme for tonight is dark bleakness because the weather finally matches my mood, and these vampire films make heavy use of darkness.

First up is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) at 4:30 Eastern Standard US Time.  It is 1h29m minutes long.

Second will be Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One in) (2008) (1h55m) at about 6:00 PM Eastern US Time.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

A classic silent film inspired by Dracula.  The vibes are immaculate and I actually like it more than the original Dracula book it’s inspired by.  This film was ordered to be destroyed on copyright-infringement grounds!  “Even with several details altered, Stoker's widow Florence sued over the adaptation's copyright violation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed.”  Luckily, some copies survived.  This movie was also allegedly banned in Sweden until 1972 for “excessive horror”

Content Warnings for Nosferatu: Symphony of Horror (1922)

Mild across the board.  Some less than great depictions of a mental institution, and Count Orlock has been noted as based on antisemitic caricatures.

Doesthedogdie: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/236790

UnconsentingMedia: https://www.unconsentingmedia.org/items/2125

IMDB Parental Guide: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013442/parentalguide/

TankieTube link to movie: https://tankie.tube/w/1Xa9E8no42PTKvhMBiY9Ss

Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One in) (2008)

This is billed as a “romantic horror film”.  I have my opinions on the matter and welcome discussion in the comments of this post about what you think of that label!  The film tells the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy who develops a friendship with a strange child in Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm.  Oops!  Turns out she’s a vampire!  A mix of horror and sweetness ensues.  Set against the bleak backdrop of the frigid North as Sweden is plunged into invernal darkness

Content Warnings for Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One in) (2008):

Violence and gore: Severe

• Depiction of graphic facial disfigurement from acid

• Someone is burned alive.

• Lots of blood

• Someone’s neck is snapped on screen

• Brief depiction of the aftereffects of genital trauma

sexual violence: Mild (text) to severe (subtext)

• None depicted explicitly, however some aspects of the relationships between the characters are inextricable from considerations of child abuse

Other:

• Some playing around with gender in ways that could be upsetting depending on how they're viewed.  The book was worse about it apparently, and the author reworked it to be much better for the film

• ending that is supposed to be ambiguous or bittersweet.  I personally believe it is just bleak.

Doesthedogdie: not linking because it’s wrong.

UnconsentingMedia: Not linking because it’s wrong.

IMDB Parental Guide: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/parentalguide/

TankieTube link to movie: https://tankie.tube/w/4bgWzWSrGLbDF2epXLhRaZ

New feature to these posts: sneak preview of 2 weeks hence:

Next time I have this slot I am hoping to do the 2024 Nosferatu, aka Newsferatu, because I missed it when it came out, and the Nic Cage film Vampire’s Kiss (1988).  We’ll have to start half an hour earlier as they’re both longer.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBd8ptCTHVk Emotes:

This song is so catchy. Shel's singing voice is kind of strange.

It is with regret that I feel I must publicly object to a certain subset of jokes about Islam on the grounds that they are tasteless.

Where I’m coming from: ex-Muslim with a complicated relationship to the faith, but this means I’ve had real-world training in how to spot a problematic Islamophobia and how to differentiate between good-natured fun, fair criticisms, and just gross behavior.  My opinion should be taken as my personal opinion on the matter and not speaking for anyone else.

The format of the joke and specific examples:

• “Alhamdulillah, Dick Cheney said the Shahada and embraced the Light of Islam on his deathbed!”

or as I just saw and which inspired me to write this,

• “[these Israelis whoremovedd Palestinian hostages] need to seek the light of Allah!”

BTW I'm definitely not saying "thou art cancelled" if you've made this joke, it's just a little course correction and community education as we all teach each other things

The Problems With This Joke:

1.  Accepting the premise, the idea people who are responsible for torturing and murdering thousands to millions of Muslims get to suddenly escape punishment for all the misery they’ve wrought is disgusting.  Celebrating that they would escape that is disgusting.

Now maybe some Muslims are so devout and peace-loving that they would celebrate such a converion and deathbed redemption.  But I never was even when I was religious.  My childhood prayers would be fedposts if I wrote them out.  I don’t want to imagine Dick Cheney going to Heaven, I want him to suffer in Hell.  The torment he inflicted upon his (surviving) victims will not end as long as they live.  The scars of torture last a lifetime, as do the emotional scars of seeing your family and friends be murdered over some imperialist nonsense.  If you want to dunk on Dick Cheney religiously, a simple and “burn in Hell” is way more solidaristic than pretending Dick Cheney got to co-opt the religion of most of his victims and escape justice for all the evil he did in life.

If you’re struggling with this concept, it may help to practice the reasoning in a different context.  You may ask yourself this: would you find it funny to joke about and celebrate the idea of Hitler converting to Judaism and coming out as gay and discovering he was part Roma and deciding that actually he supported Communism right before ridding the world of himself?

2.  It’s treating Islam as a punchline, something that’s inherently silly and funny, rather than something that is important to a quarter of the world’s population and a source of solace and strength for people resisting an active genocide.  A tool to be used to dunk on the conservatives, nothing more.  It feels like a more clever version of the liberalism of democrats saying shit like “lololol, D(R)umpf is gay for Putler” where the joke is just that they’re gay, because being gay is bad and worthy of ridicule.  What’s funny, that these bastards did something which their communities would view as heretical? No, then it wouldn’t be so specific.  The joke here is just that being Muslim is embarrassing, and that encodes Islamophobic thought.

People often use humor to cope with the uncomfortable.  I’ve done it too.  But I think this particular format, in light of SO MUCH horrific bloodshed specifically of people in this religious group, sometimes (often) even using their religion as the excuse to target them, has problems and we should be more aware of how we approach the topic.

That’s all.  There could be more to write, but I’ve got things to do and have covered everything that was easy to articulate.  Basically all the other jokes and seriousness that I’ve seen here — alhamdulillahs, mashallahs, inshallahs, others I haven’t written down — all seem supportive and inclusive.  There’s a bit of “trigger the War on Terror racists who freak out whenever they hear a bit of Arabic” coupled with “heartfelt solidarity with the victims of imperialism” to those that makes them wholesome in a way that the joke format I’m criticizing is not.