“Moviegoers who knowingly buy a ticket for “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor are going to get exactly what they expect: There is a mummy, a tomb, a dragon and an emperor. And the movie about them is all that it could be. If you think “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” sounds like a waste of time, don’t waste yours. 
I, as it happens, have time to waste…”— Roger Ebert’s Review

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction”. The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. (Examples might include money, victory/glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, etc….or something entirely unexplained.)

MacGuffins are sometimes referred to as plot coupons (especially if multiple ones are required) as the protagonist only needs to “collect enough plot coupons and trade them in for a denouement”. 

(via wikipedia)

A Brief History of knowingness and irony— with LCD Soundsystem, Weezer, Hipster Runoff, Los Campesinos, and more.

http://pitchfork.com/features/why-we-fight/7801-why-we-fight-3/

melissa:

via ekstasis, msodradek:

“The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. The text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective baffles: vocabulary, references, readability, etc.; and, lost in the midst of a text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina) there is always the other, the author. As institution, the author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared; dispossessed, they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine (except to “prattle”).”

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, first published in French 1973, p. 27.

the blogger is dead also. the blog is his epitaph and the reader is vulture. reblog as necessary. discuss

nothing makes me happier than questionaires that put me in the lowest age bracket

thank god for coke and twenty-something dietary resiliance

theblueprint:

used to denote something is several levels beyond “next level”.