“All in all, not a bad day on set.” -Victoria Smurfit VICTORIA SMURFIT TALKING ABOUT KISSING KATIE MCGRATH ON DRACULA

1x02 Diefenbaker’s Day Off // 2x08 One Good Man // 2x13 White Men Can’t Jump to Conclusions // 3x01 Burning Down the House | Normalized

due South does a main character re-casting better than any other show on TV, and they do it by playing with television's own accepted meta-narrative.

Recasting a character has a long tradition in television, creating a viewership that knows and understands the storytelling short form at play. As viewers, we realize that sometimes actors aren't available to reprise a role (or simply aren't interested in it anymore); but, for the sake of the story, sometimes the show needs that character to come back. So we lean hard into suspended disbelief and just go with it. After all, the characters in the show accept the parareality of it—why shouldn't we?

Of course, the most famous example of a character recast would be the Dick/Darren disaster on 1960s sitcom Bewitched, when Dick York was unceremoniously replaced by Dick Sargent in the role of Darrin Stephens. ("The Dick Wars" would have gone absolutely insane).

it was... not successful

But they weren't the only ones to do it. Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince, Becky from Roseanne, Daario Naharis from Game of Thrones, Greg Serrano from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (pain, agony)—recasting characters but maintaining the fiction is a storied tradition in TV. New actor, same character; totally normalized.

And shows continue to do it, even today, with a—uh—similar dedication to fucking it up doing it poorly.

why must we be punished like this

due South even engages in this trope itself in season 2, when hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King is recast and they don't even try to find an actress who looks similar. In 1x02 Diefenbaker's Day Off, she's played by brunette Madolyn Smith-Osborne; in 2x08 One Good Man, she's been replaced by blonde Maria Bello, and nobody talks about it.

yeah i'm absolutely the same person, obviously

Everyone diegetically (within the world of the show) is just like, oh yeah, that's hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King. Totally. Only non-diegetically (outside of the world of the show) does the viewer go "No, that's not the same person." Internally, the fiction proceeds as usual.

So what would happen if, say, Samantha Stephens turned to Dick Sargent and said "You're not Darrin," when everyone else in the show continued to treat him as though he was? Or if Jaskier told Geralt that he knows he's not actually Geralt, and everyone treated him like he was delusional?

Or if Fraser, even, had recognized Mackenzie King as someone entirely different, and everyone treated him like he had a hole in his bag of marbles because of it? Of course that's Mackenzie King; even her boss knows it. No, she's never been a brunette. What are you talking about?

And that's exactly what happens in Burning Down the House.

the rays vecchio

Diagetically, everyone else treats Callum Keith Rennie's character as though he is Ray Vecchio. "Oh, good, you found him," says Det. Huey. Elaine, Franchesca, literally everyone else both at the station and outside of it treat Callum Keith Rennie Ray Vecchio as though he is David Marciano Ray Vecchio. They're acting exactly as any other TV character would in the face of a recasting: as though absolutely nothing had happened.

Except for Fraser.

Fraser's specific brand of parareal Canadian plot magic means that he's immune to the recasting blindness; he's acting as an agent of the viewer, voicing our non-diegetic concerns. Fraser is (as he so often is) a character with one foot outside of the narrative. He's just always been like this and he doesn't know why.

oh this man is infuriating and hot, fuck. shit.

And for a character who already thinks he is likely insane (he sees the ghost of his dead father! He communicates with his deaf half-wolf! He is instantly committed to a mental institution upon voicing the actual true story of his life!), this is very extremely distressing. Fraser thinks he's actually lost it this time, because everyone else in due South is acting like a TV character, and Benton Fraser is acting like a viewer.

This is so brilliant on so many levels. They just fully lampshade the damn thing. It allows our protagonist to speak for disgruntled or confused viewers. It engages at a postmodern level with television as a medium with a storied history (and due South is incredibly postmodern; nearly every episode is or contains a reference to another piece of media). It's written from the perspective of someone who loves and is knowledgeable about TV tropes.

And it gives us an entirely new Ray while still maintaining respect and loyalty to the original, something no other straight (lol) recast could ever do.

Genuinely one of the most clever, witty, well-crafted hours of television ever made. I could write essays about so many different parts of it. And I guess I will!!!!!!

It’s Burning Down the House week in our dS Stacked Rewatch!

peggy's fashion

day five: favorite outfit(s)/hairstyle(s)

As I grow older I feel my capacity to understand that Miss Piggy is not a real person reached a peak in my adolescence and is now on a steady decline. I watched a Wendy Williams interview and there's this part that's like "can we get a ring cam!" and Miss Piggy shows her bling and I'm just like fuck she's so iconic. Miss Piggy who are you wearing? Miss Piggy have you ever considered running for office??

Like literally every time I see Miss Piggy there's a period where I need to readjust to the fact that it's not a person, and I feel that period is getting longer and longer with every instance

now all my Youtube recommendations are filled with Miss Piggy interviews. I’m not complaining. Miss Piggy what’s your secret to ageing so graciously

It's not just the audience; professional journalists, hosts, and actors report it is legitimately difficult to not see the Muppet as a person, and it is, in fact, incredibly easy to interview or act with them once the performer gets properly set up.

Like that one time they couldn't figure out why Kermit's audio was so garbage... then realized they'd put the mic on him instead of the performer.

this has been a very longstanding issue - before the muppet show was even a thing some muppets appeared in commercials, such as rolf the dog they had a continual problem where when people directing/shooting the dogfood commercial would give dirrection to rolf that they would be speaking to the muppet, to which rolf REPEATEDLY had to tell them ‘i cant hear you, you have to talk to him’ and point at the performer underneath him rolf is one of the most embarrassing muppets to need this direction as the performer is this, damn, obvious when not on camera

‘sir, i am a bathroom mat, the man you need to talk to is back there’

I did an interview with Gonzo one time, and when I got into the Zoom call, it was the actor on screen trying to figure out his audio. And then once he did, he went like “OKAY!” and then just like dove to the floor and it was Gonzo and there was never a moment when I doubted that the dude was just Gonzo’s tech guy 

I have met a muppet-like puppet in real life and when I tell you that my brain was hacked FUCKING INSTANTLY..... It was a person, I swear it was a person. I asked it for a hug (no i was not 5 years old, i was like 28 at this time). i genuinely don't know what came over me, it was just. It was a person???? Witchcraft

A couple years ago, I was invited to the birthday party of one of my former preschool students. I decided to bring my teaching puppet (a big rat) along because I knew several other kids from that class would be there, and she was always a huge hit with them.

They were, of course, very excited to see her. But what surprised me was that after the kids ran off to play in the sprinkler, the parents around me struck up conversation with the puppet. They continued for at least fifteen minutes, asking her questions like, "how long have you been teaching?" and "eaten out of any good dumpsters lately?" until one dad exclaimed "why have I been talking to a rat puppet this whole time!"

There's a guy who comes to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with life size Skeleton puppets of mammoth/young T-Rex that he wears. You can fully see him in the middle of the skeleton, and it's a SKELETON, but absolutely everyone interacts with the puppets like they're living, breathing animals. I watched multiple people attempt to feed pretzels to the baby rex.

vader: who tore the warning sign off of this wampa cage?? storm trooper: security footage shows it was removed by a golden protocol droid vader: LOL

Vader in RotJ: wait the Alderaan princess is my daughter?? don’t know how to feel about that.

Luke: she strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain.

Vader: OH HELL YEAH

why would you hide this in the tags that’s hilarious

the thing about the mummy movies is that you really spend most of the time thinking "wow brendan fraser's character is so cool" or "man oded fehr is so mysterious and heroic" when the fact of the matter is that these two

are the absolute most batshit insane heroes in the entire franchise

these two are intellectual loner siblings with archeology backgrounds who read and speak ancient egyptian, hire a dude directly out of prison to take them to a lost city of gold, and fight mummies literally with their bare hands. twice.

no one in these movies stands a chance against the carnahans. frankly they're lethal in how willing they are to make the absolute and most undeniably deranged decisions. jonathan pickpockets a dude on fire. evy's resurrected from the dead and immediately remembers how to use sai. they're racking shotguns from a cliff in this scene and then proceed to blow away half the antagonists.

rick and ardeth should be so lucky

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

Share the knowledge

Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!

A few additions:

Shou Xin aka 手訫 aka Xin Shou (Chinese, based Henan, China) - A group of mischievous little line-drawn cats is pouncing your way!, Drawings: Pencil, Eraser, and small Knives for added texture

As an alternative to 'sugar, spice, and everything nice'

I present: 'salt, vinegar, and everything sinister'

no it does not, I am perfectly happy with my obscurity

Capitalization and Em Dashes and Parentheses and Dialog, Oh My!

Two weeks ago when we posted our "Formatting Tweaks to Help Your Typesetter Have a Great Day" post we mentioned that the "Capitalization Quirks" section became so long that we decided to break it out into a separate post. That didn't get put up last week cause of debuting May Trope Mayhem, but the time is NOW!

Capitalization Quirks, or: How to Get More Capitals and Lowercase Letters Right So Your Editor Has One Fewer Thing To Do!

At the most technical, literal, simplistic level, all sentences in English should start with a capital letter. If you google “should I always start a sentence with a capital letter,” all the top results say yes. But! That’s overly simplistic. For example:

That’s wrong, because it’s not a new sentence. The “—t” needs to be lowercase. Thus, this should read:

Then, there’s sentences that “trail in” with an ellipse. For example: 

This one, on a technical level, could go either way. Duck Prints Press goes with lowercase on this, using the same reasoning as the em dash case: it’s not a complete sentence, more of a fragment.

Some other examples where there shouldn’t be a capital (I’ll bold the letters that shouldn’t be capitalized).

Case 1: “In any event”—taking a deep breath, she flopped into her chair—“it is what it is.”

Case 2: After I got to the event (which took way longer than it should have, but that’s a different story!), we went to our seats together.

Case 3: Every time he thought he was finished—every time!!—he realized he’d made a mistake and had to start over.

Those cases are relatively simple and clear cut. Not all sentences will be. Often, when writing dialog, people use many permutations of sentences, not-sentences, ellipses, em dashes, and more. Keeping track of what needs to be capitalized and what doesn’t requires knowing a lot of quirky rules. People especially often end up confused about when text following quotes should have a capital letter and when it shouldn’t. The rule of thumb is, if the text in question is a dialog tag, it should be lowercase, even if the dialog before it ends in a question mark or exclamation mark.

(Again, bolding the lowercase/uppercase letter in spots where people most often get mixed up.)

If, on the other hand, the narrative text after the dialog is an action (as in, not a direct dialog tag indicating how the thing was said), then it should be uppercase.

But! That’s not all!

All of these more-or-less follow the established rules of dialog capitalization, but there are some cases that simply don’t have a standard. For these, it will often depend on which style guide is being used, what editor is doing the work, what each individual publisher has decided, etc. Here’s some examples, with explanation of what they show.

And, that’s basically that! Did I miss any? Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

In conclusion…

Uh...happy writing? Or at least good luck!!!

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10 Medieval Studies’ Articles Published in March

What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in March, which range from dealing with rioters in late medieval England to a bog dress.

Click here to read more

fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

it really is crazy how quickly people were willing to just let chatgpt do everything for them. i have never even tried it. brother i don't even know if it's just a website you go to or what. i do not know where chatgpt actually lives, because i can decide my own grocery list.

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14 Queer Stories for International Children’s Book Day!

Today, April 2nd, is International Children’s Book Day! A fair few of the people who contribute to our rec lists have kids, and of course we’re always on the lookout for queer-friendly children’s books, so here’s our list of 14 children’s and middle-grade titles. The contributors to this list are: Rascal Hartley, Nina Waters, Owl Outerbridge, Dei Walker and an anonymous contributor.

Find these and more Children’s Books on our Goodreads book shelf. Wanna buy some of these awesome books? You can get them through the Duck Prints Press Bookshop.org affiliate shop

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