Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 22 (Oculus)

In this scene, Clara is cleverly disgused as Karen Gillan.

A horror movie about a haunted mirror? AND it's got a former Doctor Who companion as one of the leads? How the hell can I NOT do this one? Yes, the time has finally come. I get to apply all that weird mirroring shit I made myself infamous for during the Peter Capaldi era to a spooky movie all about it. The former Doctor Who companion is not the one I applied all of this to originally, but Karen Gillan is pretty great all the same. So, too, is the movie! I went into this not knowing quite what to expect, and it's real good I did that. Aside from a general theme of mirroring and a bunch of other things, this movie is a proper mindfuck of surreality. By around the midpoint you start to doubt what you're seeing. Past it you definitely doubt what you're seeing. Near the end, you wonder if any of what you saw was "real" to begin with. There's a Stephen King adaptation I've not covered for these yet; 1408, starring John Cusack. I only saw that movie once when it came out, but Oculus reminded me of it. Mostly because 1408, like Oculus, has the slow but steady breakdown of reality to make you doubt what you're seeing. I'm not sure what I saw for the last 100 minutes but let's try and chart it. Key word, try.


Okay, so I may or may not use the word mirror like 85 times in this. This is my playground now. Welcome to prime time, kids. So, how the hell does a haunted mirror kill you? Fucking with your head and perceptions, basically. The idea here is neat enough; two kids slowly watch their parents go crazy and their dad murder their mom, and 10 years later they come back to the house, haunted mirror in tow, because Karen Gillan's character wants to prove that the mirror is haunted. Simple setup, and the way they play the movie out is in parallel timeline, cutting back and forth between past and present. Of course, the shots mirror each other as we transition, but then... things start getting messy. The mirror's influence is felt, both in past and present, and things begin to blur. In a mad way, time starts to mirror itself. Things from the present showing up in the past, images from the past showing up in the present. In either time setting, shit begins going wrong in weird ways and showing fucked-up things that may or may not happen. The tension's high in this one, and there are only a few shots that use pain and blood as the primary scares. Everything's about perception... and how fitting, given that the main haunt of the movie is a thing that reflects images back at you. The movie itself is an unreliable narrator as things break down, showing you one thing and then revealing a totally different thing that happened.


Of course, the entire events are mirrors of each other. A woman convinced that something's going on with the mirror. A man who thinks that things are fine, but is himself being fucked up by the mirror. I'll be honest with you. I thought I had more playground to roll with, but I don't. There's only so many ways I can say that this movie toys with your perceptions and alters reality for 100 minutes, but it does. I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with how it ends, but I AM satisfied with just how much the ending mirrors itself, showing the grim finale of both past and present. That mirror is one tricky bastard, a cursed object all on its own... and if you keep questioning what's real and what's not in this one, you'll hurt your head. If you like being confused and a healthy dose of surreality, and don't mind mirror bullshit, go fire this one up. As for me... well, I'll reflect on what to do next. HEH! HEH! HEH!

Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 3 (Rosa)

This was always going to be a difficult one to write. I knew that ever since I found out that Doctor Who was doing a Rosa Parks episode. The masculine-presenting white person from Newfoundland with an obscure blog writing about Doctor Who's brush with American civil rights and racism? I am way out of my depth. Part of me just wants to throw up my hands, say "I thought it was good TV" and then just link to a bunch of articles written by people of color on the episode. God help me, though, we're going to try and say something about this episode. Just... take my opinion with a grain of salt, okay? And if I get anything wrong, do let me know and call me out. Okay. So, we are sort of still playing in that weird Hartnell tribute mode because what we have here is almost a historical. Of course, being new Doctor Who, it's a celebrity historical with a famous person from history. It's also not a pure historical story as there's a villain with sci-fi tech in Alabama. That being said, this episode has some of the most uncomfortable tense atmosphere I've sat through in Doctor Who... and it's because of the racism. I made a big deal out of how hostile planet Desolation was in last week's episode, but that was a jolly romp compared to this. Doctor Who's Alabama 1955 is dangerous, raw, and cruel in a way we haven't seen before. Because of all the goddamned racism. With two people of color on the TARDIS team, this is absolutely the worst place to be. Ryan gets the worst of it, given that he's black, but Yas gets her fair share as well. They have some moving interactions with each other in the episode, and it's lovely to see them stick together and try to be supportive of one another in such a hostile environment.


Let's talk about that villain, and his scheme. Kresko, the meddling greaser shitlord who's actively here to fuck with established history. No, not even fuck with. Gently nudge. Fiddling with things here and there to try and stop the circumstances which led to Rosa Parks sitting in that seat and refusing to get up. Why? Because he's a racist from the 79th century who wants to set back civil rights and put black people in their place (his words, not mine). I have been thinking about this literally since the episode finished and it's still a jumble. My immediate comparison point is Lord Sutcliffe from Thin Ice. That was a story which raised the idea of Bill being worried that history would be unkind to her, it not doing so, and then Lord Sutcliffe being a sudden shock of unkind racism 30 minutes in. He was also trying to murder people to get his own way, and it was satisfying to see his rage as he was denied what he wanted and then died a poor man's death under the frozen Thames. Kresko, for all his meddling and literal plotting to wipe out civil rights, is a remarkably chill racist. Compare him to the white-hot indignation that the white people of Montgomery display in the episode against black people, and he's just sort of casual about it. It's chilling, and also a little depressing. Yes, we get our acknowledgement from Yas and Ryan that while racism isn't as bad in their time as it is in 1955, it's still pretty fucking bad. The show would have been disingenuous if it tried to claim otherwise... but it's morbidly depressing that they canonize 79th century racism. To such a degree that a man would literally go back in time to set black civil rights back by 6000 years. We can do better in 8018. Hell, we can do better in 2018. Should Kresko have had a privileged freakout along the lines of Sutcliffe, and have his plans and plots more definitively stopped? I don't know. All I know is what was on screen. The detached casual racist gets blasted back into the distant past. Good. Butterfly effect that shit, fucko.


So, does it work? It worked for me, but again... I am not the person to be asking. It's an episode which was deeply uncomfortable and emotional to watch, but that very well could be due to the whole privilege thing. I'm glad they told the story they did, but... god, I don't even know how to end this one. I really don't. I liked it, but I'm the last person for whom liking it should be taken as any meaningful endorsement. Go look at what people who don't have the level of comfy privilege I do thought of it. The shocking oppressive atmosphere of racism was just uncomfortable for me. For a person of color, I can only begin to imagine how traumatic, moving, and relatable it might have been. For someone marginalized, I can't fathom what this one means... be it the episode's strengths or its missteps. I'll end by giving you two varying takes. The first, a Twitter thread from Black TARDIS livetweeting the episode. The second, Elizabeth Sandifer's review. That'll do for this week, I think. That will do just fine. Until I have to podcast this thing, anyway. Oh god.


Next week: You're the blessed, we're the spiders from Mars.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 21 (Dream Hunter Rem)

I HAVE THE POWERRRRR

Ooh. More obscure deep cut stuff to delve into, if ever so briefly. So. What do we have here? Something I'm not completely finished with, but I don't have much time left to do so. Besides, I have enough material to get through a post on it. This is Dream Hunter Rem, and... what the hell is it? Well, the three episodes of it I watched were released one after the other from 1985 to 1987 as OVAs. You can definitely tell because of all the blood and nudity. We'll get to that. You can almost treat them as short movies, since the latter two clock at just under an hour. The first is a 45 minute affair that has two separate stories in about 22 minutes or so, like a regular half-hour show would. What the hell is it? A cute green-haired anime girl who investigates the supernatural and dives into people's dreams to save them from demons causing nightmares. We are absolutely on brand, considering the first OVA was released the same year as Elm Street 2 which we did yesterday. Hell, the second half of that has the most Elm Street-like plot, involving a serial killer who dies and then comes back as a dream ghost to kill people while they're asleep. I'd say that one was my favorite of the ones I viewed today, mostly because it's absolutely goddamned wild with its imagery. Make no bones about it, this shit gets vicious. Heads come off and people melt and all sorts of other nasty nonsense. The sheer horror of it all is juxtaposed by... a cute anime girl who transforms into something off of a goddamn cheap fantasy novel, with a sword and bikini armor. Oh, and in the real world she's got a Magnum with silver bullets that have crosses engraved in the heads. Because fuck vampires AND werewolves at the same time, I guess.


Rem is absolutely a very strange series of episodes, and ones I find it hard to recommend. I did enjoy the third OVA, which mixed a headless horseman ghost with traditional Japanese samurai to have a headless samurai come back from the dead... but at that point it wasn't really about diving into dreams. It was just Rem fighting a ghost for 55 minutes. It was very good, but it didn't have the surreal crunchy dream quality to it. Episode 2 was the best in this regard, with dream kills and some quite striking imagery, but something about it didn't click with me. Even if it ended with the haunted clock tower the episode's vengeful demon was locked in turning into a giant robot and no I am not kidding holy fuck Japan. No, the thing that keeps me from shouting that you should go see Rem is the nudity. The original first episode was straight-up a hentai, and you can absolutely see where things would veer outside of PG-13 even in the later, non-lewd cut. It's questionable fanservice, to be sure, but it's only there for a short time. If that helps you any. I just had to bring it up because I don't want you bumbling into it like I somewhat did. There's two other episodes of Rem made in the 90's, called New Dream Hunter Rem. I'm going to delve into those but I've not as I write this. No, just the three will do for today. If nothing else, Rem is...  a very interesting thing to watch. This is a short one as I am pressed for time, but you know. If the premise interests you and you don't mind the stuff I've tried to warn you about, fire up some Rem. It's bloody in spots and has some weird bits, but overall it's pretty neat. I think. I'm still really not sure.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 20 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge)

Dreams come true.

Really, it was either this or the one that Rachel Talalay directed, and I don't know enough about directing to talk about the wild shit she did in it so... Part 2! Which is, paradoxically, one of the most discussed AND least discussed films in the whole Nightmare On Elm Street series. I should clarify that statement; people talk about it, but they talk about it because of a major element of subtext going on in the movie and not so much because it's an iconic entry in a famous slasher series. Countless ink has been spilled on the subject, no doubt, and I have to at least mention it in this post. Yeah, there's gay subtext floating all through this thing. You'd think I'd have a lot to say on this, but I don't. Mostly because 1) the work's been done before and 2) it would have required me digging deeper into the special features and video essays to properly cover. The most blatant it gets textually, of course, is our poor hero staggering into an S&M bar and getting caught by his gym teacher who's in a leather vest, followed minutes later by the gym teacher being tied up and ass-whipped by telekinetically-moving towels before Freddy slashes the fuck out of him. This is also the first kill of the movie, 35 minutes in. Yeah. There is something going on here but I am in no way qualified to be talking about it... so I'm not going to. Take it on good faith that people who know what they're doing have discussed this in depth and can be found out there, and let's move on to the shit I know; alchemy and the power of love.


There is some real wild shit going on here that doesn't quite go on in the other movies, from what I recall. Even if it does, this one did them first by virtue of chronology. The dream aspect is carried over, of course, but it's all used for surreality. As poor Jesse is going through the bender, so too do all your perceptions. Absolute weird shit going on, but the point of the movie is the mixing of these worlds. Dream becoming reality. Freddy Krueger, who wants revenge against someone due to the title but I don't know whom, seeks to use Jesse to bridge the gap. To become real. This lets weird shit happen in reality, particularly involving heat. The house gets hotter as we go along, shit starts lighting on fire, birds exploding... it didn't click with me until near the end that this was all because Freddy, you know, was fucking burned alive. His manifestation in this world mirrors his previous last moments! Goddamn, that's clever! Why Jesse? Because he lives in the house where Nancy killed Freddy in the last movie, and I guess he lives on somehow waiting for a host. Now I'm really curious which movie made it canon that Freddy came back to kill kids and get his revenge on the parents. This one doesn't make it textual, and I'm wondering now if I imagined it. I do like how this one's a slow burn, though. Until the shit hits the fan, you only get two actual murders. The first we mentioned, but the second's wild because Jesse becomes Freddy in a real fucked-up transformation scene. Like some kind of horrific magical girl. Keep that one in mind, we're gonna come back to that. Eventually, Freddy does manifest in reality, and what follows is him running around a pool party and slashing teens. It seems off in an Elm Street film, but in a movie about dreams becoming reality this is par for the course.


The climax to this movie, and Freddy's weakness, is literally love. I can already hear a lot of people rolling their eyes, be it now or in 1985. Yeah, he can't kill the female lead because she loves Jesse and that is holding Freddy back. On the surface, it sounds silly as hell. Digging deeper, I can see some wild merit in it. Mostly because I wrote 20,000 words about Sailor Moon and I'm like a shark sniffing blood when it comes to utopian idealism. This isn't quite it, but it's almost it. A more tragic movie would kill Jesse and Freddy, together. Indeed, Lisa tries to stab him but it doesn't work out because... Freddy's stab-proof? I guess? No, what we get is Lisa confronting Freddy in an abandoned factory while all kinds of fucked up shit happens because... shit, dreams are reality now! Anything can happen! Lisa confronts Freddy, seeing right past him and looking to Jesse and declaring her love for him. Freddy is at first taunting, saying Jesse's dead... but as he starts to bleed from the sheer force of the returned love? His tone changes. He gets more panicked in his declarations that Jesse's dead. Eventually it's enough to burn him up, and things are mirrored once more. Freddy burst out of Jesse, and now Jesse bursts out of Freddy's re-burnt corpse. Yeah, we get a dumb fakeout dream scare that literally has a fake scare in it; Freddy's toying with us now. I liked this movie! I liked it a lot! Shame there's no other Elm Streets quite like it, as we went back to the well of killing in dreams and added the new wrinkle of "themed" dreams... but that's talk for Part 3, if we ever do that. For now, I gotta say... this one was nice. As nice as can be for a movie with a zombie dream murderer, but that's Halloween, kids. That's Halloween.


Any other dream shit I can look at?

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 19 (Sharknado)

This is stupid.

It's another one of those entries. Yes, time again for both you and I to throw up our hands and say, succinctly, "the fuck?". The fact that a movie like this got made doesn't surprise me. Lord knows there's a million low-budget shlocky so-bad-it's-good shark movies out there. The fact that this one achieved the notorioty that it did, getting five sequels? That baffles me. You're kidding if you think I'm touching another five of these, but let's look at that Wikipedia link and see how farfetched they get. We go from a B-movie disaster picture melding Twister with Jaws to... the end of the world? A time travel plot about battling other Sharknadoes throughout history and then undoing the franchise? What in the actual fuck went on with this series? I was there when this came out. I PVRed it on Space, I watched it, and well... I still don't know. I guess a shitload of people wanted this particularly brazen over-the-top nonsense, and I can't claim myself exempt because I've seen the fucker twice now. Let's try, somehow or another, to take this in some sort of direction. If I could do it to Godzilla 1998, I can make an attempt with Sharknado. God help us, this is our analysis.


A charitable reading of the film would suggest that this trades in subversion and dark comedy. You don't think so-and-so is going to die, but WHOOPS HAHA THEY TOTALLY BIT IT. A less charitable one would say it makes no goddamned sense and has tonal whiplash left and right. The opening certainly has jack and shit to do with anything that happens, beyond giving you more sharks killing people. John Heard, creepy old man character that he's playing, probably should have lived past the 1/3rd mark. Tara Reid's new boyfriend literally exists to be a jerk for two minutes and then die. The wildest, of course, is the poor bus driver. He makes it out of a tough situation only to die in a wild bit of black comedy. There's one swerve to this logic, which we'll get to in the hero shot of the movie, but let's talk about those goddamned sharknadoes. On paper, of course, it is absolutely fucking stupid. Indeed, the movie is more about sharks than the tornadoes which accompany them. I think only one person actually dies to the suction of the tornado, compared to a shitload who fall prey to shark attacks. You'd think someone just wanted to make a tornado movie and tried to make it THE COOLEST SHIT EVER by making the tornados full of fucking sharks, but it's the other way around: the tornadoes support the sharks. There's also the matter of literally blowing up the tornadoes to dissipate them with a rush of warm air, which... That can't possibly make any real scientific sense, can it? It's technobabble that almost makes sense. I guess.


The best goddamn bit of the movie is the ending, actually, and no I am not trying to make a clever joke about how the high point was when the credits roll. The honor goes to the moment when protagonist Fin leaps into the mouth of a shark with a revved chainsaw, and cuts his way out from the inside. That is the kind of absolutely dumb shit I expect from a movie that fuses sharks and tornadoes, and it's a pity we didn't really get too much more of it. Oh, the movie's dumb and gory but it never reaches anything near as gloriously stupid as that moment. Hell, he even cuts one of the supporting characters who got eaten earlier out of the shark! And she lives! Is it contrived? God yes. Is it one final reverse act of subversion? Oh lord yes. How about that? I managed to find a weird dark mirroring in Sharknado of all things. Okay. Fuck it. We are getting out while we still can. The day I find deeper ground to tread in a fucking movie about shark tornadoes is the day I just publish this post and lay down for the rest of the night. Oh look. That's right now. See you tomorrow.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 18 (Super Ghouls N Ghosts)

Tonight on the Halloween marathon: a haunting. This game has haunted me for the past seven years, as I'm sure it's haunted millions of SNES players for the twenty-seven years it's been out. This is not, to be clear, because the game scarred me or made itself a white whale of impossible difficulty. I cleared this godforsaken thing only a few months after first seriously diddling with it. I have told this story on the blog before, but I don't mind repeating myself for the sake of an article. We'll keep it brief. In 2011, on my way to my favorite scenic getaway of Grand Bank, Newfoundland, we drove by an imposing mountain. Having listened to a podcast mentioning the game earlier in the trip, it was at this moment that I made up my mind. I was going to beat Super Ghouls n Ghosts. Six months later I returned to Grand Bank having done so, and did so again between a wedding's reception and its dance. Powerful stuff, but it was far from my first foray. The experience of clearing that game, plus a foolish wager I took to clear the NES adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October, taught me how to tackle hard games. Battletoads? It fell. Contra? Beaten the original, no death. Dark Souls? I'm a flame master. Yes, even the rest of the Ghosts n Goblins series fell to my apparent skill. I just call it dumb tenacity and pattern recognition, but some of you like to praise me for this stuff so I revel in it a bit. Hard Game Beater, indeed. Well, I did it again. I sat back this afternoon in my basement and beat Super Ghouls n Ghosts. I didn't intend on it, as I felt I said all I needed to say about the series two years ago with the first game... but fuck it. Here we are again. This is Super Ghouls n Ghosts, and this is the fresh hell I put myself back into.


It's not quite as good as the arcade sequel to the first game, Ghouls n Ghosts... but it's fairly solid with lots of neat innovations. Ghouls n Ghosts let you fire in four directions, added more weapons, and let you upgrade your armor to charge up for cool magic attacks. Super Ghouls ditches the vertical shooting, but it's still got lots of fun and deep mechanics with its upgrades. Green armor will power up your weapon, and gold will allow you to charge up for a cool magic attack depending on what weapon you've got. Of course, getting hit once will knock off all the cool armor... and that's where the extra cruelty comes in. See, you find armor in hidden chests, and what's inside depends on what you opened last and what armor you have. It's easy enough to memorize how things will go when you don't get hit (Weapon, Bronze, Gold, Shield) but the real shit comes with the trapped chests. Magicians will turn you into a weak and defenseless form if you open one of these... and guess what the first chest you always get when you're in your underwear is? Yep, this game fucks you over twice. Take a hit, and you get a booby trap while opening a chest to, you know, power your way back up. If nothing else, this game loves kicking you when you're down. How about those weapons? I must admit, there's versatility with a lot of them. Sure, the knife is a reliable standby and fires fast and hits hard and will generally help you, but there's other perks to certain weapons. The bow, for instance, is a great beginner's weapon. It fires upward at an angle and its powered up version is a homing shot. It's GREAT for killing those pesky goddamned Red Arremers, but it's not perfect for every situation. The pathfinding on the shots isn't perfect and you may find it missing the mark or hovering about uselessly at times. My actual emergency go-to for Arremer killing was the axe. Unpowered up, it swings in a wide enough radius that I could get close and whap them mid-air. Intermediate Arremer fighting strats.


I want to stress that I like this game... I think. I say this because I am about to unleash holy hell upon its ending requirement. In Ghosts n Goblins tradition, you have to beat the game twice. That second time, you have to defeat the two forms of the last boss with a weapon called the Goddess Bracelet. You only get it by opening a treasure chest while fully powered up, so getting hit at any time in the final level while trying to collect it means you may as well die and try again. It's a bit of a melee weapon in that it shoots a projectile that does more damage at close range... but the two bosses you have to fight with it are all focused on breathing fire and shooting lasers. Getting hit and losing your armor means your range and power is diminished... and you're on a strict time limit. You either play risky and die in this state, or play cautious and run out of time because you're doing shit for damage. It's intensely frustrating, but just fair enough that you won't quit. There are enough money bags in the opening of the stage to grant you a continue on three lives' worth of collecting them. You'll never run out. You're stuck here, in this hell purgatory, until you best these sons of bitches. The true final boss is a joke. I killed him in one try. The assholes before him are the real final battle, in my opinion. I could go on about how the princess's bracelet is the ultimate power and all that, but I think we're done here. Super Ghouls n Ghosts is a game I like. I think. It's hard to tell. I enjoyed the parts that weren't the final gauntlet! I understand if you'd rather not fire this one up, but it's horrifying in its own way, hm? Either way, enjoy the spooky season. Next time we might get really, spectacularly dumb.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 17 (The Ritual)

Oooooo the woods is spooky.

Hey, how about that? We finally got to some suggested material. I do love delving into the stuff I wouldn't otherwise, as I don't know what to expect. So it was when I loaded The Ritual up on Netflix. What did I get? Well, it's not the greatest movie ever, but it does what it sets out to do for better or worse. What is it trying to do? I dunno. Blair Witch meets The Thing is the vibe I get from it. Blair Witch because it's an hour or so of people being lost in the woods and losing their shit while spooky things happen all around them. The Thing because it's an all-male movie, and thus you get a horror movie about manly men, proper lads, dealing with spooks and ghosts. Or ancient bastard-spawns of Loki. Yeah, we'll get to that. Patrick Troughton's grandson is one of the lads! That's neat, I suppose. Well, let's see what we can dive into here. This movie's all about getting you when you least expect it, and the opening does that in spades. Just some guys going to the liquor store for some vodka, and oops there's a robbery going on and whoopsie one of the lads is dead. So now, in his memory, they're doing the thing they said they would do and hiking in Sweden. Some bad decisions later, we're all stuck in the woods with weird runes carved in the trees, animals hung up and gutted, spooky cabins with idols, spooky noises... Yeah, the whole lot. It's got an atmosphere to it and a bunch of weird shit, I'll give it that! The first hour of the movie is proper unsettling, with people getting sporadically picked off when you least expect it and nightmares plaguing the group... particularly our main guy, Luke, who froze in the liquor store while his pal Rob was killed. Predictably this leads to bitterness which comes out at the worst time, a lot of angry men, blah blah blah miss me with that shit. what's more interesting to me is Luke continuing to have surreal nightmares where the store and the woods blend together. Somewhere in here is a story about grief and guilt, but it's a little overshadowed by the spooky nature.


And then creepy cultists who turn the goddamn movie into torture porn. They sacrifice the one remaining guy that isn't Luke, and really needle it. They beat the shit out of him and torture him, then he sees his wife as he's tied up for sacrifice but PSYCH it's the monster. This thing must feed on fear and misery or something. What the hell is it? A Jotun, we're told. Some big spooky deer monster thing, we see in the end. It's implied it gave the creepy cultists eternal life? And there's a room full of spooky zombies upstairs in their cabin? What the hell is going on here? It's weird to complain when I love my ambiguity, but the movie's tiptoed just enough into the realm of explaining shit that I want it to follow up on it. It never does, though. Hell, why can't the deer thing leave the woods? Luke gets out and roars at it in a hilarious scene, but it doesn't chase him to gore him or anything. It feels almost wrong to be nitpicky like this, but the rest of the movie's tension is at its best when you don't know jack shit about what's going on. Throwing a bone in regards to explanation only calls attention to the rest of the plate, you know? I'll level with you. I'm fighting off a fever so I don't have anything else to really say about this one. I'd like to wrap it up. The Ritual is a very good hour long movie that happens to be 90 minutes long. The cultist stuff? Miss me with it. The spooky woods stuff? Okay, yeah. You got me. It's interesting, if nothing else. Maybe fire it up to see for yourself.