dhampyresa

I didn't realise there was going to be a third season of Lupin, but there is and it looks great! :D

Watch on YouTube

I know the last time I talked about this show was to complain about its portrayal of the catacombes and their "inhabitants" but don't let that fool you, I greatly enjoyed it! It's not a direct adaptation of Leblanc's works[1] but it has THE VIBES MAN THE VIBES. ~♪♫Gentleman cambrioleur♫♪~

In the shot of Assane atop a column, he's atop the Colonne Vendôme, which in the middle of Place Vendôme, itself famous for its luxury jewelries and thus: JEWEL HEIST! JEWEL HEIST! JEWEL HEIST!


Also, I find it hilarious that I posted a trailer for the adventures of a vigilante yesterday and today one about the adventures of a thief. ASSANE VS MILES AND SPIDER-GWEN WHEN


[1] Maurice Leblanc's works are in the public domain, which means you can find free ebooks online, forex: Wikisource (FR / EN), Project Gutenberg (various languages) or Bouquineux (FR). I cannot speak for any translations, being a native French speaker. My favourite of the Arsène Lupin books is L'aiguille creuse (The Hollow Needle) but I would recommend starting with Arsène Lupin gentleman-cambrioleur (The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar) for full effect -- it also includes Arsène Lupin's first meeting with Sherlock Holmes Herlock Sholmès.

1. I recently watched Lupin s2 e4 and the ease with which teen!Assane gets a map of the closed/forbidden/unofficial catacombes is LUDICROUS. He doesn't even ask! It gets handed to him by some rando!

Cataphiles are a notoriously secretive people. They hate "tourists", which is how they call anyone who's only going into the catacombes for cheap thrills or any reason beyond the love of it.

But also because. You know. It's illegal. Depending on where you are and how you got in, it can even be double or triple illegal! Most of them don't even have maps! Out of a gatekeepy desire to avoid "tourists" and also to show their catacombes knowledge chops (catachops?). And even the maps that do exist are often outdated, with tunnels and access points being created/blocked off regularly as part of the cataphiles/cataflics (police unit dedicated to patrolling the catacombes, not their official name) back and forth.

The best way to get into the milieu, as it were, is to know a guy who knows a guy, basically. And even then it's a crapshoot.

I'm also going to assume Guédira and the rest called for cataflics offscreen, because going into the catacombes without some way of knowing where you are or where you're going is a good way to end up like Philibert Aspairt.

There's a "gaslight gatekeep girlboss" joke lurking in here somewhere but hell if I can find it.

(Entry title taken from an inscription near the entry of the official catacombes. "Stop! Here is the empire of death.")

For the first time in my life, I have seen graffiti in brezhoneg (Breton). I... have my doubts at how efficient this is at conveying the message of "This is shit! Boycott [brand of graffitied ad poster]!" but it made me happy to see brezhoneg in the wild, as it were.

Friend: "Hey, I'm playing Assassin's Creed and there's this tower I don't recognise. Help?"

Me: "When/where is this?"

Friend: "1792" *sends screencaps of the tower; including a view from the Pantheon to Notre-Dame*

[snip some back and forth as I flounder for a bit]

Me: "Is it the Commanderie de Saint-Jean-de Latran?"

Friend: "It is! Thank you; I'm off to rob the Châtelet."

Me: "Have fun storming the castle!"

I live in a pretty touristy city so you'd think I'd be used by now to the fact that Americans don't think of people from other countries as people, just props.

Apparently not.

Gather round. It's time for me to go tl;dr about the Paris Commune.

A lot has been made of the Paris Commune, for various reasons -- mostly because it's where Marx derived the term "communism" from -- and it's been romanticised a lot. I'll say upfront that I'm not exempt from said romanticisation, but I'll try to be as objective as possible (keyword being "try"). I don't doubt there's much better historical scholarship on the Commune than what I'm about to write, but I've got a book of collected and contextualised first-hand accounts ("La Commune de Paris racontée par les Parisiens") next to me and I'm ready to roll.

( So let's roll! )


No lie, "The Paris Commune survives somehow" is right up there with "Carthage wins the Punic Wars" as far as my favourite alternate history scenario go.


* Louise Michel's really rad. She asked to be shot along with the rest of the Communards -- "Puisqu'il semble que tout cœur qui bat pour la liberté n'a droit aujourd'hui qu'à un peu de plomb, j'en réclame ma part" ("Since it seems every heart that fights for liberty is today given only lead, I demand my share") -- was deported to New Caledonia, sides with the Kanaks against the French government, returns to Paris accalimed by the crowd (shouting "Vive la Commune!" and "Down with the assassins!") and becomes an anarchist. She never stopped fighting. Podcast on Louise Michel (in French).

(I'm also really fond of La danse des bombes, a song based on a poem by Louise Michel.)

I went for a walk around Paris with friends today. It didn't start off as a walk, but the closest metro station to the Dernier Bar avant la Fin du Monde is Châtelet and HAHAHA NO.

Look, we'd already braved the clusterfuck that is Châtelet/Châtelet-Les Halles/Les Halles once each, we were not getting back there if we could avoid it.

I always find it hard to explain how batshit Châtelet is, both as a metro/RER/bus station and in general. It's just so big and weird and badly signposted. If you told me there was a metro line to Hell somewhere in there, I'd just shrug and go "eh, it's Châtelet". If there were alien buses stopping there, I'd just go "eh, it's Châtelet". If I suddenly found A RANDOM ORCHESTRA down on corridor, I'd take some pictures and go "eh, it's Châtelet".
( 2 pictures of the Chatelet random orchestra )

Then we found some horses just chilling near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

( 2 pictures of horses at night )

Here, have a picture of the outside of the Port Royal metro station while I'm at it.

( 1 picture )

It was a good walk, all in all. (Châtelet to Montparnasse, not by the fastest route -- partly on purpose, partly because we made the mistake of taking the sidestreets and got lost. We got lost circling the Luxembourg, wth.)