skygiants

Last night we went to go see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which I am going to attempt to write up very hastily because tonight is the LAST night it's in Boston and it was great so if anyone is inspired to make a last-minute booking they have the chance.

This is an all-dance essentially ballet production; no idea how it would have read or how comprehensible it would be if one was not familiar with The Story of Hamlet but as someone who does know the Story of Hamlet, it does a really beautiful job at being a Hamlet -- one of the friends I was with said afterwards 'I could hear the soliloquies in my head when Hamlet was doing solos' and I definitely also experienced that effect.

The cast was pared down to Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and R&G, and each of them had their own specific dance style that evoked their character. R&G in particular I thought were really striking, a sort of matched slithery jester style that involved a very different kind of physicality from Horatio or Laertes, and Horatio's style was sort of similar to theirs but a much more classical ballet jester with cartwheels and so on -- there was one part where they were dancing a pas de trois where they were all essentially dancing the same, and then Claudius shooed Horatio away and R&G immediately got slitherier. Horatio and Hamlet also did the play-within-a-play as a pas de deux, backs facing the audience with horrible comic mask-faces for the king and queen in the play on the backs of their heads, and it was so funny and creepy and fantastically disorienting.

Ophelia was fantastic, the Ophelia-Laertes-Polonius relationship was very intense -- Polonius was a sort of classical ballet wizard with a big staff that he used in all his dancing, which I thought was very funny but also very effective -- and Ophelia's madness was a really beautiful and awful sequence with mirrors and all of the cast emerging out of them, first just hands grabbing for her and then everyone surrounding her and pulling her in different directions. (The show was Not leaning away from incest vibes in all directions either, Hamlet planted one on Gertrude's lips at the end of Polonius' death scene; afterwards another friend was like 'maybe I am forgetting the plot of Hamlet but who was the woman in the room when he killed Polonius? Isn't that normally his mom??' WELL.)

The ballet also added a couple of dance bits to evoke scenes that are not actually in Shakespeare's script and thus heighten relationships; there's one that I loved when Laertes goes away to France that's Laertes going in one direction with his little rucksack and Hamlet and Horatio coming the other way after having just seen the ghost, and they pass each other agonizingly slowly and then have a fraught farewell handshake, and then during the dancing with Ophelia's corpse scene (POOR OPHELIA, they are straight-up hauling that actress around and fighting over her limp body while Horatio chases after Hamlet like 'PLEASE CHILL OUT, PLEASE BE NORMAL') there's a part where Hamlet and Laertes just kind of fall into each other's arms for a moment and cling and start to grieve together and then Claudius runs up and hauls them away from each other and they start fighting again. Gertrude also gets a beautiful little solo bit to change into mourning clothes for Ophelia's funeral where she dances in a fraught way with Hamlet's sword and is doing the sort of rocking-a-baby ballet motion, which despite having no words is a really nice bit of Gertrude interiority that you don't usually get.

Let's see, what else ... oh, the ghosts! The ghosts are all done with big tricks of shadow and light and are extremely, extremely cool. Also Horatio steals the tablecloth to pretend to be a ghost during the big breakfast scene to try and explain to Hamlet what's going on and it's very cute. I think the thing that worked least was the big finale, which looked extremely cool (Laertes and Hamlet both had big long streamers attached to their swords and they fought with them) but did make it very difficult to track who was poisoned at any given time. But overall strong recommend for Hamlet enjoyers and very curious to hear what anyone who was not previously a Hamlet enjoyer made of it if they happened to see it.

The other show I recently saw on Broadway was the new revival of Sunset Boulevard, which is just an absolutely fascinating example of what staging and direction can do to a familiar show.

The friend I went with pitched it to me with a link to this review: "have i ever seen sunset boulevard. no. am i FASCINATED by a show that hates its source but is maybe good? yes." Thinking about it, I don't think I'd ever previously seen Sunset Boulevard staged either, but I've heard the music a bunch, which is what listening to Broadway Pandora Radio a lot in the early 2000s gets you, and read a lot about it because that's what reading a lot about the history of noir gets you, so it feels deeply familiar and known to me despite the fact that I have never, technically, been to a production.

So forth we went, and returned afterwards to the question of whether the show does hate its source: no! I don't think it does! Genuinely, I think it loves its source/s, the film and the musical both, and what it's trying to do is aggressively situate itself as a musical in the context of them.

For those to whom it is less familiar, the basic plot of Sunset Boulevard: in 1950s Hollywood, a desperately out-of-work screenwriter extremely behind on his rent accidentally ends up at the house of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond, who lives in a mausoleum to her own past fame and is convinced that once she finishes the script she's working on, she can launch herself back into stardom. Once he takes a job as her script doctor, he finds himself feeding her professional and romantic obsessions in an increasingly Gothic spiral that inevitably culminates in tragedy.

In the original film, Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, a famous silent screen siren who was once once such a valuable asset to her studio that she was "carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the set", and her Significant Gothic Butler by Erich von Stroheim, a famous silent film director who had not directed a picture since 1933. It is a gothic noir About Movies, About Hollywood Culture, About Fame -- and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical is likewise About Movies, About Hollywood, About Fame; what this new production does, I think, is also make it About Theater, about film and theater, about how those are and are not the same thing.

The show's sets are existent, but minimal. The biggest element is a huge projection screen, and the crew -- and sometimes the cast -- have cameras with which they walk onto the stage, getting up close, projecting faces. The cameras are not invisible; the cast know that they're there. Norma is always playing to them. Other characters react to them in variable ways, but they know that they're being watched. The projections are always in black and white, and so is most everything else; it's high-noir, high-chiaroscuro, almost no color on the stage whatsoever, really effectively creepy. If you had asked me before this if an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could genuinely scare me, I would have confidently said no! I would not have been correct!

The most striking staging choice of the show -- and, I think, the one that most clearly portrays its directorial vision, its argument -- is ( staging spoiler I guess?? cut for length anyway )

Good production! The friend I went with is planning to see it again and I wish I could too. Also I guess now I do have to actually see the movie.

By coincidence, Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying came in for me at the library right around the same time as Long Live Evil, for an accidental double feature compare/contrast on English Language Villain Isekai Published By Orbit Last Year.

How To Become the Dark Lord is not just isekai, but also regression -- Our Heroine Davi is originally from Earth, but has spent approximately a thousand years (subjective) trying repeatedly to fulfill her apparent destiny to save fantasyland from the Dark Lord and losing the final battle every time (on the lives where she even makes it that far). Conveniently, after a thousand years, Davi remembers almost nothing about her actual life on Earth, but retains a near-encyclopedic knowledge of jokes, slang, pop culture references, etc., etc, in order to keep up a peppy, slangy first-person narration. (Occasionally Davi alludes to the likelihood that she might misremember a lot of these pop culture references, but as far as I noticed she never actually does; honestly, I wish she had, as it would have stretched my disbelief on this point slightly less.)

Anyway, the book begins when Davi has hit such an extreme point of frustration with the endless cycle of never beating the final boss that she decides she might as well see if she fares any better at becoming the final boss, and sets out on a quest to pick up a horde of orcs and and other horde-creatures to compete for the title of Dark Lord. Along the way, she learns some valuable lessons about moral relativity, how it is a bummer when people on either side of a fight die, and how it's possible that the choices she makes do matter to herself and the people around her even if she's stuck in an endless regression loop, by way of befriending some of her horde and falling for a hot butch orc woman.

So, you know, it's a comedy regression isekai. It's a perfectly fun way to pass the time, and hits all the beats it should hit. It's going broad rather than deep, and the emotional relationships did not pull me in particularly; Long Live Evil was for me more uneven but also much more absorptive, but I suspect tastes will differ on that score. One thing seems for sure across both books though and that is that we are in the era of Protagonists Making Personal Little Pop Culture Jokes For An Unappreciative Audience with a vengeance.

It's Festivids! I received two extremely delightful Court Jester vids -- Make 'Em Laugh and Better Not Wake The Baby -- both in their own ways replete with incredibly good jokes and beautiful encapsulations of the Particular Energy of this movie.

There are also a bunch of other great vids this year; I haven't had a chance to watch all the ones I wanted yet but here's a bunch I enjoyed from my first pass:

You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate (Derry Girls)

nearly impossible to go wrong with a You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate vid and this is perhaps the perfect source for it

Fabulous (Derry Girls)

Sister Michael is so majestic

Next Episode (Murderbot)

really impressed by the conceit and the technical skill on display

Phantom Stranger (Severance)

creeped me the hell out [enormously laudatory]

Cross My Heart I Hope U Die (Severance)

incredible evocation of the entire thriller that is The Helly Show

The Hour is Yours (Severance)

great joke until it isn't in the best possible way

We Were Here (Space Sweepers)

beautiful vid that filled me with Emotion about this movie and all the very hot people in it

The Spear Cuts Through Water (The Spear Cuts Through Water)

beautiful book vid that evokes all the layers of the source text

Perfect Femme (Stick It)

it IS a femininomenon!! made me immediately want to go rewatch the whole movie

Arnaq (True Detective: Night Country)

I've not actually seen this show but the vid gave me chills

Let me start out by saying that I had a great time reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Long Live Evil. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a wonderful distraction in a difficult week. I will read the sequel.

I am now going to attempt to describe the experience and I want it to be understood that I mean this in the most value-neutral, non-pejerative way possible: I read a lot of recent books that have a definite eau d'AO3 about them, and it was honestly quite refreshing and nostalgic to pick up a book that instead feels like reading a longfic on LJ circa 2005.

I do not mean the plot ... well, I sort of mean the plot. In 2005 we did not yet have the thriving genre of Villainess Isekai -- that didn't really kick off until mid-20-teens -- and Long Live Evil is emphatically a villainess isekai. However, 2005 was the immediate post-Buffy era, and what we did have in spades is Quippy High School Girl Enters High Drama Fantastical Situation, dropping memes and one-liners like there's no tomorrow, to the befuddled admiration of everyone around her. Another genre is possible! We don't have to take ourselves so seriously! At least not until it's time for a big angsty scene -- and it will eventually be time for a big angsty scene, have no fear, we can have our cake and eat it too. But first, there will be a musical episode.

Long Live Evil is what happens when you take the villainess isekai plot and absolutely marinate it in this particular 2005-era sensibility. Our Heroine is dying of cancer when she gets transmigrated into a minor villainess in her favorite epic fantasy series; unfortunately because she read the books while she was dying of cancer, she has forgotten much of the plot of the first book, which does not prevent her from saving herself from imminent execution by claiming to be a prophetess with visions of the future. She then spends the next several hundred pages sailing around and encouraging the other minor villains in her orbit to be fun and campy. There are over-the-top outfits! There is a musical episode! Everybody gets to romance their favorite character, and ALL these romances have a healthy dose of angst and betrayal and situations where one of the characters has to menace the other with a sharp knife! ( spoilers but also as soon as you meet any of these characters it is not a surprise how things will play out )

There are also possibly more memes by volume than in the Locked Tomb series and I do not say that lightly. The one that really broke me is when one of the in-book characters is looking at his love interest and thinks the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more. This is not even a meme unless you are on a very particular subset of tumblr. It is a quote from Ernest Hemingway's The Moveable Feast regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I know in my heart that it's in this book because it circulates on tumblr, and I also know in my heart that maybe 5% of the book's actual readership would recognize it as either a meme or a quote, and there isn't even the excuse that the character in question might be actively quoting tumblr because he is not a transmigrator, so what, pray tell, is it doing here?? And I have no answer, except that this is the kind of thing that people did in 2005, on livejournal, which is to collect little in-jokes and throw them magpie-like into their fanfics as Easter eggs or something.

But, also, setting all this aside, Long Live Evil is genuinely doing everything that I want out of the genre of isekai! I get bored with portal fantasy where the characters' backgrounds do not matter to the action; our heroine's personal history is central to the plot in every direction. I enjoy when we get a little meta about isekai ethics and how we feel about fiction vs reality; so does Long Live Evil! The tension between two central transmigrators about whether the experience that they're experiencing should be judged according to the ethics of reality or the ethics of fiction is my favorite element of the book. I like when background characters matter and are significant and have the ability to throw the plot in new and unexpected directions, and so does Long Live Evil! And I also like the experience of coming across a completely absurd but inexplicably compelling fic at midnight and staying up too late to read it, and this Long Live Evil absolutely provides.

I do not like tripping over a tumblr meme every five pages and going 'again?! we are in the POV of an in-universe character now! this man has never been on tumblr and never will be!' It does break my peaceful 'it's fine, this is spiritually from 2005' suspension of judgment, because even though did not have tumblr in 2005. But you can't win them all.

A few months ago, I read Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword. Well! I said. That was a fascinating experience! I don't think I'm going to continue it! But it sure was fascinating!

However, then osprey_archer came along with a devil's bargain, and so, here we are, back again, with Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions.

Returning readers may recall that in book one, Peasprout Chen attended ICE SKATING MARTIAL ARTS SCHOOL in FANTASY TAIWAN with her BABY BROTHER, a PAIR OF HOT MYSTERIOUS TWINS, and A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO HATED HER. In book two, all these people are still at martial arts school, but we have added a New Girl into the mix: Yinmei, the GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER of the DOWAGER EMPRESS of FANTASY CHINA.

Yinmei has a voice as sweet and bright as a brook! She has a face like a mirror burning with light! She keeps giving Peasprout one-sided smiles and telling her things like 'you are the lock and I am the key!' Peasprout obviously takes all of this as a sign that Yinmei is interested in stealing the heart of the Hot Mysterious Boy Twin.

Yinmei also can't take more than five steps in one day or her heart will explode, because of a punitive dose of magical puberty blockers. This apparently was NOT just a throwaway line in the last book. Cricket might also be dying from magical puberty blocker side effects; unclear.

Anyway! ICE SKATING MARTIAL ARTS SCHOOL is being MENACED by FAKE CHINA, so the entire curriculum has become All Child Soldier Training All The Time and instead of last year's elaborate solo challenges everyone has to form up into BATTLEBANDS and compete in BIG BAND BATTLES. Fake China has also announced that they will STOP menacing Ice Skating Martial Arts School if Ice Skating Martial Arts School RELINQUISHES PEASPROUT CHEN, but Peasprout has bargained herself ongoing sanctuary if her battleband comes in first in EVERY big band battle competition. Peasprout's battleband, of course, includes her BABY BROTHER, the HOT MYSTERIOUS TWINS, and, intermittently, Yinmei -- intermittently because Peasprout changes her mind about once a chapter about whether Yinmei is a VALUABLE AND VALIANT ALLY or a SINISTER SPY.

[Other battlebands include the Battle-Kite Sparkle-Pilots, who all bleach their bangs and look like kpop idols; Radiant Thousand-Story Very Tall Goddess, who climb into a sort of giant mecha pyramid of ice skating martial artists; and the Pink Army, who cut their hair into bowlcuts and declare themselves an arm of the police in a bewildering plot beat that turns out to be completely irrelevant. I was charmed by Radiant Thousand-Story Very Tall Goddess though.]

So all that is one big problem. Another problem is the school is apparently being menaced by water dragons and any students who accidentally see them will immediately be turned into pillars of salt.

( The rest is spoilers ) Many questions with Peasprout Chen, but I'll say this for these books: as much as they make my eyebrows leap up into my hairline, they are NEVER boring.

When I found out that Grand Theft Hamlet was playing at one (1!) theater in Boston on Saturday, I immediately rearranged my whole schedule to see it. I am posting about it Now in case this is true for anybody else, because I do think it's worth seeing in theaters if you can -- the whole thing is, of course, shot entirely within Grand Theft Auto and the fact that it looks absurdly beautiful on a big screen is I think part of the absurd charm of the whole thing.

Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about a pair of out-of-work actors who decided to stage a production of Hamlet during the pandemic, using the tools at their disposal: to wit, the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto and any Grand Theft Auto players who could be convinced to turn up and recite Shakespeare instead of committing random acts of violence at auditions. It's a documentary because one of the actors happens to be married to a documentary filmmaker, who decided to join him in GTA to find out what the appeal was.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the trailer:



I enjoyed this movie exactly as much as I thought I would enjoy it, which was a tremendous amount. aria described it as "like watching Slings & Arrows and Staged kiss while cool funny explosions happen in the background," which I think is extremely accurate. I love people getting through rough times by getting very invested in artistic passion projects; I love backstage problems; I love extremely that it is apparently impossible for any actor to go through the experience of putting on Hamlet without having an existential crisis about "To be or not to be," even if they are doing it in Grand Theft Auto.

As a sidenote, I think it's very funny that I seem to have backed myself into being a fan of Hamlet by becoming very passionate about several pieces of media about people putting on productions of Hamlet ... I am a simple person with simple enjoyments. Show me an actor going into an absolute tailspin about how to deliver a soliloquy that's previously been performed by all of history's greatest while something about the production blows up metaphorically or literally in the background and I am contented every time.

We ended up bookending the new year by going out to the movies twice, so my last film of 2024 and my first film of 2025 were both brand new animated pictures -- this however is probably as much similarity as I can draw between The War of the Rohirrim and Flow.

The War of the Rohirrim reminded me of nothing so much as classic Rankin and Bass animated films of my childhood like The Hobbit and Flight of Dragons. Notably, I don't think either of these films is considered to be particularly good, but I loved them very much. I think War of the Rohirrim is probably better and definitely prettier than either of the movies to which I have just compared it, and had it come out when I was a child I also would have loved it very much. As it was, I had a very good time but genarti and I did somewhat regret that we did not have the theater to ourselves ... apologies to the two guys sitting right behind us ....

The War of the Rohirrim concerns a very heroic princess of Rohan who gets caught in the middle of a long war and brutal siege when she rejects her childhood friend's marriage proposal right before a fight between their dads, in a one-two punch that turns said childhood friend tragically evil. (The childhood friend and his people are all brown-haired and dark-skinned in contrast to the blonde Rohirrim, but not to worry! our heroine has a very heroic dark-skinned cousin and the tragically evil childhood friend has an Honorable Advisor, the movie would like to assure you that it is Not racist and please not to think about it too much.) It is mostly a very normal Heroic Fantasy War Movie with a lot of moments of stirring and tragic heroism and there are only about thirty minutes where I kept catching Beth's eye and then had to completely cover my mouth to stop from laughing.

Ten of those minutes are early on in the film when ( spoiler 1 )

Then the next twenty come much later on, during the brutal siege bit of the plot, when ( spoiler 2 )

Anyway. Pretty movie! Fun to watch! I recommend watching it in a situation where you can talk to your friends so you can ask them questions like "why do these elephants have cat-eye pupils, isn't that an evolutionary disadvantage?" and "is she wearing knee-high boots over thigh-high boots?" without bothering anybody else in the theater.

genarti and I also spent a lot of time catching each other's eyes and covering our mouths with our hands while watching Flow, but that was NOT to stop from laughing, that was because a little cat had its EARS BACK and was making SAD SCARED NOISES and we were pretty sure that cat was going to be fine but that did not stop us from being STRESSED.

Flow is a beautifully animated Latvian film about a cat's adventure through a surreal magical flood and its encounters with a variety of other animals along the way, and how they end up helping each other to survive in a transformed landscape. All the animals act exactly like the animals they are, if those animals were just like ten degrees smarter than the average (smart enough to figure out how to steer the rudder of a boat, for ex.) but that aside the Behaviors are really well-observed -- I especially loved every sequence in which one creature tentatively tries to make friends by mirroring another creature's posture.

There are no humans in this movie, although the signs of their presence and absence are felt throughout. There is no dialogue. The animals make animal noises. (Except the capybara, which, according to Wikipedia, makes baby camel noises.) The sound design is really incredible -- I never want to hear a human actor speak out of a cartoon cat again. We had plans to run errands after the movie, but we ended up having to make a detour home first to pet our cats. No regrets.

My Yuletide recipient wrote me an absolutely phenomenal letter this year with like five different prompts that I wanted to fill, leaving me paralyzed with indecision ... I eventually decided that, in the spirit of Yuletide, I should try from the rarest fandom and work my way back to see what else I could manage to write, which is how I ended up inaugurating the tag for Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home with the memory of paint, a story about Hail Rosamer and Ludovic Nallaneen and artistic semi-immortality.

And then I had to do some unexpected travel and got a little bit sick and thought perhaps I wouldn't have time or energy to write anything else, but fortunately the day before Christmas I got possessed by the muse and wrote A Midwinter Night's Folly; or, Laugh, Lie, Love, a Twelfth Night story about Sir Toby & the gang that is mostly just thirty dick jokes in a trenchcoat (though no one has yet caught my stealth Christmas pun, contributed by genarti.)

(As a side effect, I have now fully brainwashed myself into becoming a 'Sir Toby and Sir Andrew have absolutely banged' truther; if the 'accost, Sir Andrew, accost!' scene is not Toby optimistically angling for and completely failing to land a Toby/Andrew/Maria threesome then I don't know how else to explain it.)

I also jumped in to contribute a little bit to genarti's Operation Mincemeat Hester-focused epistolary pinch-hit, Moments in the Middle of the War, for which she has kindly given me co-author credit even though all I did was write 250 words of largely-redacted largely-nonsense letter. Anyway, the vast majority of it is her excellent work and well worth reading!

Sometimes I get a six hundred page book out of the library and it comes in hardcover, and I look at it and go, "oh no, I will not be able to be fair to this book in my heart, because my arms will be Too Tired." And indeed I read it and spend the entire time going "this book could have been shorter! we didn't need that scene!"

And sometimes I get a six hundred page book out of the library and I feel not a JOT of resentment because I do believe that every one of those six hundred pages provided a necessary and valuable contribution. Kelly Link's The Book of Love takes maybe a hundred pages to get through the first full day of its plot in which almost nothing happens after the major inciting incident, and yeah, it did need all hundred of those pages, actually. I don't know what to tell you.

The inciting incident of The Book of Love is that teenaged Laura, Daniel, and Mo, who have been missing -- dead? -- for a year, are suddenly (temporarily?) alive again, thanks to their music teacher who was always apparently supernatural, and always apparently locked in a power struggle with Bogomil, whose realm they have just escaped along with an extremely weird stranger they call Bowie. Their music teacher tells them all, including Bowie, to figure out what happened the night they died, and to try to do some magic, before sending them all home.

Also, everyone in their life, who has been grieving them for a year, now instead believes that they spent the last year on an exchange study program in Ireland.

Also, the music class blackboard bears the message TWO RETURN, TWO REMAIN. Which is probably fine.

So they go home, to families whose houses and minds have the marks of a year of grief that they now don't remember, and try and figure out how and whether they could and should do magic.

There's plot that happens from there, around Bogomil and the music teacher and the powerful and amoral Malo Mogge who shows up shortly thereafter, trapped fifteenth-century Thomas in tow, to fill the town with increasingly terrifying surrealism. The plot is IMO the least successful and important part of the book except that it provides a vehicle through which to pick up different characters and relationships and hold them up to the light for a moment -- Laura and Daniel and Mo and Laura's sister Susannah, the link between these people and the one who did not die, and their parents and siblings and friends and part-time job bosses and high school crushes, and those people's parents and siblings and friends, all moving through grief and change and figuring out what they want to be to each other. This is a book driven by a community and the people in it and their relationships to each other much more than it's driven by impending magical peril, and I think this is a feature and not a bug. At one point Laura and Daniel go to a bar, and then we spend two pages in the POV of the bar's owner, learning about her relationship with her father and how she came to run a bar that has a working carousel; none of that is important, except in the way that it's important. Then Malo Mogge turns the bar owner into a tiger, which you would think would be more important to the book than learning about how much she loved her father, but not really. 'The Book of Love' is a big claim. I don't think every part of this book succeeds at all things, but broadly, I think it fulfills the brief. I liked it very much and I was glad for all the pages that it had, even when my arms were tired of carrying them.

(As a sidenote, if I had to guess, I would lay a small amount of money that S5-6 of Buffy was one of the kernels of inspiration for this book -- the strangeness of returning from the dead! sisters appearing and disappearing out of nothing and how you love them anyway! Your High School Teacher Is Part Of A Long Supernatural War! -- which is very funny because in terms of tone and pacing it is the exact opposite of monster of the week. We will NOT be telling ANY stories in forty minutes. Get comfy! Settle in!)