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It has been estimated that in salutes, royal and military compliments, exchanges of courteous hubbub, signals of etiquette, roadstead and citadel formalities, rising and setting of the sun saluted daily by all fortresses and all vessels of war, the opening and closing of gates, etc., etc., the civilized world, in every part of the globe, fires off daily one hundred and fifty useless cannon shots. At six francs per shot, that amounts to nine hundred thousand francs a day, or three hundred million a year, gone up in smoke. This is only one item. Meanwhile, the poor are dying of hunger.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (via handatthelevelofyoureye)

… I have no idea what a franc was really worth back then so I don’t know how outraged I should be but I suspect the answer is “quite a bit, really”.

(via pilferingapples)

If you’d like some perspective on their value—Feuilly earns three francs a day; from what I’ve read, there were workers who earned rather less. Marius lives on seven hundred a year. Bahorel, who is said to have a “prodigious allowance,” has three thousand a year.

The government is spending three hundred million a year on ritual cannon salutes.

(via midshipmankennedy)

As I read it this is about governmentS, plural, though? “the civilized world, in every part of the globe”. Not sure who all Hugo would have counted as Civilized, since he’s drawing that line, but that does spread out the outlay a bit. Still, yes, obvious rageness.

(via pilferingapples)

That’s a lowball estimate even for France; I’m having trouble tracking down accurate numbers on account of the July Monarchy was bad at government and the Second Republic was bad at everything, but even at the time of the June Rebellion there were more than 150 cannon-equipped warships in La Royale. If they were all launching ball at the sun as it advanced and retreated every day, then the problem was worse than Hugo thought it was.

…The problem was worse than Victor Muthatruckin’ Hugo thought it was.

(via texasuberalles)

WAITWHAT

I so hope you’re wrong because otherwise that’s like learning Upton Sinclair downplayed the hygiene problems in the meatpacking industry.

(via pilferingapples)

Oh gosh really?

(via apaladinagain)

apaladinagain:

10followedfelagund:

DELETED CLIPS FROM THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY.

Some things in this video that make it worth watching:

  • Legolas and Arwen saying goodbye to each other as the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, by awkwardly touching each other’s faces.
  • Homesick (heartbreaking) Merry and Pippin.
  • Aragorn angsting at Gandalf, over whether Sauron can really be defeated.
  • Shot of some orcs about to attack Lothlorien.
  • Wounded Merry being hugged by Pippin in the middle of a battlefield. 
  • Oh look, a really fucking big army of orcs.
  • A two-second shot of young Aragorn and Arwen being adorable in Lothlorien, where they first met.
  • Eomer being sexy as fuck (and kind of confused-looking? Or maybe that’s just his face), riding through a forest somewhere.
  • Legolas walking through a forest, which is not interesting unless you know this is the epilogue, and it’s supposed to be Ithilien. But then where’s his dwarf?
  • “If we do not trust to the strength of men, then we trust to the victory of Sauron.”
  • Eowyn. Is fucking awesome. And fights orcs in the caves under Helm’s Deep. 
  • Oh yeah, you know that Aragorn angstiness earlier, about Sauron? Turns out that in the original cut, that wasn’t a troll he was fighting at the gates of Mordor. It was literally Sauron. In the glowing, heavily-armored flesh.
  • Legolas being repetitive (of course).
  • Some Hobbits in suspenders.
  • Aragorn doing a L’Oreal commercial in the snow.
  • More stuff from the Council of Elrond. Apparently Sauron forged the Ring with some of his own blood inside it. Ew.
  • Elrond does the English version of the “One Ring to Rule them All” rhyme. Yikes.
  • Galadriel’s only appearance in the video, being ethereal as shit.
  • Arwen in her Helm’s Deep costume and hairdo. I’m so glad that never actually became a thing.
  • Oh wait I lied. Galadriel being even more ethereal. I didn’t think it was possible.
  • Eeew. Holy shit. Faramir’s vision of Frodo becoming a creature like Gollum.
  • Gimli’s epilogue scene! His magnifying glass reminds me of Balin.
  • Eowyn being a motherfucking badass, orc-killing and yelling at the other women to run. 
  • Aragorn getting his ass personally kicked by Sauron.
  • Aaaand a perfect ending: Some more Shieldmaiden kickassery by Eowyn.

/faints about everything but especially Eowyn fighting at Helm’s Deep

(Source: http://apaladinagain.tumblr.com/)

anotherwordformyth:

vixyish:

theshells:

Wait. Can we please talk about this please? The entire end battle of this movie. For most of the movie, Mulan has felt out of place. She doesn’t know where she fits in. Covering herself in femininity doesn’t work, like, at all. The scene of the matchmaker…I don’t even have to explain to show you how much that is not her. But then she runs away and poses as a man. She tries her hardest to blend in and be a guy, but at the same time, covering herself in the masculine just doesn’t work. She’s still awkward and out of place. The men eventually embrace her as one of their own, see her as a guy, but they see her as a strange guy, a very effeminate man. But this scene, this final part of the movie, she has finally found her place. She is short haired (masculine) and wearing a woman’s outfit. She has found her place as a tomboy, somewhere in the middle of extremes.

But to continue on and dissect this final battle, Mulan is facing Shan Yu. Shan Yu is huge and muscled, where Mulan is smaller, slimmer, but no doubt she is toned from all the training she’s done. Still, Shan Yu has his big ass sword and all she finds she is equipped with is the fan she and the other men used to sneak into the castle. She is equipped with a traditionally feminine object and Shan Yu is equipped with a traditionally masculine object. She uses that fan to disarm him, then uses the sword to trap him. Not only is this badass and clever, she uses an object she was uncomfortable with in the beginning to take a weapon she was also uncomfortable with earlier on in the movie and uses both of them to defeat a man twice as big as her with a much longer and much more extensive history of fighting and battles than she has. She, at this point, has learned to embrace both of the aspects of herself and use this to her advantage. She finally realizes by this time that she is not the traditional, overly feminine daughter her society wants her to be, but she isn’t the other extreme, either, the man’s man, lets-scratch-our-butts-and-fight-for-no-reason type seen when she first comes into the camp. She is a little bit of both, and realizing this and embracing it allows her to be more sure of herself and fully embrace who she is, making her happier, but also more confident (do I even need to point out how she stepped up as leader and showed the men a way to sneak into the palace? Oops, I already did), and a better fighter. She’s just all around awesome and this move she does when she disarms Shan Yu always makes me feel enormously proud of her and how far she’s come.

Why I love Mulan!

Also why I wish we’d get more images of her (pins, dolls, etc.) from THIS part of the movie. We get so many in her impress-the-matchmaker gown, and a number (at least of Disney pins) in her warrior garb as Ping.

THIS is the Mulan I want lots of pins of!

This scene is everything.

beneciodeltoros:

One colour that I am very particular about is obviously the red because all the reds in the movie, which are very very few, all lead to the same past, to the ghosts, to the crime and the passion and the secrets of Crimson Peak.

Red is a really brutal colour because its very voracious. Even the most subtle red burns and obliterates everything else. I was trying to make that red the past. To have that past seep through the floor, seep through the snow and reveal its true nature. Crime never stays hidden in classic romance.

I felt it was important for the ghost to be rather unique in appearance, and I chose to colour-code them in a way that has never been done before. The ghosts are buried in the clay, like the bog people in The Mummy, and I thought it would be interesting to treat them in the same colour as the clay under the house which is a bright crimson. The house is built over clay mines, and the clay is a bright red. They are visually coded and the only red in the entire movie. Everyone who has a bit of red has something to do with the ghosts. The rest of the movie does not have that colour at all.

– Guillermo Del Toro on the use of red in Crimson Peak

verysharpteeth:

hiddlesblog:

Show me where

Ok, so this moment was such an A+ gothic romance fantasy. You’ve got your two love interests, both the “angel” and the “demon” willing to die and more importantly work together to protect the woman they love. One ends up stabbed and the other ends up dead in the end, but they succeed in allowing her to save herself. If this isn’t the most swoonworthy gothic fangirl thing that would have a Bronte writing fanfiction about it, I don’t know what is. Well done Del Toro. Ann Radcliffe would be PROUD (and a bit angry she didn’t think of it).

zombeesknees:

#the
trick is not falling into the trap of thinking del Toro’s love of
monsters means ‘super nice good folks who look monstrous’  #listening to the director’s commentary on CP and the monsters in this aren’t only the nice ghosts  #thomas and lucille straight up murder people  #and he still loves them as embodying the concept of the monstrous  #and it’s not about a syrupy victorian super-happy redemption when edith realises she really does love thomas  #even after she KNOWS he facilitated her attempted murder  #and the actual murder of several others  #it’s not about forgiveness or changing or absolving – it’s just love  #like when he says in interviews love is not about changing someone it’s about accepting someone  #which – hi most gothic fiction – can make love horrific and melancholy as well as beautiful  #(as opposed to solely being healing and healthy)  #sometimes love is monstrous  #lucille’s love and thomas’ love AND edith’s love  #del Toro’s love of monsters isn’t just hellboy and that nice fishman  #he loves the kaiju that killed mako’s parents and he loves the sharpes  #and whatsmore he loves that edith loves thomas when it’s (in his words) ‘too late’  #the
point of this is i worry about the current love-fest from the united
states re: guillermo del toro turning sour the way it usually does  #like ‘we liked u when by monster u meant the ugly duckling’  #‘but now that u actually mean monsters like ‘horrifying behaviour’ we need to throw u on the trashpile’  #i mean like and dislike whatever you want but GdT’s thing is right there on the label and he’s not shy about it  #idk i can see him being accused of being a Rochester Apologist after his next gothic romance and like can we pre-emptively Not