how i'm doing now
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Since my last job ended, I’m done a bit of writing I’d like to share first and foremost:
For IGN, I spoke with workers who have been impacted by the layoffs in animation at Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I was on another show for two years. And then I left that show, which was kind of a cushy gig,” they said. “I wouldn't have made that decision if I had known, you know.”
This worker told IGN that they were frustrated by the lack of respect paid to animation workers by the studio, especially considering how much animation helped keep studios afloat during the pandemic.
“The level of disrespect is insane to me,” they said. “Throughout the pandemic, animation was the thing that kept working and kept working perfectly the same. Where everything else was shut down, like animation could still be made, and so that kept studios afloat. For them to turn around and do stuff like this is frankly, disgusting.”
Also for IGN, I wrote about the television show that has been a real balm for me, Interview with the Vampire on AMC.
When I revisit the novel, what keeps me enthralled in the story is not always the moment to moment story beats, but the beauty of Rice’s prose and the way she is able to convey the depth of Louis’s sorrow. Anne Rice’s vampires feel everything at eleven out of ten. Every insult, every heartbreak, every moment of joy, every instance of pleasure, all of it is heightened. They’re also eternally frozen in the moment of their death, still recovering from the trauma of their lives centuries into their undeath. The injustices that Louis feels have been done to him—by his vampire maker Lestat, by the world, by God—weigh on him like a rock in his gut. To read Interview with the Vampire is to really understand Louis’s point of view; the punishment of immortality, where he is eternally drowning in his own grief.
Watching AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, I do feel transported to the headspace of Louis again, still drowning in his own grief. Anderson’s Louis is the deeply troubled vampire he was in the novel; Lestat (Sam Reid) is as deranged; their surrogate daughter the vampire Claudia (Bailey Bass) is still a killer that menaces as only a child can. None of them show up in exactly the same way they do in the book. The ways in which they’ve been changed for the screen is what allows the story to highlight each of the things that make these characters feel so alive.
I wrote about Interview again at Polygon. In particular, I wrote about Lestat de Lioncourt, a horrible little man that I love.
Lestat is just a kind of character that people become obsessed with. Anne Rice clearly did, and she was the one who made him up. He’s a blorbo from my shows — a fictional character one could talk endlessly about as if they are a real person, even if they are both fake and have, in their fiction, committed war crimes.
Other than my more obvious woes, over the past few weeks I’ve been realizing how important a space Twitter has been for me professionally and also mourning it. For a short while after Musk bought the site and things immediately started getting bad and funny, it felt like a big party. But now the party has gone on too long. The energies have shifted. All your friends are leaving and some weird guys you’ve never met have brought out the hard drugs.
I’ve been spending more time on Tumblr than Twitter recently, which is a sentence I have not uttered since about 2010. I was an avid Tumblr user when the site was at its most popular, having joined most internet communities through fandom. While the site is probably mostly about fandom in some way—so many of the bios on people’s accounts mention which television shows they’re watching or books they’re reading in a way you never would on Twitter—it’s emerged as the space that I have the most fun on.
Goncharov is a good example of what makes a space like Tumblr fun. Even though it was inevitable that Tumblr users would overdo the joke—there is no kill like overkill on Tumblr—the creation of this fictional mafia movie out of a crazed air of creativity is part of why I go on the internet. It’s fun to feel like you are a part of a community. Twitter does not give me that feeling so much, and when it does, it often from a source of communal shunning or shame. It is nice to create things sometimes.
There are issues with Tumblr, of course, not just with the moderation and ownership of the site but also with the community. Fandom itself has become a very different thing than when I was on LiveJournal at age 11. The nice thing about Tumblr is that you kind of don’t have to care about that. As long as your friends are there, you can create tiny bubbles of your people and your interests that never intersect with the parts of the website that is fiercely debating about shipping.
See ya later,
Gita