Epeolatrix

So-called cancel culture has existed since the beginning of celebrity culture itself. Wil Wheaton was the victim of pointless bullying, yes, but that's not the same thing.

I'm pretty sure it's a shield because it's transparent at the bottom.

I'd always assumed it was taken more seriously as a tragedy at the time, and that the movie played up the comedic bits.

Taymor made it less tragic and more Shakespeare splatter-punk, I think. Everything was so heightened, excessive, and scenery chewing! It did have wonderful performances, though, and it was beautifully staged.

The first thing I ever saw Matthew Rhys in was Julie Taymor's Titus, where he played Goth (literal Goth, not Hot Topic Goth) villain Demetrius. My favorite description of the character is "He is a quarrelsome, lascivious, and violent boy, with very low opinions on women – though he does love his mother."

Anna Torv said: I always take things a little too [introspectively], so when I first read it in the script I was like, 'Oh my God, wow, this is actually interesting,'" she told TVLine. "I thought, 'This little kitten is representative of all these faceless [victims] and we only notice the ones that are dead because they have families that are looking for them. And then here’s this little abandoned cat that no one is going to care about. And if that was a person, it’d be the same thing.'" David Fincher said: The audience is meant to think that maybe the cat's sudden disappearance means "there was a kid in the building who’s going around killing cats. And it’s a birth of a new sociopath that we don’t quite know about. Because that’s how it starts — with [inflicting harm on] animals."

Inside the Costume Design of HBO's 'Perry Mason': "There's So Much Wear and Tear and Life"

The kidnapping case is inspired by that of Marion Parker. Sister Alice is based on Aimee Semple McPherson.

I especially love that he's inspired by Antonio Banderas as Armand in "Interview with the Vampire".

Condoms weren't pre-lubricated until the 1950s. Before then, people used Vaseline, Crisco, and K-Y gel if you could get a prescription for it.

For those that might be curious, the murder and dismemberment story of the little girl Florence Moore is based on the real-life Los Angeles case of Marion Parker from 1927. This link goes to a great history site called "Deranged LA Crimes: True 20th Century tales of murder, mayhem, political corruption, and celebrity scandal", and the Aggie of the title is notable LA reporter Aggie Underwood. She gained fame for her reportage of the Black Dahlia murder, but her career started much earlier.

Okay, so... I've decided I can handle a bit of argument because I feel secure in my sources. I haven't seen the latest episode yet, so I might be talking about things already covered; if so, sorry. The tl;dr version is that I think Wayne might have killed some of the victims, but I don't think he killed all of them. I'm willing to accept the ones where there's DNA evidence, but forensic science for things like hair and fiber isn't as much a sure thing as we believe, and it was likely even less so back then when the science wasn't quite as sophisticated as it is now. I think the pedophile ring involving John David Wilcoxen was responsible (or connected at the very least) for some, due to him and friends being a common link between a few of the children. I also would not be surprised if a couple were klan related, meaning the people who said they were in the klan and also bragged about killing kids. Yeah, maybe they were just trying to seem more important than they were, but it seems short-sighted to not have given it more consideration. Lastly, the killings did not necessarily stop when they arrested Williams; authorities stopped adding cases to the list. Also, there had been deaths that fit the criteria of the list, but weren't added when the ATKID case was still active, so even determining the actual victims remains a challenge. Do I think there was a massive and purposeful cover-up and framing of Wayne Williams? No. I think it was an extreme situation, a complex tangle of possible killers and possible victims, and authorities were overwhelmed.

I've been watching, but I got tired of arguing with people, so I'm reading without comment.

These are some of the books in my queue. I just started "The Third Reich in 100 Objects: A Material History of Nazi Germany" by Roger Moorhouse, about the way Nazi ideology was part of so many minor elements of German life during WW II. If this is a time & place you're interested in, you will probably like this book. Next up: "The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife" by Peter Gatien because everything I know about him and that club scene is filtered through the lens of Michael Alig and 'Party Monster'. “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables” by David Bellos in preparation for reading the whole novel in English for the first time. Before now, I'd only read a few chapters for a French class a bazillion years ago and I've forgotten everything. However, a friend wanted this for Christmas and it looked interesting enough to get my own copy.

I love all these shows, but yes Corner Shop has managed to get in a lot of historical detail. The only one that disappointed me was Back In Time for Brixton, and that's because it was only two episodes and I'd hoped for more. That said, I have a soft spot for anything with Ruth Goodman because there's less of her being dismayed by history and more, "Here's what we know from books, how does that work in 'real life'?" and she always seems to enjoy every time period she's in.

A less brown-face version, a version that plays out the old story with an awareness of our current sociopolitical environment, and it's been 60 years so why not have a new version that might resonate more with "today's youth". This story has been presented many times over the past six decades on stage and in film; this is just one more performance. Even in the sense of film, the original isn't going to disappear from all recorded media and memory; I think they can co-exist. It will be interesting to compare and contrast them, since our stories tend to reflect society at the time and place the story is told as much as when the story is set.

I just finished "Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession" by Rachel Monroe. It's not true crime itself so much as the author's musings about the relationship of women to true crime and what drives that. She writes about Frances Glessner Lee of the Nutshell Studies of Death, talks to a member of Sharon Tate's family about what it's like to become a victim's advocate (and some weird side drama that came out of that), and then to the wife of Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three about how she came to get involved with him and his case. Lastly she writes about a young woman who was part of Tumblr subcultures of serial killer groupies and Columbiners (mostly girls who write and make memes about how much they love the Columbine killers) and her edgelord ass goes to jail for conspiring online to commit a mass shooting. It was interesting reading, it didn't retread the same ground as every other article I've read on the topic, and I recommend it.

From what I have read, the documentary was inspired to take a "larger social issues and context" approach by a previous long-form documentary called "OJ: Made in America". Only instead of Simpson and race, it's Bundy and feminism. Rather than dwell on the killer, the focus is on the women affected by him and about the way his crimes functioned socially almost as acts of terrorism against all girls & young women at the time. I think they avoided talking about the decapitations and necrophilia because it would again reduce the murdered women to summations of their deaths rather than focusing on their lives. For the survivors, you get enough detail to show you what they overcame, but the emphasis is on their strength and not his brutality, which I really appreciated. (As to Susan Rancourt, her head was recovered but not the rest of her remains; that's why they say she wasn't found.) Also, I don't fault Keppel for accepting Bundy's offer to help with GRK. He had reason to believe he could use the situation to get more info on Bundy's crimes and maybe recover more of the missing women.

I liked them (watched on BBC) and I am considering reading the books now. I was somewhat reminded of The Alienist, but they are only set a few years apart.

Depends on what you read. There was reportage at the time that murders consistent with the ATKID series did happen after Williams’s arrest. Didn’t mean that Williams was innocent, just that there were problems with the list criteria and also that the focus on Williams was too narrow.

The Blue Monday remix in the Wonder Woman trailer is by Sebastian Böhm.

The police have never seemed particularly upset in interviews, but I don't want to get too far off topic (waiting for Dahmer to appear in an episode next season).

Douglas was personally interested in the psychology of murder, so that's where his interest was. Robert Ressler wanted to study violent crime and get past the reductive diagnosis of "crazy" when it came to murderers, so as to better aid law enforcement when they came up against crimes that were outside the norm. Why the show focuses on sex offenders is (I think) because Douglas and Ressler were the famous ones that brought the idea of profiling to the attention of the mass public. The first mainstream (non-academic non-law-enforcement) article about profiling was in 1983 and it was about tracking down serial killers. From then on, that's what profiling was, even if the unit as a whole also worked on things like arson and bombing.

As Corll got older, he got a kid named David Brooks to bring him victims; David introduced him to Henley. Brooks might have intended Henley to be a victim but Corll chose to offer him employment. At first it was burglary, but then Corll offered Henley $200 for every boy he could get. Henley was told at the time that the intent was to sell the kidnapped boys into sexual slavery for a pedophile organization in Dallas. He said no. Eventually he got poor enough that he agreed to do it, not knowing the boys would be killed. That said, once he did find out, he kept helping and eventually began to enjoy it. The reason he finally quit, the night he'd brought both a boy and girl over and Corll got mad, was that the girl convinced him to. Corll told him to rape and kill the girl. As Henley started to undress her, she asked "Is this for real?" Henley replied in the affirmative and she then asked Henley whether he was to "do anything about it." At which point he grabbed a gun and shot Corll six times, released the victims, and called the police to confess. The girl, Rhonda Williams, told her story to the Houston Press if you want to read her story.

Yes, Brian was adopted.