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myzoowiktoriaizydorczyk · 3 years

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Resident Evil

“Resident Evil” is a survival horror video game series that has 9 out of the 10 games are in in third person where you actively use guns to fight off the enemies. The franchise started all the way in 1996, it currently has 7 original games and 3 remakes.

Capcom was founded in 1979 in Osaka, Japan by Kenzo Tsujimoto. This is a video game company that has also released few films based on their hit selling franchise Resident Evil.

Resident Evil I

This is the game that started the entire franchise, it was published in 1996 for Playstation, however the game got a remake in 2002 as Shinji Mikami - the designer and director of original game - felt like the game did not age well and the GameCube could bring it closer to original vision.

Story

The protagonists are Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, they investigate Raccoon City where their team members of an elite taskforce “S.T.A.R..S” disappears, they get trapped inside a mansion which is invested with zombies and other monsters.

Trailer

Eventhough this is a horror game, there is nothing scare about this aspecially considering the fast paced music that plays the entire time. The trailer switches between real life recordings which were used as cinematics and recordings, it also censors out any gruesome elements. This is not what I expected from the trailer that started this franchise but this is the oldest game out of all the games i looked at.

Remake Trailer

This is the first trailer that uses high pitched music to create the ominous feeling and build tension - this is the first trailer from the franchise that does this. They have clearly learned what is good and not from the previous three trailers : showing different characters, limiting the amount of times we see monsters, ending on a hopeless moment.

Resident Evil II

The second game of this franchise was published in 1998, this time Shinji Mikami was the producer while Hideki Kamiya was the director. After years of requesting a remake the director Hideki Kamiya finally convinced Capcom to create a remake which was published in 2019.

Story

Two months after events of the first game, Kennedy and Claire Redfield must escape Raccoon City after the citizens are transformed into zombies by biological weapons.

Trailer

This trailer only shows us the cinematic events of the game, but unlike in the previous one they are using the game locations and models and not realy life. Also this time we hear the sound effects of the scene and there are actually characters talking, the music they use in the background quiet, deep and ominnous at first but later more action like as they show the character encountering more zombies and other monsters.

Remake Trailer

Resident Evil III

Just like the previous game it was produced by Shinji Mikami but directed by Kazuhiro Aoyama , this game was released in 1999 and remade 21 years later in 2020. However this game was directed by Kiyohiko Sakata Yasuhiro instead.

Story

Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira are tring to survive the zombie apocalypse while being hunted by an intellegent bioweapon known as Nemesis.

Trailer

This trailer once again developed as it doesn’t only show scenes with the protagonists but it also includes the policeforce encountering the infected and fighting. This is also the first one that makes you feel hopeless as it ends with every character dying and being eaten, this contrasts the music which makes it sound as though the heroes have arrived and will stop those creatures.

Remake Trailer

Resident Evil IV

This game is once again directed and written by Shinji Mikami.This is also the biggest gap between Resident Evil games as this one was released 6 years after the previous game - in 2005.

Story

Leon S. Kennedy is sent on a rescue mission to save U.S. president’s daughter Ashley Graham who has been kidnapped by a cult, this time instead of zombies he fights humans infected by a mind controlling parasite as he eventually gets joined by Ada Wong.

Trailer

Since this trailer came out after the remake of the first game was released, they decided to drop the spooky and horror theme. It reminds me of the “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” as it flashes between characters and surrounds them with words and phrases that describe them.

Resident Evil V

This game form 2009 is chronologically the first game from Resident Evil franchise that was not directed nor produced by Shinji Mikami as the director of this game is Yasuhiro Anpo and the produver is Jun Takeuchi .

Story

Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar investigate a terrorist threat by as a terrorist plans to sell a bioweapons, however to stop him they also must fight humans which are being mind controlled by a parasite.

Trailer

They once again came back to the ominous aspect of trailesr, as they used only vocals based of traditional African music - location of the gam. But all they do is show the city, until the music stops when we see the first infected transform - that’s when we see acton and the music switches to being fast.

Resident Evil VI

Published in 2012, this game was directed by Eiichiro Sasaki and produced by Yoshiaki Hirabayashi.

Story

There are four seperate campains that connect the same story, you play as Chris Redfield, Leon S. Kennedy, Jake Muller or Ada Wong depending on which one you choose. The world is once again being consumed by zombies and they travel from America to China to find the one responsible for it.

Trailer

The trailer shows us three of the four campaigns of this game, in fact they never even show that Ada Wong is in this game. It starts by telling us that there is no way of fighting it as even the U.S. President is infected, along with 70 thousand people. During this segment the trailer shows us the abandoned ruins of this city. Then it focuses on the gameplay which shows the characters fighting, and shows even more combat along with the other two campaigns while their respective protagonists talk over the music giving us hints as to what is hapenning.

Resident Evil VII

This game is not like any of the previous ones as this is the only game where you play in first person perspective but your character is also defensless. This game was released in 2017 - directed by Koshi Nakanishi and produced by Masachika Kawata.

Story

Ethan Winters is a civillian who searches for his missing wife Mia, he ends up in a derelict plantation mansion where the Baker family which is infected by a wierd virus.

Trailer

Since the gameplay as well as the story of this game is much different, the trailer also needs to stand out form the rest. Throughout the entire trailer there is a song which is really low pitched which contrasts with the highpitched noises that sometimes are added in the trailer. The trailer shows us the character wandering around the house as well as few shots that just show us things irrelevant to game play - outside of the house, animal decomposing etc. There are only few cuts where we see the protagonist being attacked by the antagonists, which is perfect as it keeps that element of suprise for the gameplay.

sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m80hA5bRk0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJYSznumed0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gun-MVEWg40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjxFtFwY6jk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KTghW30ZuY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxJbz_3PKQo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS_bGpe9qE8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3zIzY6M3fQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3wS-Q2KBpk

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ping-ping-ying · 5 years

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NCT 2019: Mafia! Yandere!

Warning: toxic relationships, mental and emotional abuse, mentions of death/murder and suicide, kidnapping, illegal crimes, descriptive violence

NCT 2019: Reaction when their s/o tries to escape

To make this easier these will deadass be split up into units😂

Requested by @99-nct 🌻💓

NCT 127:

Taeyong: Would honestly freak a little. Since he made sure he kept track of you the entire day. He always knew where you were, and what you were doing. So when he came home from working late to see the house completely empty he panicked. But about four days after escaping he used all his resources to track you down, and found you waiting at a train station.

“Hey sweetie.” He pointed a gun to your back.

You stood there frozen.

“On the count of three, you’re going to come back home with me and get severely punished, or I’ll start shooting random civilians, your call.”

Johnny: Wouldn’t be as freaked out as you would expect him to be. All he needed to do was trace your steps. He made sure to look through your emails, phone logs, and sure enough, he found out you bought a plane ticket back home (unless you live in Korea lol) . It took him quite a while to find you in the crowded airport, but once he did, he gripped your wrist making you turn and face him.

“Hey doll face, remember me? The love of your life?”

Taeil: Home boi really caught you in the midst of your escape. You thought he went to sleep so you decided to high tail it out of there. But to your misfortune, Taeil was downstairs sitting in his chair. He held a glass of whiskey as he swirled it around looking at it intently.

“Now my dear, what do you think you’re doing?”

Doyoung: Was quite oblivious of the fact that you tried to escape. You both were at the mall and he went to go order food from the food court. Once he left you, you decided to sprint towards the malls entrance/exit. People gave you weird looks but you didn’t care. Your mind was focused on escaping. A mall cop saw you basically running and he came up to you and told you to stop running. In this moment you were about to tell this mall cop everything, but you were quickly shut down.

“Honey there you are!” Doyoung came jogging up to you.

The mall cop noticed your uneasy state, so he asked you,

“Do you know this man ma’am?”

You didn’t have time to answer because Doyoung came up with a smooth lie.

“Yes, this is my wife. She suffers from PTSD. Something must’ve triggered her, I’m so sorry sir.” He came and held your hand.

“No I’m sorry, please just make sure she is okay.” The cop bowed and walked off.

Doyoung then squeezed your hand tightly, to the point where you thought he was going to break a couple of fingers

“You are in big trouble when we get home.”

Mark: Mark wasn’t really a hardcore vicious yandere. He was actually surprisingly lenient when it came to you. That was his big mistake. You kept up your good behavior so he could give you more freedom, and that he did. You two were at a park and Mark had to use the bathroom. He told you to wait for him, and you, plastered a fake smile on your face and told him you would wait. As soon as the bathroom door shut you made a run for it.

You didn’t care where you were going, as long as it was away from him. You lost track of how long you were running and decided to look back, when you did, you bumped into someone.

“Are you all right miss?” An older woman asked as she helped you up.

“Yes, I need-”

“Babe!” Mark came running up to you. “I told you to wait for me! She’s so competitive, cheater.”

“You two are adorable! Have fun!” The older woman walked off and you looked at Mark.

He grabbed your hand and yanked you towards the exit of the park.

Haechan: This evil little shit actually let you escape, just so he can hunt you down. It was part of this sick little fantasy he had. When he finally caught you, it was not even an hour later. He knocked you out and threw you in the back of the car.

“I could do this all day princess.”

Yuta: It was his fault really. He left you at home alone all day and he forgot to lock the doors and windows. He was such in a rush that he forgot to do it. You walked straight out the door, and hopped into your car. The next thing you remember is waking up in the hospital. You were weak and could barley move, Yuta was asleep in a chair to your left. In that moment, you wanted to just pull out your IV but you couldn’t fore it was probably the only thing keeping you alive right now.

“Honey! Are you okay?!” Yuta popped up and immediately grabbed your hand.

“I think, I’m fine?”

“Where were you going? You know you aren’t allowed to leave the house without me.”

To your surprise, Yuta didn’t even suspect you tried to escape, because if he did, you probably would’ve been better dying off in the car accident. So you made up a lie to save your ass.

“I-I wanted to surprise you and make you your favorite meal. I haven’t cooked it in a while, and you seemed so stressed. I just wanted to do something good.”

“Oh honey.” He gave you a kiss on your forehead. “I appreciate it, but next time, just tell me where you’re going okay?”

“Okay.”

Jungwoo: This sweetheart could turn cold in 2.5 when it came to you. He caught you trying to pick the lock on the front door.

“What are you doing?”

“I wanted to go for a walk to clear my head.”

“No, come back to bed.”

“Jungwoo-”

“COME BACK TO BED!”

Jaehyun: You kept being good and Jaehyun immediately knew something was up. You were usually a brat and acted out. For the past week he kept his eye on you. Then you decided to escape. Jaehyun was in the basement working out when you crept out the kitchen and to the front door. Before you could even touch the doorknob, both of your arms were pinned up against your head and your back slammed against the door.

“I should’ve known you were up to something. You need to start obeying me more princess.”

“Make me.” You spit in his face.

His head jerked to the side for a couple seconds and he smirked back at you.

“You’re in for one hell of a punishment baby girl.”

NCT DREAM:

(Except Mark and Haechan)

Renjun: Honestly, you were afraid to escape from Renjun. He was a sick sadistic bastard who had no problem bashing your fingers if you didn’t listen. So sad to say, you didn’t try to escape this time, due to the fact your broken leg was still healing, thanks to Renjun.

Jeno: Another one who was oblivious to your attempt to escape. He just thought you had to use the bathroom, but when you didn’t come back halfway through the movie he went searching for you. He found you talking to a cop and went up to the both of you.

“Hey babe, you’re missing the movie! Is there a problem officer?” He said ever so sweetly.

“Not at all young man, she just got lost is all.”

Jeno grabbed your hand and squeezed it tightly while walking back to the theater.

Jaemin: Just like Haechan, he loved when you “escaped”. The hunt was his favorite part, he stalked you the entire time. When you were walking back from the store, he sat parked right outside. Now all he had to do was grab you, but he decided to wait. He didn’t find it fun if the hunt ended so quickly.

Chenle: This baby went ballistic. He was looking around the school yard for you. He thought you wouldn’t have gotten out of the hand cuffs. But behold, you showed up to school with your wrists wrapped up. You basically almost cut off your wrists trying to break free. Chenle walked up to you and hugged you.

“What happened? Are you okay? You can’t leave me again. This time you won’t be in handcuffs.

Jisung: The school day was over and you tried to hurry out of the school. Jisung was lurking around and you didn’t want to run into him. A teacher stopped you to talk about your grades (leave it to teachers to ruin everything, lol *disappointed but not surprised*). Jisung made his way to you with a wicked smile on his face.

“Hey Jisung!” The teacher greeted him warmly.

“Hello! Are you ready to go?” He smirked at you.

You knew you were screwed.

WayV:

(this boutta be dark asf sksks for some reason I see WayV as darker Yandere’s then the rest of NCT lord help me sksks)

Kun: You tried and failed for the fifth time to escape from Kun. This time you ended up recieving the worst punishment ever. He tied you up in the basement and didn’t give you food or water for two days straight. Then after he fed you, and made you get on your knees in front of this large bucket. He restrained your hands and held your head under water for 30 seconds. This went on two more times before he dried you off and let you go back upstairs.

Ten: Ten wasn’t expecting to try and escape again so quickly. Since your last attempt didn’t go so well. He caught you trying to hot wire his car, since he hid the keys. He put a cloth soaked with chloroform over your face, so he didn’t have to deal with your struggling. When you woke up, you were chained up in your room on the bed. Your legs were free though. Ten came walking in with a tray of supplies. Ten wasn’t into torture, but you needed to learn your lesson. He sat down next to you and in his hand was a tiny scalpel.

“Stay still baby, this won’t hurt as much.”

He hummed softly dragged the sharp object along your shoulder. The room filled with your ear piercing screams. All Ten did was hush you and continue to torture you.

Sicheng: Oh boy, this dude. WinWin caught you talking to another guy while you were trying to escape. But, he was more angry at the fact you talked to another guy. Straight to the shed you brought you, and tied you up to a chair. This wasn’t a regular chair (cuz know he’s in that zoooone let me stfu lol),this was an electrick chair (e e e electric shock…. okok imma stop now hehe). Sicheng never used this on you unless he was really mad. To make this even more painful, he threw a bucket of freezing cold water on you, and put a cloth in your mouth. No matter how many times you pleaded and shook your head, he flipped the switch. This lasted about five minuets, before you passed out.

Lucas: Lucas was a very jealous yandere. You could look at another guy and he would want to yank your teeth out. Today he saw you trying to escape his house by running out the door. You thought he wasn’t home, but he was. Lucas grabbed you and dragged you upstairs. After tying you up to the bed post, he got out an iron rod. He went downstairs and put it over the lit fireplace for a couple minuets. When he returned, your eyes immediately went to stare at the glowing orange tip of the iron rod. A little smoke came rising off the tip, and that set you into panic mode. Your struggles were useless as he sat down and pressed the tip of the bar to your thigh. Lucas wasn’t phased at all by your whaling screams, and I mean, not at all. Whenever Lucas was mad, all he saw was red, so in this particular moment, he didn’t care that he was hurting you.

Xiaojun: Xiaojun was very quiet, and that was more scary than anything. Once he found out you tried to escape, he went into his sadistic persona. He would torture you softly at first, putting salt on the top of your hand and then pushing an ice cube on it, making it burn like acid. Then he would put a rope around your neck and choke you until you felt light headed. After that, he would choke you with his bare hands, since he doesn’t like using weapons to punish you. Let’s just say, you couldn’t speak, or barely eat right for about week.

Hendery: Didn’t take your escape attempt lightly. He really isn’t into physical torture, so he just made you do hard labor with no food, water, or breaks. Whenever you slowed down or felt like you were going to pass out, he would remind you that if you kept slacking you wouldn’t be fed or allowed back in the house. In some instances, you would rather die than go back into the house.

YangYang: This little puppy, was probably the most sadistic yandere ever. He found you trying to escape, and boy, you shouldn’t have done that. YangYang actually broke both your legs, and mentally tortured you for hours. When you didn’t seemed phased by his mental torture, he chained you up and left you down in the basement until you learned your lesson. You went about four days without food or before he caved in and came down with food and water. When you refused to eat or drink, he threatened to break both your arms. So you ate and drank, then later on cried yourself to sleep.

-PingPing -3:53pm

#nct 127 #nct scenarios #nct #nct dream #nct imagines #nct u #nct yandere #nct mafia #nct mafia au

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gumnut-logic · 4 years

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The Hero (Part Four)

Title: The Hero

Sequel/companion piece to The Joker

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Author: Gumnut

12 - 18 Nov 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: Thunderbird Two, with Virgil and Gordon aboard, is hijacked and stolen. With Virgil injured, it is up to Gordon to save his brother and his ‘bird. Sequel/companion piece to ‘The Joker’. Gordon is far more than he seems.

Word count: 5158

Spoilers & warnings: Violence, WASP!Gordon, Military!Scott, whump, language.

Timeline: Sequel/companion piece to ‘The Joker’.

Author’s note: For @corbyinoz because she has written some magnificent Virgil and Gordon fics and is a great inspiration. Thank you for all your wonderful words.

Well, this chapter took forever and is much longer than the other three. So much plot to manipulate. I hope you enjoy it :D

It started with ‘The Joker’. I got interested in WASP!Gordon and decided to explore his side of the story. Then PLOT happened. Now I have no idea what is going on.

Many thanks to @vegetacide and @scribbles97 for putting up with my crazy.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

“We have to get it out of him.” Gordon’s voice bounced about unheard.

The hospital was in an uproar, doctors and security arguing, IR temporarily shoved to one side as the ‘authorities’ determined what to do with the bomb in their midst.

“And who exactly are you asking to risk their lives to do that?” The question came from their chief of security, a brawny man, head shaved with a permanent frown carved into his forehead.

Scott straightened up to his full height, those couple of inches and his stony expression amply compensating for any extra muscle in the room. “Show me what to do, and I’ll do it myself.”

“And what training do you have?”

Blue eyes snapped to the Chief of Medicine. “All IR personnel are trained paramedics, Doctor.”

Gordon’s heart was pounding hard enough to jump out of his chest. Paramedics, yes, but this was surgery...on Virgil.

“What the hell is going on in here?!” A whir of machinery and a blur of white coat and dark hair and Virgil’s principle doctor shot into the room. “Commander Robertson, what are you doing with my patient and why are all these people in his room?”

The Chief of Medicine held up his hands defensively. “Dr Harris, we have a situation.”

“I bloody well think you do. Get all these people the hell out of this room. Mr Tracy does not need...what do you think you’re doing?! You are not moving him!”

“Doctor! The man has a bomb inside him that could destroy this entire hospital.”

“I don’t care if he has a bloody nuke inside him. He is my patient and moving him like that could damn well kill him.” She shot over to the nervous orderly and shoved him out of the way, revealing an IV knotted in the bed frame and pulling on not only Virgil’s venous catheter, but also dislodging his oxygen supply.

Scott was moving. Gordon frowned and grabbed his arm. Wait a moment.

The furious doctor untangled the medical equipment and checked Virgil was comfortable, her fingers deftly checking his responses.

Virgil didn’t respond at all.

“Get out.” Her voice was sharp.

“Doctor Harris-“

“Need I remind you why you called me in, Commander?”

“Doctor Harris!”

She straightened as much as she could in her hoverchair, her eyes steely, her lips thin.

“He must be evacuated to a safe location.”

“He will be.” And Gordon’s sister stalked in through the door. The aquanaut stared as every man present stepped back to make room for her. Tin’s expression was like a battering ram. “Commander Robertson, a moment please.”

The Chief of Medicine approached her warily. Gordon didn’t quite hear what his sister said to the man, but the shock on his face was followed by a command that dismissed everyone.

The room emptied for all except Scott, Gordon, Kayo, Doctor Harris, Robertson, and, of course, his unconscious brother.

It still felt cramped.

“Commander, time is short. My brother needs help. Can you provide it?” Kayo’s eyes were fiery.

“I cannot ask any of my staff to risk their lives-“

“For god’s sake, Ray, do you have any idea who these people are? How many lives they have saved?”

The man spun on the spot and glared at the doctor. “I will not risk this hospital and all the people in it for one man. We save as many lives as they do.”

Beside Gordon, Scott stiffened even more. “Tell us what needs to be done!”

Pale blue eyes set in even paler skin turned to Scott and targeted him. “Mr Tracy.” She glanced back at Virgil a moment before moving around the end of the bed. A flick of controls and the hoverchair lifted her a little higher in order to come face to face with the IR Commander. “Virgil needs an upper endoscopy. A camera and micro tools will need to be passed down his oesophagus. There is a possibility part of his oesophageal lining will need to be cut and sutured in order to remove the device.” Her eyes flashed and Gordon was ever so glad he wasn’t the one they were aimed at. “Do you think your skills reach that far?”

“Do I have a choice, Doctor?” Scott was a picture of tension. “And the longer we sit here talking about it the higher the chance I lose my brother.”

“You can’t operate in this hospital.”

Robertson jumped as Kayo turned to face him again. “We can evacuate to Thunderbird Two and fly to a remote area to perform the operation, or to...” Her voice drifted off into a silent room, her eyes catching her brothers’.

Gordon’s heart stopped and he glanced at his wan co-pilot. “Screw this, we need to get moving. Scott, are we go?”

His big brother was as pale as the sheets his brother was wrapped in. Voice firm but parched. “We are go.”

“Not on my watch, you’re not.” Doctor Harris glared at both of them. “He’s my patient.” A glance up and down at Scott. “You can be my nurse.” She turned to the other doctor in the room. “Ray, I need your endoscopy equipment.”

“Em, you are not a gastroenterologist and you are not operating in this hospital!”

“God, Ray, you can shove your bloody hospital where the sun doesn’t shine. It’s not like I want to come back here after this fiasco. And no, I’m not a specialist, but I do have enough emergency surgery experience to have shoved just enough instruments in just enough orifices to know what the hell I am doing. Apparently, I’m all these poor blokes have since you’re showing your true colours. Give me the damned equipment and I will help this man on a plane in the middle of nowhere if I have to.”

“Em, this is your life!”

“And it is worth less than his! Move your ass!”

Robertson looked about ready to explode, but a shift in stance by Kayo had him glance over at the Tracys before skittering out of the room.

He left silence behind him.

Until a whir of hoverjets and Doctor Harris turned back to Scott so abruptly, her thin and limp legs shook in their harness. “If we are going to do this, we will need to be fast.”

Scott shifted his feet. “We can do fast.”

-o-o-o-

The night grew late and Gordon found himself slouching into the couch. Virgil had been the principle injured brother in the incident, but Gordon had his fair share of bruises and the aftermath had been a major strain. Not to mention the alcohol he had consumed.

It was catching up.

“Mister Gordon, you should listen to your body.” Kyrano sat calmly on the couch beside him, far too upright and calm for Gordon’s liking.

“K, I’m fine.” But a pair of blue eyes had targeted him and he knew he was going to be nagged to bed at any moment. “And drop the ‘mister’, it makes you sound like a servant or something.”

“A simple sign of respect, Mister Gordon.”

Gordon groaned. “Yes, Mister Kyrano.”

“‘Master’ would be more applicable in that instance.”

The aquanaut stared at him. Kyrano’s expression was completely serious...except for the tiniest of curve of his lips.

“God, you’re still an ass.”

“Respect, Mister Gordon, goes a long way. You should remember that.”

It had been a long time since the first ‘mister’. Hell, Gordon couldn’t have been more than six years old the first time the security specialist had addressed him that way. As a kid, it was ego-chuffing. As an adult it was a little uncomfortable. The Tracys might be billionaires, but no one was beneath them. Except perhaps the Hood. He was beneath everyone.

Gordon blinked.

“He’s your brother.” It came out without thought. The news of Kayo’s relationship to their nemesis was a couple of years old now, but they hadn’t encountered Kyrano during that time.

His former teacher did not react other than a brief flicker in those green eyes. “Half-brother.”

“What’s the story?”

“Gordon-“ Scott was cut off as Kyrano held up his hand.

“Bela Gaat, was born of my mother, against her will, during a time she and our family prefer not to discuss. Suffice to say, he is my older half-brother whose heritage differs considerably from my own.”

“Bela Gaat.” The name fell from Scott’s lips like a gasped curse. “You’ve known who he is all this time.” It wasn’t a question, but it was.

Green eyes met blue, unflinching. “And what power has his name? Can it stop him from hunting your family?”

Internally, Gordon sighed as Scott visibly flared. “Any information would have helped, Kyrano.”

“If it had, I would have given it to you.”

“What else do you know?”

“Not enough.”

“K, please.” All chances of sleep now gone, Gordon struggled to find the energy this discussion suddenly needed.

Green eyes turned to him and for the first time in his life, Gordon saw vulnerability beyond the steel.

Shit.

“I was not aware of his existence until shortly after Tanusha was born. He came to us, needing assistance. For some time, he dwelt with our family as a brother and an uncle. It was a pleasant for a while.” Those eyes darted between the two Tracys. “I regret my kindness more than you will ever know.”

“What happened?” It was like watching a car crash. He couldn’t look away.

“Tanusha lost her mother, her grandfather and, to a certain extent, her father.” Lips thinned. “Jeff Tracy was her saviour. And ultimately, Bela took him, too.”

A silence followed that statement. Gordon simply staring, his brain tumbling with permutations. Beside him Scott was stiff as a board.

“The man is a curse to all he touches. You will always be Mister Gordon and Mister Tracy as I owe you more than you will ever know.”

-o-o-o-

Only the man unconscious in his ‘bird’s medbay could have landed Thunderbird Two more gently than Scott did in the middle of the Simpson Desert. Outside the temperatures soared, but Two’s life support denied it any impact on the atmosphere inside the great green ‘bird.

Gordon felt her landing struts touch sand and rock from within the medbay. He had been conscripted as a nurse, Doctor Harris giving sharp and clear instructions during the short flight across half the Australian continent. Gordon had no doubt Penny had had to talk fast to get them access to the nearest vacant space, IR emergency codes likely stretched to the limit. John had sworn over comms at least once as the Australian authorities were not happy accepting an unknown incendiary device onto their turf.

John and Penny made it happen. They could smooth ruffled feathers later.

He just hoped they were fast enough.

The doctor had an array of equipment deployed around his brother. She was remarkably fast. He had never seen a hoverchair so deftly manipulated at such speed.

“Gordon, please secure your brother’s restraints. We can’t risk anaesthesia with what is already in his system. He’s out cold, but I can’t guarantee he will stay that way.”

The aquanaut stared at her for a second before shaking himself and doing as she bade. Virgil was propped on his side in preparation for the operation, not the optimal position for restraint, but they had to make do.

His brother’s hands were cold in his as he immobilised them. Straps across his arms, around his chest, legs and ankles, each strap tightening Gordon’s throat further. He prayed Virgil would sleep through it all. The thought of his brother waking up in the middle of the operation...

God, please no. Please don’t hurt him any further.

“Are you okay?” Pale eyes were assessing him.

“I’m fine.”

“You were injured during the incident.”

“Superficial.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Focus on Virgil. He needs you more than I do.”

Those eyes fixed on him a moment longer and he got the distinct impression he had been added to the list of ‘her patients’. The thought was mildly alarming.

Scott barrelled into the room, Kayo a step behind him. “We’re down and secured. Are we ready?”

Doctor Harris straightened. “We’re ready.”

The words were said and it all just happened. Masks were donned, hands were sterilised and surgically gloved, gowns were shoved over baldric-less uniforms and Gordon found himself handing instruments to a focussed Doctor Harris. He watched as the endoscope was fed down his brother’s throat and he shut down his emotional responses, letting calm settle as he distanced himself from what was happening before him.

Scott’s steely expression as he sat at Virgil’s head, monitoring his breathing, reflected the pain ignored in Gordon’s gut.

Above his prone brother, the endoscope display scrolled along Virgil’s oesophageal lining.

“I’m getting signal interference.” The doctor frowned.

“John.” Scott said his brother’s name and the response was immediate, the display clearing abruptly. “Thank you, Thunderbird Five.”

And there it was. The tiny bomb flickered once on the display. “Ask your Eye in the Sky for a reading on the capsule stability.” Harris’ voice was calm and sharp.

“Thunderbird Five, take instruction from Doctor Harris. Loop into the scanner.” A pause. “Deploy Eos, if necessary.”

“FAB.” John’s voice was its usual clear and calm balm. “Doctor Harris, capsule stability is poor.” A pause as John flickered numbers above the table, his holographic form blinking in beside them. “I don’t think forceps are an option.”

“Then we’ll have to cut it out.”

Gordon swallowed in sympathy.

“Doctor, you are going to have to prevent it from travelling further into his digestive system.”

“I am well aware of that, Thunderbird Five.”

It was odd hearing that callsign uttered by someone other than a member of International Rescue.

Gordon stared at the display. A flicker of medical shielding and a microlaser shot out, slicing into his brother. A glance down at Virgil, his skin was still pale, his mouth held open by a surgical guard, a cap covering his hair, Scott’s hand resting gently on his head.

It suddenly occurred to Gordon that these minutes could quite well be their last. One wrong move and that pill inside his brother would take them all. He should be alarmed, fearful, but he wasn’t. He stared at his eldest brother’s fingers laying gently on Virgil’s head and he knew he was exactly where he needed to be. There would regrets. For the doctor, for his sister, his brothers and those left behind. But not for himself. He would die doing what he was meant to do.

And then he’d hunt down the bastards who did this to his brother and haunt their asses to death.

Or insanity. Have them jumping at shadows and drooling on the carpet. That might be more satisfying.

The laser cauterised as it cut, the medical shielding inching over the gap to prevent gastric leakage.

“Get your lockbox ready.”

Kayo moved from the other side of the room, a containment capsule in hand. Inside was a specimen dish. Harris retracted the endoscopic tool, a tiny part of his brother held in its clawed tip. The bomb sat cushioned in flesh. The doctor placed it ever so carefully in the dish and Kayo closed the capsule.

The capsule wouldn’t contain the explosion if it was triggered, but it did prevent jostling of its contents.

Kayo was out the door. Scott caught Gordon’s eyes as he rose to his feet, his hand still gentle on Virgil’s head. And his big brother was moving. “I’ll launch as smoothly as I can, but it won’t be perfect.”

“You worry about flying, I’ll worry about my patient, Commander.” The doctor didn’t even look up, her eyes focussed on the micro-sutures she was stitching.

Scott’s fingers touched Virgil’s head one more time, ever so gently, and he, too, left the room.

“We need to move fast. With that bomb went whatever drug was keeping your brother under. I do not want him waking up in this situation.”

They were fast enough.

Kayo got the bomb out of Thunderbird Two and onto the desert sands where she left it. Scott got them off the ground before it could explode. Harris finished her suturing and got the endoscope out of his brother before he could stir.

The Australian authorities got bomb disposal out to the Simpson Desert and contained the fallout.

Penny got to have afternoon tea with the Prime Minister.

Thunderbird Two returned to Wellington, however Doctor Harris demanded they attend Wellington Hospital rather than returning to the military complex. Her scorn of Ray Robertson was rather extensive and Gordon had suspicions that there was more to that equation than she was letting on.

But he didn’t care. He got to sit beside Virgil and watch a pair of dopey brown eyes finally open and focus on him.

“Hey, Virgil.”

“G’don.” A slow blink. “He c’n’t have you, n’t gonna let him.” And those eyes slipped closed again.

Gordon slumped in his seat before reaching out and touching his brother’s hair. Dark strands slipped through his fingers.

Quietly. “No, Virg, I know you won’t.”

-o-o-o-

Scott was called off on Tracy Industries business the next morning...the last few days of neglect due to Virgil’s injuries now needing to be compensated for. So, it was Gordon and John who spent the next day running through Tracy Island’s security with Kyrano. Brains was called in when necessary, but he was clearly uncomfortable with the specialist and made himself scarce as soon as possible.

Kyrano ignored him.

“What’s the sensor rotational period?”

Gordon raised an eyebrow. “You know that. We argued over it extensively and you won.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“One fiftieth of a second.”

“Increase it.”

“What?”

“You have a window enough to slip a missile through.” The Malay’s expression was solemn.

“There is no missile that can breach that period.”

“That you know of.”

Gordon stared at him. “The energy expenditure will double.”

“Better than losing half an island.”

Gordon continued to stare. “Okay, I’ll speak to Brains and Kayo.” Tin’s absence spoke volumes. It was likely she was performing her own assessments, but he could almost guarantee she was listening in. There was no way she was going to compromise the Island’s security because of a tiff with her father. She’d listen in and make her own decisions.

“Her name is Tanusha.”

“Her name is whatever she wants it to be.” Gordon sighed. “C’mon, K, what are we going to do about these Null people? They hurt Virg bad.”

Green eyes fastened on him. “How is he? I have yet to see him.”

“Sleeping. He has a lot of recovery to get through.”

“I hope to see him later today. He might have some intel on those who captured you.”

Gordon held up a hand. “K, no, don’t.”

“Mister Gordon, we need every bit of information we can gather.”

“We have enough. Virgil doesn’t remember much at all.”

“Yet you chose to hide what he does remember from me.”

“For personal reasons! Nothing of a security nature.”

“Everything is important.”

“No, K, just no! Leave Virgil alone.” His brother had gone through enough. “Anything you need to know can come from me. I was conscious the entire time.”

Kyrano eyed him. “Why do you feel the need to protect Mister Virgil from me? I mean him no harm. And our relationship has been well tended over the years. We correspond regularly.”

Gordon stared. “You do?”

“Most certainly, Mister Virgil has been in contact for many years.” An arched eyebrow. “Unlike some.”

“I didn’t know that.” Really? Virgil had never mentioned any regular contact with Gordon’s mentor. What had they spoken about?

“Perhaps if you put more effort into communication in general, you would know.”

The stare turned into a narrow-eyed glare. “Communication takes two, K. I haven’t heard a thing from you. So, apparently, you’ll speak to my brother, but not me. Got an answer for that?”

Those green eyes held him for a moment before looking away. “Life is far from perfect, Mister Gordon.”

“Hah! Philosophical wank, K, is not an answer.” Okay, so it did hurt. Of all his brothers, Gordon thought he had connected the most with their security specialist. At least until he disappeared on them.

“Sometimes there is no answer.” It was said somewhat wistfully and for a moment sadness passed over the man’s face only to be quickly pushed aside.

Gordon frowned. “K?”

His mentor straightened, his posture ramrod. “Sensor density?”

Lips thinned, Gordon’s eyes caught Kyrano’s challenging him. But as always, the older man was dominant and a flicker of an eyebrow had his protege turning back to the instrumentation. “Five per thousand metres, but overlap is considerable.”

Kyrano sighed. “ More, Mister Gordon, you cannot afford to compromise.”

A sigh. “How did I know you were going to say that?”

-o-o-o-

“C’mon, Virgil, I know you’re in there. Time to wake up.”

His brother had slept and slept. Doctor Harris said it was normal. Hell, Virgil slept like the dead when perfectly healthy, but it had been over a day and both Gordon and Scott needed the reassurance that their brother was with them.

Best way to do that was the same way he did it when the man crashed on the couch at home.

“Viiiiiiiirgiiiiiiiil.”

The man’s eyes shot open and glared at him. “What?!”

Wow. Poke the bear and you get snarled at. “Ooh, welcome back to the land of the living. Nice entrance.”

“Gordon, what the hell? Let me sleep.”

“Nope.”

He watched as Virgil drifted and, for a moment, he thought he had lost him again. But those eyes opened and stared at the world around him with an awareness that Gordon hadn’t seen in days.

God, it was a relief.

“Why am I in hospital?”

He saw the dots connect and he was reaching out as Virgil shot up yelling about a trap. Scott, sitting on the other side of the bed caught their brother the same time Gordon did. The engineer wobbled where he sat and they lowered him back down to the bed.

“Take it easy, Virgil, you’ve been through quite a bit.” The moment Scott spoke, Virgil’s attention narrowed on their eldest brother. Gordon could have been offended, but really, that was just the way things were. They all looked to Scott for guidance, but none more so than Virgil.

“What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

Virgil spouted off the basics and then, thank god, he ran out of specifics. “A fight. I lost?”

Scott hesitated a second, Virgil didn’t appear to notice. “We think so. You have quite a lot of bruising, a couple of cracked ribs and two head injuries.”

Gordon frowned and Scott shot him a look that clearly said ‘shut up’.

“Two?”

“Yeah, and you also had a bloodstream full of some nasty chemicals. They drugged you pretty bad. Took the doctors some time to identify with exactly what. You’ve been mostly out of it for a couple of days.”

“Days?!”

“You were unconscious for most of it.”

Brown eyes darted back and forth between the two brothers and frowned. “Most of it?”

“Yeah.”

That gaze narrowed once again on Scott. His brother glanced at Gordon again, before looking at his watch.

Virgil caught the shift in gaze and frowned even more. “What did I do?”

“Nothing of importance.” Scott finally made eye contact with Virgil.

“Like what?” Their brother had a history of bad reactions to medications and there was a familiar worry in those eyes. Scott’s omission of certain details became clear. He was distracting Virgil by planting the suspicion that he had done something outlandish while out of it.

Well, he had, really, but there was no way Gordon was going to make fun of his brother’s faith in him. Not on pain of death.

“There was some delirium. Look, Virgil, you were ill. Don’t worry about it.”

Virgil was obviously suspicious and no doubt they would have to come up with something in the short term. At least until Virgil was ready to hear the truth. A truth Scott had obviously decided to keep to himself for the moment.

“How did we get out?”

Scott shifted Virgil’s attention in his direction. “Gordon got you out.”

And those brown eyes latched onto Gordon with that same faith he’d seen in that hangar. It should be funny. It should be something he could rib his brother about. But no.

It chilled him.

So, he threw it away with humour, ducking out of the questions with flippancy and misdirection. So much misdirection that Virgil, even in his half-awake state realised something was wrong and peppered him with questions about his health.

The faith turned to worry and the world righted itself. His big brother taking his place once again and checking up on him.

“He’s fine, Virgil. Stop worrying.” Scott’s exasperation was obvious, emphasised by a glare shot in Gordon’s direction. “He’s just being Gordon...and if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to kick his ass.”

Gordon froze.

Those brown eyes flicked back to him and the faith appeared again. “You got us out of there.”

“That I did.”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime, bro.” He forced a grin under that admiring gaze. I’m the goofball brother, remember? “Anytime.”

The soft smile that appeared on Virgil’s face almost broke him. But those brown eyes were closing again.

“Go back to sleep, Virgil.” Despite himself, he reached out and rested his hand on his brother’s arm.

“Knew you could do it.” It was whispered and his brother’s eyes did not open again.

Well, shit.

Virgil’s breathing shifted into the soft regularity of sleep, but Gordon just sat there and stared.

-o-o-o-

“What I want to know, Colonel Casey, is why International Rescue was not informed that we could expect an attack on one of our vessels.”

Colonel Casey’s hologram could not have been standing straighter, but that was nothing unusual. “And I, Commander, would like to know how you discovered that information.”

Brown eyes met blue and Gordon swore there was a flash in the air where their energies fought each other. Scott stood next to him equally ramrod straight, fury in his stance. “I think that is rather redundant now, Colonel, since I have two operatives injured due to a neglect in communications.”

“Scott, you need to rein in Thunderbird Five. The damage your brother did to the GDF network is not something I can cover up.”

“I’m not asking you to cover up anything, Colonel. John did nothing to your network. We have our sources. We don’t need to hack your systems to discover a truth we should have been told long before it put a Tracy in the hospital.”

Okay, technically Scott wasn’t lying. Eos hacked the GDF, Eos found the information and she could be considered a source...technically.

Scott and Gordon were alone in the comms room. Virgil still hadn’t left his suite. Gordon had checked on his earlier and found him still fast asleep. He wasn’t going to disturb that sleep. Alan had taken Grandma to the mainland for a supply run...otherwise known as a distraction enough to keep their matriarch out of the kitchen and come back with plenty of edibles. That left Brains in his lab and Kayo and Kyrano prowling around each other in the security offices.

Gordon chose to keep well out of that and the moment Scott finished his conference call with Tracy Industries, he joined him in what was looking to be the confrontation of the century between the GDF and IR.

“Do you expect me to believe that, Commander?” Casey’s voice had lost all the godmother and had an edge of steel.

“I expect to be reliably informed of any danger to my operatives, Colonel.”

The ranks being tossed around had Gordon wanting to dig up his lieutenant bars in self-defence.

“Commander, we had our reasons for withholding the information. Our relationship has a certain amount of trust in it. I had hoped you would consider that before questioning.”

“Virgil nearly died. He had a bomb in his throat that didn’t explode simply through pure chance!”

That did it. The colonel’s expression flickered for a moment, like a broken holosignal, and their horrified godmother peeked through.

But only for a moment.

“Commander, the decision was made for a valid reason.”

“And what reason is that?”

“That International Rescue has been compromised.”

Gordon froze. “What?”

Those brown eyes flickered to him, their gaze scanning the bruises on his face, no doubt. Aunt Val’s shoulders settled a little. “The group call themselves ‘Null’, they claim their aim is to end the war between the Chaos Crew and International Rescue.”

“We know that.” Scott’s voice gave no ground.

“A source advised us that an attack was planned, but we had very little detail. It was our hope that we would be able to respond quickly enough with that intel.”

“You didn’t.” So, so cold. “And despite our team’s sacrifices, you failed to capture a single perpetrator. In fact, if it wasn’t for a civilian doctor in a military hospital that refused to assist us, Virgil would be dead.”

Why Gordon was feeling so distant from events that had so intimately involved him, he didn’t know. Scott’s fury was a volcanic presence beside him, threatening to take out everything in its path. In contrast, Gordon felt cold, more like a glacier than a lava flow. Cold, still, but ultimately inevitable.

“How are we compromised?” Gordon’s voice sounded inadequate against the gravity of the question.

Again, that brown gaze caught his. “A known associate of International Rescue has been identified as a major player in the Null group. It was decided that it was unsafe to notify you of our knowledge in case the information was leaked to that person.”

A shift of his feet. “Leaked to who?”

-o-o-o-

Virgil woke in pain.

But that was nothing unusual. His ribs ached and there was the nastiness deep in his throat. Swallowing hurt.

At least his head had stopped aching. All he had to contend with there was the fog, which, no doubt, would double once his brothers worked out he was awake and delivered his pain medication.

Ugh.

It sucked to be him.

He rolled over and his whole body complained. Maybe drugs would be a good idea. He reached for his comms.

There was a knock at the door.

Speak of the devil? “Come in?” His voice came out dry and parched and it set him coughing, something he shouldn’t be doing.

The moment blurred as his body shook. A hand landed in his hair and he leant into it until he could get his breathing under control.

His eyes were teary and he had to blink to clear them, looking up expecting to see Scott frowning down at him.

It wasn’t Scott.

“Kyrano?”

“Hello, Mister Virgil.”

-o-o-o-

End Part Four

Part Five

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Gordon Tracy #Scott Tracy #John Tracy #Virgil Tracy #em harris #the joker and the hero

20 notes · View notes

svtts · 5 years

Text

camp leader!jae x camp leader!fem reader

→ category: angst/fluff

→ topic: you and jae had been best friends since your first year at camp when you were five. however, you'd both caught feelings for eachother and your first summer being camp leaders seemed to aid in getting you together.

→ warnings: none

summer 2019! the year you’d finally be a camp leader instead of a camper. everything was so exciting, you’d trained all year round for this.

there were ten camp leaders, five female and five male. lucky for you, you were the leader of the bear-cub girl group, which consisted of five girls, all aged 7-14 and you loved them.

a trait that you had acquired after endless years at camp was being competitive, the five girls being equally as competitive as you. especially against bear-cub boy group leader, jae. i mean, it wasn’t your fault that he always seemed to do well in everything effortlessly!

[♫] love by lana del rey

—‘the world is yours and you can’t refuse it.’

the constant teasing, small yet noticeable skinship and giggles from both of you made it pretty damn obvious you were into eachother.

almost every camper, leader and parent could see the chemistry between the both of you. however, you were both too dense to realise.

you’d gotten up promptly, getting ready before sliding your beat-up doc martens on and strolling out of your shared hut, with the other female leaders.

jae was standing on the porch, as he always does, waiting for you.

‘good morning sunshine.’ he says, poking your side as you laugh lightly.

‘good morning jae.’ you tell him as you head to the two identical bear-cub huts opposite eachother, discussing the plan for the day.

‘rise and shine girlies.’ you shouted, knocking on the door lightly as jae said the same, swapping girlies with uglies instead. ‘fifteen minutes until breakfast.’

you plopped down next to jae on the grass outside the huts. as he lied down, the sun reflected on his fair skin, making his plump pink lips highlighted. you studied his face before he spoke out.

‘are you wearing suncream? it’s already warm and you’ll get burnt soon.’ he says, opening his eyes to look at you. he looked at you closely, drawing your features with his eyes, although he wanted to run his fingers along your cheeks.

‘i knew there was something i forgot.’ you cursed silently, standing up.

‘do you have some?’ he questioned, leaning up.

‘i should.’ you answer him.

‘you’re so dumb, how can someone as pale as you forget to put suncream on.’ he laughs and you pout, kicking him lightly.

‘why can’t they see that they’re basically in love?’ eunsol said, peeking out of the window, one of the other girls next to her, as they cooed at jae and you.

‘we should get them to date.’ the older one, yeri, suggested. ‘i’m sure the boys would help us.’

[♫] brooklyn baby by lana del rey

iii

—‘i think i’m too cool to know you, you say i’m like the ice i freeze.’

as you rushed into the canteen, freshly covered in factor 40 suncream, you scan the hall for jae and the ten kids.

it doesn’t take long before you hear his loud yet, cute laugh. making your way to the back table where all of them are seated, a space left next to jae for you.

‘look! here’s a sun-protected _______.’ jae says, the ten kids all laughing lightly.

‘hey! i just wanted to make sure you were all awake!’ you exclaimed, looking at the five girls that were eating and whispering to the other boys.

‘i got your food.’ jae tells you, giving you your usual breakfast, before continuing to eat his.

‘thank you.’ you say, beginning to eat. ‘why are they all whispering so much today?’

‘i have no idea. hey! are you keeping secrets from us?’ jae pouted and a small smile played on your lips as you watched him.

ever since you were young, you’d be coming to summer camp. you and jae met on your first year due to being in the same group and ever since you’d be best friends; all through your early teenage years, to training and getting qualifications to now.

‘see.’ the older girl whispered to the older boy, both of them coming up with a plan to get the both of you together.

‘i’ll talk to jae, you talk to ______. maybe we can get one of them to admit to us that they like eachother.’ he suggests and she nods before telling the others.

after a silly breakfast, as jae began to joke with the smallest camper, asking her to do his hair as she shook her head laughing.

‘den building huh?’ you said, walking next to jae and one of the younger boys.

‘ah! we’re gonna be so good at this!’ jae squeals enthusiastically, high fiving the boy at your side.

‘hey! we’re supposed to be a whole team.’ you whine and jae messes up your hair playfully.

‘girls vs. boys.’ he says as you begin to enter the woods, keeping a count on the kids you have with you.

‘i mean, if you want to play like that.’ you shrug, walking faster than jae, grabbing the smaller girls hand. ‘pick a spot for us to make dens missy.’

the littlest waddles to a few trees, many logs and leaves on the floor near them. ‘here!’

‘so, we’ll have here and, you can have the ones parallel to us.’ you offer to boys.

‘perfect!’ one of the five boys says enthusiastically.

‘ok, we have forty-five minutes. starting,’ jae pauses momentarily to look at his phone. ‘now!’

immediately, a group meeting is called where the girls decide that you and the oldest, yeri, will walk around looking for branches and logs big enough, the middle three, chaeyoung, eunsol and jungeun, with work on constructing it and the youngest, haejin , will pick flowers from the middle of the two dens for decoration.

‘jae, are you alright to stay here whilst we gather some stuff.’ you ask, and he nods pointing finger guns at you whilst winking.

you lightly blush at his foolishness before yeri grabs your hand, dragging you into the he woods.

‘so, jae?’ she wiggles her eyebrows.

‘what do you mean?’ you answer as you bend over to brush some leaves off a log.

‘i mean, it’s pretty obvious you like him.’ she spills out and you pause.

‘is it that obvious?’ you say, looking up at her as she laughs and nods. ‘i mean, it’s just the little things, like the caring for me and the play-fullness and the-‘

‘as much as i would adore to hear you awe over jae, we need to get a plan in action.’ she says.

‘no we do not.’ you answer back, picking up a log as she copies. grabbing a few extra as well.

‘come on! you can’t just hide behind your feelings. live a little!’ she suggests and you shake your head.

‘i’m pretty sure i don’t want to get humiliated by being turnt down by my colleague and best friend.’ you tell her as you both begin to head back.

‘oh my gosh, _______, you’re so dense! he likes you too! it’s so obvious.’ she tells you exaggeratedly.

‘yeah and pigs can fly.’ you say before the conversation ends as you arrive back at the den building area. you can’t help but feeling on edge, now she knows, who’s to say she won’t tell the girls, who will tell the boys, who will tell jae.

you push it to the back of your head as you begin to help construct the den, jae now gone off with the oldest of his group to gather supplies.

[♫] love by lana del rey

—‘it’s enough just to make you feel crazy, sometimes.’

it had been three weeks since your conversation with the yeri, and so far nothing had changed. jae had still be the same, however he seemed to touch you and hug you a lot more.

everyday was eventful and fun, you were by far having the best summer of your life. the good thing is, as you had a permanent job here, you’d stay here all year round.

the camp opened on the weekend near halloween however, the activities where completely different, ranging from ghost hunts to pumpkin carving.

once the children left, in two and a half weeks, you’d be moving around the huts and cleaning, fixing up the activity huts, checking the quality of all the equipment.

any lonely person would find that tedious and annoying however, jae would be with you the whole time and you can’t help but look forward to it.

as much as you hated to be adhering to the ‘best friend to lovers’ cliche, you were completely head over heels for jae. he made the most boring thing into the funnest, most exciting thing ever by only cracking a few jokes or imaging something extravagant or adventurous.

his cute laugh was something you lived for, it sounded like music to your ears and his voice. his voice was angelic whenever he sung. he only really sung when he’d whip out his guitar at the last campfire of the summer. but, you couldn’t help but get excited thinking about him singing in two weeks time.

your crush was making you feel crazy, making you go insane with love.

today, all your plans were ruined when it began to rain as you arrived at the lake. luckily, you and jae had planned for when the weather was rough.

all twelve of you had rushed back to camp, and huddled up in the boys hut.

‘we should tell ghost stories!’ one of the boys suggested as you felt a small pull on your shorts. you look down to see the haejin , looking quite distraught.

‘what’s wrong? hey, don’t cry.’ you say, bending down to pull her into a hug.

‘i left my teddy bear by the lake.’ she stutters.

‘hey, i can go and get it now! we’ll get him back.’ you tell her as you stroke her arm, calmly.

one of the girls takes the youngest, distracting her with the boys as they do silly tricks.

‘what’s happened?’ jae says quietly behind you, his breath on your neck. you can’t help but wonder, what would it feel like to have his lips on your neck?

quickly, you snap out of your mini trance and turn around to him. ‘she left her teddy by the lake, i’m gonna run and grab it.’

‘are you sure? it’s really bad weather and you could get hurt or lost.’ he says, worry laced in every word.

‘i promise you i’ll be fine.’ you reassure him but, he doesn’t look convinced. there’s a moment where jae wishes he kissed your cheek then instead, it passed and you pulled your coat on and rushed out of the door.

jae tried his best to be his normal, funny and entertaining self as he worried about you however, the ten kids could see straight through him.

‘we all know you like _______.’ chaeyoung says and jae looks at the oldest boy.

‘pffft, no i don’t.’ he tried to deny.

‘yeah right, so if _______ was to date,’ she pauses. ‘baekhyun from woodpecker, you’d be totally fine with it?’ these children knew how to get what they wanted, and they were doing a really good job at it.

‘i mean no, she’s free to date who she wants right?’ jae says, biting his lip and looking away from the ten.

‘so if they cuddled up at the campfire, and always kissed,’ chaeyoung began to taunt.

‘ok no. that won’t happen, she’s not even close with baekhyun. and plus, i won’t let that happen.’ jae blurts out.

‘date already!’ one of the boys giggles whilst the others fake gag.

‘i don’t know.’ jae answers back.

‘she literally told me she likes you! just hurry up so we can see you two days before we leave!’ yeri strops.

‘she did?’ jae questioned, and they all sigh.

‘yes.’ she answers blankly as if to say duh jae stop being so dense. jae smiles to himself at the thought of you being his girlfriend, being able to hold you, kiss you, call you his.

soon enough half an hour has gone by and you’re still not back, to make matters worse it had begun to thunder as well.

jae was getting increasingly worried, fiddling with his fingers, trying to distract himself with playing monopoly with the kids.

he’d finally reached for his phone pulling it out and discovering yours in his pocket as well. damn you, jae, always looking after her stuff.

‘guys i’m going to call chan, sit tight.’ he tells the ten as he heads outside onto the porch briefly, the kids all occupied playing the game, or at least trying.

‘chan, can you hear me?’ jae says, he has no idea whether the weather would affect the connection between the phones.

‘jae, yeah. what’s up?’ he answers almost instantly.

‘is there a chance you can watch my lot, _____ has gone into the woods to get a lost toy and she hasn’t come back yet.’ jae rushes.

‘i’m in the canteen with my lot, bring them over to me and i’ll watch them.’ he answers and jae thanks him before getting the children into their coats and rushing to the canteen.

[♫] im with you by vance joy

— ‘you looked at me and said, baby this rain changes everything.’

as soon as the ten kids are dropped off with chan and jihyo, the leaders of the crocodile group, jae sprints towards the lake.

every single bad scenario runs through his head, it was muddy and the rain could easily batter someone as small and fragile as you.

‘______!’ he shouts, as he wipes his glasses. he recalls what you were wearing, a pair of shorts, your dark blue camp leader top, identical to his and a matching dark blue raincoat.

as he approaches the side of the lake by the shelter, he’s had to wipe his glasses multiple times and he was soaked through.

‘_______!’ he tries again. he peeks into the small shelter and his heart suddenly races. your cuddled in the corner, desperately trying to warm yourself up, your legs covered in mud.

‘_____, oh my god.’ he quickly runs to you, pulling you into his arms, feeling your cold damp skin against his warm skin.

‘i’m sorry, i tripped and i thought i’d wait until the storm passed, but then i started to get really cold and-‘

before you can continue rambling, a soft pair of lips land on yours. it feels like every bit of cold nibbling at you had warmed up, and the sound of the rain had stopped. you both pulled away to breathe as he admires your face.

‘o-oh.’ you stuttered. he laughs lightly, helping you stand up.

‘please be careful, i was so worried, you’re freezing cold and wet, you could’ve died.’ he exclaims.

‘maybe a slight over exaggeration but, i’m fine jae, really.’ you tell him, but he shakes his head. he turns before grabbing the teddy bear that you had collected and placed next to you on the ground.

‘i’m going to call chan, then we’ll head back to camp.’ jae says, before he grabs his phone out of his pocket with one hand, using his other hand to wrap around your waist, pulling into his arms.

‘i’ve got her. we��re heading back now, we might need first aid.’ he says, as you look up at him. can you believe you just kissed him? his lips were just on yours. holy shit.

‘please be careful. i’m not letting you go out alone again.’ jae repeats, as you both venture out into the rain and wind.

‘if it wasn’t raining then i would have been perfectly fine.’ you argue.

‘but it is raining and it is windy.’ jae answers back and you roll your eyes. concentrating on walking back as jae slips his hand into yours.

this was nothing new to you, he seemed to do this a lot, but something about this time it seemed so much more reassuring and comforting. you state at your intertwined hands before looking up at him.

jae began to rush a bit as he noticed you shivering slightly. as soon as he could he would make you his girlfriend, but he wanted to prioritise making sure you’re fine.

it began to rain even harder as you enter the canteen. despite the peaceful jog-walk you’d just had with jae, your legs were still covered in mud and your were completely drenched, jae not far off being drenched as well.

‘_______!’ the kids scream all running towards you. you smile at them, trying to convince them that your head isn’t all over the place.

‘here! this is for you.’ you answer, pulling the teddy bear out of the inside of your coat, and placing it in haejin a petite hands.

‘thank you!’ she squeals then begins to tell her teddy bear off for ‘wondering away.’

‘_______, are you okay?’ jihyo says, she seemed concerned as chan distracted the kids with a crappy scooby-doo movie.

'i'm fine, just a bit cold.' you answer, jae raising his eyebrow at you.

'i'll call siwon, tell him you need to take the afternoon off.' jihyo says.

'i'm completely fine. i promise you.' the thought of siwon, your boss, finding out you were injured for such stupid reason made you anxious.

before you can detest anymore, jihyo is across the room on the phone and jae is trying convince you that you need the rest of today off, plus it's only a few hours.

'siwon is coming now.' jihyo says and you grab jaes hands, fiddling with his fingers, a habit you had acquired after numerous movie night with the kids,meal times, quiz nights etc.

'you're basically siwons favourite leader ________, i'm sure he'll be more concerned than mad.' jihyo tells you and you shake your head.

[♫] young and beautiful by lana del rey

vii —'he's my sun, he makes me shine, like diamonds.' young and beautiful by lana del rey

as suspected, siwon was completely worried and not the tiniest bit mad. he understood why you went into the woods and reassured you, much to jaes dislike, that he would do the same.

'take the next few hours off, come back around 7 for dinner, alright?' siwon says. 'and also it was about time you two dated.' his eyes flicker to your hands and you blush deeply and jae laughs.

'make sure to look after her please jae. jihyo, are you and chan okay with watching the bear-cubs, i'll happily stay as well.' siwon asks. 'jae, go and take _______ to get cleaned up.'

there was a mutual element of trust between jae, siwon and you. siwon knew you were best friends, as you both had been when he was a camp leader for you, he knows you two very well and knows that you both care for eachother deeply.

jae nods and instantly you're both rushing to the girls cabin, where you let jae in. he'd been in here millions of times before, there was no ban on girl leaders and boy leaders being in eachothers rooms as siwon knew you wouldn't doing dirty things at a place like this.

'first shower and clean all the mud off your legs,' jae instructs, placing himself down on the bed. you obeyed, grabbing some new clothes out of your wardrobe.

after fourty minutes, you'd successfully showered, gotten changed and refreshed. now jae was concerned about the developing bruise on your leg.

'what am i gonna do with you,' he sighs.

'it doesn't hurt, just let it be for a bit.' you says and he nods his head. 'so uh.'

'hmm?' he says, looking at you. barefaced you looked so incredibly beautiful and jae just wanted to make sure you knew.

'the kiss...' you start.

'i meant it. i obviously wanted to do it in a more romantic situation but, i just had the overwhelming feeling when i saw you there.' he brings to ramble.

'it was perfect jae.' you tell him, you were afraid he meant have regretted it or not meant it.

he signals for you to come over to him and you stand between his legs as he continues to talk. he doubts whether it was really perfect, i mean you were in the middle of the storm, freezing your asses off.

'we have three more hours right? we can take my car and go to town.' he suggests. you nod before he slings the key out of his pocket. 'we're gonna have to be quick, they might catch us.'

[♫] what you know by two door cinema club (i 100% recommend you listen to this whilst you read this part)

viii —'and i can tell just what you want, you don't want to be alone.'

quickly, you scan the outside, the rain had died down slightly and resorted to a wet drizzle, the sun now beginning to shine, there was no one in sight as you closed the door behind you both.

before you can process what's happening, jae is grabbing your hand and you're both running to the staff car park.

once you spot his car, he's unlocked it and you're both sliding in to your seats before buckling your seatbelts and jae steps on the gas, zooming out of the car park.

'lets get it!' he shouts, as you shake your head in shame.

switching on the radio, you both laugh and talk as jae's hand sits comfortably on your thigh. everything was perfect, you were laughing and joking around, driving in the now emerging sunshine, jaes hand resting with your hand on top of his comfortably.

when you began to approach the town, which was just around the lake, jae pulled over by the side of the lake. it was exceptionally beautiful now, the storm had passed and left a glare on everything, that caught the light often and made you admire it.

'so,' jae says, as you make your way around the car and to his side, where he's closest to the shore. he brings his arms tightly around your waist, as yours find their way to his shoulders.

'this seems like a nicer place, to ask you to be my girlfriend.' he laughs lightly and you smile, heat rising into your cheeks. 'so, _______, will you be my girlfriend?'

'of course.' you reply, a smile dancing on your lips. you pull his head down so your lips can meet his.

this kiss had x1000 more feelings than the one before, every inch of love that's been trapped inside is finally free and swirling around the both of you.

jae feels like he's on cloud 9, your lips are so soft, and taste like cherries. he feels complete, every time he didn't kiss you feels like this kiss has made up for it.

once you pull away, to breathe, jae laughs lightly.

'i've liked you for so long but, i didn't think you liked me back.' you start, as he kisses your cheek, he kisses everywhere he's wanted to. your cheek, your jawline, your neck, your nose.

'how long?' he says, pulling away from a particularly long kiss on your neck.

'since we started leader training, last year.' you finished, your hands running through his hair.

'so, i could've kissed you a whole year ago?' he says, almost in disbelief.

'you could've.' you say, laughing lightly.

'well, i wish i told you earlier.' he sighs, 'but, i'm gonna make up for all the missed kisses now.'

the next three hours were full of laughs, kisses and visiting all the places in town that you'd never seen before.

[♫]apocalypse by cigarettes after sex

—'your lips, my lips, apocalypse.'

as it approached 6:45, you both got back into the car after having the best time of your lives. the sun shone peacefully, as you drove back to camp.

you peered out of the window, admiring the view of the lake as the sun reflected on it perfectly. jaes hand was securely on your thigh, as you both sing the lyrics to the song on the radio.

finally you make it back to camp, parking the car and both getting out. jae leans against the car watching you as you get out, admiring all your features.

you both enter camp, incredibly happy and excited to see the ten kids that you left with jihyo, siwon and chan.

as you enter the canteen, all eyes are on you both, before haejin, the youngest, shouts.

'______! jae!' she squeals getting out of her seat and running toward you both whilst the other nine all do the same. you smile before accepting the smallest into your arms.

'i missed you so much!' she says, as she shows a cute little pout. the canteen has gone back to its normal level of chatter.

'we were only gone for a few hours.' you say.

'the most boring few hours of my life.' one of the boys adds. both of you laugh before you scoop haejin into your arms, jae in front of you talking to the eldest boy and girl.

'i did it.' jae said to the two.

'finally!' they cheer, as all the kids sit down on the table. jae sitting opposite you as you sit with haejin on one side of you, eunsol on the other side.

the table erupts into chatter, the kids expressing their disgust to the boring few hours.

'well, tomorrow we'll do something so fun that it'll make you forget about your afternoon.' you suggest and they all reply enthusiastic responses.

'we're gonna go and grab our food, are you guys ok here?' jae asks and they all nod, most of them busy eating whilst the others talk about playing games.

you both go up to the counter, where the rest of the leaders are getting served.

'______, is that a..' yukhei starts, a hint of sarcasm on his voice. 'a vampire bite?'

confused you look to where he's pointing, and a purple mark is on your neck. jae giggles lightly as the other leaders start to jump on the joke, jae now getting food for the both of you.

'hmm, jae? what do you think? it could be a spider bite.' lisa suggests and you shake your head, pulling your hair to cover the hickey.

jae comes up behind you, wrapping one hand around your waist, 'i don't know? i don't think i spider bite would look like that.' he continues on with the joke. the leaders all laugh before scurrying off to their tables.

'what if one of the little ones saw this?' you whisper and you walk back to the table, his hand still around your waist as he'd already put the food on the table earlier.

'it's a mosquito bite as far as they're concerned.' he whispers back, as you reach the table and sit in your seat.

[♫] wonderwall by oasis

x —'hot summer nights, mid-july, when you and i were forever wild.'

two weeks had passed, the best summer of your life so far was almost done. you couldn't help but pout as you walked with your group to the bonfire.

this was the annual bonfire, it had been happening ever since jae and you had been coming here at five years old.

'hey! why do you look so pouty?' one of the boys said, making jae, who was just in front of you, guitar in his back and his hand in haejins, turn around to you.

'it's just sad because, you guys leave tomorrow and i'll miss you all.' you say, looking at them. you'd gotten really close to the ten kids and hate to admit that it's going to be quiet and boring without them.

'we'll come back for the halloween and easter and next summer!' eunsol tells you and you laugh, nodding.

as you found your area around the campfire, all the kids settled down, you and jae sitting beside them.

the bonfire was regulated by siwon, leeteuk and donghae. the five different groups had areas to sit in, purely so that the kids didn't get hurt by running around wildly between seats.

jae cheekily slipped his arm around your waist as you hummed in content, feeling the warmth of the fire in your face.

'you're beautiful.' he says to you and immediately a deep red blush had spread across your cheeks.

'you guys are so cute.' yeri cooed, disturbing the small moment. nervously, you pull your hair behind your ear.

jae stayed cuddled to your side whilst siwon and the rest of the supreme leaders did their speeches, highlighted the best and worst moments of this summer.

'now, jae and brian.' siwon turns around, and everyone's attention is turned to the two of you as well as some diverted to brian. 'are gonna play guitar.'

'right, yeah.' he giggles almost nervously but excitedly as he grabs his guitar.

'think of some songs guys.' siwon says as you move out of jaes way. jihyo calling you over to them as the bonfire had died down and the kids were aloud to move areas.

'i'm going over to jihyo, ok?' you tell jae.

'ok babe.' he answers as he works on tuning his guitar. he looks up at you, pouting his lips and you give him a quick kiss before running over to jihyo.

'he loves you so much.' jihyo starts, as haejin finds her way onto your lap, obviously sleepy.

'i do as well.' you answer as you glance over at jae, to find him already looking over you, then winking at you before talking to chan and brian who were sitting next to him.

'i'm gonna request wonderwall.' she says.

'oh yeah, that's a good one.' you say as you try to brainstorm for songs.

almost fifteen minutes later, a song had finally been decided and it was jihyos suggestion.

you watched closely, as jae concentrated on his guitar, his glasses slipping down his nose slightly as the fire highlighted his features perfectly.

'five, six, seven, eight.' brian said before they both began to play their guitars. as soon as jae began to sing you felt like you were in heaven.

his voice was perfectly smooth and sexy, you felt amazed not only by your boyfriends voice but how easily he could harmonise with brian.

i don't believe that anybody, feels the way i do about you now

he sung so effortlessly, your eyes locked with his as the words left his lips. as they glided into the chorus, everyone began to sing with them however, jaes eye only went between you and the guitar throughout the whole song.

you're gonna be the one that saves me

the song finishes, everyone cheering and clapping before edging them on to perform more.

as they began to sing do i wanna know? haejin falls asleep against your chest and you coo at the sight as jihyo giggles as well.

'she's so cute, oh my god.' jihyo gushes, as some of the campers begin to sing along with your boyfriend and brian.

when you turn to look at jae, his eyes are already glued to you, as you mouth to him 'she's fallen asleep' and he awes at her as well.

after forty-five minutes of singing songs and enjoying your last night together, it comes to an end. as much as he hated to admit it, you'd only been sitting across from him but he felt like he wanted you by his side the entire time.

'she's so cute.' jae says, as you carry haejin back to the huts, the other nine all tiredly dotted around you all.

this was by far jaes favourite combination, you, the love of his life and a small cute, sleeping child. it made him so incredibly soft, and excited for the future, even if it was too early to say.

after fifteen minutes, you'd successfully gotten the five girls into bed and you were waiting outside the hut on the wooden railing, for jae to emerge from the boys hut.

'ah! finally, i have you all to myself.' he says, standing between your legs and kissing you sweetly.

'you were amazing tonight.' you tell him as you jump down from the railing, taking his hand in yours and wondering back to your huts. 'you should sing more.'

'i'm really gonna miss the kids.' jae sighs and you agree, leaning into him as he slides his arm around your waist, letting his hand sit in your back pocket. 'i've had the best summer yet.'

'me too.' you answer, 'but hey. let's not get all sad now, we've got the rest of this year to be here, kids or not.'

'we're moving into a hut together, right?' he asks. when the kids all left tomorrow all the huts could be moved around and lived in until they returned in october.

'is this your way of asking me to move in with you?' you laugh lightly. 'it's only been two weeks.' you shimmy away from his embrace purposely, to tease him. you begin to skip off ahead of him.

'it might as well be a year and two weeks.' he mutters, before running after you and bringing his arms around your waist, pulling you into his chest. 'we'll move in then move out in october, it'll be fun.'

'right. and siwon will have nothing to say about it?' you ask, turning around in his arms, as you bring your hands to side of his face, drawing your fingertips along his cheek.

'shut up, you know he won't. you're literally his favourite leader, if anyone else had gone out into the woods that day, they'd get in so much trouble. but, because it was you, you didn't.'

'you're annoying.' you tell him, bringing his head down so you could kiss him.

'i know.' he giggles, before reconnecting your lips. this was your happy place, being with jae at the place that you loved.

nothing beat this summer, and you doubt another will however, as long as you had jae you knew you were going to have the best time.

'thank you for the best summer yet.' you tell him and he smiles, looking at you in complete adoration.

'wouldn't be the best without you.' he finished before reconnecting you lips again.

82 notes · View notes

eddycurrents · 5 years

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For the week of 27 May 2019

Quick Bits:

A Walk Through Hell #10 somehow gets even more disturbing as we’re shown some of McGregor’s past as he was abused and set up as a suicide. The horror that Garth Ennis, Goran Sudžuka, Ive Svorcina, and Rob Steen keep exploring in this series keeps getting more personal and seemingly has no limit to its depth.

| Published by AfterShock

Amazing Spider-Man #22 concludes (mostly) the “Hunted” arc as Kraven continues to try to convince Spider-Man that he’s a killer and to finally put Kraven out of his misery. It’s incredibly messed up logic, but Nick Spencer, Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba, Edgar Delgado, Erick Arciniega, and Joe Caramagna make it interesting. You could consider this end anti-climactic, especially after how long this has been, but I get the feeling we’ll be dealing with the ramifications for a while to come.

| Published by Marvel

Amber Blake #3 takes an interesting turn as an undercover operation into a modelling agency reveals that Amber’s childhood friend Amanda is still alive. The level of intrigue and twists in this story just keeps escalating, matching the density of the layouts and art from Butch Guice, Mike Perkins, and Dan Brown.

| Published by IDW

Angel #1 is incredible. Possibly even better than the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and that has set a ridiculously high bar. Bryan Edward Hill, Gleb Melnikov, Gabriel Cassata, and Ed Dukeshire embrace the darker, moodier feel of Angel consistent with the different atmosphere that was present in the television series, while diving deep into building up his dark past and conflicted future. There’s a lot that is new to this interpretation, which just makes it more intriguing. And the art from Melnikov and Cassata is gorgeous.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Ascender #2 advances the vamps’ plan to eradicate the remaining technology in the universe, as Andy is reunited with Bandit, and the vamps come to threaten him and his family. This remains an interesting new take on the Descender world from Jeff Lemire, Dustin Nguyen, and Steve Wands as we see more of what’s happened since the end of that series.

| Published by Image

Batman: Last Knight on Earth #1 is an interesting debut from Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia, and Tom Napolitano. On its surface, it’s an “Old Man Bruce” story, as a previously comatose Bruce awakens in a dark and strange future. But this existence is weird and unreliable. Especially as Bruce awakens in a fiction at first, being told that he’s in Arkham and that all of his villains and time as Batman were fever dreams cooked up by a fractured mind. This may well be the best art ever from Capullo, Glapion, and Plascencia.

| Published by DC Comics / Black Label

Black Science #40 shows that the story still has some surprises in store as it rockets towards the end. Also some ridiculous jokes. Matteo Scalera and Moreno Dinisio continue to inventive as hell with the art.

| Published by Image / Giant Generator

Coda #12 is the explosive, brilliant conclusion to what has been on the best series of this year and last. Si Spurrier, Matías Bergara, Michael Doig, and Jim Campbell have delivered some stunning flights of imagination, tapping into some highly inventive nihilistic fantasy, presenting the final battle battle this issue, and, man, does it stick the landing. Phenomenal storytelling all around.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Daredevil #6 begins “No Devils, Only God” in a New York City without Daredevil. Lalit Kumar Sharma, Jay Leisten, and Java Tartaglia come on for art duties for this arc and it’s an interesting shift. Sharma’s style reminds me a bit of Klaus Janson’s, but without the heavy inks and shadows.

| Published by Marvel

Detective Comics Annual #2 heads into Year Two territory as we get a new Reaper from Peter J. Tomasi, Travis Moore, Max Raynor, Tamra Bonvillain, Nick Filardi, and Rob Leigh. This is a nice use of the annual format, giving us a satisfying single issue story setting up a possible future arc.

| Published by DC Comics

The Forgotten Queen #4 brings an end to this excellent series exploring the history of Vexana, War-Monger, from Tini Howard, Amilcar Pinna, Ulises Arreola, and Jeff Powell. Very interesting depth added to the character and interesting hints as to what more might be coming, hopefully.

| Published by Valiant

Hellboy vs. Lobster Johnson: Ring of Death elaborates further on Hellboy’s time in Mexico making wrestling movies in a pair of tales from Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson, Mike Norton, Paul Grist, Dave Stewart, Bill Crabtree, and Clem Robins. Seeing a presentation of the movie Hellboy starred in is a real treat.

| Published by Dark Horse

Immortal Hulk #18 leans hard into the body horror aspect of the series, debuting both Betty’s full form as this new Harpy and in the Abomination. Joe Bennett, Ruy José, and Paul Mounts just nail this perfectly.

| Published by Marvel

Killer Groove #1 is a great first issue from Ollie Masters, Eoin Marron, Jordie Bellaire, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. It’s a taut crime drama mixing a never-was musician with the potential of life as a hitman, as he lucks into a kill during a chance encounter. Great art from Marron and Bellaire.

| Published by AfterShock

The Magnificent Ms. Marvel #3 advances the alien plot, sending Kamala and her parents off to Saffa to supposedly fulfill the role of their Destined One, saving the planet again. Saladin Ahmed, Minkyu Jung, Juan Vlasco, Ian Herring, and Joe Caramagna are doing some interesting world-building here, and ensuring that nothing is quite what it seems.

| Published by Marvel

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #5 is the beautiful conclusion to what has been a brilliant series from Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Mary Safro, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. It’s been a sequel, satire, criticism, and repudiation of Watchmen, but it’s also been an interesting mediation on “being better” while coming to terms with the nature of reality and learning to deal with the human element.

| Published by Dynamite

Queen of Bad Dreams #2 gets more into the grit of IJ Wei’s investigation into the escaped figment, delivering some great police procedural stuff. The artwork from Jordi Pérez and Dearbhla Kelly is wonderful. Reminding me a lot of some of the work from John Watkiss, particularly during a very impressive action sequence.

| Published by Vault

She Said Destroy #1 is an intriguing science fantasy debut from Joe Corallo, Liana Kangas, Rebecca Nalty, and Melanie Ujimori. It taps into Celtic mythology, presenting a war between Brigid and the Morrigan, but also appears to be telling a coming of age story with some members of the Morrigan’s flock as they try to combat Brigid’s oppression.

| Published by Vault

Star Wars #108 is essentially another one-shot in the 80th anniversary of Marvel celebration, with Matthew Rosenberg and a murderers’ row of new and old Star Wars artists delivering a tale set in the old Marvel continuity. While you’ll get more out of it if you’re familiar with the original series, with familiar faces like Valance Hunter, Domina Tagge, and Jaxxon, but it still works well on its own without having any foreknowledge of previous events.

| Published by Marvel

Stranger Things: Six #1 begins another prequel mini-series, this time introducing us to “Six” and looking into the experiments going on at the Hawkins Labs, from Jody Houser, Edgar Salazar, Keith Champagne, Marissa Louise, and Nate Piekos. I quite liked the first one that served as a view into the terror that Will went through during season one, but this one looks like it’ll be breaking some new ground. Very interested to see more of what happened earlier.

| Published by Dark Horse

Superman: Leviathan Rising Special #1 is a tease for Event Leviathan, the next turn in the Superman series, the forthcoming Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen minis, and the upcoming Supergirl arc once she returns to Earth, but it also manages to tell a fairly entertaining story in its own right as Talia al Ghul kidnaps Clark Kent.

| Published by DC Comics

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #94 continues “City at War” as everything gets nastier and dirtier, and we still haven’t had a full-on incendiary spark yet to ignite even larger warfare. Dave Wachter and Ronda Pattison deliver some incredible artwork. Splinter is very chilling in this one.

| Published by IDW

Thor #13 will make you care about Cul Borson. At least, a little bit. Maybe. Jason Aaron, Mike del Mundo, Marco D’Alfonso, and Joe Sabino deliver on another single issue story broadening the bits and pieces of the War of the Realms.

| Published by Marvel

Transformers #6 takes a break from the ongoing narrative and gives us a look into the past friendship between Megatron and Orion Pax, from Brian Ruckley, Beth McGuire-Smith, and Tom B. Long. There are some interesting parallels between Megatron’s observations and the drifting apart of these two old friends.

| Published by IDW

Wolverine: The Long Night #5 concludes this adaptation of the podcast of the same name from Benjamin Percy, Marcio Takara, Matt Milla, and Joe Caramagna. This has been a mature, psychological thriller amidst all of the violence and darkness, with this final chapter delivering more twists even as it brings the answers.

| Published by Marvel

Other Highlights: Age of X-Man: X-Tremists #4, Bad Luck Chuck #3, Black Panther #12, Blossoms 666 #4, Catwoman Annual #1, Dark Red #3, Dead Kings #5, Delver #4, Dick Tracy Forever #2, Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #8, Dog Days of Summer #1, Fantastic Four #10, Fight Club 3 #5, Four Sisters 2: Hortense, Grand Abyss Hotel, KINO #16, Life on the Moon, Lumberjanes: Somewhere Green #1, Major X #4, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #39, Princeless - Book 8: Princesses #3, Punk Mambo #2, Punks Not Dead: London Calling #4, Rick & Morty #50, Spawn #297, Star Trek: Year Five #2, Star Wars: Vader - Dark Visions #4, Superior Spider-Man #6, TMNT: Urban Legends #13, Thanos #2, Wailing Blade #1, War of the Realms: Giant-Man #2, War of the Realms: Spider-Man & The League of Realms #2, War of the Realms: War Scrolls #2, Wasted Space #10, X-23 #12, X-Men: Grand Design - X-Tinction #1

Recommended Collections: Death Orb - Volume 1, Dept. H Omnibus - Volume 1, The Goon: Bunch of Old Crap, Judge Dredd: Toxic, Punisher - Volume 2: War in Bagalia, Rick & Morty Presents - Volume 1, X-Force - Volume 1: Sins of the Past

For the week of 20 May 2019

Quick Bits:

Action Comics #1011 is the last stop before Event Leviathan starts in earnest and it raises more questions as to what’s going on. Brian Michael Bendis, Steve Epting, Brad Anderson, and Josh Reed have done a great job elevating tension through this lead-up and moving the pieces around the board.

| Published by DC Comics

Assassin Nation #3 is another brutal issue from Kyle Starks, Erica Henderson, and Deron Bennett. The body count remains high and we get more questions about who authorized the hit. There’s some hints that it may all just be misdirection.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Detective Comics #1004 gives us the life history of Astrid Arkham. It’s told largely in full page montages, really allowing Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy, and Nathan Fairbairn to cut loose on the visuals.

| Published by DC Comics

Faithless #2 sees Faith go to a party, and then it gets weird. This feels like that Griffin Dunne film of him wandering around New York, only with more magic and gorgeous art from Maria Llovet.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Ghost Tree #2 delivers well on the promise of the first issue, going further with Brandt’s conversations with the spirits around the ghost tree, and setting up the possibility of something horrible coming soon. More gorgeous artwork from Simon Gane, Ian Herring, and Becka Kinzie.

| Published by IDW

Incursion #4 is a fitting conclusion to this series bringing Gilad back to a regular status in the world of the living, with some interesting teases as to what might be further down the line, from Andy Diggle, Alex Paknadel, Doug Braithwaite, Diego Rodriguez, Leonardo Paciarotti, and Marshall Dillon.

| Published by Valiant

Justice League Dark #11 continues “Lords of Order” and keeps burning down the magical side of the DC Universe, while diving very deep into the back catalogue to build up the new. James Tynion IV is developing a very interesting structure for what might be coming.

| Published by DC Comics

Middlewest #7 shows the sheer devastation that Abel can unleash as his powers manifest, similar to the rage that his father has shown, and how his newfound “family” can also let him down horribly. Great work from Skottie Young, Jorge Corona, Jean-Francois Beaulieu, and Nate Piekos as the story seems to be headed for more dangerous waters.

| Published by Image

Star Wars: Age of Rebellion - Jabba the Hutt #1 is an entertaining little story of how Jabba manipulates others to accomplish his goals.

| Published by Marvel

Stone Star #3 gives us another surprise as Dail tries to save Kitzo from being eaten in the arena by Most-Maw. It’s very interesting how this series plays with elements of hero shooters and the designs for the characters and creatures by Max Dunbar are incredible.

| Published by Swords & Sassery

Other Highlights: A Shining Beacon, Age of X-Man: Amazing Nightcrawler #4, Animosity #21, Asgardians of the Galaxy #9, Avengers #19, Batgirl #35, Battlestar Galactica: Twilight Command #4, Bone Parish #9, Books of Magic #8, Clue: Candlestick #1, Cyber Force #10, Dial H for Hero #3, Doctor Strange #14, The Flash #71, Freedom Fighters #6, Gasolina #18, GI Joe: A Real American Hero #262, The Goon #2, Highwayman, Invader Zim #43, Invisible Kingdom #3, Martian Manhunter #5, Marvel Comics Presents #5, Mary Shelley: Monster Hunter #2, Miles Morales: Spider-Man #6, Monstress #22, Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur #43, Mr. & Mrs. X #11, Redneck #20, Riverdale Season 3 #3, Road of Bones #1, Rumble #12, Runaways #21, Shuri #8, The Silencer #17, Star Trek: Q Conflict #4, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge #2, Tony Stark: Iron Man #11, The Unstoppable Wasp #8, Venom #14, War of the Realms: Journey into Mystery #3, War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas #2, War of the Realms: The Punisher #2, War of the Realms: Strikeforce - The Land of Giants #1, War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men #2, The Warning #7, Welcome to Wanderland #4. Wolverine: Infinity Watch #4, Wonder Woman #71, X-Force #8

Recommended Collections: Black Badge - Volume 1, Black Magick, Cover - Volume 1, Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Volume 1, East of West - Volume 9, Fantastic Four - Volume 2: Mr. & Mrs. Grimm, Friendo - Volume 1, James Bond: Blackbox, Middlewest - Book 1, Planet Terry Complete Collection, Redlands - Volume 2, Summit - Volume 3: Truth & Consequences, Wayward - Book 3

d. emerson eddy thinks there should be more hours in the day.

#This Week in Comics

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davidmann95 · 5 years

Text

Early Kingdom Hearts III impressions

I got the thing. The playing of the thing has been sporadic, though hopefully that should change tomorrow. Having made it partway through the Toy Story world, here’s what I think so far, in mostly non-spoilery terms (I touch on a couple minor and/or expected things that happen over the course of the first world) but under a cut regardless. Except for one critical thing I need to make sure everybody sees: the opening to the Toy Story world is very possibly already the best moment in gaming in 2019, and even if you don’t give the weakest, wettest fart about this series, you owe it to yourself to look up those first 2 minutes or so on Youtube.

* so fucking pretty

* Only one truly sour note so far (other than Phil not speaking at the Coliseum, which is monstrous), but damn, what a place to have one: the 0.2 ending made perfect sense to use for the opening here, but for god’s sake, why on Earth not just use the whole thing? So damn janky cut to the bone like that; at minimum it should have kept “I’m back!” This is somewhat in keeping with the game as a whole being almost aggressive in letting you know you’re screwed if you didn’t play literally every other game (other than hopefully X, since I passed on that) - this isn’t really Kingdom Hearts III, it’s Kingdom Hearts III Part 3/3 after Dream Drop Distance and A Fragmentary Passage - but frankly, I feel like at this point that’s fair, even if IV better do a better job at starting on a relatively clean slate. It’s just this one point where I feel like it failed in execution, but the philosophy remains understandable.

* It’s fun! I wish I could cycle through the triangle commands, but the fighting’s frenzied and exciting while remaining familiar, and I’m using magic and shotlocks a lot more than I did in past games. I thought moving away from the command deck was a mistake, and I still hope they return in the future, but this absolutely feels like the perfected form of the classic model.

* This is a LOT funnier than past games. A few moments of stiffness that are par for the course aside, the dialogue feels so much more fluid and natural than in the past, while still managing to bring it for the emotional material.

* There are about 3 or 4 times more mechanics involved here than a normie like me could ever hope to grasp, but it feels like a pick-and-choose of what might most interest you and your playstyle rather than an overwhelming necessary collectathon, especially given I know the secret ending this time is just going to be behind a single scavenger hunt, so I approve.

* The Gummi Ship is...fun now. Not an outright blast or anything, I can’t imagine i’ll go into the depths of it, but I honest-to-god dig blasting around the overworld in the thing and the actual fights are perfectly solid. I remember playing Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time years ago and thinking “just do this!”, and it honestly isn’t a million miles away from what they went for. Big gold star for most improved mechanic.

* I was concerned the new (ish, I know she’s filled the part in a minor capacity in the past) Kairi voice actor would be distracting, but as of her one time sticking her head in so far, I think she’s really good. Sadly they kept Richard Epcar as Ansem, and while to be clear he’s definitely still good, I’m holding out hope that if the Xehanorts fuse together for the final battle as implied by the last trailer, that guy’ll be voiced by Billy Zane. I think I’ll be down for the new Master Xehanort later, since going by the trailer the new guy with him is doing entirely his own thing rather than a weak Nimoy impression.

* Sora, you took down four previously post-game bonus boss-tier enemies at the same time, why are you talking like you’ve been reduced to a 90-pound weakling

* Malificent is still convinced she’s the main villain and that’s delightful, as is her and Pete’s failed first go at grabbing the box.

* Love love love the Uncharted-style integrated environmental storytelling and incidental dialogue, which I’ve thought for awhile the series would benefit from; learning why Seifer wasn’t in Twilight Town this time and why the skateboards vanished damn near made me double over, and I cannot overstate how important it was to me to learn that pizza and burgers exist in the universe of Kingdom Hearts.

* I like the camera and I’m definitely using it more than I did in Spider-Man, even if it’s nowhere near as versatile., since you can actually take pictures and there’s more environmental stuff actually worth taking pictures of. And in the past I’ve been a little ehhhh on the song titled Sora as his definitive tune compared to everyone else’s, but I like it a lot more as the ringtone.

* I’d always assumed that it would take, like, the Kingdom Hearts equivalent of a nuke to break a Keyblade, and that it would set off titanic repercussions or at least seriously damage the heart of whoever wielded it. That it’s apparently more of a ‘damn, gotta get a new one at the shop’ situation certainly makes it clearer how Riku was able to just hand Kairi one like it wasn’t even a thing. Apparently it isn’t!

* And finally: I assume it’s a character thing, but if I had a whatever name like Lea and then was bequeathed something as dope as Axel, I too would stick with the latter even after getting my heart back.

#Kingdom Hearts III #Kingdom Hearts #Opinion

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

Video

youtube

LIL NAS X - OLD TOWN ROAD

[6.73]

We're gonna bluuuurb til we can't no more...

Katie Gill: The problem with "Old Town Road" is that it's more interesting as a thinkpiece than an actual song. The song charting, then being excluded, from the Billboard Country Music charts opens so many questions that can't be answered in one sitting. Is this a further example of the well-documented racism in country music? Or is this just a freak accident hick-hop song that vaulted it's way out of the depths of subgenre hell? Is a twangy voice and references to horses enough to make a song "country"? Does the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus in a remix that dropped on Friday legitimize the song's credentials or just make them worse? Where was all this controversy when "Meant To Be," an honest-to-god pop song, was holding steady on the charts? There are so many questions and so many points of conversation that spring out from this song, that it's a pity "Old Town Road" itself is just okay. Everything about it screams "filler track for the SoundCloud page," from the length to the trap beats to the aggressively mediocre lyrics. The song didn't even chart on it's own merits: it charted because it's used in a TikTok meme! This is like if "We Are Number One" or "No Mercy" made their way to the top of the iTunes charts and people decided to have a conversation about the limits of genre based on those charting. I'm a little annoyed, because the conversation around "Old Town Road" is something that country music should be having... but just not around "Old Town Road." [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are essays upon essays to be written about "Old Town Road" as a prism for the racial divides that have served as undergirding for the modern American genre system since the 1930s division between "hillbilly" and "race" records. It's the perfect hunk of think-piece fodder: a simple core question -- is it country? -- that can spiral out to all corners of culture until the song itself is obscured. So let's focus on the song, instead. Because beyond all world-historical significance, "Old Town Road" fucking bangs. It's all in the bait and switch of that intro -- banjos and horns plunking away until Lil Nas X's triumphant "YEAAAH" (second this decade only to Fetty Wap) drops and the beat comes in. It's a joke until it's not -- maybe you came in from the Red Dead Redemption 2 video, or from a friend of yours talking about the hilarious country trap song, or from the artist's own Twitter, which is more Meech On Mars than Meek Mill, but no matter the source, you'll find that "Old Town Road" has its way of looping into your brain, all drawls and boasts and banjos. It's meme rap, but much like prior iterations of this joke ("Like a Farmer"), Lil Nas X fully and deeply commits -- he doesn't drop the pretense for a single line, keeping the track short enough to not outlive its welcome while still exploring its weird conceit to its fullest. Yet even in its jokey vibe there's some actual pathos -- no matter how put on, the lonesome cowboy sorrow of Lil Nas X's declaration that he'll "ride till [he] can't no more" feels genuine. "Old Town Road" is everything at once, the implosion of late teens culture into one undeniable moment. [10]

David Moore: So here's a true gem of a novelty song -- a phrase I use with both intention and respect; I grew up in a Dementoid household -- that could launch a thousand thinkpieces about hip-hop, country, class, the object and subject of jokes, whether to call something a joke at all, you name it. But what I keep returning to is the economy of it, its simplicity, how there is so much in so little, the way that someone on the outside can grok things inaccessible to the insiders, maybe by accident or by studious observation and a fresh perspective, the way music can be a multiverse, characters from one world complicating or clarifying or confusing the limits of another in a mutually provocative way. I'm not a backstory guy, which is to say I'm not a research guy, which is to say I'm either intuitive or lazy or both, so I don't have any clue where this came from, but I know magic when I hear it, I know what it sounds like when you discover, or simply stumble into by accident, the path beyond the bounds of territory you presumed exhausted, territory that can always get bigger, always invite whole new parties to the party. It's a real party party; you can get in. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: "Old Town Road" is the "Starships" of 2019: a song that objectively is not great, but will be called great for the understandable reason that liking or disliking it now unavoidably entails choosing the right or wrong side. This tends to lead to hand-waving freakoutery about critics not talking about the music, man, but once The Discourse is out in the world, it becomes a real and critical part of the song's existence; not talking about Billboard punting "Old Town Road" would be like talking about "Not Ready to Make Nice" as an workaday country song. The problem is not quite as simple as "the Billboard charts don't want black artists," an argument with historical precedent but now doomed to fail: clearly, people like Kane Brown and Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton (who's left off lists like this, somehow) have hits. It's more about respectability politics. Traditionalists hate the idea of memes, social media, and perceived line-cutting, all of which means they'll hate a song born not of the Nashville and former-fraternity-bro scene, but via TikTok and stan Twitter. But what they really, really hate is rap and anything that sounds like a gateway to rap; like if they tolerate this Cardi B will be next. Country radio, for the past decade or two, has been pop radio with all the blatant rap signifiers removed; its songs aren't about cowboys or horses but suburban WASP life. Of course, double standards abound. Talking about lean is out; talking about bingeing beer is fine. "Bull riding and boobies" isn't OK because it's from a guy called Lil Nas X -- I honestly think people would whine less if this exact song was credited to "Montero Hill" -- but "I got a girl, her name's Sheila, she goes batshit on tequila" is OK because it's from a guy called Jake Owen, and "Look What God Gave Her" is OK because it hides its ogling of boobies behind plausibly deniable God talk. Fortunately "Old Town Road" is better than "Starships" -- the NIN sample is inspired, and the hook is evocative and sticky. (It fucks with authenticity politics, too -- Lil Nas X wrote his own song, but the big corporate country artists often don't.) Its main problem is that it's slight: a meme that doesn't overstay past the punchline, a song that never quite gets to song size. [5]

Thomas Inskeep: Sampling Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghosts IV" to (help) create a western motif is hands-down brilliant, so huge thumbs-up for that. Lyrically, this is pretty empty, a bunch of western clichés strung together -- but then again, the same can be said of plenty of Big & Rich songs. Split the score down the middle, accordingly. [5]

Scott Mildenhall: But surely this is how country music should sound? Lil Nas X has performed alchemy in combining two generic styles into something inspiring, flipping the meaning of "pony and trap" on its head. The mechanical sound of trap is rusted into the mechanical sound of fixing a combine, or at least pretending that is something you might do, and such performance is fun for all the family. Well, unless you're an American farming family tired of stereotypes anyway. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: Non country (trap) beat with subtle country instrumentation? Sounds like much of country radio, only way better! [7]

Nortey Dowuona: A burning, humming bass girds under sticklike banjos as Lil Nas X rides into town to water his horse and head back out onto the open road. [5]

Alex Clifton: I spent the weekend re-enacting this scene from Easy A with this song, so it's safe to say I like it. I especially love the "horse"/"Porsche" line, which is unexpected and amazing. [7]

Alfred Soto: The usual genre conversations threaten to smother analysis. If Lil Nas X can use trap drums, then why can't Sam Hunt use loops? Silly. (Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes: "The Constitution is what the judges say it is"). The Kanye allusion ("Y'all can't tell me nuthin'") works extra-diagetically. An assemblage of modest, discrete charms held together by a solid performance at its center -- nothing more. I await the Future-Frank Liddell collab. [5]

Edward Okulicz: It's affectionate and actually quite deferential in its treatment of its parent genres. Crossovers like this have been hinted at, and gestured towards in the other direction quite a bit of late (country artists affecting hip-hop, less so the latter), and the two genres have more in common than the caricatures of the sorts of people who are supposed to listen to them do. Of course, I mean those genres as they exist today, and not in the warped imaginations of purists. You can see why kids have latched on, and it's easy to snarl at Big Chart for sticking their oar in. The kids are right; artists control the means of production and radio and chart compilers can accept that they aren't the tastemakers, and attempts to force their tastes down other people's throats will lead to a backlash. This is not a brilliant song but it's a picture of one of many potential musical futures and, at two minutes, the perfect length too. The right response is to smile, and "Old Town Road" makes it easy to smile -- it's an earworm. Sure, it doesn't give me the same immediate feeling of fuck!!! this is the best that I got when I first heard that version of Bubba Sparxxx's "Comin' Round" but country music survived "Honey, I'm Good" and it will survive this. It might well thrive. [6]

Joshua Copperman: I recently found out that I have a moderate Vitamin D deficiency, but looking up the song everyone was talking about and hearing this basically confirmed that I should go outside more often. There are definitely things to talk about: it's the logical conclusion to "I listen to everything except country and rap" jokes when the inverse has taken over the Hot 100, and it's a song that's set to hit number one because everyone is incredulous that it exists at all -- with a Billy Ray Cyrus remix to boot. The conversations about what makes a song "country" are all fascinating, but it's hard to fully enjoy pieces about something that, as an actual song, is so fundamentally empty. The Nine Inch Nails sample is interesting, but like everything else, more intriguing in theory than execution. This will wind up on every site's "best of 2019" lists, and then in ten years people will snark on how a song with "My life is a movie/Bullridin' and boobies" was so critically acclaimed. As a meme/discourse lightning rod, it's an [8], as a how-to guide for late-2010s fame, it's a [10], but there's little appeal in a vacuum. Adding a bonus point, because music has never existed in a vacuum anyway. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: Remember when the internet was still described as a realm of lawless and limitless potential, when open source could be touted as revolutionary praxis and "free flow of information" was a sacred utterance? Now one of the key political questions is whether private companies should be doing more to banish online rulebreakers or whether the federal government should step in to delimit what those rules are. Whichever side ends up winning, it's clear that the wide open spaces of the Frontier Internet are rapidly facing enclosure. Montero Hill learned this the hard way when his @nasmaraj account was suspended by Twitter as part of its crackdown against spam-based virality. While Tweetdeckers are nobody's martyrs, it's a minor tragedy every time an account with that many followers and that much influence gets shunted off to the broken-link stacks of the Wayback Machine. Rules must be laid down, but their enforcement always entails loss -- the bittersweet triumph of civilization over nature that forms the backbone of every classic Western. Maybe Hill/nasmaraj/Lil Nas X had this loss in mind when writing the jauntily defiant lyrics of "Old Town Road." Maybe he was just riding the microtrends of the moment like he was before. Still, this particular microtrend -- the reappropriation of cowboy imagery by non-white Americans -- feels too weighty to be reduced to mere aesthetics. Turner's Frontier Thesis may have been racially blinkered to the extreme, but the myths and yearnings it spawned can never die; they just get democratized. So it makes sense that young Americans, even those who don't know who John Wayne is, would subconsciously reach out for the rural, the rustic, the rugged and free, just as we feel the global frontiers closing all around us. Our foreign policy elites hold endless panel talks about "maintaining power projection" and "winning the AI race," but most normal people don't care about that stuff. We're all secretly waiting for China to take over like in our cyberpunk stories, so we can drop all the pressures of being the Indispensable Nation and just feast off our legacy like post-imperial Britain. And what is that legacy? It's rock, it's country, it's hip hop, it's "Wrangler on my booty," it's all the vulgar mongrelisms that force our post-ironic white nationalists to adopt Old Europe as their lodestar. In short, it's "Old Town Road." We're gonna ride this horse 'til we can't no more, we're gonna reify these myths 'til we can't no more, because when the empire is gone, the myths are all we have. (Oh, and the Billy Ray remix is a [10]. Obviously.) [9]

Jonathan Bradley: People suppose that genre exists to delineate a set of sounds, and while it does do that, it depends even more on its ability to build, define, and speak for communities. The question of whether "Old Town Road" is a country song or not is in some ways easily resolved: country music showed no interest in Lil Nas X -- or at least not until Billy Ray Cyrus noticed an opportune moment to complicate expectations and grab headlines -- and so Lil Nas X's song was not country. Even taking into account its sound and subject matter, his hit is best understood as a burlesque on country music, one that parodies and exaggerates the genre's motifs and themes for heightened effect. The kids on TikTok, who turned the long-gone lonesome blues of the song's tumbleweed hook into viral content, understand this intuitively: they use the incongruity that clarifies at the beat drop as an opportunity to engage in caricature and costume. And while Lil Nas X, a huckster and a trendspotter before he was a pop star, has been happy to embrace the yee-haw mantle that has been bestowed upon him, his song is a familiar rap exercise in play and extended metaphor. The Shop Boyz did much the same thing with "Party Like a Rock Star" and it would be obtuse to suppose that was a rock song. And yet, as the country historian Bill C. Malone has written, country since its inception has attracted fans "because of its presumed Southern traits, whether romantically or negatively expressed"; there has always been a bit of schtick to this sound. I wondered when we reviewed Trixie Mattel whether country is, on some level, intrinsically camp, and it's tough to declare definitively that Lil Nas X's bold hick strokes are that much more stylized than Jake Owen's performance of small town ordinariness. And just as a country music based on cohesive community rather than sound has found itself broad enough to encompass northern hair metal, Auto-Tuned club stomps, and Ludacris, the gate-keeping involved in keeping Lil Nas X out begins to look suspicious. After all, the first song to debut on Billboard's Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart, the predecessor to today's Hot Country Songs, was "Pistol Packin' Mama," a hillbilly goof by the decidedly uncountry combination of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. As Malone has written, "While the commercial fraternity thought mainly of profits, the recording men, radio executives, publicists, promoters, ad men, sponsors, and booking agents who dealt with folk music also readily manipulated public perceptions in order to sell their products." One of the ways they did that was to tap into already mythological figures of American individualism like the cowboy, who is, after all, a creature of the west and not the South. "The respective visions of cowboy and western life drew far more from popular culture and myth ... than they did from reality," Malone writes of the early country singers who embraced cowboy personae; in some ways Lil Nas X's purloining of meme interest in that same culture places him within a rich country heritage. After all, when in popular entertainment has shameless self-promotion not been part of the aspirant's trade? It does matter how cultural communities react to the music made in their name, but when certain people are adjudicated not fit for club membership, it is worth asking why. Country's culture, I said recently, is "one that's implicitly but not definitely Southern, implicitly but not definitely rural, and implicitly but not definitely white," and it's easy to see how Lil Nas X doesn't fit into that. Country music's racism isn't unique to the genre -- the historical hegemonies of punk and indie rock are at least as determinedly white -- but it is particularly visible. Country is racist like the South is racist like America is racist. Lil Nas X disrupts that settlement, helping us imagine a country music that genuinely encompasses the music of the American South -- a genre that has space for "This is How We Roll" and Miranda Lambert, Lil Boosie and Young Thug, "Formation" and Juvenile, and perhaps even Norteño and banda sounds. That would be, however, not only a far different country music to what we know today, but the music of a far different America. [7]

Iris Xie: Yeet haw! Aside from the great pleasure I've had in showing this to my friends, (Me, two weeks ago: "Have you heard this country trap song???" My friends, this week: "Iris, that song you're talking about now has Billy Ray Cyrus on it??") and either slinging back and forth memey references, engaging in discussions on the state of white supremacy in the music industry while also debating about the song's merit, or hearing my friends start singing "can't nobody tell me nothing..." very quietly at any moment and I can't help but join in -- it's all been very fun. Aside from making plans to play "Old Town Road" on my next country road drive to Costco, something that's occurred to me is that this is a song boosted by the status and calamity of its metanarrative. We could always use more discussions of the double standards that Black and POC artists face in the industry when it comes to genres and participating in it, and I'm honestly glad Lil Nas X just made something that was fun and made sense to him, even if "Old Town Road" doesn't stray too much from the conventions of both trap and country, resulting in a well-balanced mashup that sounds more safe than surprising to me, but is serene in its confidence nevertheless. On the flipside of that genre-mashing, Miley wishes and is probably very jealous of her father now for hopping onto this train, lest we forget about all of her cultural appropriation attempts. But for the song itself, those long, relaxed drawls and the imagery of riding a horse to the trap beat -- why not? We live in weird times now, Black people's contributions to country music were erased, and it's kind of a relaxing song. Also, I'm a fan of the "Can't nobody tell me nothing" lyric, which has become an unintentionally defiant line in the face of all the backlash, resulting in a message to rally around. Now excuse me, as I text my friends that "I'm gonna take my horse down to the old town road." [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Lil Nas X #country #pop #music #music review #writing

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thesportssoundoff · 5 years

Text

The UFC Released A Schedule; Let’s Play Matchmaker For It

(As always, this shit is tiring but also a lot of fun. If you read this, I appreciate it. It's a lot of work to even try to play around with this stupidity but I also think having to do this exercise makes you a teensy bit smarter, if only because you gain an appreciation for its difficulty.)

Joey

November 12th

The UFC unveiled it's 2019 early schedule slate and it is in so many words, an attack on you, me, the world of MMA, the universe as a whole and all we love dear. It's a loaded slate of 11 fight cards compared to 8 in 2017 and 9 in 2018. It's the debut of the ESPN era where 42 guaranteed shows at 12 fights a pop are coming our way with rumors of as many as 4-5 Fight Pass slates as well. The UFC will be on ESPN, ESPN+ and PPV from locales like Brooklyn, Brazil, Australia, London and Arizona with plenty more to be announced in the coming weeks obviously. The past year whenever the UFC has rolled out their scheduling in THIS format, I've tried to play the best Sean Shelby/Mick Maynard I can and matchmake for the events. It is a long painful process and if you're reading this, I hope you're prepared for me to do it again.

Couple o' caveats before I begin:

-I am not predicting any flyweight fights. Until they book a single fight in 2019 at the weight, I'm assuming it's gone.

-We're rolling with what we got. No GSP, no Diaz Brothers. no Rumbles bails out, none of that. We got what we got.

-Just doing co-mains and main events. If I got a PPV fight or two in mind, it'll be in the overview of it.

-Don't expect a non-Brazilian main event in Brazil or so on so forth. There ARE rules to this game, ya goons.

Ready?

January 19th UFC on ESPN+/ESPN Barclays Center Brooklyn New York

ESPN+ Main Event: Anderson Silva vs Israel Adesanya Co Main Event: Yoel Romero vs Anthony Smith

ESPN Main Event: Rachael Ostovich vs Paige Van Zant Co Main Event: Cub Swanson vs Jeremy Stephens

At the press conference, Dana White said somethings at UFC 230 were going to lead into what would happen for this card. Given the amount of middleweights on the show, I suppose that's where the action is. We know Yoel Romero has a signed contract for Jan 19th so right off the jump, the first assumption is Romero vs Costa which, I suppose, is the right fight to make at least until Ariel Helwani broke news that Paolo Costa is hurt----again. The question I have (and perhaps will continue to have) is where Anderson Silva fits into the discussion. Silva is rumored to be returnign in January LIKELY for this card. Silva vs Israel Adesanya sounds very interesting and I'd be 100% with it. It would be a tremendous treat for striking fans and is the perfect use of both guys. My concern is that Adesanya, Paula Costa and Jacare Souza are all basically jockeying for the back up spot for the February show from Australia. It makes FAR more sense to put Adesanya there vs JAG and roll with something else for Silva----but you're not going to get a lot of these opportunities. Silva vs Adesanya will probably draw more eyeballs to your ESPN+ debut than any other fight you could come up with that isn't a title fight (and for the record, I bet the app will get a few title fights here or there). More on that in a pinch. Keeping Yoel Romero on the card and finding somebody else to fight him keeps a dude who just headlined a PPV on your undercard in a somewhat premier role. I am all aboard on Romero vs anybody but let's go with Yoel Romero going UP in weight to try his hand at 205 lbs vs Anthony Smith. Let's roll. The ESPN "prelims" need to be treated like a main card due to the attention it's going to receive and while PVZ vs Ostovich might sell folks on your app, PVS vs Ostovich probably gets more eyeballs on your ESPN debut on a network. Go with that because it's a lie to assume you can come up with another fight to garner that level of attention.

UFC 223 January 26th Honda Center Anaheim, California

Main Event: TJ Dillashaw vs Henry Cejudo Co-Main Event: Robbie Lawler vs Ben Askren

This one is I guess pretty much locked up. The UFC isn't going to bring Ben Askren in without the plans to showcase him and a co-main under this kind of a title fight makes some sense. Personally I'd go with something else BUT I'm also not sure what would fit better. If they're committed to Askren fighting for a title, might as well co-main event him. Cruz vs Lineker is a tremendous #2 fight with the idea that a guy can jump up in the case of an injury to Cejudo or something of that ilk. Wouldn't surprise me if they roll out a title fight to protect them in the event that fight falls through BUT I'm not sure we're going to get one of those. Your PPV main card could look something like TJ/Cejudo, Lawler/Askren, Till/Mike Perry, Cruz/Lineker and a filler fifth fight. Not awful but probably not the greatest shakes either.

UFC on ESPN+ Feb 2nd Centro de Formação Olímpica Fortaleza, Brazil

Main Event: Jose Aldo vs Donald Cerrone Co-Main Event: Demian Maia vs Diego Sanchez

Brazilian Fight Nights often times suffer from cards that are sliced and diced and picked apart before fight time comes around. The UFC's got an easy one to deal with here as apparently Aldo vs Cerrone was in the works once upon a time. Aldo has said he's waiting to see if Holloway or Ortega wins to make a move to 155 lbs but my belief and hope is that he'll simply make the decision to go up 10 lbs regardless. The co-main event can just be a fun time. Demian Maia has said that he's retiring at the end of his UFC deal so let's just give him safe and fun fights. Watching Maia vs Woodley, Covington and Usman combined with the losses from the top guys he beat gives off the impression that his run to the title shot was very much the work of some amazingly fun yet brief smoke and mirrors. Maia vs Sanchez is a rare "fun" fight that sort of protects both guys and could give way to some intriguing grappling exchanges. Let's not beat the devil out of Demian just yet. Throw in your usual collection of good solid Brazilians on the undercard (Thiago Santos will show up here for sure, I'd imagine Shoeface and Lil Nog will as well) and you're on your way to something good.

UFC 234 February 9th Rod Laver Arena Sydney, Australia

Main Event: Robert Whittaker vs Kelvin Gastelum Co-Main Event: Cain Velasquez vs Either Tai Tuiavasa or the winner of Curtis Blaydes/Francis Ngannou

There are very few fights I'm as intrigued about as Whittaker vs Gastelum. On paper, that's a fantastic fight well worthy of a main event spot. It's the confirmed headliner so there's not much to play with there. I originally figured Rose vs Andrade would make sense here but there's a problem; Rose Namajunas says she's not going to be ready to go until the Spring. Andrade vs Suarez as an interim title fight would be nice and all but I imagine most fans would reject that fight on principle alone. Let's dream big and by big I mean HW. Cain Velasquez is APPARENTLY healthy and ready to fight soon for the UFC. Per Javy Mendez, Cain and the UFC are wrapping up a new deal and once that's done, Cain's getting brought back out for a fight. I don't TRUST that but Cain vs anybody is a fantastic co-main event and would give Australia something nifty and different. I don't need to see Cain vs JDS IV especially since both men are cooked and Stipe Miocic has a more important role to fill. That means that Tai if he beats JDS or the winner of Blaydes vs Ngannou can get the Cain fight instead. Rounding out the main card, I've got my eyes on Jacare as the back up for the main event. While UFC booking says Jacare gets the best MW available (because why would we do something simple?), I'm giving Jacare a soft touch for doing me a favor and staying on the show. Italian Alessio Di Chirico is coming off a win and is a weak-ish enough grappler that I could see that being easy work for Jacare. Ross Pearson is bound to show up on here somewhere (it's the way of the world) and the same goes for Tyson Pedro (fighting in early December). Wouldn't snub my nose at maybe one more Mark Hunt old dude HW fight either vs another old dude (Arlovski?). Also if Volkanovski wins vs Chad Mendes and is fresh enough to return around this time? Put him in the showcase spot.

UFC on ESPN February 17th Talking Stick Casino Phoenix, Arizona

Main Event: Tony Ferguson vs Dustin Poirier Co-Main Event: Frankie Edgar vs Josh Emmett

The UFC's official OFFICIAL debut on ESPN comes in February in Arizona so let's go out there and give us some of that fresh out the oven violence for fight fans. Let's say Khabib Nurmagomedov gets suspended for six months from the date of UFC 228. That puts him in line-ish to fight in April which is basically the cut off point before he takes off for Ramadan. It would be doable but a tight squeeze for the UFC to pull that off, right? Okay NOW let's say he gets suspended for eight months. An eight month suspension is basically a year long suspension since it'll take Khabib into Ramadan and Khabib tends to re-emerge into the September to December months. As such, Khabib could be out into "it's reasonable to have an interim title" range. The same goes for a year long suspension or potentially even longer. With the lay out as it is, Tony Ferguson vs Dustin Poirier makes a lot of sense as a potential interim title fight. Tony Ferguson is the unofficial official UFC lightweight champion while Dustin's never been hotter as a fighter. The co-main event just feels like a good way to get Edgar back into the mix vs a guy who has some steam on him. Holloway vs Ortega, Moicano vs Bektic, Volkanovski vs Mendes sucks up six of the top featherweights and I've seen Edgar beat Swanson twice and Stephens once (and I kinda booked them against one another but shhhhhh!). That leaves very little that's appealing for Edgar at 145 lbs and the idea of doing a fun as shit Edgar vs Cruz fight at 145 lbs probably has very little zest with fans PLUS Cruz is fighting in December. The only other option I felt moderately interested in seeing Edgar face would be Josh Emmett. Emmett is coming off a loss but he did headline on Fox (and was a co-main), he's got some spark behind his name and I feel very comfortable and confident that it'll at least be a somewhat captivating fight on paper. As for the rest of the main card? I don't have anything definitive in mind given how loaded November and December are for the UFC. If you forced me to flesh out six fights, it might look something like this:

Ferguson/Poirier Edgar/Emmett Mackenzie Dern/Felice Herrig Aljamain Sterling/Rani Yahya Gian Villante/Khalil Rountree (Because deep down inside of my soul, I really do hate all of you and myself)

That's assuming they do five fights. If they do four, scratch that last one and thank me for it.

UFC on ESPN+ February 23rd Scotttrade Center St. Louis, Missouri

Main Event: Justin Gaethje vs the winner of Dan Hooker/Edson Barboza Co-Main Event: Marlon Moraes vs Raphael Assuncao II

The UFC hasn't announced a venue for this yet so we're playing a little bit of God here. There are heavy rumors that this show is bookmarked for South Korea but if that were the case then the UFC Would be going Korea, Australia and Brazil in a span of a mouth and that doesn't seem overly likely. If it was up to me, the main and co-main event here would be swapped and reversed. The only way you're going to get bantamweights accepted as main eventers is to roll them out and see what happens. Assuncao vs Moraes II is supposedly a fight the UFC is working on and both guys are #1 contender types in a division hungry FOR a number one contender. Feels like a fair and easy fight to make but ALAS----welcome to MMA where everything is fine until it isn't. Figuring that the desire to have a "big" main event trumps logic and common sense, even for a digital streaming app, let's go with what I think is a perfectly acceptable headliner of Justin Gaethje vs the winner of Barboza vs Hooker. Gaethje has main evented in three of his four UFC fights so he's clearly a guy the company has faith in in that spot. Barboza is a proven headliner and IF Hooker beats Edson then there's no doubting where he should be ranked and who he should wind up facing. That main event just feels right in the UFC's never ending division of great fights. Moraes vs Assuncao II is a perfect co-main event, teeth firmly grinding together as I type it.

UFC 235 March 2nd T-Mobile Arena

Main Event: Daniel Cormier vs Brock Lesnar OR Stipe Miocic Co-Main Event: Tyron Woodley vs Colby Covington

The main event feels like a lock for DC's final fight before he either goes off to work as a WWE commentator or replaces Dana White as the face of the UFC while Dana takes a more behind the scenes role in the company. Despite Cormier saying he'd fight Jones again at LHW, I don't see that ever being the case just due to the weight cut. Not cutting to LHW has been such a positive for DC that he has joked (perhaps?) that the lack of a weight cut has opened the door for him to extend his career if he wanted to. That means either Brock or Stipe is getting the call to face Cormier. My immediate thought is that they will do everything in their power to get Brock vs DC in March. Why? Because if both guys are retiring then you're just free to do whatever. It's sort of like how Bisping turned down Vitor as a retirement fight when both were looking for one last fight; what's the downside to cheating if you're going to be gone anyways? As for the co-main event, we can't avoid this forever. At some point, Tyron Woodley vs Colby Covington is coming our way and our collective asses are going to have to deal with that. It's an intriguing fight I suppose inside the cage but at the end of the day, there's simply no way to workaround the ugliness that'll follow it outside of it. And just for the sake of funsies, add a third title fight here for good measure. Give me the winner of Jonna/Shevchenko vs the winner of Eye/Chookagian in December. Feels like everything should match up in a timely fashion there. Hell I wouldn't even be totally opposed to Nicco Montano getting the shot here either. Throw in Michelle Waterson vs Livia Souza and Chris Weidman's debut at 205 lbs vs Misha Cirkunov and we are happily off to the races.

UFC on ESPN+ March 9th Boardwalk Hall Atlantic City, New Jersey

Main Event: Cody Garbrandt vs Jimmie Rivera Co-Main Event: Dominick Reyes vs Jan Blachowicz

Again, no location is listed here so we're left to play creative games with locations. The UFC has agreements in place to run shows in China and Russia twice a year (in theory) but they also have deals with Singapore (normally in June) and Atlantic City. Let's keep it in the States and turn our attention to Atlantic City. AGAIN the only way you're going to get bantamweights respected is if you give them main event opportunities. I would've gone Cruz/Lineker winner vs Garbrandt but I'd imagine the winner of Cruz vs Lineker is the fast track candidate for the bantamweight title fight. Garbrandt needs a break from TJ Dillashaw and Cruz----and a fight with Jimmie Rivera feels a bit like a safe and secure rebound fight. Rivera is probably the easiest of the available top 5 guys and I'd like to see if a refreshed Garbrandt could handle Rivera's pressure and crisp combinations. The co-main feels like a damn good fight that even Reyes has chimed in about. Dom Reyes wants this to be a main event but I'm more committed to helping improve the imagery of bantamweights as main eventers than I am in giving Reyes a main event spot. He doesn't need it as much as bantamweight overall needs it.

UFC on ESPN+ March 16th The 02 Arena London, England

Main Event: Darren Till vs Derek Brunson Co-Main Event: Marcin Tybura vs Alexander Volkov

Guys like Jimi Manuwa, LEon Edwards (the hell do you find a spot for him on these shows?), Arnold Allen and the wealth of other good European fighters figure to be on here somewhere. This is where not having a Mousasi type hurts because you could willingly plug him in here at any spot and he'll be a reputable international draw. For me, give me Till vs Brunson in a test to see whether Darren Till is ready for the move up to 185 lbs. Brunson is sort of the Mr. Reliable a la Uriah Hall who the UFC calls on when they need a guy with some clout who can pop in and do a deal. The co-main is just the usual international bit; two big European heavyweights being told to go out there and throw hands at one another. Sneak in Overeem somewhere on this main card in an easier fight (Shamil Abdurakhimov, lookin at you!) and you've got a pretty decent top of the billing for a return to the UK. Leon Edwards is the one guy I kind of lack a spot for; Edwards was supposed to fight a bunch of different guys but the UFC has basically hidden him out in Europe (with a pinch hit in Brazil or Asia) so it's hard to find a good spot for him. Just talking out loud here on that one but maybe the loser of Usman vs RDA? I can't see RDA being willing to go to Europe but he fought in Mexico and Singapore recently so perhaps the travel isn't going to be THAT big of a deal. Also I assume this is where we'll see the return of Gokhan Saki despite him being MIA for what feels like a century now. Mairbek Taisumov vs David Teymur would be a dandy too.

UFC on ESPN+ March 23rd American Airlines Center Dallas, Texas

Main Event: Holly Holm vs Amanda Nunes/Cris Cyborg Co-Main Event: Yair Rodriguez vs Ricardo Lamas

I am going to BET you that ESPN has some "You'll get a title fight" assurances from the UFC. Just a random guess. With Amanda Nunes bottoming out on PPV with under 100K buys vs Rocky Pennington and Cyborg always one foot in, one foot out the door, maybe this is where you use your digital platform to help make some folks happy. Holly Holm is (usually) always really good at attracting eyeballs to her fights in some form or fashion. Consider that she sold 200K+ buys with GDR as a headliner for the love of all that's holy (with some help from Anderson Silva too) and remember the numbers she's drawn on free TV. Holm vs Nunes is a fresh fight at 135 lbs that would/could make folks happy on all fronts. It's a respectable main event. Cyborg vs Holm 2 could follow a similar suit as a "big" fight main event given to fans for $4.99 a month. It's an enticer and perhaps that ESPN+ sub count means more to ESPN (and the UFC) than whatever rating you pop the week AFTER this one. Things don't always make sense in MMA anyways. Yair vs Lamas is a fight the UFC has tried to make apparently three times before and so now I imagine is as good a time as any to pull it off. Yair's stock will never be higher and Lamas seems to be on the downswing of things in his career potentially. Maybe that's a fight you can pull off and feel good about. Also I imagine March is more than enough time for Derrick Lewis to heal up and grace us all with his wonderful presence

UFC on ESPN March 30th SAP Center San Jose, California

Main Event- Luke Rockhold vs Paulo Costa Co-Main Event- Anthony Pettis vs Nik Lentz

And so we end this long and painful march towards the end of the "official" calendar with one more show on ESPN. I feel like at this point the "obvious" fights are exhausted and you're left to try and get creative with a smidge of spots that make sense for an ESPN headliner. The one fight that remains that I'd feel most comfortable with is this one; a clash between rising MW contender Paulo Costa and longtime stalwart and guy who seems too stubborn to cut to 205 Luke Rochold. In reality, it's a pretty fair match up for both guys. Costa gets to chase the big "name" that eluded him and after pulling out of two fights and struggling with injuries, it makes sense that Rockhold's return would be a bit more subdued. Rockhold is still a guy who can draw eyes to TV sets and so Rockhold vs Costa on "free" TV feels like a bit of a dandy for fans. As far as a co-main event for the ole boys at ESPN? Kinda stuck. At this point I'm projecting 10 events (and like four months into the future) so it's not exactly the easiest deal in the world. As such how about Anthony Pettis vs Nik Lentz? Pettis is still a name who can be relied upon for some semblance of notoriety and Nik Lentz is one of the few dudes at 155 lbs he hasn't fought quite yet. Most of the fun exciting LWs I believe Pettis has either fought or has passed on as well given that he turned down Mairbek Taisumov (not the worst idea), Kevin Lee (for UFC 228) and so Lentz feels like a fair shake in giving Pettis someone he COULD beat while also presenting challenges to him. Throw in Ovince St. Preux somewhere and give us the latest from Cat Zingano and I'm cool with that.

#MMA #UFC #Fight Nights #2019 #Match Making

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kamerontwph034 · 4 years

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ledenews · 4 years

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The Human Side of No Sports

"Day 4 Without Sports: Looked over across the couch and noticed a strange woman sitting there. Apparently we’re related, along with these two kids running around. Strange. They seem nice though." It’s a variant of a constantly updated meme circulating throughout social media about what sports fans have been doing since athletic competitions from the professional level down to youth sports came to a grinding halt as the battle to contain the coronavirus wages across the country. Sure, they are funny, and for some, might be downright cathartic. But there’s a human element to the canceling of sports, and it’s not just the professional athletes it’s affecting. After all, nearly all of them will be back for another season, whenever sports resume. For high school and college amateur athletes, though, that next chance may never come. Some who are eagerly awaiting the prospect of starting back up spring sports are hoping against hope. Others had their championship dreams dashed right as they were about to reach them. LEDENews wanted to put a human face to this decision and asked four area athletes, three high school seniors and one collegiate athlete, just how they felt when they had a dream, a goal they’d worked for their entire careers suddenly ripped away.

She Was Right There

Danielle Stewart spent her first two collegiate seasons at Notre Dame College in Ohio. The first two seasons, she won the Mountain East Conference’s pole vault title. But following her sophomore season, NDC opted to drop its track program, necessitating a change of scenery for the Strongsville, Ohio native. She found Wheeling University, then still known as Wheeling Jesuit, and made the transfer. While she came up short in the conference meet her junior year, finishing second, Stewart returned atop the podium her senior season, setting multiple PR marks along the way. “It was definitely a change being this far from Strongsville, but I love it,” Stewart said. “It was the best move I could have ever made. I’ve PR’d by over a foot since coming here and I’ve got to experience so many new things. I love the school, my teammates and my coaches.” Another on that list is qualifying for the NCAA Division II Track & Field Indoor Championship Meet. Stewart’s mark of 3.93, her PR to date, at a meet in Youngstown earned her the qualifying mark. She equaled that mark later in capturing the MEC title. Stewart was pumped when she learned of her automatic qualification. After all, she and another athlete each finished with the same height, 20th best, last season. They took her and left Stewart at home. “I had to hit a big height this year to guarantee my spot,” Stewart said. “Hitting 3.93 felt like a dream. Honestly, I was in shock. I could not stop smiling and hugging my teammates and coaches. Honestly, it was one of the best moments of my life.”

In Shock

One of the best moments that sadly, gave one to one of the worst. Stewart and head coach Patrick Stanton had been in Alabama two days when the decision was handed down. She had a good two days of practice and was ready to take on her competitors. “I honestly had just had the best vault practice of my life,” Stewart said. “The head coach and I were out to lunch when he got the email. I did not believe him at first. I had to call my pole vault coach and tell him not to get on the plane and fly down. I just sat there in shock but when my vault coach called, I bawled. After what happened last indoor season, I was so ready to prove myself.” Stewart had thought of the possibilities prior to the announcement, but already being there, she figured the meet would go on, just without spectators. Her parents were already told not to travel down. She definitely has some unfinished business and goals to achieve. Fortunately, the NCAA has given spring sports athletes another season of eligibility. So, if the credits and financials work out, Stewart plans to be back. “I am happy I qualified for nationals, but I do not feel like I finished my goal of becoming an All-American,” Stewart said. “And my goal ever since I started vaulting was to clear four meters and so that is another reason I feel I am not finished. “We were allowed to take practice jumps at the facility (in Alabama) and I cleared a 4-meter bungee.”

Kiersten Kesselring (15) is Fort Frye's lone senior and is a four-year starter at center.

Lone Senior’s Last Chance

Getting to the final four in Ohio is a monumentally difficult task. The Fort Frye girls program, in all its storied history, had only done it once. That’s until this season, when the Cadets knocked off No. 2 Portsmouth Notre Dame in a Division IV regional final, 49-31, to advance to Columbus. Always in the hunt, Fort Frye fell to Shadyside last season in the district finals as it was the Lady Tigers who advanced to the Final Four. The previous two seasons, the Cadets’ demise came in the district semifinal round. But not this season. Something about this season’s team clicked early. “The entire year felt like this was our year as a team” said Kiersten Kesselring, a four-year starter at center and the team’s lone senior. “Even from the beginning, this year felt different … We just play so well and strong together and are extremely close.” Kesselring would know. She’d been around for the previous years’ narrow losses in 2019 and 18, and the blowout loss to Hiland her freshman season. So that family feel she picked up early this fall during preseason camp gave her the feeling like this could be there year. “Our team is definitely a family,” Kesselring said. “We are all close and care about one another. None of us are selfish and we can all score.”

Should Have

The stats attest to that statement. Fort Frye had multiple players average double figures, but not even leading scorer Hannah Archer averaged better than 15. You won’t find any Cadets on the all-Ohio first or second team. But you will find them at St. John Arena. Or, that is to say, you would have … should have. “It was definitely a shock and no one was prepared for it,” Kesselring admitted when she and her teammates learned the game would be postponed. “We are still shook up about it and not knowing if we’ll ever get to play together again or not is hard. I’m devastated by the fact I could’ve played my last game as a Lady Cadet and didn’t even know it.” The OHSAA has a press conference scheduled for noon Thursday when the fate of the Cadets, and many teams like them in basketball and wrestling across Ohio, will likely be decided. Given the continued efforts to quarantine the public from one another in effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, the upcoming presser is ominous. “This was our year to make history and have the opportunity right in front of us to make the finals; to do it for the community, our families and coaches,” Kesselring said. “These games meant so much to us and it’s a heartbreaking feeling to have them just taken away. My heart goes out to all the other teams and athletes going through the same feelings we are right now.”

Alex Vargo is pictured with head coach Michael Jebbia, receiving a plaque for breaking the school record for most points in a game with 53.

Ending a Lengthy Drought

Wheeling Park is one of the more tradition-rich boys’ basketball programs in the Ohio Valley, and in West Virginia with multiple state championships. Yet the school had hit a bit of a snag in state tournament appearances on the boys’ side, not having been to Charleston since the 20-plus win season of 2011-2012. That changed this season when senior all-state Alex Vargo canned a mid-range stepback in the waning seconds against Morgantown, followed by a steal from junior D.J. Saunders to seal the game and end the drought. Or at least it should have. “Winning the regional game was definitely the best moment in my four years as a Patriot,” Vargo said. “I’ve never had the chance to play in the state tournament so winning regionals was and always has been my main goal. Finally accomplishing that was the best feeling ever.” Like many others across the state, that feeling quickly changed. First the NBA announced the suspension of its regular season, followed by the NCAA opting for fan-less tournament games and ultimately a cancellation of March Madness.

Canceled

“I found out an hour before practice,” Vargo recalled. “I saw it on Twitter and then everyone starting sending me the news through text. When the NBA and NCAA started canceling their games and tournaments, I figured ours would be canceled too. I was angry when I first found out. My teammates and I’s hard work was taken away.” Vargo noted that Morgantown had been a thorn in the Patriots’ side throughout his career, including a humbling defeat at the Palace on the Hill to those same Mohigans prior to the start of the sectional tournament. But Vargo and his teammates ultimately got the job done when it mattered. “Being on the other side of that felt great,” Vargo said of the win. “I was shocked/angry/sad the whole day after finding out because I know this year’s team is special and could’ve made some serious noise down at the tournament. But I still have hope and I’m going to continue to work hard every day as if it’s being played next week.”

St. Clairsville's Derek Witsberger is shown atop the podium at the Jimmy Wood Invitational earlier this season.

Finally His Time

St. Clairsville Derek Witzberger is a fun loving guy, but when he’s on the field or on the mat, he’s all business. Once football season turned to wrestling, Witsberger’s singular focus was finally getting over the hump and qualifying for the state meet. He’d came close in the past, placing fifth as a junior at 195. He qualified but failed to place as a sophomore. Wisberger narrowly missed finishing as District Champion, losing a tough 5-4 decision to River View’s Dalton Cunningham in the semifinals. Cunningham went on to win by technical fall in the finals. Witsberger, meanwhile, secured his third-place finish with a pin. Now was his time. Finally. “I was more prepared and hungry than excited,”Witsberger said of qualifying for the state meet. “I put my whole heart into one goal and when it became postponed, it broke my heart. We were almost ready to lead and head to Columbus when I found out.”

It Came True

Witsberger is the team captain and is the lone St. Clairsville senior to qualify for states. His win total is fourth in the school’s history. He placed at OVAC’s twice, finishing runner-up this season and fourth as a junior. He was ready to go for that state medal. He admitted he began to worry about it being canceled as news kept rolling but still, it took a bit to sink in. “When everything began getting canceled and postponed, I started to worry but it never resonated with me until it actually became true,” Witsberger said. “It’s still too early because I feel like I have some unfinished business left to prove.” While Witsberger’s wrestling days may be over, depending on Thursday’s announcement, his athletic career is not. He earlier signed on to continue his football career at Marietta College in the Ohio Athletic Conference, joining a large incoming recruiting class of some of the OVAC’s best. But is he holding out hope for Thursday? “It’s already been done and in three weeks, everyone will either be way overweight or completely out of wrestling shape,” Witsberger lamented. “It’s very difficult to get into wrestling shape and compete at a high level.” Read the full article

#FortFrye #OVAC #sports #StClairsville #UpperOhioValley #wheelinguniversity #WPHS

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND October 11, 2019 - THE KING, GEMINI MAN, PARASITE and More!

Having barely recovered from this past weekend’s double whammy of New York Comic-Con and New York Film Festival, I’m starting to question whether I should continue doing this column… again. It’s a lot of work putting it together each week, and it’s really tough to balance this with my paying writing work.

It certainly doesn’t help matters that I never got around to finishing last week’s column, because I got too busy with other stuff, but this week, I haven’t seen any of the three wide releases for various reasons, so there might not be as much to write about. Since I’ve already reviews Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite for The Beat, I want to talk about another amazing film getting a limited theatrical release.

That movie is David Michôd’s THE KING, which Netflix is giving a limited theatrical release before its streaming debut on the service starting November 1.

Set in the 15th Century, the movie is loosely adapted on Shakespeare’s King Henry IV and Henry V but it’s handled in a lot less stodgy way than other Shakespeare films like Michael Fassbender’s recent turn as Hamlet. Henry IV is played by Michôd regular Ben Mendelson, but Henry V is played by Timothée Chalamet who has zero interest in being king even after his father dies. But the performance that really grabbed my attention was that of Joel Edgerton (who co-wrote the screenplay with Michôd) who I didn’t even recognize as the younger king’s trusty colleague Falstaff until about an hour into the movie. Robert Pattinson (who appeared in Michôd’s The Rover) plays a smaller but absolutely hilarious role that I won’t reveal, although it’s hard to forget it since it’s such a different character for Pattinson. Much of the film deals with how Henry handles becoming King of England, especially when he’s pushed to go to war with France. I don’t have a lot more to say about this movie is that it surpassed all my expectations, especially in the battle sequence in the last half of the movie which is on par with anything in Gladiator or Braveheart, but then there’s an equally terrific epilogue that really shows Chalamet to be at the top of his game. I also should mention the amazing turns by Sean Harris from Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Lily Rose-Depp and Thomasin McKenzie as Henry’s sister.

This is just a great film that I hope people will make an effort to go see in theaters, even though Netflix really isn’t giving it as big a theatrical or awards push as some of their other movies. I know it’s playing at the Landmark 57thStreet in New York, but that’s the only theater I could find.

That aside, the big movie of the weekend is Ang Lee’s GEMINI MAN (Paramount), starring Will Smith and Will Smith. You may already know the general premise that it involves an older hitman played by Smith being hunted by a younger Smith, or maybe it’s vice versa. I don’t know since I had to miss the New York press screening due to illness, but I’ll probably try to see this when it opens this weekend. I might even give it a look in 3D at 128 FS, as maybe the third time’s the charm in that format.

U.A. Releasing is attempting their second animated release of the year with THE ADDAMS FAMILY, which I’ll be seeing on Wednesday night and reviewing over at The Beat. It has a pretty amazing voice cast, and I’ve been a fan of the comic strips and TV show, enough to hope that the filmmakers behind Sausage Party can do it justice and still be funny with a PG rating.

I’m a little bit dubious of CBS Films’ JEXI, starring Adam Devine, since the studio decided not to screen in advance for critics, and that’s VERY rare for a populist comedy like this one, which basically has Devine falling for his Siri-like smartphone assistant, or maybe it’s vice versa. If I can find the time, I might check this out, but I don’t expect it to do very well with so little advance promotion.

You can read more about these wide releases and how they might fare over at my weekly Box Office Preview at The Beat.

LIMITED RELEASES

I’ve already reviewed Bong Joon-ho’s new film PARASITE (NEON) over at The Beat, but it’s an intriguing enough film that I certainly could talk more about it. It’s an interesting look at the Korean class system through the interactions between a family living in poverty and the rich family they dupe into letting into their homes. The movie looks incredible and Bong’s cast is top-notch in creating a dark comedy dealing with rather serious issues, and honestly, you should go to see it without knowing too much about it, so that’s all I’ll say. Interestingly, the movie has already sold out about seven preview screenings on Thursday night and a few more Friday at the IFC Centerwhere Director Bong and a few of his stars will be doing QnAs after the shows.

I had been tracking Michael Goy’s MARY (RLJE Films) for some time, mainly because it has an impressive cast including Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer, but also it mostly takes place on a haunted boat, and I’m generally a fan of boating. Mary is actually the boat’s name, one that’s spotted by Oldman’s working class captain David who wants to make a better life for his family, something he thinks the boat can help with. Once David and his family are out at seas, they begin to turn on one another and lose their sanity as the boat drifts off-course.

Opening in New York and L.A. on Wednesday is Eric Notarnicola’s Mister America (Magnolia), and if you’re in New York, you can try to get tickets for the Metrograph where Notarnicola will be appearing with stars Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington aka “Neil Hamburger” for three shows tonight! It’s a faux political documentary following Heidecker on his campaign to depose the incumbent San Berarndino D.A. who tried him for selling e-cigs at an EDM festival, killing many. If this is even remotely as weird as the last few films I’ve seen with Heidecker and Turkington, it’s probably best that I haven’t seen this, and probably won’t, although the premise sounds intriguing.

There are some interesting docs this weekend including Fantastic Fungi, directed by time-lapse photographer Louie Schwartzberg (Wings of Life and the 3D IMAX film Mysteries of the Unseen Worlds) and “written” by Mark Monroe, who has been involved with some great docs including this year’sThe Biggest Little Farm. As you can tell from the title, this one explores the ground beneath our feet and how the fungi kingdom offers ways to heal and save our planet. It’s opening at New York’s Village East Cinemason Friday and in other theatersdown the road. Oh yeah, it’s also narrated by Brie Larson.

Also opening at the QuadFriday is Robin McKenna’s documentary Gift (Matson Films), based on Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” exploring the relationship between art and the “gift economy.”

Opening at the Cinema Village Friday is Killing Zoe writer Roger Avary’s new movie Lucky Day (Lionsgate), starring Luke Bracey, Nina Dobrev, Crispin Glover and Clifton Collins Jr. It’s about a paranoid safe-cracker and his family who have to face a psychotic hitman out for revenge. I’m guessing that Glover is playing the psycho.

As far as sequels, there’s Along Came the Devil 2 (Gravitas Ventures), the sequel to Jason and Heather DeVan’s Along Came the Devil, which I’m honestly not sure I saw. Laura Slade Wiggins plays Jordan who receives an unsettling voice mail and returns home to her estranged father (Bruce Davison) only to learn that a demonic force has attached itself to the town.

Lastly, there’s Broadway star Michael Damian’s High Strung Free Dance (Atlas Distribution), the sequel to his 2016 movie High Strung, which I’ve never seen. It follows Thomas Doherty’s young choreographer Zander Raines as he gives a break to a talented contemporary dancer (Juliet Doherty) and a pianist (Harry Jarvis) by putting them in his Broadway show “Free Dance,” that becomes more complicated by a love triangle between the three. It also stars Jane Seymour, who was also in the previous film.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

The New York Film Festival is finishing up this Friday with Edward Norton’s new ‘50s detective film MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, which I quite liked and have also reviewed for The Beat. Also playing is Mati Diop’s Cannes prize-winning Atlantics, which will be on Netflix in November.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Before I get to the regular Netflix releases, I do want to draw special attention to Abe Forythe’s LITTLE MONSTERS, which just received a one-night nationwide screening on Tuesday but will debut on Hulu this Friday. It’s a very witty zombie comedy set in Australia starring Alexander England (Alien: Covenant) as Dave, a slacker musician who develops a crush on his nephew’s beguiling kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (played indelibly by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o). When he finds out that the class is being taken on a field trip to a petting zoo, Dave volunteers as a chaperone, only for things to get complicated when they get there and a famed child entertainer called Teddy McGiggle (and played by Josh Gad) starts showing interest in Miss Caroline. Oh, yeah, and I also mentioned zombie, didn’t I? The class arrives at the park just as a zombie outbreak begins so Dave and Miss Caroline have to protect the kids.

I generally liked this movie, which I found quite witty and a much stronger zombie-comedy effort than something like last year’s Anna and the Apocalypse. I loved what Lupita does with her characterization in this and I even kind of liked Josh Gad, although he took his character a little too far at times. Either way, if you have Hulu-- as I now do -- this is a fun watch and you can do worse with your time.

Although Vince Gilligan’s EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE with Aaron Paul reprising his role of Jesse Pinkman is streaming on Netflix starting Friday, it’s also getting a rather limited run in theaters for those who would prefer to see it that way. I personally haven’t seen it yet, but it’s supposed to be a direct continuation from that amazing final episode of Breaking Bad. A few places where you can see it live with other fans including the IFC Center and Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. Also on Netflix Friday is the psychological thrillerFracturedfrom Brad Anderson, starring Sam Worthington – I wonder where he’d gotten – and Lily Rabe from American Horror Story. Worthington plays Ray, who is driving across country with his wife and daughter when they stop at a rest area where his daughter falls and breaks her arm. Once he gets her to the hospital, Ray passes out from exhaustion and when he wakes up, his wife and daughter are missing with absolutely no record of them having ever been there. I haven’t had a chance to see this but I’m always interested in what Brad Anderson is up to since I’m such a huge fan of his earlier movies like Session 9 and The Machinist.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Shirkers director Sandi Tan returns to the Metrograph to screen Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola Xin 35mm on Saturday night, and the Metrograph continues its “NYC ’81” series this weekend with Andrew Bergman’s So Fine, a series of New York shorts from 1981, Peter Yates’ Eyewitness, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andreand more. This Saturday, Welcome To Metrograph: Reduxwill screen Martin Scorsese’s 1974 filmAlice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, starring Ellen Burstyn and Kristopher Kristopherson, which I believe was the inspiration for the TV sitcom “Alice” but I could be wrong. Late Nites at Metrograph has the greatest movie in the series so far, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, starring Kurt Russell, which is also a part of “NYC ’81.” Playtime: Family Matineeswill screen Miyazaki’s Oscar-nominated 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN(NYC)

There’s still a few tickets for tonight’s “Weird Wednesday” movie, Lucio Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey. Thursday night the Alamo is showing Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer from 2014 as his new movie Parasite opens (that one’s almost sold out as of this writing). Sunday afternoon, the Alamo is screening a 35mm print of the 1960’s Korean film The Housemaid, which inspired Parasite. Monday night (and already sold out) is a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariwith a live score (sorry!). Next week’s “Terror Tuesday” is Ti West’s House of the Devil, a fantastic chiller, and next week’s “Weird Wednesday” is the 1987 British film Born of Fire, presented by my good friend and filmmaker Ted Geoghegan.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

The Dolemite series continues with a double feature of Dolemite is My Name with the Dolemite movie The Human Tornado (1976), then on Thursday night, the Eddie Murphy double features with Disco Godfather (1979). Wednesday’s horror movie is Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting while Friday’s horror matinee is Hello Mary Lou: Pro Night I I(1987) Tarantino’s Death Proof is the Friday night midnight offering, while Dolemite Is My Namewill screen Saturday night at midnight. (Listen, the Eddie Murphy is not really repertory but it’s a great movie to see with an audience, so take advantage of this chance being given to you by the New Bev, and go see it!!!) This weekend’s “Kiddee Matinee” is Jules Bass’ Mad Monster Party? from 1967 and starring the one and only Boris Karloff. There’s also a Halloween Edition of “Cartoon Club” on Saturday AND Sunday, but they’re both sold out online. Monday afternoon, there’s a matinee of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996)

FILM FORUM (NYC):

I’m pretty excited about the Film Forum’s upcoming “Shitamachi” series starting next week, but in the meantime, the Forum will be screening a 50thanniversary 4k restoration of Yôji Yamada’s Tora-San, Our Loveable Tramp (It’s Tough Being a Man), which is part of a long-running series that I personally have never had a chance to see even though I’ve loved Yamada’s Edo-period samurai films from a few years back. This weekend’s “Film Forum Jr.” is A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and the Film Forum is also screening a 4k restoration of Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, both of them also from 1969 and celebrating their 50thanniversaaries. Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl will end Thursday while the Yves St. Laurent doc Celebration will continue through next Tuesday. The “Shirley Clarke 100” will continue through the rest of the month but only her 1962 doc Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World screens this weekend on Saturday.

AERO (LA):

Looks like a planned James Ivory double features for Thursday and Friday have been cancelled, but they’ll be showing the excellent doc Love, Antosha about the late Anton Yelchin in a double feature with Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy. Saturday begins a “Béla Tarr Revisited” series showing films by the popular Hungarian auteur with The Turin Horse (2011) on Saturday night and the new 4k restoration of Sátántángo on Sunday. Just FYI, the latter is 450 minutes or about 7 and a half hours long. There will be an intermission and an extended break but hopefully, you REALLY love Tarr’s work. (I don’t.) Tuesday’s free “Tuesdays with Lorre” screening is The Beast with Five Fingers from 1946.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

“See It Big! Ghost Stories” continues this weekend with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice on Saturday and Ti West’s The Inkeepers on Sunday, both worthwhile movies to see on the big screen. MOMI is also starting a new series called “No Joke: Absurd Comedy as Political Reality” kicking off with a Weds. night screening of Mister America (see above) and then Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers on Saturday and “An Evening with the Yes Men” (political documentarians) on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon is the “Sesame Street Short Film Festival” screening a bunch of live action and animated shorts commissioned by the popular PBS show.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

Francis Ford Coppola’s restored and remastered Cotton Club Encore, which just premiered at the New York Film Festival a couple weeks back will get a theatrical run at the Quad, as will Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus(1976), starring Jane Birkin as a truck stop waitress who begins a friendship with Joe Dallesandro’s garbage truck driver, making his boyfriend (Hugues Quester) jealous.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Not sure what’s going on with the IFC Center’s ongoing weekend rep series but George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road(2015) will screen just before midnight on Friday and Saturday, and then the Coens’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski will screen as part of Late Night Favorites: Summer 2019as will Satoshi Kon’s 2006 film Paprika.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

The Egyptian is pretty busy this weekend with “German Currents 2019” i.e. not repertory, but on Saturday, they’ll show a “Retroformat” screening of the 1928 film The Spielerwith live accompaniment.

BAM CINEMATEK(NYC):

This Sunday’s “Beyond the Canon” is a double feature of Claudia Well’s Girlfriends (1978) with John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

Oddly, the Roxy is screening the 2015 horror movie Unfriended on Wednesday and then David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me(1992) on Thursday, but really you should go there to see Lulu Wang’s excellent The Farewell – my #1 movie of 2019 so far – if you haven’t seen it yet.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This Friday’s midnight movie is John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween.

And great news... MOMA should be back next week!

Next week, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, Mistress of Evil, but the movie I’m really looking forward to is Zombieland Double Tap.

#WhatToWatchThisWeekend Movies Parasite GeminiMan TheKing AddamsFamily Reviews Jexi

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pedallingthroughlifetest-blog · 5 years

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Where To Start: Anxiety, Depression & Cycling

Well if you are reading this I guess a hello is in order...Hello, I'm Julian & im 30 years old, I ride bikes, I have a good job, a home, someone who loves me, supports me with my dreams, puts up with my cycling obsession, friends who enable my cycling obsession, I guess I'm just like everyone else in the world except for one other part of my life, I suffer with anxiety and depression.

We aren't immune to depression and anxiety and that may surprise some, but the road to success in life is often riddled with emotional turmoil. In addition to the unrelenting pressure to perform at work, home and in other aspects of your life. people talk of a culture of invincibility, in which admitting weakness feels risky and maintaining a veneer of composure is paramount, that is not the case. If anything it tends to feed it more and more, I guess a little more background would help understand the situation.

Ive always thought that when I speak about this id expect at least one person to think “Man up” which I guess is a judgement of character but something that has been drilled into people from my generation and the one below me.

Where did it all begin

A fair few years ago I was living out in Australia with my girlfriend of the time and it just so happened that we were going to move back to the UK to the Yorkshire dales where we had both found work, shortly after we went on a break as things we not the same, she met someone else, we separated. I got a job back in the West Midlands and moved back in with my dad and hat is where is all began, I threw myself into work, got another job to save up extra money to put back into the savings that I had depleted workings 6 - 7 days weeks, working from 8am to 5pm then going to another job from 5:30pm to 12pm. Slowly I started to burn out, I got anxious at work and didn't know why this resulted to me hiding in the toilet with a tight chest not being able to breathe and feeling extremely overwhelmed, It grew from there, I did a good job at hiding it from my family until one day I was on my way home and just burst into tears, wait hang on a second men are not meant to cry... well yes they do and its more common then you think. I called my dad on the phone and said I needed to talk to him when I got home and when I arrived back I just told him how I was feeling. This resulted in me taking a trip to the doctors to talk about how I was feeling, looking back on it the doctor that treated me didn't really do a good job if I'm honest.

Straight away I was offered Anti Depressants (Fluoxetine) needing the help I dived straight in, I’d never felt like this and I just wanted it to go away. Shortly after the side effects started to take hold, with Fluoxetine you are basically going to have a bad turn before it gets better as its the way the drug works. I couldn't function at work, reading and processing things became a chore and my hope started to fade. This might not have been the best approach but I couldn't do it and whined myself off, and because I wasn't feeling as low I guess I thought i had a grip, I had some talking therapy with the lovely people at MIND, got a new job and things looked on the up.

Cycling Is My Coping Mechanism

Cycling is my way of getting rid of the energy, frustration and its a place where I don't have to think. There is the thrill of the open road, wind in your face and the sun on your back not to mention it boosts your endorphins so that always helps. I always rode alone and never in a group and if im honest, I didn't have any friends at the time. This is where the Gorilla Coffee Cafe comes in. I was told I needed to meet some friends, cycling friends were the obvious option as it was something I'm extremely passionate about. I had a hunt around facebook and found a cafe called Gorilla Coffee which is based in Kings Heath at the time was only a 15-minute ride from me, I joined there cycling page and I put a post on there asking if there was a ride this week. Turns out it was the 1st September which happens to be the MSH (Mad Summer Hare) a cycling sportive in which all the club riders go to. Luckily there was a drop in ride that day and I thought well I will just show up and see what happens. I met a few of the club members that weren't doing it and we went on a really nice ride, the rest is history I have been going everything Thursdays & most Sundays since, Made some great friends who ive been away with on cycling tips, out on nights out and someone you can just chat to about anything. They really are the best mates I could ever ask for.

It's back again

In June 2019 a couple years later it all started to come back, but a little worse off this time I was getting anxious, feeling sad and just didn't want to go on living at times again I did a good job at hiding this for a while until it all blew up. Luckily this time around I have someone who pushed me to the correct help that I need, I reached out to the guys at the cafe who have supported me and I've since had my first counselling session again. I guess I didn't want to go back onto meds after how they made me feel and wanted to just try a different approach, it won't be for everyone but if you don't try you don't know. People always say or post things like “if your feeling low, reach out there are people that want to help” and its all well a good saying that but sometimes thats the thing that is stopping people, they can't reach out because of how they feel. Im not telling you want to do but if you know someone well enough you'll see they are struggling through there change of habits, so why don't you “Reach out to them”. it might just save a life.

The cycling is helping me massively, getting out there to clear my head, taking time to think things through, when I’m not doing it after a bad day I just tend to fester and let the problems Im worrying about just manifest in my head. Everyone has a outlet and I guess I can say that amongst other parts that have helped me, cycling saved my life. I'm still on the mend and things won't be right straight away but as they say there is light at the end of the tunnel. ive never been good at signing things off unfortunately so il do it in the only way I can.

Keep pedalling Through Life

If you need help then it is out there.

Information:

Samaritans – for everyone Call 116 123 Email [email protected]

Information:

Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) – for men Call 0800 58 58 58 – 5pm to midnight every day Visit the webchat page

Information:

Papyrus – for people under 35 Call 0800 068 41 41 – Monday to Friday 10am to 10pm, weekends 2pm to 10pm, bank holidays 2pm to 5pm Text 07786 209697 Email [email protected]

Information:

Childline – for children and young people under 19 Call 0800 1111 – the number won't show up on your phone bill

Talk to someone you trust

Let family or friends know what's going on for you. They may be able to offer support and help keep you safe.

There's no right or wrong way to talk about suicidal feelings – starting the conversation is what's important.

#Cycling #depression #anexity #help #feeling down #cyclist #road cyclist

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blaurascon-kzk · 5 years

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KZK Discord Digest [Week of May 30 - June 7 Pt.1]

SUMMARY: There's a big thing we're doing that I'm gonna split off into its own post so people can directly reference that. Plus this post is gonna be enormous. Pt.2 should be up shortly after this one. It’s been a busy week!

After months of trying to land a rental and a job in VA so they can move, Kat and April have decided, fuck it, they're going - some generous friends will be having them stay there until they're able to find a place of their own. The PODs are already being loaded. Kat will likely not be able to make / release new things for 2-3 weeks while they move and get settled. On top of that, he has to put his cat Ishizu to sleep soon - she's developed kidney failure and the only treatment would involve dialysis and subq fluid injections, so the difficult decision was made to let her go.

To help fund the move, we've put up a lot of our old LEs and plushy avatars, including things like the Darastryx, Mana Machina, and Murk Beast that haven't seen the light of day since their release. The sale will run for a few weeks, minimum. Check it out here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Okarthel/181/81/50

The Direwolf plushy is still WIP. See below for a sneak peek (with a lot of color) Direwolf freebie devkit is finished, barring documentation and instructions. Paid devkit will be getting a v1.2 update soon as well. No ETA on their release given IRL circumstances, but rest assured they are coming as soon as possible! Direwolf update is still WIP pending the move. We apologize deeply for the massive delay with this, and want to thank you all for your patience.

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May 30

Kat05/30/2019 @everyone Another quick teaser for the Eastern Dragon coloring page: Noodle derg!

Kat05/30/2019 @everyone Last teaser for today, as this one took me all day to finish, but here's the final result for the Eastern Dragon coloring page. The PSD for it, as well as the Northern will be made available once they are both complete. And a quick reminder, You have until tomorrow night to contribute to my patreon at the 10$ or more level if you want to snag a cool resin crystal! I've got another batch of mail going out in a couple of days to fill recent orders so now's your best chance! https://www.patreon.com/darkecokat

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May 31

Kat05/31/2019 @everyone Amazing how much quicker something goes when you've got less detail to contend with! The Northern and Eastern Dragon pages are done, as per the votes on the most recent Coloring page Poll. You can download all the available pages here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PfjTfO0M2a47arowNzhXD7MWxEDeNfgI And here's a preview of the Northern Dragon coloring page! A lone Dragon emerges from its den to greet the emerging spring as the final snowfall starts to melt.

Kat05/31/2019 @everyone Keeping the productivity train rolling. Decided to pick up the Direwolf plush today to break up the monotony of setting up devkit stuff and arting. Here's a preview of one of the steps of making a 3D model. This color vomit is not just awful to look at. It actually serves a very important purpose. Once I've finished the low poly model, I will bake these colors onto it, and my software will be able to use these very distinct colors as a 'Color ID' Mask. It'll save me a bit of time later setting up all the markings during the final baking/texturing phase. Stay tuned for more updates.

Kat05/31/2019 @everyone Been a busy day for announcements the last couple of days. Apologies for nuking your notifications. So update on the job situation.

As of this moment, my fiance and I are on the brink of burning one of our last few bridges with no way of going back. Her job has failed time and time again to work with her on scheduling for travel, and through no fault of her own, could be jobless by the end of tomorrow. Monday she flies up north for an interview, and if they don't hire her, we're out of options. She'll be jobless and we'll be stuck in Louisiana for at least the next six months which is far from ideal.

I say this because I need to start looking forward toward new projects. I'd intended to get the Direwolf update out before I started anything new, but this move has already caused so many delays and problems, that things are now piling up and I need to keep my income stable if I have any hope of qualifying for a place on just my income alone. So I will do my best to get the plush av out, get the freeby dev kit out, then I will be moving forward with production on a new avatar, while simultaneously working on the remaining bug fixes, missing features and general QoL improvements for the Direwolf.

I promised the update, and as usual, I've dropped that ball. For that I am sorry, and I can only hope for your forgiveness and support as my Fiance and I try to transition through this exceptionally difficult time in our lives.

I hate this state. I hate the people here. I hate being alone all the time. This move is supposed to help fix most of that, and putting out new content is the only way I can make that happen. I hope you all understand. Thank you.

______

Jun 1

KatLast Saturday at 7:08 PM @everyone Update on the devkit progress: The Paid devkit will be getting a 1.2 release to address some minor issues bugging me, but that's not happening just yet. The freeby kits have been finished. Now I'm penning up the documentation and usage instructions. Those should be available once I get back from Dallas.

Speaking of Dallas, I will be gone for Sunday, monday, and tuesday. Its cheaper for us to book a hotel room and stay two nights to wait for her return flight than it is to drive back and forth (a total of 12-15 hours of driving for two round trips to dallas) so I'll be camping out in my hotel room with my switch and laptop xD. Hopefully I will have some good news on monday.

______

Jun 2

KatLast Sunday at 11:13 AM @everyone so.. I will not be going to dallas, as originally planned. Last night my eldest cat ishizu got very sick. I'm sitting at an emergency clinic right now and wont be home in time to join. So please.. do me a favor, send @AprilsaurusRex words of encouragement for her interview. I'm not able to be there to support her on this trip and its tearing me apart.

KatLast Sunday at 1:07 PM @everyone At home now, waiting on news of the blood test results. Doctors had to sedate her to draw blood because she was fighting back so badly. Normally i'm there to calm her down but the clinic was exceptionally busy and I desperately needed food in my stomach. Total costs are already up around $400 for the IV(sever dehydration from constant vomiting), blood work, and the exam fee. that, compounded with the expenses to book the flights for this interview have taken a bite out of my savings so.. expect some sort of sale or something soon. I'm going to use the unexpected next few days home to focus on work. Thank you all for your support, patience and understanding.

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Jun 3

KatLast Monday at 3:01 PM @everyone Going to try to keep this brief today. Lab results came back early yesterday for my cat(I spent all day just.. processing, and... preparing myself for whats coming.). I've been reviewing her bloodwork and doing my best through research to interpret the results, along with the information provided by my vets. Her kidneys are in bad shape, and the only 'treatment' now is dialysis and weekly subcutaneous injections of fluids to combat dehydration. I can barely give her a syringe of chicken flavored medicine, let alone get her to sit still long enough to give her a shot. They had to mildly sedate her to even draw blood so... I've made the soul crushing decision to.. stabilize her for now, make her comfortable, and set a date. She will be buried next to my other animals.

As for moving... My fiance and I decided 'fuck it'. Job or no, we're leaving. Thanks to some generous friends in the area, we've got a place to stay while we find a place to live or while she looks for a job should the worst happen and Geico fall thru. I've already ordered the pods and i h ave 15 days to load it before city officials fine me for the pods overstaying its welcome. That'll arrive on the 6th so.. basically everything's on hold at this point while I move and prepare myself to say goodbye to my beloved Ishizu. I got her as a freshman in highschool. I'm going to miss her. so much. I dont want to put her to sleep but weekly injections, stress, and constantly being dragged to a vet where its cold and sterile and constantly stinks of fear is not how I want her final days to play out. I didn't come to this conclusion easily, and even now I wish there weer another way.

KatLast Monday at 3:08 PM @everyone All I ask is that when you get home, or if you are home.. give your cats, dogs, brids, lizards, snakes, turtles.. whatever animals you share your love with, please just.. give em a hug for me, ok? Let em know they're loved, even if they dont understand it. Thank you all for your kind words.

KatLast Monday at 9:58 PM @everyone As mentioned before, I've opted to put up a bunch of retired stuff for sale. Some of the stuff was sold recently when our car broke down, but some of it, like the freeby will o drakes, the murk beast, and the mana machina, haven't seen the light of day since their initial release. Also available is the darastryx, the winter hunt freebies (wings, horns, tail, ect), and a bunch of LEs released for the Sergals, Fennecs, Raptors, Central Dragons and Rift Dragons. I hate that I have to do stuff like this but I will have no time over the next 2-3 weeks to produce any new content, and this is my best chance at staying afloat financially while the move happens. Thank you. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Okarthel/181/81/50

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Jun 4

KatLast Tuesday at 11:07 PM @everyone We've been having some major issues with our host, so if you have any issues with a purchase, PLEASE let myself or @Blau know. I will do my best to respond and resolve the issues.

That said, by popular demand I've set up 4 new sets of avatars out that were previously exclusive to preorder or hunt events: This is the LE Fennecs, LE Ferox, LE Kaori, and the Hunt exclusive Rift Dragons. This sale will only go on for a few weeks.

A fond thank you to everyone for their support and kind words. It means the world to me. Ishizu is home with me now, and has spent the majority of today relaxing and resting. She's yet to eat anything, but she's drank a bit. Hasn't used the restroom yet though which has me really worried.

______

Jun 5

KatLast Wednesday at 11:08 AM @everyone If you or someone you know has had any issues with deliveries, please drop me a message in SL. I know the alloy was a bit issue (entirely because of a mistake I made), so just drop me a message mk?

KatLast Wednesday at 12:32 PM @everyone If you're wearing a Kirin Alloy and your neck/spine guards attach to your HUD, this is a bug with Firestorm, not the avatar. I've just tested a freshly unpacked copy on the Default viewer and it works just fine for me. So make sure your viewer is up to date, and if it is, send a bug report to the Firestorm devs. Thank you.

#kzk-dd #kzk

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thatguysamaniac-blog · 4 years

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While looking for images of anthropomorphized versions of the new pokemon with their tits out, we stumbled upon some clickbait. Not just any clickbait, metacritic showing us a definitive fact based, unbiased top 50 games of the 2010's: 1. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, 2010) 97 2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch, 2017) 97 3. Red Dead Redemption 2 (PlayStation 4, 2018) 97 4. Grand Theft Auto V (PlayStation 4, 2014) 97 5. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017) 97 6. Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360, 2010) 96 7. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Xbox 360, 2011) 96 8. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3, 2013) 95 9. The Last of Us Remastered (PlayStation 4, 2014) 95 10. Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360, 2010) 95 11. Portal 2 (Xbox 360, 2011) 95 12. God of War (PlayStation 4, 2018) 94 13. Batman: Arkham City (Xbox 360, 2011) 94 14. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS, 2011) 94 15. BioShock Infinite (PC, 2013) 94 16. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (Xbox 360, 2010) 93 17. Divinity: Original Sin II (PC, 2017) 93 18. Super Mario 3D World (Wii U, 2013) 93 19. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC, 2010) 93 20. Persona 4 Golden (PlayStation Vita, 2012) 93 21. Persona 5 (PlayStation 4, 2017) 93 22. Mass Effect 3 (Xbox 360, 2012) 93 23. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (PlayStation 4, 2015) 93 24. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii, 2011) 93 25. Rock Band 3 (Xbox 360, 2010) 93 26. Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (PlayStation 4, 2016) 93 27. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch, 2018) 93 28. INSIDE (Xbox One, 2016) 93 29. Forza Horizon 4 (Xbox One, 2018) 92 30. God of War III (PlayStation 3, 2010) 92 31. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PlayStation 3, 2011) 92 32. Bloodborne (PlayStation 4, 2015) 92 33. Celeste (Switch, 2018) 92 34. Super Street Fighter IV (PlayStation 3, 2010) 92 35. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PlayStation 4, 2015) 92 36. Undertale (PC, 2015) 92 37. Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS, 2013) 92 38. Divinity: Original Sin II - Definitive Edition (PlayStation 4, 2018) 92 39. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Wii U, 2014) 92 40. Journey (PlayStation 3, 2012) 92 41. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii, 2012) 92 42. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch, 2017) 92 43. The ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (PlayStation 3, 2011) 92 44. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine (PC, 2016) 92 45. LittleBigPlanet 2 (PlayStation 3, 2011) 91 46. Overwatch (PC, 2016) 91 47. Bayonetta 2 (Wii U, 2014) 91 48. Forza Horizon 3 (Xbox One, 2016) 91 49. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers (PC, 2019) 91 50. Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition (Switch, 2019) Richie: I LIEK THE DUBBLE ONES! The Last of Us x2 Divinity: Original Sin II x2 Play count: 16 off that list, that's also eight twentyfifths, which is roughly how much of my massive dick your mom can take. Cunzy: Now, we all know the issues with a crowd sourced list. It's dumb. It's like putting together a list of best fruit, or favourite socks. However, every now and then it's useful to pull the wang out to measure it against the communities' wang and see just how weird and misshapen our is (we share genital appendages) by comparison. Play count: 9! What an alternative darling I am! Richie: I mean they are great, and you know they will be, but you have to draw the line somewhere, So you have to choose and say, "Nah I wont play this", better the time sink you know, right? And you choose your reasons, you skim an article, and find the thing that is slightly wrong and then activate your inner drama queen to say "OMG that is not a game I want to play I cant believe they dont have Fred Durst doing the voice of the main character" or something equally nuts. And there is plenty of them on that list that I simply refuse to play for these reasons. And I guess that's fine? Time is finite, I cant go back ten years and play all of the PS3 games I never played? Can I? Cunzy: GUILTY CONFESSIONS, A.K.A those games you know are great but just never got around to: Mario Odyssey, LoZ (the whole franchise), Red Dead (series), Mass Effect (series), Persona (series), Divinity (series), Souls (series)... where do I hand my gamer card back? Richie: Also Overwatch... Do people actually play it, or is that there just because people fiddle with their genitalia to fund cosplay camgirls? Cunzy: Yes, watch me throat this widowmaker dildo on my stream now. Richie: So do we disagree with this list? Well, to be fucking honest I'm not going to research it myself, I'm not sure I have played much more than 50 games this year, as far as i can recall, I played a lot of Diablo 3 and Fallout/Skyrim... but yeah I'm sure the above is good... Actually fuck that, Games of the decade for me are... Every iteration of pokemon that came out in the last 10 years, X/Y, Sun/Moon, Black/White, Sword/Shield, Flaps/Scrotum. Skyrim SNOW VIKING DRAGON SHOUTING Animal Crossing, Shake the tree for Nook. Lego Everything, play, collect, repeat Hyperdimensions Neptunia. Ultra Japanese anthropomorphised consoles as Anime girls. Vert is best Waifu. Fallouts So many plus expansions, Chandler as a bad guy is special. Diablo 3, Clicky loot loot WoW Classic, because... FFXIII-2, Timetravel-bocolina Tomodatchi Life, Make your friends on the DS into miis, interact with them, cry alone at night Smash Bros. Repeatedly main Peach till she becomes top tier, yaay Jackbox games, All Gems, probably the best multiplayer gaming actually this decade. Doki Doki Literature Club, MO-NI-KA Batmanzes, grapple glide Southparkgames, play the stories you have watched and add a weak RPG element. Dragon Ages-s, Way better than mass effect Every Naruto game. Like lego, but with anime ninjas Barrel Scrape: the game, where you frantically look at your steam collection for the games you have most played, and check the dates of your 360 games to see if they fall into this category I played 18 games it seems? Cunzy: *gasps for air*, wipes synthetic jizz from Lollipop Chainsaw skirt. Ten years is a long time. Here's my top 18 games of the decade. Silent Hill Shattered Memories 2010 Silent Hill without the combat and all the more psychologically chilling because of it. Great setting, theme and story. One I regularly come back to and still brick myself. Endless Ocean 2 2010 Expanding on the first one in every way, shame there aren't more nature lovin' games in this ilk. Monster Hunter Tri 2010 The only one in the series to have kept my attention despite it being the 'wrong one' according to many in the MH community. Lost Planet 2 2010 Probably one of the games with the most comprehensive couch co-op mode and ridiculous bosses to team up against. Absolutely bonkers story, giant monsters and jetpacks. What more do you need? Dead Rising 2 2010 I wasn't too bothered with DR3 and DR4 despite absolutely loving the first game. They seem to have crossed the line between goofy but po-faced and just silly apocalypse zombie killing. DR2 arguably gives you a playground more memorable than Willamette and stays on the 'serious' side. Dead Space 2 2011 One of my favourite gaming franchises I think, excellently built world that is complemented by the tie in anime, comics and spin-off games. Resident Evil Revelations 2012 It was a good decade for Resident Evil with almost every game seeing multiple ports, re-releases and remasters. It's a close call between Resident Evil 2 and Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS for my favourite of the decade but this one really got it's biohazardous talons-with-eyes into us especially raid mode. Revelations 2 is fantastic co-op but the raid mode side of things isn't as fluid as the original Revelations. Criminally, aside from a brief VR foray into Resident Evil 7, we errr didn't play it. The Last Story 2012 Oh, I fell in love with this game and despite the small geography of Lazulis City it felt like a living city with many surprises tucked away. Great soundtrack to boot. Fire Emblem Awakening 2013 Another series that had a rock solid decade starting with Awakening then the rest of the 3DS trilogy, an excellent Warriors game and even Heroes wasn't too bad. Although Fire Emblem Three Houses is the superior game, it's the cast and the support system pioneered by Awakening that has this in my top 18. Tomb Raider 2013 Sometimes the context in which you play a game is as important as the game itself. A weekend in 2013 with fellow Tomb Raider fans blasting through this excellent and long awaited reboot is fondly remembered. Last of Us 2013 It's hard to put a finger on just one thing that makes this game phenomenal but there's not been much like it since. LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2013 There were some great LEGO games this decade from opposites LEGO Worlds and LEGO Dimensions to movie tie-ins and a strong series of games based on the Marvel and DC comics. The Marvel trilogy in particular was outstanding. Everyone's Gone to the Rapture 2015 With age, the more energetic games can leave me wheezing with exhaustion just thinking about playing them and EGttR is a perfect respite from the shootbang games. Honestly, I'd be keen to play more games just like this. The English countryside setting in particular made it extra special. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 2017 Honestly, who actually puts Mario Kart on their top games list? Well thinking about it and looking at play records it's probably the perfect couch multiplayer game but with a real challenging depth to those looking to break records and get a hold of those elusive gold kart components. Splatoon 2 2017 Cheating slightly here by including Splatoon 2 and the Octo Expansion as one entry. I'm really not a huge fan of the central competitive gameplay of Splatoon, although I've put in the hours, but the single player side of things are a worthy first person puzzler(?) in their own right. Into the Breach 2018 When the options paralysis sets in, which is often, I just spin up Into the Breach. Three hours and a few runs later I'll question why I don't play this game even more often. Hundreds of hours in and still challenges to do, runs to try. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate 2018 Part game, part nerdy love letter to gaming, part video game museum. Pokemon Sword and Shield 2019 Okay as Richie pointed above any of the pokemon mainline series could have filled this slot but the last one makes most sense. Twas also a good decade for the spinoffs. I enjoyed Pokemon Conquest a huge deal, put an embarrassing amount of time into Quest as well as Picross, Rumble, Duel, Go and mystery dungeons. And there we have it, lists, we'll be back at some point in the future with more lists, perhaps with a list spanning the last 2 decades, to present you with our Game of the Century (spoilers, it's SSX Tricky). Also if anyone has a word to describe my above rant about the act of proactively dismissing something despite knowing it will be good to avoid committing to the time sink, please let me know. We live in a time of labels, there must be a word for this! Love and where do you even start with persona! Richie + Cunzy X

http://www.thatguys.co.uk/2020/01/top-50-games-of-decade-commentary.html

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