#how can i title my creations if they do not reveal their names to me in a vision?

[microwave-core]

Rose Colored Pages; Love Flavored Tea

Cynthia x Fem! Reader

Even the Champion of Sinnoh needs someone to look after her, especially when her desire for knowledge keeps her locked up in her room for hours on end.

The flipping of paper, only momentarily interrupted by the occasional scratch of pen against paper, fills the otherwise silent air in the awfully cluttered room of, who very well may be, Sinnoh’s greatest champion. You peer through the cracked open doorway, leaning against the opening to watch the fervent actions of Cynthia, your dearest girlfriend, hunched over on the ground, surrounded by a horde of texts haphazardly thrown around the already messy room.

You have no idea how long she’s maintained this position. She’s been like this since you arrived at her home in the early morning, meaning her spine has suffered for at least a dozen or so hours. She’s barely said anything, either, having given a brief “hello” upon hearing you walk through the front door and the occasional hum in response to your own words and actions, letting you know you were heard and seen.

Rolling your eyes, you delicately traverse the minefield of her study. The floor was cluttered with books, both open and closed, and loose papers. While they appeared to have been thrown around carelessly, Cynthia knows where all her important items are in the greater mess. They drive you crazy, especially given the amount of empty space on the bookshelves where they could easily be slotted into, but you leave them be.

Standing directly over her, you get a glimpse of what she’s looking at. An Extensive View of Sinnoh’s History, Hisui: An Overview, and The Remnants of Spear Pillar are all closed and stacked off to the blonde’s side. You can only assume that open faced books are of a similar nature, depicting ruins and murals and eldritch abominations. 

In the middle of the controlled mayhem are Cynthia’s own notes, scattered pages filled with messy writing, crude drawings, and citations. You’re unsure of what the point of this research is for, assuming she wasn’t doing this for her own satisfaction.

Squatting down, you gently wrap your arms around her shoulders, cradling your face against her back. “Having fun?” She hums in response. While she doesn’t turn to look at you, her posture shifts ever so slightly as she begins to write quicker than before for a few moments before putting her pen down, allowing her poor aching wrist to rest.

Finished jotting down her current history-related thoughts, she finally turns to you. Her visible eye shines through its tiredness (when was the last time she slept?), a soft smile gracing her features. “Of course I am. I’m surrounded by my greatest loves.” She leans back into your embrace.

The shaking of your head, amazed that you have to compete with history for the heart of your girlfriend, makes her laugh. “My day is always brightened upon seeing you, my love.” She remains there, happy to take a minor break. 

With her full attention, your arms tighten snuggly around her fully. Her hands find your own. They are calloused, but just as warm as the rest of her. She stills, exhaling happily. Cynthia will continuously claim that she loves history as much as she loves you, but only you bring about much needed relief and relaxation. Your warmth and presence puts her at ease, letting her eyelids and shoulders drop. 

You are eventually forced to pull away, knowing that she would stay in this position as long as you remained glued to her back. You unwind your arms from her warm, and probably sore, body to stand up and return to the terrifying dragon a few rooms over awaiting your return for more affection, but before you can, Cynthia taps her cheek gently, clearly desiring some affection of her own before allowing you to walk away.

You roll your eyes again, but you lean down to press a kiss to her cheek nonetheless. She’s clearly pleased with herself when you pull back slightly, beckoning you down for another kiss. Her lips are soft and taste of the mint tea you had brought her hours ago. 

The gleam in her eye prevents you from moving away fully, eye contact tethering you to both the floor and her, only broken when she glances away to the empty teacup laying close by.

“Bring me more?” The adorable expression on her face prevents you from rolling your eyes for the third time in quick succession, but doesn’t stop you from scoffing. You take the cup nonetheless.

“You want a slice of cake to go along with that?” “Please.” She’s always so endearing with you if it means she can get sweets out of it. You’d hold it against her if you didn’t love her so much. After all, complaining meant less time to be curled around her Garchomp, who was intent on soaking up all of the affection that Cynthia was missing out on.

“I’ll join you soon, I promise.” She throws out before turning back to the mess of paper in front of her. Her tone is sincere, but she’s said the same phrase more times than you can count during your relationship. Not that you mind, you were in no rush, and neither was she.

Besides, the sooner she finishes with her work, the sooner you can weave your way into her office space and clean up the clutter she’s grown so attached to. A good few hours will doubtlessly pass before she’s done, but you can already hear her half-hearted complaining as you pick up the books you oh-so-carefully tip-toed around earlier.

And the sooner her archeological and historical texts are slotted away in their shelves and notes into their binders, the sooner you can entangle yourself into each other’s arms, willing away the remaining hours of daylight to snuggle through the cold Sinnoh night.

#pokemon x reader #cynthia x reader #fem reader #titles are hard #how can i title my creations if they do not reveal their names to me in a vision? #the og waifu deserves some domestic fluff #god i love not writing dialogue #back to back writing? on my shitty blog?

[kaisers-house-of-desires]

Idia with bottom incubus reader 🙏

Where it's reader's first time being an incubus and he finally gets to do his job for the first time but he accidentally gets teleported to some random guy (Idia) instead of a woman

Coming right up~!

Title: Wrong Turn

Characters: top!Idia x bottom!incubus!reader

Contains: reader is an incubus, virgin Idia, pet names (pretty boy, sweet boy)

Fandom: Twisted Wonderland

Full request below the cut

All characters are 18+

MINORS, FEM ALIGNED, AGELESS/BLANK BLOGS DNI

Reblogs > likes

"Yes! My first summon! You excitedly flew around the area, watching as the portal slowly opened in the middle of your domain.

Ever since your recent creation, you had been waiting eagerly to be summoned, awaiting to charm a pretty lady. Once the portal's flames flickered to life and stopped growing in size, it was safe to cross. You happily flew into the tear of space, flittering through dimensions.

It was quite easy to navigate. You followed the string of desires, like following a light at the end of a tunnel. It was a quick journey thanks to your speed, and when you popped up from the summoner's ground, you immediately burst into a charasmatic introduction, hand on your chest, posed dramatically.

"Well hello there, dear~ You've done right by summoning me. Trust me when I say that you will have the night of your life. We can go as long as you like, or you can leave all control to me and--"

Once your eyes landed on the summoner, you froze.

Blue hair flickered like a flame, dark stained lips were parted in surprise, and wide, tired yellow eyes were practically glowing against the dim light. There was a controller gripped tightly in trembling hands. Was this...your summoner?

Returning to a more neutral pose, you gazed about the room in silence. This certainly was no woman's room, at least, that you were aware of.

"...Well...This is embarrassing," you sighed out, rubbing the back of your neck. "I must have taken a wrong turn..."

"Wh...What are you?"

That voice... Yeah, this only solidified that you made some sort of error on your way over, but could you really blame yourself? This was your first summon, your first journey! There had to be some leeway, right?

Well...something had to be done. You were here, and you had one of two choices: you could charm this person into a night of passion, or you could wipe his memory and pretend this never happened.

And why waste such a good opportunity?

"Well my friend~" Returning to your more entertaining voice, you hovered over toward the other, a teasing smile already set on your face. "I'm your friendly little incubus~ I'm here to provide you with all the fun you could ever desire~"

He brought up the controller, using it to hide part of his face from your closeness. He was silent for awhile, waiting for you to continue instead.

"By the way your room looks, and..." You gave a small scoff, "by how you look, is it safe to say you haven't had a lick of fun?"

Amidst all the blue, you could see gradients of pink show from the controller barrier. The male's eyes darted away, afraid to now meet yours.

"Yeah, I thought so, but don't worry! That's why I'm here~" With a single finger, you pushed the controller down, revealing his flustered face to you. "If you let me, I can show you what it's like to have all that fun~"

You were surprised to receive an answer.

"O-Only if...I could...um..."

You hummed inquisitively, a finger tracing along his pale jaw before resting under his chin to tilt his head up. "Yes, sweet boy? Use your words."

"I...I want t-to...be the one to...um...p-put it in..." His gaze never met yours.

You fought to surpress a laugh. Really, this skittish little thing wants to put it in? To you, he screamed bottom, but this was his first time, so it was your duty to lead him through it.

"Alright, then~ Why don't we prep up~?"

---

While agreeing to let him put it inside of you, you would be damned if this chihuahua would actually top you. You had him lay on his bed, the male keeping his clothes on, though his pants were unbuttoned and ready. He had his arms over his eyes, shielding himself from your nude form.

"Oh come on now," you teased, crawling over him and lifting one arm up from his head and uncovering part of his face. "You've never even seen a naked body that wasn't your own?"

You could see the pink seep to his neck. God he was so flustered.

"Well...before we get started, can I have the honor of knowing the name I'll be screaming...~?"

His breath hitched in his throat, the response almost forced out. "I-Idia."

"Idia...Alright~ I'm y/n, and it'll be a pleasure to have you fill me~"

Not minding his little flustered reactions, you sat yourself upon his lap, starting off with a simple grinding. It was enough to get Idia to whine out, the friction new and sensitive along his shaft. For you, it was just as pleasing. You felt him harden against you, and it sent chills down your spine. If this was enough to rile you up, then you knew you'd enjoy more.

It didn't take long for him to writhe his hips, his boxers and pants growing tight. His motions only drew more sounds from you, and your impatient self couldn't wait anymore. Sitting up some, you retrieved the hardened cock from its confines, practically drooling at the sight.

"Oh, you're a big boy for a virgin~"

No response, but you would make sure you get one as you positioned the tip against your ass.

"A-Alright, I'm gonna go down, is that o-okay~?"

There was a pause, but Idia nodded his head. You had the clear.

Thanks to your incubus body, taking cocks was actually an easy feat. You didn't need to prep up as much as a human would, and you were thankful for that. Upon sitting yourself to the hilt, your wings spread out in a flutter, your eyes rolling back from the sensation that collided with you.

"F-Fuck~!"

You weren't the only one making sweet sounds, as Idia, whimpered out against how tight you felt, how hot it made his cock feel. "T-Tight..."

"Y-Yeah, tight, isn't it, pretty boy? Does it feel good~?"

This answer didn't take long. In fact, it was almost immediate. "Y-Yes. P-Please, don't stay still."

You quirked a brow at the response. "Y-You sure? You...barely got inside."

While you were more than ready, you wanted your partner to be comfortable while intimate. Idia was, in fact, comfortable. So much so that he gripped onto your hips and thrusted into you, setting off a chain reaction.

You cried out into the air, your back arching as his hips came into contact with your ass. You felt a wave of bliss wash over you as you felt him piston deep inside. Strings of swears fell from your lips as you soon lost your balance and hunched over him, his movements not halting. For a virgin, he was quite excited, unless he actually wasn't a virgin? You weren't sure at this point. All you cared about was what you were summoned for: sexual fun.

"G-God you're so big...~" you moaned into his ear, clutching onto his shoulders. "Q-Quite a shock f-for a guy like you~"

He was silent, taking advantage of this once in a life time situation he had fallen into. As his motions continued, a name was sounded from his mouth, a name that was well known to you as, well, it was your own.

Your cock twitched against you two as you heard your own name muttered from him. You felt yourself already nearing your climax, and you only had your fresh creation to blame.

Coincidentally, Idia was nearing his end. Both your moans pitched in tone as you two came without warning. Your seed coated between you and him, dirtying his shirt as Idia's cum filled you in turn.

You two lay on his bed, chests heaving with every deep breath. You turned your head to give his sweat sheened neck a small kiss, causing him to shudder further. You then leaned up to his ear, a hint of teasing in your voice.

"How about a round two?"

#kaisers house of desires #x reader #x male reader #x male y/n #x male smut #twisted wonderland #twst x reader #twst smut #twst idia #idia x male reader #twisted wonderland idia #idia shroud #idia x reader #disney twisted wonderland

[plainviewwelcomesyou]

Sit the closet one

You play it safe and just sit in the one closest to you.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Ya know what we like to do here, kid? We like to have ourselves a good load’a fun. And hey - what’s more fun than a lil’ game? So let’s play a lil’ game called “Who’s Who”. Need I explain more?

You shake your head ‘no’.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Good. Ya already know ya place.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Obviously -

He puts his hands on his chest.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: There’s me. Good ol’ Lucia Celebration, the one ‘n’ only Birthday King. When things get run, I’m the one runnin’ em. ‘Head honcho’, ‘big shot’, whateva’ words ya have to sum up “the guy in charge”.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: And over there,

He points to another member. This one bearing the resemblance of a three-headed fish.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Is-

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: HARK! FOR I AM IMAGIO DIATRIBE, ORDERER OF THE GUNCH!!! YOU, LOWLY RECRUIT, HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY STRIPPED OF INDIVIDUALITY, AND IT’S ALL THANKS TO ME!!!! ME AND THE GUNCH, OH THAT MAGNIFICENT MACHINE THAT I ALONE BUILT TO PEEL AT THE FREEDOM OF THE MIND - THAT’S RIGHT, THE GUNCH AND ME!!! SO TO HELL WITH THE TULSE AND HER INFERIOR ROBOT CREATIONS, WHO’S LAUGHING NOW YOU FUC-

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Imagio would you please get off of the table.

Imagio is, in fact, on the table.

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: OH.

Imagio is no longer on the table.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Now, for someone who actually knows how to ACT correctly - Mx. Adelias, would you do the honors?

The bird-like being closes the fan that had once been obscuring their face, revealing a suave, put-together appearance.

EIDELIAS ADELIAS: Charmed to. Hello, dear - you can call me Eidelias Adelias, or going by my title, ‘Official Birthday Party Supervisor of Spectacle’.

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: THERE THEY GO, “OFFICIAL BLEHBLEHBLEHBLEEEE”- WEAR IT OUT, WILL YOU?!

EIDELIAS ADELIAS: Imagio, for the self described ‘pillar of control’ you certainly don’t have the best grasp on controlling yourself~

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: I WILL RIP YOU APART YOU LITTL-

LUCIA CELEBRATION: MR. DIATRIBE I CAN AND WILL RETURN THAT PUNY LITTLE PIPE ORGAN OF YOURS IF YOU KEEP THIS UP!

Imagio gets teary in all three pairs of eyes.

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: MY ORGAN??? MY PRICELESS ORGAN?!

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: THE ONE BOUND OF PIXIE-SILVER AND THE FINEST BIRCH?!

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: I-I SWEAR UP AND DOWN ON MY LIFE, SIR, MOTHER GOSS FORGIVE MY SOUL, I’LL BEHAVE! I’LL BEHAVE!!!! I PROFUSELY APOLOGIZE FOR EEEEVERYTHING!!!!!!! I’M SO SORRY FOR EVER TORMENTING YOU WITH QUARELLSOME NOTHINGS!!!! I DIDN’T MEAAAAN ITTTTTT!!!!!

The fish - or fishes - turns into a shaky mess of incoherent tears. At least she’s not talking anymore, and that seems to be good enough for Lucia.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: B.B., would you-

EIDELIAS ADELIAS: I regret to inform you that it appears that B.B is absent from today’s gathering. In the Gauntlet, I presume.

Lucia looks over to an empty chair, the one meant for B.B.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: RIGHT. RUNNIN’ THE GAUNTLET. YEAH.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: PHINEAS GEARSHIFT?!

An elderly half-mechanized snail-man sitting across from you wakes up from somehow being able to sleep through all this.

PHINEAS GEARSHIFT: HUH? BWHUH? HUH?!!

LUCIA CELEBRATION: READ. WHAT’S ON. THE PAGE.

PHINEAS GEARSHIFT: Oh.

Mr. Gearshift shuffles paperwork around, before reading off one sheet in particular.

PHINEAS GEARSHIFT: ‘My name is Phineas Gearshift, owner of Gearshift Incorporated and a … gl…GLAD endorser of The Birthday Party. As the appointed Old Money Manager of this fine establishment of hardworking individuals, I proudly back the Birthday Party with…MILLIONS of my own dollars…each. Year.’ That good enough fer ‘ya?

LUCIA CELEBRATION: It works.

Little Man sits up from one of the member chairs - shocking you that he even has a chair at all. But, his name is on a plaque, so..?

LITTLE MAN: DHDHDGSGSGSHSSJAHSHSHSSHHSNSNSBSBSJSHSGSBSKSJSJSBJSSJHSHAHSJSJSSHHEBBEJESHSHJSJSJSSBSHSBSSBSISHSH

LUCIA CELEBRATION: …Wisely said, Lil’ guy.

IMAGIO DIATRIBE: WAIT WHY DOES HE HAVE A SEA-

LUCIA CELEBRATION: Shuttup AND LASTLY, THE STAR OF THE SHOW - CINNAFUN SWIRL HERSELF!

Cinnafun laughs and waves awkwardly, looking incredibly uncomfortable for such a confident pop star.

CINNAFUN SWIRL: Ummm. Hiii~iiii. I’m Cinnafun Swirl, and….I….I’m the appointed Diva of Doom, and….~ Ha. Yeah. That’s me. Hi.

LUCIA CELEBRATION: That’s ‘em all, then. Finally. New guy, is there ANYTHING you need me to repeat on that front?! ANYTHING AT ALL?!

(No, we… we can move on.)

(YOU PEOPLE HAVE PROBLEMS.)

#plainview

[raionmimi]

Someone once told me that they loathe Medb because she objectifies people, and I can't help but agree. From her creation of Cu Alter to her relationship with Skadi, and then something Fergus mentioned twice, once in the manga and once in Summer 4. But, rather than seeing this in a negative light, as the person who mentioned this, I couldn't help but find this an interesting fault because the story, for the most part, treats this as neither fully bad or completely good Because viewing it through this lens makes Skadi and her relationship uniquely realistic because, while Medb is doing it for completely warped and selfish motives, it also highlights the fact that Skadi needs a self-severing person in her life to get over her troubles and eluvates her in such a intersting manner. Or, in another situation, how she basically earns Cu alter's respect via sheer tenacity through that viewpoint but also caused the american singularity. I had these thoughts swriling around my head the past few days I couldn't help but to wonder what the biggest Medb fan would think about this.

A lot of people, including your friend, view America as a "I have you now, my pretty" scenarios from what I've seen. America plays it up that Medb "gets to have" Cu as an object of affection. Higashide specifically wanted the player to think that, so it comes off as a surprise in the reveal when Alter admits that he's fighting for Medb's wish on his own free will the whole entire time.

(TL;DR: at the bottom before the cut)

When you go back, you realize that there is a lot of foreshadowing that this was the case the whole time. Namely that Cu Alter has so much autonomy and free will for someone who is supposedly "under control." Medb never gets mad at him when he disagrees with her, and the fact that he would debate with her at all is extremely telling when she's usually pretty pushy as a person when it comes to what she thinks is the correct line of action

Both Medb and Cu have their own ideas of what it means to be a king and a hero. For Cu, we know that he doesn't care for honors and titles, but Medb had to work her ass off to get a title for her own safety and to be taken seriously by others. Cu (probably) thought he was well meaning for telling Medb that he didn't want to hurt or kill her because she was a woman, but to her, it was insulting that he wouldn't view her as a warrior when she had gone through a fuckton to get to where she was. He accepted that he was going to die in a blaze of glory, while she can't understand how he can just go throw his life away without ever properly taking her on when everyone thinks of her as the villain of his story.

So there's an obvious disconnect between the two. The fact that they DO talk about this, change each other's minds, and disagree is where the development lays. By the end of the singularity, Alter is able to recognize Medb's efforts as a queen, which was the main validation she wanted from him. Medb also arguably understands that Cu isn't how she thought he’d be that if you notice, anytime they're together, she no longer brings up how she thinks he should act. She just thinks what he does is really cool instead, so they’ve basically gotten the chance to get to know each other better and come to some sort of understanding

The only problem is that Higashide never actually addresses the issue on Cu's end. Personally, I don't really mind tooo too much because Medb's emotions is what I care more so about in the dynamic, but it still leaves a very huge "What even are his thoughts about this?" And I dont mean Alter, I mean the original Cu. It's very clear by the stark difference in how Medb talks to Alter and Cu that she thinks Cu is much colder to her than he actually is. But she also was able to talk to Alter more genuinely because with his emotions suppressed, it was like talking to someone who would never actually respond in a way that would be too overwhelming where she'd have to be on guard. But that's only a stepping stone to the actual problem.

Cu cares a great deal about Medb as a person because if he wasn't aware of her circumstances when they were alive, he does now that they're servants. He mentioned her in HA before she was even in FGO and says that a ton of bad things happened to her and she's a product of what happened to her. But he still doesn't do anything about it in a way that's actually helpful. He treats Medb like someone he feels like he has to take care of, even if she's troublesome, instead of acknowledging his own flaws that got him into the situation with her in the first place.

He still has chivalrous view of women that can be seen as patronizing like telling Medusa in Extella that he doesnt want to fight or kill women when Medusa had the clear advantage. He chooses Nero over Tamamo because Tamamo reminded him too much of Medb. He talks about how he wants to be more reliable to Medb in his voiceline, even to the point of making a promise to her that we still have NO idea what it could possibly have been about. He avoids Medb when she's up to mischief, yet when she asks for help he is immediately willing to do whatever. Even to the point that Knocknarea in LB6 is confused as to why he's so eager and willing to help her.

Cu's thoughts are a huge piece of the puzzle missing that if you don't pay attention to how he handles Medb, it comes off as one sided when it's more like two people avoiding communicating the root of a problem.

I highly doubt that his side would ever occur as the closest there has come to being critical of Cu's actions is the consequences of his thing with Fand and Emer in the Vday events with Caren and Bazett. Do agree that sometimes, other writers will just use Medb's love for him as a gag to idk fill up the spaces or something. It can be funny but if that's all she does, then ya I get the criticisms esp when their actual convos are way funnier. I have more thoughts on them, but I've already wrote so much lmao

Very cool and poggers of the manga to have Cu Alter kneeling down and accepting a kiss from her tho

TL;DR: Medb and Cu have lore to build off of + that there are flaws to be addressed. Makes the subtle growth very cool and leeway for further Medb development and complexities.

---

Putting the rest under the cut because I'm critical of the way Sakurai writes Medb and Skadi. Read if u want, but know that I'm kind of a hater so I'd rather you look at something you like instead.

Sakurai's writing with Skadi doesn't have the benefit of lore to easily play around with though. TL;DR at the bottom.

The problem is that the writers never really fleshed out Scathach that much, nor did they have the latter interact much with Medb. The whole premise of this dynamic is that Medb thinks Skadi is Scathach and she's surprised that "Scathach is acting different than she usually does" and keeps trying to get Skadi to act "like she usually does"

But Medb doesn't even really know Scathach, they hardly talked. Like ever. There's like 5 lines of dialogue from between 2018 to now between the two across the American singularity to events and voice lines. Most of the time, they don't even directly talk to each other. Unlike her thing with Alter, Medb has never come to an understanding with Scathach, nor does she really have any reason to care about her

The writing has to rely on existing character dynamics that... was hardly there to begin with makes it crumble that much faster to me personally. It'd make more sense if they had actually written a LOT of interaction with each other to the point of them influencing each other's characters, whether in a positive or negative way. But as it stands, it'd make more sense for Medb to react to the gap difference between Ushi and Taira than Scathach and Skadi because the writers chose to give more depth to Ushi and Medb as frenemies.

I was never a fan of Medb Skadi writing because it comes off as a cheap way to introduce Skadi into the Chaldea dynamics. It's nothing like Ushi or Ex and Medb, Knocknarea and Castoria's level of development, where it'd make sense. Not to mention, nothing about Skadi is remotely what Medb is interested in. If it had been the other way around, where Skadi was introduced first and then Scathach showed up, it'd make a bit more sense given who Medb usually hangs out with or talks to

Sakurai mainly utilizes Medb as a mouthpiece of how cute and uwu Skadi is rather than having any meaningful development between the two across multiple events. It just gets weird and sometimes even creepy at times, esp when you remember Higashide's Medb had never been sexual towards Alter. But Sakurai's Medb sexually harasses Skadi when Medb herself is a SA victim?? And she writes Medb as calling herself tainted in a diff event????? Even Minase treated Medb better in the Prisma Illya event. Like, I don't hate Sakurai, but she can be very hit or miss with me on certain things.

You can compare Skadi to almost any other character that Medb has interacted with, and it's severely lacking. Neither one's lore is really addressed until Skadi's interlude and even then, Medb doesn't really have much to do with it, she's just "I will lend you a Cu (caster) because I'm already holding two Cu's hands right now"

I don't mind if people like Skadi, but I just don't think Sakurai handles Medb and Skadi well together. It comes off as either shoe horned yuri bait at worst, and not knowing where to put Skadi since she didn't have much connection to any character in her LB at best that she just slapped her onto Medb for the vague Scathach connection. There is no lessons learned, no real understanding of each other, and it's just Medb doing what she wants. There's no balance or substance that I personally like

I admit that I have not read her summer event parts to know how she develops with other characters though. I'm still very :// about the transphobia with her changing Caeneus's spirit origin without his consent because she "wanted Caeneus to fit in with the other girls" which doesn't help much when she calls Caeneus tainted because of their SA in the lostbelt.

I just don't really care much for the character or the writing between her and medb, so that's why you'll hardly ever see me talk about her.

Apologies because I know you went in talking positively, but I agree with your friend on this one. It does come heavily across as objectification and one of those ships you'd meme on as "gay ship for straight ppl (with a male audience in mind specifically)" and is not treated well, so I personally ignore it.

TL;DR: I dont like Skadi writing or Medb/Skadi writing. I do not mind if other do tho, so like its just do ya own thing, yfeel?

Anyways, ship Castoria x Knocknarea

#magical college girl #critical #LONG post #VERY LONG POST #Im so sorry anon #Tumblr deleted a bunch of my paragraphs when I posted this oops is there a word limit

[ya-zz]

A lil scenario in my head, it's messy and eh, I just have no idea how to write war scenes as you can see, anyways, have my creation

Ramattra canonically woke up in New York, and watching genesis again, it gave me an idea.

You were one of many, but at the same one of not so many.

This war has been going on for years, and humanity was at a bring of exhaustion. Many children, women and men, died, their bodies never to be found. And soon, you will join them.

In a desperate move to make evacuation of children and wounded, any adult capable of walking and holding a weapon was ordered a suicide charge into the enemy forces to buy time for others, more important to flee. Overwatch forces and what was left of the army were too far away to help. You only had a few hundreds soldiers and around three thousand of volunteers willing to go. You were one of them, hoping silently to end your pain, and die in a fight. Useful.

You hid behind a piece of concrete rubble and sat down, your breath being ragged and uneven from the earlier run. Your hands trembling, yet not from fear, holding a rifle.

You got used to fear. To having to be afraid. You knew that the omnics that once took care of your child self were just machines after all. No matter how many funny backstories and meaningful names you gave them as a child. It was sad, really. To pity your now enemies. But now, you were just tired. You weren't sure if you wanted to see another day.

You turned your head to the right, and saw a ravager, who fell to the ground, aiming their weapon at you. Almost automatically you aimed your weapon at it, somehow faster, and...

You both stopped before pulling the trigger.

You watched shocked, as it's LEDs started blinking blue, as it's motion stopped.

You saw that it probably fell down, probably from the force of the explosion earlier, covered in mud and scratches. Part of its faceplate was broken, showing an optic that currently was widening and shrinking as if there were two sides fighting for dominance.

And then, it dropped the weapon, almost... Confused. Like suddenly this murder bit was a child, looking around in wonder. It touched its face, feeling around, and dropping it's weapon in the process. It slowly started standing up as well, it's LED's glowing soft blue instead of bloody red that you grew to hate.

You also got up, careful to not reveal yourself from behind your cover. You noticed that shots were quieter, almost at the standstill.

"I..." You looked down at it, as it spoke. To you. A human.

They never spoke out loud. They could, since they had a voice box that could mimic human speech, but R-7000, in your experience they never used the voice range that was mimicking human voice. They usually spoke commands in omnicode, humans being only able to hear a quiet hum.

"I am sorry..." His voice was surprisingly deep, yet still had this robotic echo to it, as all omnics did.

You did not say anything. You kept staring at him, flabbergasted. You never thought that whatever Overwatch planned in Nepal would actually work. Ever.

It was known to you that Overwatch was doing an operation meant to turn the tides of the war, something about making omnics able to disable their programming. But this... You felt that you witnessed something. Whenever good or bad, it was something.

You did not know to this day why you did what you did.

You slowly made your way to the sitting ravager until you were standing in front of him. You then tore material from your coat and tied it around omnics head, covering the damaged faceplate and optic. It just stared back at you, unmoving, as you finished it with a bow.

"You are... Not what you are" you said out loud, not really knowing what you meant at the time.

It titled it's head and raised its hand to touch the cloth. It looked like a child, scared, but curious.

This was the beginning of a new future that none ever expected to happen.

I read this in between the busy parts of my shift when it came through and I just stood there like :0

This is such a cool idea! Being there to fight and then witnessing the sentience-y of omnics… ooo boy I’d read this hands down-

#overwatch #ramattra #askyazz

[mariacallous]

Let me just be honest: Patrick Stewart brings out my daddy issues. That keen gaze, alternately steely and compassionate. That warrior-monk profile, disciplined and ascetic. And, of course, the Shakespearean cadences that wash over your mind and soul like a lullaby. For more than three decades, as Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard and the X-Men’s Charles Xavier, Stewart has embodied a sort of kind and courtly Master of the Universe, trusted by all to wield awesome power exclusively for good. What more could you want in a father?

Well, perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Stewart, who is 83, has just published his memoir, Making It So. The title, from Picard’s signature command, is a nod to the starship captain’s primacy in his life, and also perhaps a tease, a hint that herein lie the secrets to the creation of that galactic sense of empathy.

The book recounts Stewart’s trajectory from Yorkshire, where he grew up poor and left school at 15, to Hollywood megastardom. It wasn’t an easy one. When a producer working on the planned Star Trek reboot chanced to see him in a Shakespeare reading at UCLA, Stewart, by then aged 46 and with two decades in the Royal Shakespeare Company under his belt, had almost never had a high-profile role on either stage or screen. His first Star Trek audition went badly (unbeknownst to him, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, ordered that Stewart’s name “never, ever be mentioned in my presence again!”). While waiting to hear back, he had such a profound midlife crisis over his modest achievements that he briefly tried to retrain as a professional squash player.

To be honest once more: As a piece of writing, the book is disappointingly guileless. There are moments of introspection and vulnerability, particularly around the impacts of witnessing his father repeatedly beating his mother and the breakdown of Stewart’s first two marriages, but these are brief. There’s a lot of what can only be called fanboying over legendary stars he’s met. Even the people he has clashed with (most notably Roddenberry, who never did take a shine to him) are dealt with gently. Reading it, I was tempted to conclude that Stewart is just Englishly guarded about showing his true feelings, or is even trying to disguise an ambivalence about having become a household name for sci-fi and fantasy instead of for Macbeth, Lear, or Hamlet.

These suspicions started to evaporate the moment I met him in the kitchen of his house in Los Angeles. The guilelessness is genuine: Stewart in person is Picard and Xavier in their kindliest, most compassionate moments. He seems by now truly happy with where life has led him. The house is filled with art and with mementos that give one a sense of a man deeply loved by his friends, including hand-drawn illustrations showing him and soulmate Ian McKellen as bowler-hatted Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.

Stewart is also keenly aware of how few good years he has left. During our conversation, he apologized more than once for his “croaky” and “gravelly” voice (“So long as it doesn’t give offense”) and tendency to ramble (“Sometimes I lose my place”), and he swung between wanting to explore new roles and take Picard for one last spin.

By the time we finished speaking, I had come to understand three things. One, that Stewart’s very un-Hollywood lack of a mean streak is nonetheless hard-won, the result of a long, painful process of forgiving both himself and his father—in other words, of dealing with his own daddy issues. Two, that this struggle is all there in the book; he just doesn’t (and this is perhaps the self-effacing Englishness) make a big deal of it. And three, that as someone with no small amount of forgiving still to do myself, this was what I had unconsciously been looking to learn from him all along.

Gideon Lichfield: You’ve been with Picard for 36 years—10 seasons of television and four movies. You and he have coevolved psychologically. How has that evolution been?

Patrick Stewart: It has been a long journey in which he and I were, to begin with, very much apart. He was an object, and it’s one of the reasons why season 1 of The Next Generation is not one of the best. I think the rest of the principal cast tuned in to what we were doing so much quicker than I did.

What was blocking you?

My life before that had been primarily theater. I brought way too much of my theater technique, my stage technique, into that first season.

We think of Picard as caring, compassionate, disciplined; the fate of the galaxy is safe in his hands. But when I started rewatching The Next Generation, and then watching Star Trek: Picard for the first time, I realized that actually, he’s emotionally conflicted. He has repressed rage. He’s a rule-breaker. Were those aspects of him that you were conscious of early on, or that only came out much later?

They came out later, and it just happened to coincide with a time in my life when I was beginning therapy. As you’ve read the book, you would’ve seen there that my childhood was at times difficult. My father was a weekend alcoholic, with a lot of anger and aggression inside him. He was five years in the Second World War, but he’d also been a soldier for 10 years, from the ’20s to the ’30s. He suffered from PTSD, no question of it.

There’s a passage where you say that, from your father, “I drew Picard’s stern, intimidating tendencies. But I like to think that my mother is in the captain too, in his moments of warmth and sensitivity.” Do you see Picard as your way of reconciling that conflict between your parents?

Very much so, yes. Both Star Trek and therapy have been responsible for that. Having to open the doors into my childhood in order to be an actor became utterly intriguing to me in a way that it never had been before. And I regret that when I look back on some of the roles I played, what I might have brought to them if I just released myself a little bit more.

I asked quite a few of my friends, “Do you think Patrick Stewart is straight or gay?” At least half of them said they thought you were gay or bi. I’m gay, and I must admit I thought you were too. In the book you talk about going on a world tour with a company that included a lot of gay actors, and how you felt very comfortable in their presence, which is unusual for somebody growing up in rural Yorkshire in the 1940s and 1950s. What do you think made you so comfortable?

It was a period in the life of the Old Vic Company in London when it had a director and a producer who were gay, and there was a strong emphasis on employing gay actors as well. I adored these people, and when we arrived in Sydney, I moved into a house with three gay men. And their kindness, generosity, humor, and commitment to their work so impressed me that I fell in love with them. I fell in love with the man who married Sunny and me, Ian McKellen. So I take in your assessment of my sexuality with gratitude and a certain amount of pride. Because when finally my 15-month world tour was over, I missed those gay men I’d spent so much time with.

I think the reason people have this impression you’re gay is something about that care and compassion that Picard has—and that Professor Xavier has as well.

But the compassion comes through because there has been something else in both their cases, both Xavier and Picard. And it was knowing that in the role and discovering it in myself that made all the difference. The rage, the fear, the embarrassment. The shame of my childhood experiences. Few people knew. For decades I never talked about it.

The shame of the domestic abuse?

Yes.

It does seem like you found a way to incorporate the best parts of your father into your work.

My only regret is that I can’t tell him that’s what I’m doing. And thank my mother for her care and love and cherishment of me.

When you were first approached about doing the X-Men, you said, “I don’t want to do another sci-fi fantasy thing with funny costumes.” What persuaded you?

Well, the director, Bryan Singer. It’s very sad, borderline tragic, that he’s withdrawn from the job that he did for a while so brilliantly. [Singer has faced multiple allegations of sexually assaulting minors throughout his career, and has a reputation for erratic behavior on set.] I wanted to work with him very much, but I didn’t want it to be in science fiction. He persuaded me that there was no comparison between Charles Xavier and Jean-Luc Picard. All of the similarities I put together years later.

Do you think that Xavier and Picard are different in some ways?

Charles Xavier is physically handicapped. I think it gave him more empathy than Picard had. We’ve seen Picard lose it a couple of times.

In your book you hint that there’s possibly another Picard film in the works.

I mean, it’s not in the works at all. But I have spoken privately and confidentially to people who would be involved if it were to happen. And as I’ve already said publicly, I’m moving on. I don’t know how much time I have left, but I want it to be as diverse as possible.

You write in the book that you feel like you have so many characters in you still waiting. What kinds of characters?

I don’t know how many, and I don’t know who they are until a text stimulates them. There’s one text that keeps getting tossed in my direction, which is King Lear.

I would love to see you in Lear.

But should I do it? I’m not sure that I have the physical stamina. It’s nearly a four-hour play. Ian McKellen [who first played Lear in 2007] told me that the role has a big break, like a 25-minute break, in the middle of the play. Thank you, William Shakespeare! He knew what he was doing. He was an actor himself. He knew what it was like to play endless roles where you’d never leave the stage. And Ian lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, very close to the theater. He would go home in the middle of his interval while the play went on.

Going back to the Star Trek franchise, I can imagine that somebody at Paramount has already hatched plans to do a series about Picard as a young Starfleet officer before he becomes captain …

I see where you’re going.

How does that feel to you? We now have multiple Kirks and McCoys and Spocks. Can you imagine there being another Picard?

It will happen, I’m sure. I mean, I already have a son. And who knows what’s going to happen to him. He could become the next Jean-Luc, and he’s a wonderful actor. But Star Trek: Picard, especially season three, left us in a very unresolved place. I had an idea about how to play the last scene that would have kind of resolved it, but it didn’t work out.

You write in the book that you wanted him to be married or to have a woman in his life. Is that what you would want to see, the final resolution come to the screen?

Well, it would be: Let’s explore further the inside of this man’s head. His fears, his anger, his frustration, his questioning all of those things. There is a moment, I’m not quite sure where it comes in the series … Well, there are two moments. One is when Picard doesn’t know what to do. He’s stumped. And we never saw that in The Next Generation. There is also a moment when he is truly fearful. And those two pointers alone, I think, make him an interesting study for one more movie.

You said that there are questions still to be resolved in his mind. Do you feel like there are questions on what’s going on in your mind?

About Jean-Luc?

About yourself.

About myself? That’s truly a work in progress.

Still?

Oh, yes. It always will be. There are problems in my family life, not here, not with my wife, but with my family in England. And I believe it is my job to internally connect with this and then perhaps more overtly connect with it.

You know, this is one of the kind of shameful things about acting: Immediately, I think, “Oh, yes, I know what I would do with that!” And from being a teenage boy, I could do that. Because, as a teenage boy, it meant I didn’t have to be Patrick Stewart, who I didn’t really like very much. I could pretend to be somebody else, and adults would believe me.

When would you say that you started to like Patrick Stewart?

Well, you see, my mother had suffered and I had been unable to protect her. I did my best, as did my older brother Trevor, five years older than me, who died last year. There he is with me. [He picks up and shows me a photograph sitting on his desk of himself and Trevor as young children.] Sorry—not good to be showing things on an audio recording! What was your question?

When you started to like yourself.

There were moments on stage, I think initially, when I felt, “Oops, was that me? Well, it wasn’t anybody else. It must’ve been you”—when I realized that I had stepped into another life. It meant I trusted myself, and I felt good about myself and confident. But it’s been a long journey.

It sounds like you learned to forgive Patrick Stewart even when you didn’t like him.

I think on the whole I didn’t do too badly. I could have done better, both in my childhood and in my early acting years. But now at 83, I think I’m more interested in my life and who I am than I was at any other point.

Do you have a favorite episode or film in the Star Trek universe?

Yes, “The Inner Light” [season 5, episode 25 of TNG].

That’s my favorite as well.

Really?

Yes. What I remember about it is Picard waking up after living 40 years as someone else and realizing that these were memories implanted into his brain. You can imagine what a profound effect that must have on a person. And I feel like we see that in Picard’s face, even though you don’t say anything. But tell me why it’s your favorite.

Because I become someone other than Jean-Luc Picard over decades of living a different life, and therefore become a different person, a domestic person, not a starship captain. And there is another, personal reason. My son Daniel played my son in “The Inner Light.” That was an extraordinary experience.

I think of “The Inner Light” as being one of two moments when Picard has changed irrevocably. The other is the assimilation by the Borg. He cannot be the same man after those experiences.

That’s absolutely true, and I should always try to remember that at times like this: The assimilation changed him for good. And like extreme and possibly tragic experiences, we can’t, nor should we try to, erase them, forget them. They’re part of us, what we are. We have to learn to accept them.

That’s where I am right now with Jean-Luc, and it actually makes me intrigued. So conversations like this, rather than encouraging me to move away from my history, actually are gradually sucking me in. So I get closer and closer to the possibility. One more shot!

[waterdanced]

alright, folks, strap in for another theory rambling from syd: demyx edition

what we know about demyx:

not much

(that's, like, partially facetious but also true. all we really know is that he's connected to some ancient keyblade legacy. on top of that, though, there are some observations we can make:)

his death in kh2 has him in a weird pillar of light only shared slightly with xigbar

i trust him when he says he's not a scientist

his title is the melodious nocturne in en and nocturnal poem in jp

his element is water, which has been heavily associated with darkness as a metaphor in kingdom hearts

now, let's set aside demyx for a second to discuss the master of masters — and no, this theory isn't one of those theories about them being the same or whatever. i have taste.

the landi lodge on youtube posits that the master of masters may very well be light itself, and i'm inclined to agree; the fact that he says "the truth is what you see with your eyes, not what you hear," only for the screen to flash with light when his name is blanked from being heard is almost evidence enough, but compound that with my outdated theory about him being kingdom hearts itself... i feel it makes sense. what we also know about the master of masters is that he once had friends in a time long ago who fell in another keyblade war, and darkness is his long-time enemy.

there is also a lot of christian imagery going into mom and the foretellers, given the seven deadly sins and whatnot. i promise this is relevant.

one more important detail: one of the thirteen true darknesses is currently unaccounted for.

now, let's get back to demyx and what i think about him:

let's take one possibility for his true name, edym, and consider that it's an alternative spelling of adam. adam was created by god, famously known as a being of light.

let's consider that edym — possibly like luxu, possibly like the foretellers, if you let me be very insane — may very well have been a creation of the master of masters in an era long past. they may be connected in a way without being the same person. consider edym as a prototype replica (which would work narratively given all his talking points and plot involving the replicas), maybe even with, somehow, a piece of the master in him to kickstart his existence — sort of similar to the concept of a nobody. it would explain his light pillar at death, and it would explain his haha, yeah, no dismissal of being a scientist. it would also explain his ancient keyblade legacy. it might even explain why he knows nobodies do have hearts, which no one is aware of canonically.

consider him one of mom's original friends, thought lost in the war. consider him becoming a vessel for the missing darkness and how that would be such a painful insult and personal attack to the master of masters while also explaining his affinity for water, so often linked to darkness. it would also explain the nocturne/nocturnal part of his titles, given that nothing else about demyx really fits that description whereas most of the others at least fit who they're assigned to.

there is also the fact that vexen comments about "men like us, men of science," when speaking to demyx... which is certainly not accurate for vexen's perception of demyx. but consider that vexen/even has displayed a very sharp intuition before in being able to tell that ventus is a heart of pure light, so perhaps he's picking up on something about demyx's past and true nature.

this would all even, in a way similar to how xigbar set off mom-similarity warning bells in others before that reveal, explain what similarities are there between demyx and the master.

i've talked about my theories for luxord and how those would put him around the missing link era, but i don't think mom's original era would be mentioned if it wouldn't also be relevant. demyx having a personal connection to the master of masters would add another layer to the way he's often seen with xigbar, as well.

and all this said, demyx could still very well have ended up quadratum, thus making him a duo with luxord still despite being from different eras.

i hope all of this makes sense. i could definitely spend more time on it to make it more cohesive, but... this is what y'all get.

#ooc. ♪ #theories. ♪

[sibillascribbles08]

Pray tell what is the ninjago s10 you wrote in your head 👀

Waaah okay this is a touch of an essay and is kind of full of OCs sorry ???

Anyway it was lame AF to me that the show built up so much hype around the oni and then they were the lamest villains ever like okay they have freaky paralyzing smoke and what else?? They got disintegrated by a tornado of creation this is so lame what.

SO a few things I would go about tweaking, and this is keeping everything up to s9 canon btw not changing things around in there (I have other versions where I tweak that stuff lmao)

So first, Leader of the oni is actually scary as fuck, Queen of the Oni to be exact, yeah that's right the FSM had two moms who are now divorced. I have art of this lady on the blog (Queenie is her usual title) and while she's often seen as just six ft tall an elegant she can get massive sized so thirty feet <3 She's powerful, because she has every kind of magic oni can learn at her disposal and this includes mind control, illusions, transformation, gravity, all that jazz (My essay on how the elemental powers are split between oni and dragon origins is something for another time). Anyway she can p much just paralyze people with her mind if she needs to when she walks into a room.

The invasion just starts with her, because while most of the oni have been hiding away in the departed realm like the show states, she's actually been hanging around in Ninjago for ages. In fact, surprise, she was disguised as the Empress the whole time. Let Harumi find all those books about the oni masks so she'd open a portal and summon Garmadon.

Cept that wasn't Garmadon, it's another oni in disguise, and this is why he's so fucking OOC, except he ditched his post and is now kinda hiding from her.

Hang on I'm getting on a tangent here, ANYWAY she reveals herself to specifically talk to Lloyd and try to get him on her side, because family and all that, and while Lloyd obviously hesitates the Queen is pretty convincing and may also be threatening his friends lives so he surrenders and Queenie activates his oni blood which like, doesn't make him evil but does make him a little more inclined to get into trouble lmao.

And NOW the army comes through, poison oni are the ones setting off the smoke causing paralysis. The ninja are scrambling for a plan and while doing this start recruiting the other elemental masters to help. Detail details, two other things happen. Wu travels back to the first realm to find Firstborne, believing she's the only thing that could stop Queenie. Meanwhile the oni disguised as Garmadon (named Efri) gets found out and forced to travel through the departed realm to find the FSM for help (he finds the real Garmadon along the way and some of the past EMs (including Cole's mom, Jay's birth mom, OG Ice Master, Dr. Julien, and even Morro) (Everyone is here YAY)

More details details, the elemental masters are trying to keep the oni contained, trying to get Lloyd to stop helping Queenie (Lloyd: Guys don't you get it, we wouldn't even have to fight if you'd just LISTEN to us) And big climax everyone gets back from their respective adventures and crashes in the middle (FSM doesn't come back btw he's a bitch who says no my problem and Garmadon tells him to go fuck himself)

Big epic fight montage which eventually cuts back to a 30ft Queenie fighting Firstborne but while they are like, fighting, they are also arguing like a divorced couple and Lloyd is standing there like lmao wait ???? you two seriously just need marriage counseling ARE YOU SERIOUS?

Basically by listening Lloyd figures out that A) Queenie and Firstborne got divorced because of a rift the FSM sort of caused (not entirely his fault but he was the spearhead). B) The war left a lot of scarring on both sides. C) The First Realm looks like SHIT because with the oni gone, so was the balance, causing the land to turn to ruin despite dragons being considered creators they had no idea how to maintain the environment.

Lloyd gets the help of the other ninja, turn into this giant fusion spirit thing just to stop Queenie and Firstborne from fighting and tell them to GET THEIR SHIT TOGETHER YOU TWO ARE HOW GODDAMN OLD TALK SHIT OUT LIKE ADULTS.

So they do. Not everything is fixed but it's a start. Oni are allowed back in the first realm to start fresh (a few stay in ninjago). Lloyd has a lot of new powers to learn how to deal with. A lot of ninja get closure talking to ghosts (yay?)

UUUH The end, I know it's missing some details but summaries and all that.

#scribs speaks #long post #oops #ninjago #s8 and 9 Garmadon wasn't fucking Garmadon not my dilf who the fuck is that

[volskayadottxt]

Lifeweaver, agriculture, and capital's ownership of human labor

Like all things, this will be messy. But I want to write down my thoughts before I can no longer parse them correctly. All of this analysis is pretty basic, just a heads up.

A conflict in Lifeweaver's backstory that I like is the matter of biolight's ownership. Namely, who owns this novel technology? Niran, the mind behind it, or Vishkar, the company whose resources technically allowed for its creation? This is actually the second time Vishkar has been embroiled in such a issue (the first being the company's claim on the sound technology created by Lucio's father, which Lucio eventually stole).

It resonates with me in two ways. Firstly: as an agricultural scientist with colleagues whose work is funded for my corporate-backed grants, I recognize that they have no copyright ownership of their work. It's part of the contract between research lab and corporate entity--we get funds, they get findings. These are (in practice) funds required for essential research (we all need food to eat) but not provided by the capitalist state (despite our university being public). After the work is completed, the partner company decide how we present our data to the broader scientific community (which most of us scientists agree is a Very Bad practice).

The conversation between Niran and Angela reminds me of those I've had with other academics about how much of our work (and what kind of work we do) is both dictated and beholden to the interests of the capitalist class. Of course, we can't create a cool glove and run away to a Gay Underwater Mansion to avoid lawsuits.

The second way it resonates with me is just how much this applies to the gaming industry as well. When it was announced that Chris Metzen would be returning as a creative consultant for Warcraft, there was much excitement about reuniting him with his baby. Legally, he had no control over the IP once he retired. And of course this applies to all former Overwatch devs.

I wonder if this element of Niran's story is reflecting the contradictions Team 4 must feel with regards to their lack of ownership over the Overwatch IP, especially when there is pressure to leave the company. In 2023, you need to have very strong feelings for Overwatch to work on it. The bad faith take would be that such a storyline was accidental, but I don't think so. History tells us that engaging in class struggle (or being on the receiving end of class warfare) radicalizes people. Perhaps this is an expression of the contradictions Team 4's writers are painfully aware of, but unable to address in the existing economic system. Capitalism is unable to resolve this contradiction because it is the source of said contradiction--creative work cannot be owned by those whose labor produced it when the profit motive is in play.

Of course, there is an irony to be had that this storyline is presented in a AAA, always-online, live-service title at all. But the same could be said for Valorant's subplot about Kingdom, or Apex Legends' backdrop of capitalist-controlled bloodsport. Should creatives under the thumb of capital attempt to explore these ideas at all? I would say no, that art would objectively be lesser for it. If anything, I think it reveals what Team 4 is thinking post July 2021--how what they create has been influenced by the class struggle they engage in. I am curious to see what they will make in the future.

#laurencedottxt

[mischief-lies-and-stories]

My Nearly 7-Hour-Long Loki Playlist

I have over 100 songs on a playlist for Loki. I use Apple Music, and I would recreate and link a Spotify playlist, but the account is linked to my Facebook and I don’t want to reveal my full name so I’m not going to do that. All of these songs should probably be able to be found on Spotify, though. I pulled inspiration for this playlist from many versions of Loki from the comics, movies, show, and my fanfic characterizations, as well as the various ships I include him in (post on these forthcoming). This post will be quite long given how many songs I have on this playlist, but I will try to restrict my explanation for including the song to a few words about the pairing or version of Loki the song calls to mind or some specific lyrics that made me think of him. Also some brief spoilers for some of my fics. 

“Next to Me”, Imagine Dragons: How Loki views his relationship (brotherly or romantic, you choose) with Thor.

“Two Hands,” Passenger: Post-Infinity War Loki to Thor (again, you can decide type of relationship), includes the line “Our sun is all but set,” which I titled one of my Infinity War fix-it fics as a callback to Loki’s words, “The sun will shine on us again.”

“Timber and Coal,” Passenger: soft FrostIron

“Thunder,” Imagine Dragons: Thor

“Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin: essentially the Thor: Ragnarok theme song

“Thunder,” Passenger: Thor

“I’ll Keep You Safe,” Sleeping at Last: Thor and Loki (The line, “Your darkness will be rewritten/Into a work of fiction” feels very Thor reassuring Loki that he can change.)

“All Through the Night,” Sleeping at Last: title of part one of my FrostIron series, Nights on the Roof

“Saturn,” Sleeping at Last: Canonically, Loki mourning Frigga. Or Loki mourning Thor in part 2 of my Visions Made of Flesh and Light series, written just after the first trailer for Infinity War, before we knew Loki dies but saw Thor floating unconscious in space.

“Pompeii,” Bastille: This is mostly from the repeated line “How am I gonna be an optimist about this?” Either my point of view, because I added this right after Endgame, when Loki bit it in Infinity War and didn’t come back. Or the series finale of Loki, after everything goes to shit. 

“Icarus,” Bastille: Loki: Agent of Asgard angst of Loki burning. (They talk about this a lot and I put that into fics a lot because it’s such angsty imagery.)

“Devil’s Backbone,” The Civil Wars: Some of these songs are my opinion on Loki.

“Glory and Gore,” Lorde: I think I found this on a different Loki playlist. It just fits him.

“Poison and Wine,” The Civil Wars: Thorki

“The Last of the Real Ones,” Fall Out Boy: FrostIron

“I’ll Be Good,” Jaymes Young: Loki: Agent of Asgard (and also Journey into Mystery)

“After the Storm,” Mumford and Sons: More Loki: Agent of Asgard angst. Just this Sisyphian struggle he constantly has of trying to be good and do the right thing and rewrite who he is, and then either self-sabotaging or falling back into the box other people have made for him. 

“Thistle and Weeds,” Mumford and Sons: More angst. Sometimes when I hear angst, I just think Loki.

“Gale Song,” The Lumineers: “It’s a lonely road for the tired man.” My AoA boi again.

“Long Way Home,” The Lumineers: My guess is this was also inspired by the Visions Made of Flesh and Light series.

“Gun Song,” The Lumineers: Mostly for the line “One day I pray I’ll be more than my father’s son.”

“White Lie,” The Lumineers: God of Lies

“Nobody Knows,” The Lumineers: Every year at the camp I go to, we hold a memorial for those that passed away that year, and every year on the slideshow of their pictures they play this song. So this song is just forever seared into my brain as a mourning song. At this point in playlist creation, Endgame is out but Loki is not, so Loki is still super dead and I’m mad about it. 

“Second Child, Restless Child,” The Oh Hellos: Loki to a goddamn T.

“Like the Dawn,” The Oh Hellos: Thorki, hence my fic Like the Dawn.

“Her Sweet Kiss,” from The Witcher: Either Mobius about Sylvie and Loki or Theo about Amora and Loki, it could go either way. 

“In Case You Don’t Live Forever,” Ben Platt: Thorki or FrostIron

“Kiss Quick,” Matt Nathanson: FrostIron, if I remember correctly.

“Ghost Town,” First Aid Kit: Thorki (“But I’ll come back to you someday.”)

“Golden Leaves,” Passenger: Thorki (“Do you remember how this first begun?/ Teeth were white and our skin was young.”)

“I Was Wrong,” The Oh Hellos: Loki showing remorse and trying to be a better person. 

“Temporary Love,” Ben Platt: FrostIron (Specifically Nights on the Roof FrostIron)

“Cedar Lane,” First Aid Kit: Thorki 

“If I Walk Away,” Josh Groban: Thorki

“Wait For Me,” from Hadestown: I think this was either Phantom Limb, which is my Theo/Loki fanfiction that links Where Mischief Lies to the rest of the MCU. Or I also had a FrostIron idea that didn’t go anywhere that I was temporarily calling Valhalla Heist, where Loki and Tony break out of Valhalla and fall in love along the way, so like kind of Orpheus and Eurydice a little bit. And then also the similarities between this song and “Where you go, I go,” which is the recurring vow FrostIron makes in the Nights on the Roof series. 

“My Fault,” Imagine Dragons: Loki’s guilt and angst

“Bitter Water,” The Oh Hellos: “I know I shouldn’t love you, but I do.” Thorki, because incest.

“Before You Go,” Lewis Capaldi: “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, but I was just kidding myself.” Enemies-to-Lovers. And more specifically, Thorki during Loki’s death in Infinity War, “Before you go,/ Was there something I could have said to make it all stop hurting?”

“River,” Sam Smith: Angst

“Keeping Your Head Up,” Birdy: FrostIron (Specifically Nights on the Roof, as usual)

“King of the World,” First Aid Kit: Loki’s motivation through most of his history.

“Scars,” James Bay: That point in Ragnarok when Thor and Loki part ways on Sakaar, but then Loki follows him to Asgard because they love each other (again, brotherly or romantic, doesn’t matter, it fits for either). 

“Heirloom,” Sleeping at Last: The angst of having to deal with a dad like Odin, who’s a frickin’ dick. “You are so much more than your father’s son/You are so much more than what I’ve become.”

“Sandstorm,” Passenger: “Lover, oh my lover/I know I’m not easy to understand/Cover, darling take cover/For I am the sandstorm/And you are the sand.” Angsty FrostIron

“Bad Habit,” Ben Platt: Thorki

“C’est La Mort,” The Civil Wars: “Say your good-byes, but darling if you please/don’t go without me.” This is some Thor crying over Loki’s body as the ship explodes around him type of angst.

“I’m With You,” Vance Joy: FrostIron

“How Long Will I Love You,” Ellie Golding: Thorki

“I Won’t Give Up,” Jason Mraz: FrostIron

“I Never Told You,” Colbie Caillat: Thorki

“North,” Sleeping at Last: I feel like this relates to all of my ships, always, ever. It’s one of my favorite songs. But this is where the title for my FrostIron wedding fic comes from, Give Us Bread, Give Us Salt, Give Us Wine. It just has wedding vibes. 

“Achilles Come Down,” Gang of Youths: Icarus-like burning vibes. Avengers-era MCU Loki or AoA Loki

“Chemicals,” Dean Lewis: Thorki

“Remember When It Rained,” Josh Groban: Thorki angst, especially with the rain imagery and Thor being the god of thunder.

“Left Behind,” from Spring Awakening: Thor mourning Loki. (And also sometimes I play around with killing off Tony. It’s never going to be canon in my FrostIron series, but I play around with hurting Loki sometimes.)

“Very Full,” Tom Hiddleston: I love this song. It’s the song he sings in Asgardian (Norwegian) on Lamentis in Loki. I wish we had the rest of the song; it’s so good.

“Everything,” Michael Buble: Thorki

“Eavesdrop,” The Civil Wars: Either FrostIron in the most recent part of my series (part 6), or Lokius once they reunite after the events that happened in the season finale. Because it starts, “I don’t want to talk right now/I just want your arms wrapped around me in this moment.”

“Hold My Girl,” George Ezra: Don’t mind me, just pretending to serenade Sylvie. 

“Jump For My Love” and “Fire,” The Pointer Sisters; and “Jupiter”, from The Planets, by Gustav Holst: A while back, Tom Hiddleston did like an AMA or whatever with Tumblr. I didn’t watch it, I don’t know how you watch them, and I don’t care. But Tumblr is Tumblr, so they do “ads” where they make you see some of it. And one of the things he was asked was, “What is some music you think Loki would listen to?” And he said that Loki would either listen to something classical with like a redemptive arc, like “Jupiter” from The Planets, or he would listen to disco dance music like The Pointer Sisters (of which I grabbed “Jump For My Love” and “Fire” because I didn’t feel like listening to their entire discography). And he was right! I don’t know how he was right; it seems very unlikely that these songs fit, but he’s 100% right, and it’s insane how right he was. And “Jupiter” makes me cry every time. There’s no words, it’s completely classical, and I cry every time. Because he’s right, it’s Loki’s arc in music form, and it makes me cry.

“All I’ve Ever Known,” from Hadestown: “I was alone so long/I didn’t even know that I was lonely.” Lokius

“Hymn for N,” The Cottars: Sylvie

“Lokius,” Natalie Holt: The score from Loki. 

“She Used to Be Mine,” from Waitress: Oh my God, this song is so Sylvie, it’s crazy. This song also makes me cry, because I love Sylvie and she’s perfect and this song breaks my fucking heart.

“A Long Time Ago,” First Aid Kit: Thorki

“Shotgun,” George Ezra: This song has nothing to do with anything, EXCEPT for two lyrics that make me think of my friends in the Void. And they are: “Home-grown alligator” and “time flies in the yellow and green.”

“Send Me a River,” The Cottars: Sylvie

“RAIN,” Ben Platt: Lokius

“For the Dancing and the Dreaming,” from How to Train Your Dragon 2: I’ve decided that this is a song they sing on Asgard. I wrote a ficlet (that I haven’t posted anywhere yet) of Loki from my FrostIron series singing this in Asgardian (Norwegian) to Tony. 

“Vargsangen,” Johanna Grussner: This is a Scandinavian lullaby (I think) about wolves (if I remember correctly). I was trying to find a song for Loki to sing and this is one of the songs I found that I liked, but ultimately went with the above song for the ficlet instead.

“Light,” Sleeping at Last: Thorki (“May these words be the first to find your ears/The world is brighter than the sun, now that you’re here.” The sun will shine on us again, essentially.)

“The One,” Kodaline: Lokius, namely from Choose Me. 

“Dark Moon,” Bonnie Guitar and “If You Love Me (Really Love Me),” Brenda Lee: two songs played in Loki.

“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” from Ella Enchanted (I know this is a cover, but this is the one on the playlist): FrostIron

“Paradise,” George Ezra: Lokius

“So Will I,” Ben Platt: FrostIron, namely Nights on the Roof

“Love Will Find a Way,” from Lion King 2: Either FrostIron during part 6 of Nights on the Roof or Lokius after the season finale of Loki.

“I’m Still Here,” from Treasure Planet: AoA Loki and Loki (“And how can the world want me to change?/ They’re the ones that stay the same.” “They can’t tell me who to be/ ‘Cause I’m not what they see.”)

“Won’t Look Back,” Josh Groban: Nights on the Roof FrostIron

“Where Do I Go From Here?” from Pocahontas 2: AoA Loki and Loki

“If I Say I Love You,” Mumford and Sons: Lokius

“Ten Thousand Miles,” Altan: Thorki, especially Loki trying to get back to Thor after being killed by Thanos

“You Are Enough,” Sleeping At Last: Lokius, a la “You can be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. Just in case anyone ever told you any different.” Could also be me, slapping the shit out of Loki, being like “Get your head out of your ass. You are worthy.”

“Carry You,” The Native Sibling: Lokius

“Half a Man,” Dean Lewis: angst

“Overcome,” from Cyrano: Thorki, probably

“Break My Heart Again,” Finneas: Anything angsty is Loki related

“All These Things That I’ve Done,” The Killers: “Last call for sin/While everyone’s lost, the battle is won/With all these things that I’ve done.” More angst, honestly.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Guns N’ Roses: He’s not even in this movie, and I’m so mad about it, but the theme song for Thor: Love and Thunder.

“Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked,” Cage the Elephant: Again, another song I found on another Loki playlist, but very Loki.

“True Love,” P!nk: Okay, listen. This is exactly how I feel about Loki. “Sometimes I hate every stupid word you say/ Sometimes I wanna slap you in your whole face/ There’s no one quite like you/ You push all my buttons down/ I know life would suck without you./ At the same time I wanna hug you/ I wanna wrap my hands around your neck/ You’re an asshole, but I love you/ You make me so mad I ask myself/ Why I’m still here, oh, where could I go/ You’re the only love I’ve ever known/ But I hate you, I really hate you/ So much I think it must be true love.” All of the lyrics are relevant. Loki is a dick and I love him. 

“Come What May,” from Moulin Rouge: “Never knew I could feel like this/ Like I’ve never seen the sky before/ I want to vanish inside your kiss/ Everyday I love you more and more.” Is it thorki? Yes. Is it FrostIron? Yes. Is it lokius? Yes. Is it Cloudki? Probably. (If you don’t recognize that one, stay tuned; I’m planning a ships post soon.)

“Rat A Tat,” Fall Out Boy: Just Loki vibes. Also, “If my love is a weapon.” Love is a dagger, anyone?

“Victorious,” Panic! At the Disco: Vibes again, I think, sorry.

“After the Gold Rush,” k.d. lang: I think the last verse was giving me Ragnarok and beginning of Infinity War vibes.

“I Was an Island,” John-Allison Weiss: Lokius or FrostIron

“Allies or Enemies,” The Crane Wives: Thorki 

“Easier,” The Crane Wives: Loki at the end of Defenders: Beyond (It’s a very long explanation, I would just say to read Al Ewing’s Loki arc, AoA and DB and then you’ll get why this fits at the end.)

“October,” The Crane Wives: Lokius

“Let Me Fall,” Josh Groban: End of AoA Loki in his moment of Ego-Death (“Someone I am is waiting for courage/The one I want, the one I will become will catch me.” “Though the phoenix may or may not rise.”)

“Caleb Trask,” The Crane Wives: “So you’ve got bad in your blood/ Brother, you’re one of us/ So you’ve got bad in your blood/ How long you gonna wait for those azaleas to bud?” Just Loki.

“I Am My Own Muse,” Fall Out Boy: Loki vibes, and also the line, “Let’s twist the knife again.” Love is a dagger.

“Beloved,” Mumford and Sons: Lokius

“All Things Shall Be Peace,” from Were the World Mine: “Take comfort, he no more shall see my face/Whom I do love and will do till my death.” Lokius from Loki’s perspective in the finale (though I think we’re going to get the original Mobius back very soon).

“Unwritten,” Natasha Beddingfield: Sylvie just killed He Who Remains, and the Sacred Timeline has gone up to a point. And now what happens beyond it is anyone’s guess. “The rest is still unwritten.”

#loki #loki playlist #loki songs #fan playlist #loki tv show #sylvie laufeydottir #lokius #thorki #frostiron

[verbosebabbler]

DIV Style and UL Style Comments: ZampanioSim East

I initially privated this because after I, through more webcode shenanigans, found what to me felt like a cheaty way to get passwords, but if all ways are ok than I'll reveal at least this much of my findings. Still personally unsure about revealing the passwords, but that's something for later me to figure out.

I know nothing about webpage coding, nor do I know much about ZampanioSim East, even though I’ve been exploring it forever so far. But I did find comments of things in the web code, but I think they might be like actual spoilers. Weird to say, since we have had things like direct author commentary, but those felt intended to be found. This feels like miscellaneous comments about how to make the game or what more to do that got left in the code. I’m posting them below under a read more here. Apologies if these somehow are spoilers; the nature of making ARGs is you can’t expect what players won’t find and can’t expect what players will find.

DIV Style post coffin trial of killer plus live blogging of a tgifradys

UL Style

if you "go up" in game mode, leads to jr in a chair attic mode (instead of a genuine moment of forth wall breaking connection chair JR just wants any info on the "real" zampanio, especially any cached copies of that dead faq link. twisting the one moment of truth in indie games like this into more lies (while also being true because yes plz if you make zampanio fan works plz send)

JustTruth ends with you being assigned your TrueClasspect now that you've answered all possible questions

when Truth and Game intersect you meet god (at end of adventure). JustJR mode where i explain why i made this game, sitting in a chair

truth and game true = meta map of zampanio if you are in true mode AND game mode at the same time

gigglesnort fnaf mod is creepy pasta

secrets under construction component, shitty geocities gif of construction.

creepy pastas scattered throughout the site, based on themes, of the form: "You sit down to play a game. It's weirdly obsessed with X. theme1 creepy. then thene2 creepy. * lightly themed ghosts (just enough variation for gaslighting) Suddenly, you can feel the pounding behind your eyes. "let me out" you hear, "let me out"."

a QUEST has a title, text and a reward, all strings. (so you can say that a companion themed quest gives +1 loyalty and a god quest raises your acolyte level, etc etc)

quest screen (has to be at end so can reference ITEMS and GODS (the two gods both are trying to woo the PLayer))

for each theme, finally break out PERSON from noun , refactor SKILL CREATION to use person place or thing rather than generic noun * store missing TEMPLATE PLACEHOLDERS (VISUAL_EFFECT, MONSTER_EFFECT, OBJECT, LOCATION, ADJ, INSULT, COMPLIMENT,CLASS, ASPECT, COMPANION, CITYNAME) in consts (missing CLASS, ASPECT, and CITYNAME, COMPANION NAME) * for each theme, write out a super tiny quest or two with TEMPLATE PLACEHOLDERS The city guard knows it takes a PERSON to catch a thief, and they have come to you. The ADJ OBJ has been stolen from the LOCATION, with no witnesses. Will you be the one to finally crack the case?" "if there is a companion who has a theme that matches TEMPLATE theme, they slot into anything that needs COMPANION name" * on player creation, generate quest array from themes. title is procedural from the theme of the template chosen. * quest screen (copy CITYBUILDING SCREEN as a start) has list of quest titles (upgrades to summary of quest plus the fake skill points you'd get for completing it)

https://zampaniosim.fandom.com/wiki/ZampanioSim_Wiki

pretend to know facts about the user, such as they play cookie clicker slow owl sounds in cctv mode need more reasons for people to hang around with ghosts blackbirds cipher wasted ominous song (you blew it) literally index page of ZampanioSimsim update death popup to focus on "new character to play as" not reincarnation jadedResearcher — Today at 5:08 PM note: when its time to go live, have LITRPGSIM e point to something ominous jadedResearcher — Today at 7:12 PM jadedResearcher — Today at 7:20 PM *persephone, hades, demeter quest. QUESTS are more "combination of side quests and overarching story plot". (think land quests) * session 0 is "the game is real i swear" notJR, the core of Truth is "zampanio was never real but the creepypasta faq was" notJR, and the core of game mode is "the game wasn't real and you couldn't accept that" notJR. * port in fractal shit post (cant compile dart version anymore), associate different states of the fractal with diff words from gaslight array * gaslight cursor revals a radius of true color (hidden yellow things in the pictures?) * post screenshots of this ramble hidden in Truth (is it readable in cctv mode???) * one password is aviary full o fanimated gull skeletons * another is just skelejr sitting in her wheelchair * sprinkle right pws at the 'end' of each path and more *zampanio (not the sim) is designed to spark Obsession in a target and convince them to attempt to enact or oppose the end of the world (the End can either cause the Unbinding of Chaos or the Binding of Madness). if you unbind chaos then the page reloads and you are a player with every theme at once and then some. if you bind maddness the page reloads and you are a custom spawned player with a coherent and human created backstory, skills, buildings, etc. regardless of which mode you can do a new ritual to Balance the Scales and return to regular mode. Which ritual you can attempt to do is decided by seed, and in order to Unbind Chaos you need to have 9 specific items spawn (from duskhollow) and attempt to use them in GAme Mode (they all have custome effects)

link to fake ramble of someone trying to find all the secrets and easter eggs of LitRPGSim (not the fake Zampanio game, the sim) including fake ones

fractal sim plus radio???

third path: press esc too many times and perma crash the menu, leaving the spiral sitting there goin "…" and it …panicking and activating win mode????

first ending where you max out skills (or played long enough to reach the heat death of the universe (thru auto clicker)) and menu finally closes and then fake credits role

sub titles unlock only when you unlock skills related to them. you have to discover them, essentially

zero player game where you get little mini stories about what you 'did', like "used Medical Crown to heal a king" or whatever. if the game were working PROPERLY it should praise you for whatever skill you've used the most, but obviously you've never used a single skill so it just picks one at random or glitches out. have console logs about ERORR NO FAVORIE SKILL FOUND etc.

if i ever do a lets play of zampanio it should be a hacked version that never goes live that is different in many very important ways but subtle at first

#discoveringzampanio

[beforecolin]

the purpose of this blog is to give a place to the abundance of words and images that i am constantly in the midst of processing. it should serve as a place to put my thoughts, a record of my thinking that i can refer back to. It is, of course, mostly for my own benefit, and it is my hope that this blog will keep me accountable to myself. Its a way of pretending what i do matters, without being too precious about it. And it’s fun because someone else can look at it if they want.

it’s funny when i pursue threads of interest that seem new, but suddenly reveal their connectedness to a whole web of previous interests. It is odd how i discovered the term art brut. i’ve been playing around with generating images with midjourney recently and one of the features that is a real boon of the software is that you can tell it to describe an image for you. so i plugged in an image that i created with it and had it describe it to me, and one of the neat things that happens is that it will give you names of artists along with other critical terminology from art theory. in this case i was pursuing an image rendered in a childlike style.

i had just recently gotten chatgpt to write the three little pigs in the nouveau roman style of alain robbe-grillet, the results of which were hilarious (the real joke of it, though, was that the output was evidence of a poor and reductive understanding of what robbe-grillet is really up to). one edition of my prompts was “poorly drawn, bad drawing, big bad wolf, drawn by a 3 year old with no drawing skills, "the wolf, a mere occurence" is legibly written in the piece depicting a scene with the big bad wolf and the three little pigs” ; another, “the big bad wolf with the phrase, ‘the wolf, a mere occurence’ included in the image, drawn by a 5 year old boy born in north carolina in 1993 with adhd and no artistic skill.” i really wanted to emphasize the poorly drawn, childlike style of the output. midjourney is so good at “good,” i wanted to see how it dealt with the bad. in some sense it failed to fail. every image it produced was compositionally perfect, but rendered with “loose, gestural mark-making,” as it so described itself. one of the things that worked out in an interesting way involved the text. “the wolf, a mere occurrence,” a line from the robbe-grillet three little pigs that encapsulated the dead-pan humor of it, never quite made into the image with perfect legibility. i was making these on the day midjourney released an update that was supposed to make text more legible, but it was still failing to get it right. The fact that AI is so bad at writing legible text is perfect for a prompt that includes within it the form of poor execution, as was the case with these. These are still some of my favorite images i’ve made with midjourney.

just before i had the idea to do the three little pigs, i was trying these ideas: “the annunciation drawn by a 5 year old boy born in 1993 with mediocre drawing skills and adhd” and “assumption of mary drawn by a 6 year old boy with adhd born in 1993” traditional themes rendered in a childlike style. In my approach to creation in general there is always a predominance of the recombinatory, so it is no surprise that it occurred to me to enact a conceptual juxtaposition like this before doing something more obvious like children’s story (albeit a version already corrupted by the nouveau roman, granted) in a children’s style. but once i discovered art brut, i began doing a lot of research on jean dubuffet. like, a lot. i will get into that more, but one of the things i read in a book titled Brutal Aesthetics said that dubuffet was interested in the “treatment of traditional themes with childish techniques.” this is part of what we are seeing in his Woman Pinning Up Her Hair and Childbirth. It was a moment of recognition, like, oh, i was thinking of doing something that has been done in a serious way. Art brut and jean dubuffet came as validating discovery. And this is something i’m excited about.

There is an essential irony to learning the history and tradition of a fascination with childlike drawing that exemplifies the paradox that was central to dubuffet’s understanding of art brut. In general it is a twist in the nature/culture distinction that mirrors other oppositions in play with the child, the naive, the innocent, on the side of nature, and the corrupted adult on the side of culture. “Dubuffet”, Hal Foster writes, “was on the side of the very acculturation that he lamented.” Art brut cannot be made consciously. Art made in the style of art brut can never be art brut, and that is ok. I can make a childlike drawing, but it will only be childlike, not a drawing made by a child. Unless i’m really just a 30 year old child, which is probably closer to the truth, and that is where we want to be. But the paradox is even more murky, aas we proceed with kettle logic: on the one hand there is no way of truly coaxing the childlike into enacting itself so that we can harness the pure essential quality of the child, but on the other hand, we can, because the child never existed, not in a pure, prelapsarian sate, not prior to but always already after corruption, somehow both before and after the fall. there is a mystical way of intuing this that is valuable and that I pursue alongside with a scientific approach, with measurable, quantifiable phenomena that fit into an analytic framework (mystic-child / scientist - man)(we will have to add briccoleur / engineer to this dichotomy soon, as dubuffett and levi-strauss were in direct correspondence and engagement with one another’s work. central to my thinking is a keen attentiveness to the ways we might create, enact, discover, invent the denaturalized child, that a precultural entity doesn’t exist as a static being but a state of becoming, and in a spot, for a moment, the mystical mind of the child exists and is born, distorted, and cataylzed by the knowledge of the acculturated. That it is never fully precultural, but that when it is, as animal, as child, as savage, as madman, it becomes so by the preexistence of a culture that it has not yet encountered itself. When the libido of a culture is liberated, it is a moment of recognition of that which it condemns externally as integral to its consistency as a distinct body. “insofar as it liberates libinal instincts, these instincts are sadistic,” and my thinking is informed by De Sade the dialectician. my feeling is more or less this: perhaps kid art can only fully become kid art when a man does it. and that kid art is always made by a little man. art brut, the childlike, is kin to the hard, indigestible kernel of the real that resists symbolic order while also serving as grounds for a new symbolic order. and with the author of brutal aestetics again, “Dubuffet and Bataille in particular seize on negative remainders, such as the brut and the informe, that appear to resist any cultural assimilation.”

kids are little men with their own rigorous schemata. everything i do in my work is in some sense chasing children, just as they chase me away from the playground, they’re a terrifying mob of bullies and mad scientists. all grounds are playgrounds. who says we can’t work on the playground? working with these images i realize that this quality of loose, gestural mark making was one of the central qualities i am in pursuit of in some way, in terms of the defining characteristics of kid art. (but, for me, it may turn out that largely what i will come to understand as the defining characteristics of kid art happen to coincide with the criteria for good art in general.) it is a recovery of raw vision without nostalgia, with new directions toward the child to come. kids are little men of knowledge with their own rigorous schemata, and according to student of bergson and pioneer in the study of child art, georges-henri luquet, they have a logically consistent framework that informs (l’informe) their works to a large degree. before kids learn the convention of visual, perspecitval realism, they are enmeshed in something Luquet called intellectual realism. this is when children draw things not really as they see them, but as they know them. one technique by which this is evidenced is one that relies on an objective notion of transparency: when a kid draws a shoe, you can often still see the toes on the feet through the shoe.

Foster quoting Luquet:

“According to Luquet, intellectual realism is governed by “internal models”; the object depicted by the child exists in her mind more than in the world, and she is faithful to this mental type more to any mundane referent.19 Indeed, she aims to conserve this model at all cost. Hence her sign for a horse or a house will reappear, in whole or part, in drawing after drawing (Luquet called this insistence “graphic automatism”), and if the image seems wrong to the child, she will simply do it over

on the same piece of paper. What defines the internal model is its “exemplarity”; it “is not meant to represent an individual object or person, but a category of objects.” To achieve this goal of “a generic image,” the child works “to present the greatest number, if not all, of the essential elements of the represented object, and to pre- serve each in its characteristic shape, ‘in itself,’ as it were.”It is this imperative that leads the child to her intellectual realism, which adults see as distortion but she regards as fidelity, and in this matter she proceeds logically.”

children are extreme idealists of Tlönian order (hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö).

from Brutal Aesthetics:

“For the art of children, which he included in the art brut collection from the beginning, speaks directly to his anti-aesthetic then in emergence: it has a strong claim on the moti- vated (children draw “solely for their own personal satisfaction,” not for others like parents and teachers), on the fundamental (according to Luquet, this art reveals prime elements of picture-making), and on the general (we were all child artists once). This last point was especially important to Dubuffet; again and again he favored generality over specificity. Of course, these broad concerns with the necessary, the essential, and the universal are quintessentially modernist; so too are the particular qualities typical of child drawing, such as flatness of image, frontality of figure, ambiguity between horizontal and vertical planes, and composition understood as tabulation more than as tableau.”

composition understood as tabulation more than as tableau. I’ve thought about this line a lot since i read it because i think it is another articulation of something i had been searching for in art in general, and it made explicit for me the connection between kid art and outsider art by way of defining a particular aesthetic characteristic, something like the aesthetic of the diagram. this is also where the child and the madman are connected. much in the way that children are faithful to internal models as they compose, as they are drawing what they know, so too is the schizophrenic, or other people that experience life in a way that has been, either or both internally or externally characterized as atypical, biologically and or socially, who i will simply refer to as the madman. (it seems apt that a dedication to a logic of exemplarity would be found to be a guiding principle in those that have somehow been deemed exceptional or exemplary.) supposedly what separates the fantastical compositions of a madman from those of the common man is the fact that for the madman, what is depicted, though fanciful, is not an imagined abstraction of the world and how they see it but a faithful representation of it. it is plain to see that these are the faultlines around which faulter the distinction between the common man and the exceptional man. perhaps it is only ever a difference in degree of deviation from the accepted image of thought, varying in degrees of abnormality against the standard scale of the normal. again the nature culture divide comes back here but with new stakes, perhaps we are less willing to admit that this dichotomy penetrates the substrate of something we hold to be so foundational as a a cognitive science of human perspective, that there is, at some level an equivalence in what we mean when we say, respectively, how we see the world (neuro-bio-physiologically) and how we see the world (culturally, aesthically). this reveals to me another question that recurs for me which has to do with speculating upon the relative spatio-temporal relation of position with regards to perception and interpretation and their (im)possible simultinaeity and/or coincidence (or maybe kant really did already settle this: “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts blind”). for the madman, the world is regular so he makes regular things. for the common man, the world is wonky so he makes things wonky.

[tomeltinto]

For us to be ourselves (2023/12/06 Interview)

The Novembers released “At the Beginning” in the first half of 2020, while the new coronavirus was just starting to exert its fury. In the same year we fell into a situation where concerts with a live audience could not be held, but starting from 2021 they held one-man concerts in Usen Studio Coast and Zepp Haneda (Tokyo), appeared in large-scale festival Fuji Rock Festival, and in addition to that each member has intensified their own solo activities and kept moving widely. Then, after 3 years and a half from their latest work, they completed the ninth full album, “the Novembers.”

The name of the band was crowned as the album title, and it is about 16 years after their debut album of 2007, “THE NOVEMBERS”. Members explained the reason as “We wanted you to feel that the Novembers of now are this”, and revealed that it is a “rock album where the us of now are condensed”. At Ongaku Natalie, we are celebrating the release of this work with an interview to Kobayashi Yūsuke. Looking back to “At the Beginning”, he's talking to us about the background in which they created this rock album, “the Novembers”.

──The period of the creation of the previous work “At the Beginning” was just the period when the new coronavirus was spreading around, and back then you [Kobayashi-san] talked about how, along with the state of the world, the composition of an album would change as well.

Back then we had scheduled a tour not just in Japan, but in Asia as well, and that period ended with many activities related to “At the Beginning” that could not be executed properly. So, honestly, it became a work where many regrets and feelings linger. It became introspective as in “what can we do now?”, because of several activities that we had to cease.

──“At the Beginning” was a strong album with a dark mood, also because it came after 2019’s “Angels”. At first “Rainbow”, that depicts in a majestic way a “beginning”, was supposed to be the last song, but you were saying that with the spreading of the virus, you decided that “if it hasn’t yet begun, it’s already too late”, so you decided to move the song order at the top.

The air of the moment of creation and the zeitgeist flow into every album, and since we changed the song order and the arrangement, matching “At the Beginning” to the state of society, maybe it was more in real-time than anything we had ever done. We were constantly trying to think “That’s good”, and as we continued doing this in the album, and it was not like only in this particular moment we thought “let’s do this in this mood”. However, I feel like there were many moments when we were looking for both parts oozing out of ourselves and the most self-conscious parts. The result of working on what kind of band we are, so, became the style of that album.

──In 2020 the Novembers temporarily halted concerts with a live audience, but starting from 2021 you gradually restored them, and continued one-man (shows) in large venues like Usen Studio Coast and Zepp Haneda (Tōkyō). And also, in 2022 you appeared in Fuji Rock Festival, so it seems like you had a favourable new start.

Looking back, large-scale concerts continued then.

──On the one side, when you held the one-man show at the Liquid room, in november 2022, you said “I’m writing new songs, but I didn’t give them to my bandmates yet, and only the songs I didn’t show anyone have increased”, and “what I want to do with this band, it’s become something that weighs heavily on me”. Was this disquieting state somewhere [then]? What was the situation like in the band back then?

My words at the time worried the fans and I apologized for that. Starting from 2020, all the members tested each their own strengths in activities outside of the Novembers, me with the Spellbound, Takamatsu started working with Petit Brabancon.

──Even outside of music, Kengo worked in many collaborations and Yoshiki [Ryōsuke] even opened a clothing brand. That’s quite vast.

Obviously, both Kengo and Yoshiki kept making music, they also started being support members for other bands. All of us have experienced new methods, aesthetics, philosophies from other places, different from the Novembers.

──About the individual activities of the members, did you set in advance until what point to undertake them?

Not particularly. Each one of us had a positive experience in their own field, and since we wanted to have a good communication once we would meet again, there were no restrictions. On the one hand I was fretting about not neglecting the activities with the Novembers, but I also felt frustrated about not making an album.

──Were there different parts, points where you made use of the activities outside of the Novembers, during the making of the album and in live performances?

I think there definitely were, but it wasn’t like we were talking about it like “let’s change this” or “let’s make use of this action from that one time”. We do not talk about it, but I feel like it shows from the performance, from the sound.

The meaning of the Novembers being the Novembers.

──At Natalie, we asked you a few times to talk about the activities with the Spellbound, and one of those times you said that “[you]’d like to use with the Novembers what I got from the Spellbound”. As with the Spellbound as well you’ve worked tirelessly on the creation of an album, concerts and large-scale festival performances throughout several dates, I imagine this has been for you a valuable experience.

It’s been only three years since I’ve started working with the Spellbound, and I’ve spent such an intense time that it doesn’t feel so short. So I end up inevitably comparing music by both the Novembers and the Spellbound. Before I started working with the Spellbound, I was creating with a feeling like “I will only make the songs I want to make”., and I realized that that’s something that makes me self-sufficient, for better or for worse.

──Working with Nakano Masayuki, (The Spellbound, Boom Boom Satellites), your way to confront music has changed quite a lot.

Nakano-san always thinks earnestly like “how can I change the world with music?”. I think that seeing this scene before my very eyes, I understood why I was so attracted by Boom Boom Satellites and why they’ve been driving my life. At the same time, I understood how serious and hard it could be to guide people and the times in a positive direction.

──So, also the attitude and music you were looking for in the Novembers changed as well.

The hurdle of a standard of value entered in me all at once, so I could no longer be satisfied saying “That’s a pretty good song”. I kept thinking about what it was that could make someone happier, something cooler, and time passed while I was working. So because of that, rather than saying that I fell into a slump, it would be a nuance close to being conflicted with all my heart, so as to make a better work. To make an example with food, I was fermenting. (Laughs)

──Fermentation (laughs). Did the other members know that you were so conflicted while writing?

Honestly, after falling into the Corona outbreak, we didn’t meet much with the other members. We’ve been friends since our 10’s, so if we had united it would have been like always, but I was convinced like “I have to settle this matter all by myself”. Obviously, it’s important to have time alone to think, but thinking along with someone else is important too. And with that, we weren’t able to share daily things like “I want to make this come true, now and in this situation” and grow together.

──Because they’re long-time friends, there are things it’s hard to talk about.

On the contrary, there are things I have to tell them because they’re friends. However, there are times where I prioritized too much getting along and harmony, and I ended up not having a meaningful contact. For a band, if you throw even a pebble, there’s the possibility that that harmony could crumble. But more than settling “let’s continue this band the four of us”, we had to think together about what it means for the Novembers to be the Novembers.

──About “Kanashimi ga kawaitara”, released this April, you commented this: “we’re taking back ourselves” and “we’re ascertaining the meaning of being the Novembers and the meaning in our meeting”. So there was this background.

Yes. We’ve also had the time to deeply consider how to keep going with the band from now on, with this meaning.

Creating an instant when we come into contact with new music.

──Before the general distribution of the new album “the Novembers”, it was put on pre-sale in each venue of the one-man tour, and even tickets where the members would be handing over the CD were arranged.

Just releasing an album, and only then carrying out a tour would be dull. Now the distribution became the main point, and the span between it and presenting the new songs becomes shorter, so we wanted to deliver it more carefully and thoroughly. So by presenting the new songs of the album with a tour before the general distribution, we made the very first moment of contact with the new music into a live concert. Also the CD conveys directly the feeling that “This is us now”.

──Even naming the album after the band name was due to “I want you to feel the very band itself”. We could say it’s like you returned to the early days of your activities in a way, with an act close to having someone taking into their hands the sound source at the venue, going to see the concert without including prior information, buying (the album) in a direct sale if they like the songs.

In addition, since in case of purchase of a ticket including the album, we were making people decide in advance whether to buy or not the album without having listened to even one of the new songs, it becomes even more of a hurdle. Since there were many people who bought that ticket including the album, I was grateful and also very tense. Because it conveyed not only the desire to support our activities, but also the thought that they believe that the new work of the Novembers is something good.

──You went and personally handed over the albums to the audience, how was it?

There were many people from whom I felt that they really looked forward to this, and there were many people that thanked me like “I’ve been following you for nearly fifteen years, but it’s the first time I’ve spoken to the members” or “Thank you for always been so close to me”. We also receive messages on social media, but I was happy that we could let them express their feelings in front of us.

──So far, you as a band have always been treasuring the act of giving something to someone, the letter and the flower seeds enclosed in “zeitgeist”, the formula of the “share-CD” in the single “kyō mo ikitane”, where you included 2 CDs with the same contents, the delivery of the “Tour 2022 - Kangiten” after the end of every performance, the paper with the lyrics of the songs you’ve just performed at concerts. The very personal delivery of this album, we feel what you want to convey in that stance.

From the personal delivery words and feelings are born, and since the energy you can’t see comes and goes, we can say that it’s a truly intimate communication. When you think that it’s not only a thing, but also every conversation and gesture is a gift, the appearance of your everyday life, and the way you grasp the facial expression and aura of your partner change as well. Precisely because I live with someone, I am regularly becoming more aware of a feeling like “I want to increase the happy moments”.

If we don’t express all we have now, the baton of energy won’t stay.

──As the comments you made when the release date of the new album “the Novembers” was announced, like “a rock album where the us of now are condensed”, and “after all it’s really cool to be in a rock band. It’s that kind of album”, this was an album where you condensed the charm of rock that you [the Novembers] have pursued until now. From the first song “BOY”, you demonstrate your will to plunge forward with lyrics like “Please don’t stand in our way, if we destroy everything”, “We are reborn, pressing on the accelerator”, and it feels like you divided the songs into two, the first half that emphasises guitar sounds from you and Kengo, and the second half, from the sixth song “GAME”, that emphasises the rhythm elements from Takamatsu and Yoshiki. How did you decide the whole composition or concept?

This time I wrote all the song at pretty much the same time, and in that I could see a connected story. And from that eventually I came out with the theme of a “rock album” and it was kind of like the flow.

──So in the first half you express frankly a sound like “The Novembers is this kind of band” with “BOY”, and after that “Seaside” is new wave, “Daremo shiranai” is hard and alternative, and songs that shake free from every genre that you have taken as a motif follow.

To be honest I didn’t realise the idea of musical taste and genre. It’s not like we especially discussed “BOY” being the first song. More than calculation and deliberateness, the mood and aura of the band that we can’t express with words became the criteria for the musical composition and the song order. Somehow it was more of a feeling like the fighting spirit, in a way, of “let’s express everything we have now”, “the baton of energy we’re giving the listener, it won’t linger if we don’t do our best”.

──It’s the feeling, and the individuality of each song has stood out.

Also I think that the idea of every member like “I want to be like this” or “I want to develop like this” is dwelling in each song. The songs grow in the same way as watering flowers, it’s a natural and healthy way of creating.

──The ballad in the middle “Katachi aru mono, Bokura wo tabanete” while incorporating a mood similar to “Saikin Anata no Kurashi wa dō” and “kyō mo ikitane”, is a challenging song that also features the sound of saxophone.

We played this at Shindaita Fever, at the celebration for the 15th debut anniversary, and thanks to that we completed it. Not only at the exhibition, but I also participated at a talk event with tobird, who has been handling our artworks for a long time, and while we were looking back at the activities until now, I realised that we have many accomplishments, like treasures. And I wanted to turn those memories into a song.

──This talk event was focused on looking back to all of your activities from the early days up to now, there were many valuable topics.

There are also parts where you reflect when you look back on past events, but I also understand things I finally realised now and that I treasure. I often daydream if I’d look glittering if the me of the past saw the me of today, and if I’d be a person who could inspire [that past me]. On one hand there were moments when I thought “I was good back then”, and I feel like I’ve lost something important. But through the past (I’ve) accumulated, I want to keep being the best now.

Not to get closer to the ideals, but to keep working while feeling

──One more song in the middle of the record, “November”, precisely because it recalls the name of the band, does it quote elements from the past songs, does it give a new interpretation?

“November” is a song I’ve developed from some lines I wrote back in 2010, so it’s not like I wanted to collect and reinterpret the motifs of old songs. In my case, the more what I want to express with a song is concrete, the more its explosive power grows dull. Picturing the blueprint and creating by getting closer to that ideal, it’s just not my thing. Most of the time I complete things touching the songs, working all the time while feeling with all my heart.

──So what’s the reason you gave it the title “November”?

At the stage of the rough sketch of songwriting, without parts of the song composition like A-melody, B-melody, the hook, being clearly defined, it just kept on flowing like a road movie, and it was good. Only at a later time it started to sound like it was a symbol of our band and existence itself.

──In the second half follow “GAME” which showcases Yoshiki’s powerful drumming, “Cashmere” where Takamatsu’s complex bass becomes intertwined with ethnic tunes, “Morning Sun” which abundantly uses step recording vaguely resemblant to the 1980s synthpop, songs with a characteristic way to use rhythm. It’s also something that the Novembers challenged in recent years, and developed ideas of new sounds.

With “GAME” using only one type of riff I wondered what kind of song could come out, and it was ready with the rehearsals in studio sessions. Normally I try to make sounds accurately with the effector board, but I just tried to perform with the amp and guitar in the studio. For how long the time I couldn’t make songs along with the other members, I feel like we genuinely rejoiced at being able to perform the 4 of us together. I completed “Morning Sun”, like “November”, based on an idea I’ve had for a long time.

──Like “November” and “Morning Sun”, there’s also the pattern of developing ideas conceived several years ago.

But instead of dragging them out, it was like thinking unintentionally “Let’s do this song once more”. Truthfully, this year we’ve encountered some trouble with the hard disk where we had been safekeeping the original tracks, and we lost all the songs we’d made and stored during the corona.

──You also talked about it during the talk event. Yoshiki, who was sitting there too, said that “We were absolutely depressed.”

Especially if we’re counting the number of songs, there were enough to make three albums, and they all disappeared. But we broke through it, and while making use of some ideas left in my head, reflecting also the ideas of each member, as a result we used this as a chance to make fresh songs, and it tied us together.

The power of words “Dakiau yō ni” unleashed

──Then, the last song “Dakiau yō ni” is the song that probably symbolises not only the album, but the Novembers from now on. In an interview with The Spellbound, you said about lyrics “the form when transcribed, the type to be fixated on the world view that is expressed in the lines”, but hearing those words, I realised that the Novembers’ lyrics have, to a certain extent, many long lines.

I see.

──Also, regarding that, “Dakiau yō ni” accumulates short and kind lyrics like “Even if I forget the fun things, let’s walk just a bit” and “Even if I forget the happy things, we will walk”, and it feels like the whole song enhances the power of words.

This is also something my activity with the Spellbound has had a huge influence on. I think earnestly about something I want to convey, I understand how closely I can examine it, and it paid off with the result that a better standard has been raised.

──This feature of your poetry is also shown in the single “Kanashimi ga kawaitara”, and I suppose that it was further defined in “Dakiau yō ni”. Furthermore, with “I’m gradually coming undone, breaking, when I can’t understand anything anymore, reassure me”, and the influence generated by the Novembers, with “I’m gradually coming undone, even if I break, because you make me remember my shape” you’re making the fans that have been following you feel a sense of trust. Precisely because every word is so sincere, it’s like a persuasive power has born.

I’m glad. It was worth to value so much which words I should use.

──By the same token, aside from the songs that could, for example, cheer someone up, if the words employed are too dark the persuasive power fades as well, if the tone is too strong an uncomfortable feeling arises, as if you were being forced. This balance is very difficult, but how do you think about the lyrics while also paying attention to all that?

Lyrics are very mysterious, when I looked at them as characters, when I read them aloud, when I talked about them, when I sang them on the melody, the way they are transmitted changes in each moment. Even the simple “Fine”, the impression changes completely if it indicates a specific someone, or if it doesn’t necessarily indicate it. It happens that the energy of the singer yields the persuasiveness of those words, and the opposite happens as well. It’s hard to quantify it and to explain it, but because the deep emotion of music is born from vibes and feelings impossible to analyse. When I value that, it sparks joy in me too, and I’m able to share that feeling for the first time to the listener. It resonates.

──Also, it’s a case-by-case thing, but there are also cases where discrepancies arise between the original artist’s intention and the listener’s interpretation.

Yeah, that’s unavoidable… there are people who are deeply moved seeing the hard work, and there are others that may have a negative reaction. But if the feeling of “I want to make something good making something” is true, what is transmitted by the work could change. The old me would be making music with a feeling like “I like this kind of music” or “I like this beautiful thing”, happy just by looking at those things. I jumped out of that extent of self-absorption, and I started thinking “I want to create for someone who also includes myself”, and then the moment I’d feel like I maybe I’ve actually delivered it, I’ve started thinking that that was good.

Rock changes the “here” you are into “somewhere”

──There are people who claim that due to many musicians being on the scene for a long time, and the number of listeners increasing, they gradually could no longer understand who to make music for, or that they could no longer write lyrics. You [seem to] address your songs to the right person, how do you gain that consciousness?

I’m that kind of person who worries about the lyrics all the time too. But maybe that’s normal, and the fact itself that both I and the listener could think that the words and melody I came up with are good, it’s a miracle. Maybe it’s about wondering if the thought of “I want to share it even if it’s painful” will prevail. Also, I think it can coexist with the wish for both the people close to us and the world to be happy. It’s important to write lyrics as if we were writing about the meaning of our existence in the world in a letter, and I feel like that kind of songs will keep being heard forever.

──Another one, this album is, again, a work where you’ve been searching what rock is, and rock is violence and beauty, and it’s sinister, you can express it with many images. What do you think rock is?

Yeah… I believe rock changes the “here” you are into a “somewhere”. The rock bands that changed my life are all like that, they made me feel like the place where I am now has changed into a completely different world. To put it in other words, it changes something in a person to the point their world view changes. They’ve been driving my life, and that energy still remains inside me. That’s why I’m doing it too. To me, that’s rock.

──Indeed in this album, with words like “start walking” and “fly”, it’s depicted a state where you tap into a different world. Going even further, in the line “we’ve flown beautifully to the other side of the rainbow” in “Dakiau yō ni”, is charged with the desire to go in the same direction of “Rainbow”, that was supposed to be the last one of your previous album, and, differently from “ANGELS” and “At the Beginning”, the whole album is wrapped in a bright atmosphere, and it’s like finally it’s showing in a very Novembers-manner the words you’ve been saying for a long time during the MC speeches, “Let’s meet in a bright future”.

I have the actual feeling that we made a good album. But there’s also the feeling of “we can make an even better one”.

──It’s also important what appears in the vision of what comes next.

Yes. More than vision, it’s about premonition and hope. Rather, without those it’s very tough (laughs). From now on too, we’ll keep having this feeling like “let’s make an even better one”. So if with the last work of my life I’ll feel like “I did it!”, it will be the best.

#the novembers #kobayashi yusuke #takamatsu hirofumi #kengo matsumoto #yoshiki ryosuke #2023 #the novembers (2023) #interview

[wolint]

FRESH MANNA

PRAISE HIS NAME!

Psalm 145

It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to the Most High declares Psalm 92:1 and our text is an incomparable Psalm of praise that the Jews have such high estimation for that they assert that, if one reads it with sincerity of heart repeatedly three times daily, one will enjoy the infallible blessings of the world to come.

How can one extol and magnify God’s majestic splendour?

This marvellous psalm is bursting with attributes of God and revelations of his character:

He is compassionate to all his creations.

He is gracious, generous, loving, all-powerful, righteous, watchful, protective, near to us, great and good, and ever faithful.

The passage also reveals some of God’s titles: Judge, King, and Lord.

Think of the Saviour: Jesus is the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, our Counsellor, our Good Shepherd. Prayerfully studying and meditating on the character traits and names of God is one of the most faith-building, encouraging things you can do for your spiritual life.

Praise will dispel your anxiety, boost your faith and help you trust God more.

Knowing the true character of God will renew and transform your mind with the truth, dissolve any doubt you may have, and breathe life into your soul.

The Lord is good to all—There is not a soul in the world that is not continually under God’s merciful love.

His tender mercies—His bowels of compassion are over all His works; He feels for His intelligent offspring, as the most affectionate mother does for the child of her bosom. And through this matchless mercy, these bowels of compassion, His son Jesus tasted death for every one of us.

David was praising and celebrating God for His goodness and generosity toward His creatures, especially His people. One remarkable feature is the way David used so many different words for “praise”: “extol”; “bless”; “praise”; “commend”; “declare”; “meditate”; “speak”; “pour forth”; “sing aloud”; and “give thanks, can you think of a better way to praise and celebrate the name of your Father, creator, and God?

Hallelujah! What we all shout in worship is the English word for Hālal, a Hebrew word for "to praise." It is to boast in, glorify, extol, and celebrate the Lord who is most "worthy of praise," and David seemed to have had a standard of boasting in his God and praising Him in everything and all circumstances.

Will you dare to praise God?

Praise His name! We don’t have to wait for victory before we praise the Lord as learnt from David and as directed by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:18, let praise and thanksgiving be your lifestyle.

Giving thanks and praise to God is required of all believers in acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty and gratitude for all the goods that come from his hands and then give Him the praise due for His grace and mercy.

Leah was so full of gratitude and praise to God that she named her son Judah! A confession of God’s goodness to her in Genesis 29:35.

How do you confess your gratitude and praise to God?

Consider how great God is, then consider how sinful and mortal we are. Then consider how great God’s love is for you. How can we help but praise him? He is powerful enough to sustain the universe and loving enough to redeem it.

Loudly declaring the attributes of God while thinking about how you’ve experienced different aspects of his character is a powerful act of worship. Praise His name!

Take a few moments to pray this psalm aloud. Ask God to reveal Himself to you in greater clarity than you’ve ever experienced before and PRAISE HIS NAME!

PRAYER: The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my victory. He is my God, and I will praise him; he is my father’s God, and I will exalt him for creating and loving me enough to be my God through Christ Jesus. Amen.

Shalom

WOMEN OF LIGHT INT. PRAYER MIN.

#spotify #devotional #christianpost #women's ministry #biblestudy #biblestudy christianpost women's ministry #biblestudy christianpost 'women's ministry #conference #family #prayer meeting

[chrysochroma]

Hermit Horror Week

Day 7: From Beyond

@hermithorrorweek i’m finally done

Title: Dark Matter

Prompt: From Beyond

Rating: Teen And Up

Words: 1,009

Warnings: Implied Death, Cults, Religious Imagery, Doomsday

Summary: The cult of the Moon is not what it seems.

read on Ao3

Mumbo stared into the sky, eyes set on the shining Moon taking up most of it. It had been 9 days since he had first noticed it growing in size, and it had gotten significantly larger since then. Mumbo basked in the bright glow that it gave off, not once closing his eyes, letting it fill his vision. It felt almost refreshing to feel its soft light after a day under the Burning Star. The moonlight filled his vision as he stood, simply existing in the presence of the Moon.

He opened his pocket watch with a click and looked at it. Its single hand was almost at the halfway point of the white half of the watch’s face. The moon was at its highest point in the sky above him, basking the ground in its light. He closed the watch, then tucked it back into the pocket of his pristine white suit.

“Excuse me, Pontifex?”
Mumbo turned around to see Impulse, accompanied by a pair of Phantoms perched on his shoulders. “Yes?”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Actually, I’m in the middle of something at the moment, so now isn’t the best time.”

Impulse instantly backed up, his eyes trained on the ground between them. “Of course, I’m so sorry.” Impulse’s Phantoms left his shoulders and flew up towards Mumbo, then started to circle around his head, forming a halo.

“Bring it up again later, I’ll get back to you about it.” Mumbo continued.

“Yes, thank you, Pontifex.”

“Of course, Moonchild.”

Mumbo turned back around as Impulse left and looked at the stoic faces of the eight statues surrounding his temple, then the brazier filled with bright blue fire in the middle of it. He turned the pages of the sacred text he had created in the name of his God. He read the prophecies revealed to him, written down for all of history to study. His name, scrawled across the pages of his own creation. The Moon shone bright over his head, ready to be worshipped. The purple tint of the circles under his eyes almost matched his tie.

An earthquake rocked the ground beneath Mumbo’s feet. He felt his heels lift off the ground, and seconds later, he was floating a meter in the air. He looked up at the Moon as he drifted farther upwards into its embrace. His eyes shot open and a resonant voice filled his ears.

“What is the meaning of this unfaithfulness?”

Mumbo kept his voice flat and casual as he spoke, his unfocused eyes filled with moonlight. “I have been nothing but completely devoted since you revealed yourself to me.”

“Nonsense. This new … regime of yours does none of what we agreed to.”

“That will come in time, my Lord. I can only ask for your patience.”

“I have given you patience already.”

“Then give me more, Almighty One.”

There was a moment of silence.

“These methods of yours are unacceptable. Keep up your side of the bargain, apostle, and I will keep mine. You know what the consequences are if you fail.”

“I won’t, my Lord.”

Mumbo closed his eyes as he floated back down to the ground. He straightened his tie, then turned to his followers.

“Pontifex, if I may,” Impulse started.

“Of course.”

“I … I think I’m seeing things.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know, I just-“ He hesitated. “I- there!” He pointed to his right. “That person, you see them, right?”

Mumbo glanced to where he was pointing, then back at Impulse. “There’s nothing there.”

“No, no, sir, there’s-“ Impulse looked frantically around before speaking again. “I- I’m hallucinating, aren’t I?”

Mumbo’s voice was calm and patient. “No, you aren’t.”

“But you said it yourself, sir, it’s not there.”

“You are not hallucinating, child. The Holy One would not let such misfortune come upon one of his Children.”

Impulse nodded. “Of course. You’re right. Thank you, Pontifex.”

“You’re welcome, Moonchild.”

Mumbo looked to the Moon as Impulse walked away. I gave you this, he thought. I helped you, and in exchange, you will help me.

Mumbo’s eyes scanned over the audience of his followers. “Children of the True Light, out time is upon us. As you all can see, our Great Hope of Glory, the Author of our Eternal Salvation has descended to our earthly plane to bring about their renewal of our world. They will shape our world to suit their needs, and we have been promised existence in the new utopia of the God of Love and Peace. He that has called us to Glory and Virtue will harbor us against the wickedness of the Burning Star. Together, we will be granted salvation as a reward for our faith. Moonchildren, our Day of Deliverance is upon us.”

Mumbo watched as the Moon fell ever closer to the ground, his loyal followers standing behind him. Chunks of stone and dirt were lifted into the sky all around them as they waited for their deliverance. The Moom seemed to taunt them, mocking the promise their Pontifex had said it had made. Mumbo’s followers looked at each other with worried glances as the Moon fell. Mumbo stared straight ahead, unfazed and undaunted. He was prepared for the coming of his new world. He thought he was prepared.

Fire surrounded them as the Moon made contact with the ground, incinerating everything on impact. His followers looked to him with confusion and terror, some recipe for betrayal. Mumbo stared in horror at his burning world, then looked up into the glowing lightness.

“Your day of deliverance.”

“Yes.”

“They do not know the true meaning of your words.”

“The truth is unimportant.”

“Tell that to them.”

“I wish I could, but I can’t, because of you.”

“You failed to uphold your end of the bargain, so I stopped holding up mine. It’s only fair.”

“None of this is fair!”

“You were the one that made it this way, Pontifex.”

“I-“

“You put yourself here. You put all of them here. Now, it is time to reap your rewards.”

Mumbo’s eyes closed.

#writing #creative writing #hermithorrorweek2023 #horror #hermitcraft #hermitcraft season 8 #mumbo jumbo

[fireflyhwufanficwriter]

My thoughts on Dr. Stone’s S03E06 (“Treasure Box”)

(Safe to read for anime-only folks.)

My thoughts after watching Season Three, Episode Six:

01. They are REALLY using 3D animation techniques to flex how awesome the Perseus and this part of the kingdom's journey are XD

02. I'm hearing the inspiring music again, while they're talking about the revival fluid! :)

03. The search for the treasure box begins! And that's exactly the title of this episode - "Treasure Box!" :D

04. The new voice actor they got to play Byakuya is doing a great job! I can hear the differences (the new voice is deeper, and doesn't have the cool gravelly effect the old voice did), but the new voice is still pretty close to the old one! :)

05. Ah, so they - or maybe he - taught their descendants about seashells, and probably way more information, too! :O

06. This "tell me the Hundred Tales" scene didn't go quite like how I imagined it, since the location is slightly different here. But Ruri still asks if Senku is prepared for what he's about to hear… :O

07. (The night-to-day lighting and bird transition was a nice touch! :D)

08. …and Senku is so totally NOT prepared. He was panting in exhaustion by the end of the Seventh Tale! XD

09. I love how Ruri starts with Kohaku's name - it makes so much sense for her to do that! :) Although for all we know, maybe that was how the tale about ores actually began, too… :)

10. Wait… so Senku approached Ruri at night. They went through Tales One to Seven through the night and part of the morning, until Gen brought them tea, presumably around breakfast time. Then while Senku is still holding the tea mug, he asks about tales about ores :D

11. Absolutely nobody would interrupt Senku and Ruri, so they probably stayed up there talking the entire time… and by the time they get to amber, gold, diamond, and platinum, it's sunset. So… THE WHOLE DAY was spent on just ONE Tale - the one about ores. So Kohaku may not have been the first one discussed after all… but wow, that's a LONG time for just ONE Tale… :O Although it's an extremely important tale, so details ARE important! :O

12. So Dunbar's Number is 150 - the ideal maximum number for a cohesive society… :)

13. Platinum… the ultimate treasure in the stone world, is sleeping in the treasure box… :O

14. And the treasure box is the Soyuz spaceship, the ultimate creation of humanity, made to withstand the highest of temperatures and the harshest of climates! :D

15. It's so sweet that Senku's so surprised about not knowing anybody's name! It's like he cares so much about the people of Ishigami Villages that he knows them all very well, and the idea of NOT knowing one of them is so shocking to him! :)

16. Kohaku just casually tells Senku that of course he doesn't remember the name, because he has no name… and Soyuz is just like, "It's fine; you can call me whatever" XD

17. That was a very, very understated reaction to the "I'm not actually from Ishigami Village" reveal - one of the rare times I think the anime didn't do the manga justice. That should have been MIND-BLOWING to Kohaku and Chrome… and Kokuyou, and everybody else! :O

18. His name is Soyuz, and he's going to lead them to the Soyuz! :D

19. And Senku understands the implications of this revelation immediately! :)

20. The people of Ishigami Village and the people of Treasure Island are distant relatives, because the very first Tale was about telling them to go to Japan (and probably included instructions how to do so, like by navigating using the stars or something)! :D

21. And just like what they kingdom of science discussed before, putting everybody on a ship had the potential of making humanity go extinct, so only some of them had to have kept trying over the years… and eventually, one group made it, and started Ishigami Village! :O

22. This is a good moment for Kokuyou. Even though he's not the village chief anymore, he (of course) still feels an extremely strong sense of responsibility towards the members of Ishigami Village, which is why he was so alarmed that the Treasure Island people they're sailing to could be Why-Man, and why he had such a sense of urgency when scolding Soyuz. AND he gathered himself and thanked Soyuz for coming forward! :D

23. He's still SO frustrated, though… and Kohaku puts a comforting hand on his back; aww! :)

24. "What exists beyond the horizon?" is a deeply human question that is within all of us! :O

25. Hmm, we got some anime-only Soyuz information… I… think… hmm, I haven't read this part of the manga in a while XD

26. Aww, that was a very kind thing that Gen said to Soyuz! AND Kokuyou agreed! :)

27. Not days… they're going to arrive in Treasure Island is just a few HOURS! XD

28. Kohaku and Nikki tried to Yuzuriha, but she's an absolute veteran when it comes to sitting through Senku's detailed, five-hour scientific explanations! :D

29. That's good information to know about stairs and ships - thank you, Ryusui! :)

30. Sleeping quarters, goats, a greenhouse, engines, storage, a… Mobile Lab… and so much more! :D And a squid, stingray, and shark underwater XD

31. Seasickness, and some scopolamine… whatever that is… from a flower to cure it! :) Just a small amount and Ginro is back to being confident about his being one of the people of the sea, saying they can handle themselves in a storm… :D

32. …and they actually DO get themselves inside a storm! :O

33. Ryusui's so chill, and Senku is so NOT chill XD

34. The storms will make things incredibly difficult for them, but it will provide them with much-needed cover, too! :)

35. Soyuz, after over a decade, is once again laying eyes on his home… Treasure Island! :D

36. Senku is talking to Byakuya; talking about how they're here at his Treasure Island; aww! :O

37. Oh, this episode! :) While a couple of moments didn't quite go how I imagined they would, I really liked seeing Byakuya again, and seeing Ruri talk to Senku about the Hundred Tales, and about the Tale about ores! :D The title of the next episode is "Ray of Despair, Ray of Hope" - and it's time for me to go and watch this episode now! :D

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#dr stone #ishigami senku #kohaku #dr stone kohaku #dr. stone #dr. stone kohaku