aGlassDarkly

Is The Count of Monte Cristo really that much better than Robin Hood? I don't think it should be, but its adaptations hit harder and I think there are more of them.

Speculating here, but maybe the rich people that pay for these adaptations to be produced find it easier to relate to Dantès, who starts poor and ends rich than Loxley (or however they want to spell it this time), who starts as an aristocrat and becomes an outlaw.

Dantès does most of the “work” of the story himself; sometimes he gets a plucky sidekick, depending on the adaptation of the book. Loxley, in almost all of the adaptations I’ve seen, bands together with the common folk and leads them to rise up against oppression inflicted on them by the greed of one or two men.

I’m probably stretching it a bit, but if I was a billionaire deciding what people get to watch, I assume the Count would scare me less than a band of commoners overthrowing their rich oppressors.

Then again, even though I’m common as they come, I’ll admit that I like Dumas’s coherence and Dantès’s complexity more than the looser jumble that comes with the Robin Hood myth. Monte Cristo will probably always be at the top of my list of books to read and reread every couple of years until I’m dead, simply because it has everything for a fun adventure story — a simple guy, the woman he loves, the enemies (and one drunk sot) who betray him, a wise mentor, growth through adversity, revenge, saving your friends from bankruptcy and suicide, helping nice people marry each other, realizing that revenge tends to not limit its damage to the targets you choose, more growth, and…weirdly marrying that nice lady you bought.

Okay, the last thing is a bit odd and Haydée gets left out of some adaptations, which is a bit of a shame, since the scene with Dantès and Mercédès where they realize they’ve become different people than they were when they were in love 800 pages ago, and they’ll never be together and that’s okay, is probably my favorite part in the whole thing. Someday, someone will do that scene well.

When the internet was better, sometimes people just made entertaining things for no particular reason.

I keep waiting for the headline to be something like “Vance slammed face-first into the sidewalk by passersby until he stopped twitching,” but I’m always disappointed.

Every time I think it can’t get more embarrassing, they find an even more cringey way to act.

I liked that one; there were some really funny memes.

Feels weird that the thing I’m looking forward to most is left alignment for a bunch of currently center-aligned text. I’m not sure when I started to hate center alignment, but I’m always happy to watch it die.

No; you are exactly the right amount of cynical.

I like the amber light some of those give off (LED Edison-style bulbs with a dimmer). My trick is to hide them behind objects (like a row of books) and put them on a smart switch so I don’t have to get near them — they light up the wall/ceiling behind the object with a nice warm glow and I don’t have to look at them directly.

Oh, that I did not know about. Sounds even worse.

Thanks for the link, that was a fun read.

I’m guessing that thing from a few months ago where he was scared of gay people in a cartoon.

You’ve given us almost 100 posts and over 200 comments — you really have given a lot, even to just the fediverse. I don’t know what I can give in return, so I’ll give your blog a visit and here’s my thanks for giving us good content.